Sponsored by our friends at Veeam Software! Make sure to click here and get the latest and greatest data protection platform for everything from containers to your cloud!
Sponsored by the Shift Group - Shift Group is turning athletes into sales professionals. Is your company looking to hire driven, competitive former athletes? Shift Group not only offers a large pool of diverse sales candidates from entry level to leadership – they help early stage companies in developing their hiring strategy, interview process and build strong sales cultures that attract the best talent for early stage companies.
Sponsored by Diabolical Coffee. Devilishly good coffee and diabolically awesome clothing
JR Butler is the Founder and CEO of Shift Group. This is an episode filled with lessons on what it takes to commit to building yourself, your team, and your business. JR is an inspiration and I can’t wait to have him back on to dive into more of his story and the work he is doing with Shift Group.
Check out Shift Group at https://shiftgroup.io and big thanks to JR on the launch of our new partnership to help amplify what he and the Shift Group team are doing to help empower elite athletes with the tools to succeed in technology startups as growing sales leaders.
Sponsored by our friends at Veeam Software! Make sure to click here and get the latest and greatest data protection platform for everything from containers to your cloud!
Sponsored by the Shift Group - Shift Group is turning athletes into sales professionals. Is your company looking to hire driven, competitive former athletes? Shift Group not only offers a large pool of diverse sales candidates from entry level to leadership – they help early stage companies in developing their hiring strategy, interview process and build strong sales cultures that attract the best talent for early stage companies.
Sponsored by Diabolical Coffee. Devilishly good coffee and diabolically awesome clothing
Buu Lam is a Community Evangelist at F5 supporting the growing DevCentral community. Beyond just the day to day work Buu does with F5, he’s a fantastic content creator and someone who embodies the value of customer and people first.
We cover a lot of what he has done in the transition from architect to SE to evangelist plus a deep dive into his video and audio rig! Make sure to subscribe to Buu’s channel here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCtVH…
p.s. he has one of the best LinkedIn profiles ever because you can read it like a story. Seriously, check it out here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/buulam/
Sponsored by our friends at Veeam Software! Make sure to click here and get the latest and greatest data protection platform for everything from containers to your cloud!
Sponsored by the Shift Group - Shift Group is turning athletes into sales professionals. Is your company looking to hire driven, competitive former athletes? Shift Group not only offers a large pool of diverse sales candidates from entry level to leadership – they help early stage companies in developing their hiring strategy, interview process and build strong sales cultures that attract the best talent for early stage companies.
Sponsored by Diabolical Coffee. Devilishly good coffee and diabolically awesome clothing
Satyam founded UXReactor in 2014 together with his brother, Prasad. Under his leadership, UXReactor has become the fastest growing specialized experience design firm in the USA, with a team of 60+ employees spread over three continents.
Before starting his entrepreneurial journey, Satyam served as Managing Director of Product Design at Citrix in San Francisco, where he played a crucial role in growing the product design team from four members to over 100+ practitioners.
Satyam was instrumental in building PayPal’s Global Design Center in India while leading a design team in Silicon Valley. We explore an in-depth conversation of modern UX, the myths of UI and UX, plus the first principles of design and its impact on usability and business success.
Hello, everybody. Welcome back. My name is Eric Wright. I’m the host of your DiscoPosse podcast. Thank you for listening and for watching. Of course, if you want to check out the video version of this and other amazing episodes, you can head on over to youtube.com/discopossepodcast. You can see them all as they happen, which is kind of fun. And thank you for all the people that are watching because we’re actually getting really good uptake on that side of the world. All right. This is Satyam Kantamneni. He is a fantastic, fantastic guest. He’s doing really interesting stuff with his team, UXReactor. He’s also the author of the soon to be released Uxdplaybook, which if you follow the links, go to Uxdplaybook.com. This is a must get so well put together. We have a fantastic conversation talking about his approach to user experience and real user experience. So we separate the myths of UI versus UX, the psychology that goes into creating user flow and experience in general. This can be done in software, in business, in physical spaces. It’s all over. So it’s a real pleasure to take the learnings and the research that Satyam is doing and bring it to this audience. You are going to enjoy this. I sure hope you do, because I came away with a real sort of feeling of being blessed after having gotten all these lessons.
And of course, speaking of reasons why we can have this incredible user experience, I’m so proud to say thank you to the fine folks at Veaam Software who are supporting this podcast and helping me to make sure we can bring more great conversations like the one we are about to listed with Satyam. If you want to learn about everything you need for your data protection needs, whether it’s in the cloud, whether it’s on premises, whether it’s physical servers, even those containerized crazy workloads. That’s right. Those containers, they go away and they’re gone. So you’ve got to be careful. You can actually back up because there are persistent container workloads. There are great reasons to back that stuff up. Hey, I could go on for hours about that, but I’m not going to because you’re going to go to vee.am/discoposse. And you’re going to check it out yourself because you need to do that much much more than what I just talked about.
Go check it out. Go to vee.am/discoposse. And thank you to the amazing people at Veeam Software. And if you want to toast somebody to your fantastic Veeam Protection, then drop it over to Diabolicalcoffee.com. Grab a pound of the fantastic beans. They’re devilishly good. And the diabolical asthma swag. All right, let’s get to the podcast.
I’m Satyam. I’m the co-founder and presently the managing partner at UXReactor. And today you’re listening to me at the Disco Posse podcast.
Satyam, thank you and welcome to this discussion. I really enjoy when we get to explore the topic and the practice of user experience. And as we chatted a bit in our pre discussion, preparing for this, it’s such a loaded phrase. There’s over marketing, overuse of the word. And I think this is a great chance for us to talk to you about UX Reactor, the basis behind your approach, the book, which I’ve been thankfully able to access a preview copy prior to publishing, which is fantastic. But for folks that are new to you, Satyam, if you don’t mind, give a quick introduction and a bio, and then we’ll start to talk about the UX Reactor story.
Absolutely, Eric. I think it always is useful to see. I have a very, I would say an eclectic background. I studied electronics engineering way back when I realized very quickly that I didn’t want to be a chip designer and needed more human aspects of work. I was serendipitously introduced to a professional at that point called human factors, how humans interact with complex technologies. And that became my line of work for the last two decades. So that’s kind of the highest level over time. I’ve studied engineering, I’ve studied design, I’ve studied business. So all three aspects of looking at how things come together. And fortunately, seven years back, I got to kind of spend a lot of time by building a firm, UXReactor, and looking at the intersection of all three of them, especially as the world is getting more tech savvy and more tech pervasive and businesses are kind of driving a lot more tech. But with a design mindset, obviously, Steve Jobs did an awesome acceleration to a lot of these things over the last two decades. So, yeah, I’m kind of right at the cusp of seeing this go through. And being in the Silicon Valley also helps me to kind of be very much plugged in with the tech Mecca that’s kind of it’s become at this point.
Yeah. The surroundings are certainly still despite the fact that we’ve seen sort of a depatriation of the real estate and folks moving to other parts, sort of broadening the locations that people can build from. There is still such a storied sense of history there and so much still active. Right. It’s always amazing to me. And I think the best thing, if you don’t mind, I’d love to just begin with, if you were to type it into Google, define user experience.
It’s often the most misunderstood word in the profession. If you really look at it, every system in the world has users for the system and users come in different contexts and every user has an experience. And the best definition I’ve found so far in my profession is any event or occurrence that leaves an impression is an experience. And therefore you need to kind of look at every event and occurrence that your system actually has. But now if you look at systems like hotels, they have studied this for a long while. Our hospitality, they’ve studied experience for a long while. And that’s why you’re paying a lot more for a red carton than a much more, smaller, cheaper option. But then in the tech world, where you’re starting to look at one of the biggest trends that’s going on as tech is becoming more front and center, is obviously dehumanizing to in a lot of ways, but also humanizing to a lot of ways. Right. So dehumanizing systems that you would call customer service. Now, you probably are talking to a conversational system, but again, it still has to work with a human on the other side.
So that’s why experiences are becoming much more important, especially as those events are becoming tech events, as those movements are becoming tech movements and memories are being created with tech. So you really need to kind of define experience on that end. And that is what is called user experience in the context of the tech world. But honestly, user experience, and the first thing I tell anyone is user experience is a mindset. And then how do you bring that mindset to tech is where I believe is the biggest opportunity. And if you really think about what Steve Jobs did, he did that. And that’s why today Apple is still the world’s most valuable company.
Yeah, it’s funny if we take that sort of Apple example, even within Apple, during and beyond the Steve Jobs era, we saw the introduction of Schemorphic, which was a word that no one needed. They realized they needed to know what it meant. And then on the tail end of that, the poo pooing of Schemorphic as so last year. Right. Like, we suddenly was like, oh, the natural wood texture on stuff. They’ve seen evolution. But the ethos behind the experience is always consistent. And I think that’s what’s interesting in looking at your own background as well. It’s the vision, the ethos. It’s the thing that you want to achieve. The way in which you achieve it may alter by technologies, by whether it’s visualized, whether it’s audible, whatever it is, but it’s ultimately it’s the practice that you’re creating.
Actually, let me kind of dig deep on the word practice there and also kind of sometimes add profession to it because a lot of times people don’t look at that as a skill, then more like a profession. And unfortunately, that’s kind of where a lot of business leaders kind of make the mistake. So I’ll kind of let me unpack that a bit there. When you look at the profession of user experience overall or the practice of user experience, there are different levels of how you can create value. The UI level, which is like, how does the screen look to me? How does it feel to me that’s kind of exactly towards like, Schemorphic style, hierarchy, color, fonts, all those things kind of come to be in that craft. However, when you start looking at it as a next level, you start looking at how does the whole product experience look like. So when you think about Apple, they look at an ecosystem experience. Right. So when you go from and anything, again, when you look at this is nowadays, Tesla has done this really well. They look at the whole ecosystem and they’re looking at the whole product as an ecosystem.
And that’s kind of the next level of how you’re thinking about the user’s experience. And then the third level, which is kind of the level which is much more organizational, where everybody and every element, right, from the lowest end organization, the highest organization, the newest organization, the oldest, whichever way you look at it, they all think about the user first. The users experience second, the design third, and then fourth, the technology. And that’s kind of when you start thinking about every facet of what the business is, that’s the last level and the most important frontier of user experience. And again, every time you think about the user and how this will make them feel that moment or that opportunity, that fundamentally is where value is created. I unfortunately see nine out of ten organizations spending their time in the UI side, and therefore, they only see value there and also make a lot of misteps there.
Yeah. This is the interesting. Like the misnomer, when people say user experience, they inevitably think you’re a front end developer. Like, no human computer interaction is not about which bloody JavaScript framework you’re writing your front end in or response you’re using.
Absolutely.
You look up the user experience as a phrase has been coopted by web designers building a single page app. And I have to be careful. So there is a truth that that in itself is a user experience, but that is so niche and so narrow above definition. And the use of the phrase that the same person that will do a fantastic single page app that will draw you through a journey that makes you get to the bottom to use a strong CTA and like you do all of the right things. That is not the same as somebody who like a Tesla, like an Apple, like an IBM, like a Microsoft, like a power company that wants you to do something like you and your clients experience, the user experience goes far beyond you getting to the bottom and clicking the button.
Absolutely. And I think that is obviously the right intent, because eventually that’s how they’re interacting with the system. But it takes a lot of deep understanding of why is the user there? What are they trying to do? What are the motivations? What is the context? The same way as you would design for a kindergartner an education platform is not the same way as you design it for a high schooler. Right. And there’s all those nuances and so much context is there. And that’s where the beauty of user experience is when you can unravel it.
The interesting thing is I like that you mentioned the idea of education built towards a preschooler or elementary school fundamentally different from somebody who’s college age or beyond or perhaps even an octogenarian, right. And it is funny because I noticed things that can seem wondrous to a 30 to 50 year old are instinctual and obvious to a child sometimes. And I always give this example of the simplest thing is you take a coin and you take the coin, and all you do is you make the coin disappear. To everybody else they look at your hand because you can force them to do this. But the first thing that a child does, I’ve got two young kids is they look at the hand that you took the coin. They know right away they know where it is. You can’t push them towards an experience. You can’t guide them because they instinctually have figured it out. But to the user of a system, it’s the same thing. It’s like you have to try and pull them towards something that they didn’t instinctively necessarily believe they needed.
I think there is a little bit of I have a different perspective there. Right. So there’s an ethical element of user experience that you are trying to give people what they need, however, give it to them the way they want it in the context that they are. And the last two parts is where the tricky part is. Right. Because again, in the profession, there’s an element of looking at trying. How do I get you to click on things? How do I get you to not do what I want to do? There’s a lot of dark patterns there. But there’s one aspect of that in the last two years, more or less. Right. So what you have seen is legal has now become a tech system. Right. You have education has become a tech system. You have seen health care becoming a tech system. You’re now talking to telehealth way more openly than three years back. And these are all things that again, giving it to like a kid who’s going to go telehealth kid who’s going to go into education. All of these things are actually now becoming much more where the systems are created without the user in the loop.
And actually, one thing, Eric, I’ll tell you, which is what’s fascinating, as I became a student of this profession, that till the 40% of the products that are shipped out there are shipped without talking to one user. Right. So they’re built out with that construct like let me ship it and they will start using it. And that is just a fascinating thing of how many millions of dollars are spent on building feature sets and building products that actually don’t work for the user. And that’s why you see a product market fit as a failure. I actually think that’s the fastest way of throwing money at something and hoping it will stick and it doesn’t happen.
Now, this brings up a good callback to a famous Steve Jobs saying whether it’s actual or misquoted is the idea that users don’t know what they need until you give it to them. And people hear that. And it’s such an out of context phrase because if you read the stories of product development and product management inside Apple, it was so wrapped into user interviews and continuous research with real users. What was the I forget what it’s called, the creative process, I think, or creative design, I can’t recall. I should look it up. There’s a great book that talks. It was like an early project manager who worked with Jobs and creative selection. I think that was the name of the book. And it’s such a fantastic journey through that. But all people are going to get take out of that is I’m going to create something because the user doesn’t know what they’re doing.
Because along with the Steve Jobs code, another quote that comes from Henry Ford and it also kind of muddies the water, which is like if I just ask users what they want, they’ve just told me about a faster horse. And this was in the context of building the Model T. In both of these contexts I think a lot of people, when they read that or listen to it, they don’t understand the underlying essence. You still have to understand that users and let’s say talk about the Henry Ford context, that users will still have to kind of take care of a horse. There was not a whole family that can sit on the same horse. There is you cannot go faster than a certain speed. There’s a lot of those elements that also are informing how you’re kind of a designing in that context. And those are still user problem the same way as when you look at Steve Jobs, you start looking at he was very in tune with who the users are that he’s building for that he actually what are the pain points for them and what is he trying to kind of build from?
Like, he knew that people were carrying multiple devices, one for music, one for camera, one for personal organization. And then he said, I’m going to bring all of that together. But however, they don’t know how that will look. Like the visioning is a different problem versus the need of the R. And I think a lot of times people confuse the visioning of going and talking to user what they actually need versus what the needs of the R are. And I actually think there are two different facets. And you should really be building a lot more deeper sense of the need of the R. And that only comes when you start observing users and are much more empathetic to the users of your system.
Yeah. And this is, you touched on it before, too. And I talked about even in the way I described it. Right. The idea of leading somebody towards something that you want them to do versus observing them and figuring out how to create a system in which it would naturally draw them to a path.
Absolutely.
And you used the word ethical and that we’ll talk a bit at length about that. I don’t want to get there just yet, because that’s a single thread that I really want to spend some time on. But it is interesting that when you observe behavior with the goal of building systems towards the end goal with continuous observation and feeding back to that loop, the ability to have both the patience and the capability to go through that, it’s got to be a unique perspective and a unique person that can do that.
To a large extent, yes. Again, if you care about it enough, you will spend the time studying it, learning about it, immersing yourself in it. Right. I mean, you can talk about building all the software for health care. I’ll give you an interesting anecdote here. This was early in my career. I was designing a system for breast biopsy system for the doctors. And as a young designer sitting in the office, I was like, yeah, this is how the doctor would use it. They would go and I was designing the thing where they actually were hitting the dials in the system so that they can get the right settings for the suction without going too much into the details of how the system works. But as I sat there, I assume that the doctor is hitting those dials and therefore this is how they will look at it. But when you go and observe and you immerse yourself and you see a couple of them, first of all, it’s hyper intimidating, very loud. And more importantly, the doctor is not doing it. The doctor’s focused on the biopsy itself. He’s giving the commands to the assistant who’s actually doing it, just observing how that subtlety works, how the user and the ecosystem work, then you realize, I just designed it for the wrong person.
The doctor would never touch it and it’s an assistant who’s touching it. So the commands have to be much more clear. And if semantics are important, if a doctor says Zoom in and then there’s no Zoom in button there, then the assistant is there’s a lot of those nuances that you really think about. And that just was my first one of my early lessons I learned where you started observing that you really have to immerse yourself. But if I was just sitting on the desk and doing it like most people would, then obviously it’s not going to work well, and then the doctor is not going to use it or they’re going to have more issues or more importantly, it’ll have some repercussions to the patient that we don’t really don’t want.
I guess if you think it’s actually a really good example too, because Ergonomics and physical environment is the sort of the OG of user experience. Right. We’re achieving this through software design and software user interfaces, but it used to be very physical. And I remember even hearing a good example was like in sport performance, somebody Lance Armstrong, love them or hate them, obviously, a well known cyclist, fantastic at time trialing. And so they did is they called them their F1 team. They were like fanatical designers, engineers that were building the best bicycle, and they were doing everything they could to shave every possible second off of a time trial. Because it’s 60 kilometer time trial will be one by 3 seconds. And that’s horrifying to imagine, like, how accurate you need to be and how differentiated do you have to try to be to achieve those 3 seconds? And so what they did, they said in the winds tunnel, the perfect bike design for this was going to be sort of narrowing the pedal width by millimeters. It was almost an insignificant difference. But over the course of a 1 hour time trial, it would take 5 seconds off of the time trial, which is the difference between winning and losing.
And when they put him out on the road with it, he came back and his time was worse. And they said, what happened? And he’s like, my hips are on fire. Because while engineering wise, it was the ideal design. He just physically did not work like it took away from the way that he can physically ride it. When you see the marriage of humans and engineering, you realize that it’s two fantastically different practices that are coming together.
Absolutely. And I think that’s the in the design world, we call it prototyping with the users. We can prototype as much as you want in the lab, but taking it to the users, letting them interact with it, letting them engage with it and then observing it and iterating on it. Absolutely. But again, these are all things that we have already figured out in the non-tech sector. Right. So prototyping has been a big part of architecture. They scale model everything before they actually build it has been a big thing. Industrial design, where they actually prototype and kind of use it. But then in the software world, for as much as we look at it, as I said, 40% of the products are shipped without even talking to one user or showing it to one user. And that’s kind of where I find that as it software is, it still is not behind the curve there.
Yeah. And often, too, even if they feel like they’ve been successful once, like they’ve gotten somebody to download and they see if the numbers are heading the right direction, if they’re going up into the right as far as adoption and retention, because it’s sort of a Schrodinger’s cat problem that would have gone better if we had spent more time with the user. We’re gaining an adoption. Our turn rate is low or reasonable. So how do you define successful but meanwhile both pre products and then post product that’s the other thing is that user experience is continuous. It’s not a thing you do once and say, okay, good, stamp it, mark it complete, it’s now in QA and continuous engineering.
Yeah. And I think you use a good term there. Continuous engineering, actually. I’m very inspired personally over the Kaisen philosophy of continuous improvement. And one thing I always say is if your users have problems, that means you haven’t done your, if any problem in the system. You haven’t done enough design or experience design until your users are in delight mode. And it’s actually interesting because once you get in the delight mode where they’re like someone thought about me or someone thought about my context, that smile that comes in in their face, that’s where you kind of end that phase. Now the irony of this is a year later that’s table stakes. Now you had to score in more delight. And that’s why it’s continuously because now just think about smartphones. Today, anyone who comes out with a smartphone without a touch screen interface, are they even actually viable? Absolutely not. Right. But then when Apple came out with the first touch screen with their construct, a very different anyone comes out with a smartphone without conversational AI – not stable stakes. But that’s where your delight has to continuously be evolving. And as tech becomes more and more powerful, you really have to queue in and what is that pain point? What is that opportunity? And that’s why continuously, every day you’d eat, sleep and drink that as a systems designer or a software systems designer, otherwise you will be left behind.
When did you know that this was a passion and that you had the ability to create a world around it?
I’ve been in this profession for 20 years. I enjoyed this, but I’ve never really knew why. And I think the last ten years is where I’ve started honing in and why. And the why is that when you really think about it, this is one profession that actually you can talk to users, understand the pain points, quickly come back prototype items and then go back to them, talk to them. And when you start realizing the power that has that you actually are as a profession, which is nothing less than when you really think about it as like an innovative. And that’s when you realize that everything can be thought through in that angle, any problem can be solved from this angle. And that’s kind of when I truly started realizing the power as I started growing in rank and like one small change here can make such a telescopic effect. So I would say the last ten years is when I started realizing more and more the power that this can unleash. Obviously a pivotal moment was going to business school and starting to understand more business problems from other peers because I went to an exec program.
But before that, I really enjoyed it, but never really understood why and what are the contours of that interest. But I would say the last ten years has been more so being very aware of it.
Now, this is an interesting point that you braised that I think is very important is the connection of the business outcome to the user experience. Only the measurability, because it is a very sort of touchy-feely type of idea. As we talk about sort of the practice of user experience that people believe it’s like, people will like it more. We use odd superlatives to describe it, but there is measurability in it. So tell me where that differentiates a true user experience designer from maybe somebody who’s involved in user experience, but just more specific and niche is part of the process.
As I mentioned earlier, you can do a lot of user experience on a UI level. Designing a screen, a form factor itself. But all you can design and use experience as an organizational aspect. Now, a good designer is thinking about how do I again, I’ll give you an interesting lesson I learned early on which would probably connect some of these dots. I was working in a company once, and I’m not kidding you. Every team I worked with said we are user centric. And it was a fascinating thing. I’m customer success, I talk to users. I’m user-centric. I am customer support. I talk to users, I’m user-eccentric. I am engineering, I’m building for users, I’m user-centric. I am marketing. So everybody had the frame of mind. You go and ask the user, how is this company for you? And they’re like, man, I talked to support. They will send me one place and they say, go talk to them. Products actually does one thing. And so from a user’s perspective, they were like, I hate what you guys are doing and I don’t like it. So when you look at it, it’s interesting, the intent is right, but the outcome is kind of not coming together there.
So when you start thinking about what a good designer bad experience designer, absolutely good designs are being done on the UI leve., but really bad design is being done on organizational level. So that’s kind of where you’re looking at. And obviously the impact of that, the more higher you go, the more value that you can unlock. But in the most basic sense, I think they’re coming back to something that you kind of started with, where’s the business sense? The UI level is obviously very touchy-feely. Like they feel right, they look right, they’re delighted, all that stuff. But if you really look at all businesses, all business stakeholders, they care about adoption, retention, satisfaction, efficiency, and these are all user efficiency and user engagement. And to get to that level, you really need to understand why the user gets it, doesn’t get it, what’s the context, who the user is. And then you kind of build those experiments and iterate on it. And that’s truly when you start and you can increase adoption, you can increase attention. So many times you make tweaks and e-commerce or transactional experiences, and then you start seeing them back, like just explaining something to someone gets them to sign up faster.
Just getting them to kind of talk to a community and building a community experience gets them to engage better. So these are all things that you need to know, what are the unmet needs? And then because of that engagement, there’s a higher attention, there’s higher adoption, there’s all these nuances that come to it, everything that you do. And that’s also why UX Reactor was founded, because I was just sick and tired personally, where design was becoming very much like a touchy-feely thing. And I said, no, design is a business driver. And I met and that was also the pivotal point for me was finishing our business school and talking to about 100 other business leaders from different contexts. And I could see that they had real business problems that I could solve. And that’s kind of what the genesis. And actually, I think anybody who says that as a practitioner, that designers touchy-feel, that means they don’t really understand the power. And unfortunately, that is still a profession that’s in adolescent. So therefore, there’s still a lot of that going on.
Yeah, I worked in finance and insurance and technology, like in tech support early on in the first part of my career. And it was trying to think it was like 2003, so early 2000s. And even like pre-1999 origin, I worked at Sunlight Financial, anybody who can look at my LinkedIn. So I’m not giving away secrets here. And I remember we were like moving from mainframe terminals to PC. So this is like Windows 31. The first change, adding a mouse to somebody’s life was like, good golly, I’ve never seen one of these things before. What is this? What do you do with it? It was literally that level of change in business process. And then we had this one team that I remember that always stood out to me. And they were the ones that had colored hair and tattoos, and they sat in the middle of the floor of our IT Department for some reason because we had all these printers and they were the design team, and they worked on the only Macintosh computers in the whole company. And they were these sort of odd group of folks in that they were different than the traditional suit wearing insurance folks. We’re still in a very corporate environment. However, the leader of the team was this fellow named Paul. And I learned so many lessons from him, that he could beautifully nurture the creative process that these young, just such interesting people could bring. And they were looking at, like, physical design and like brochures. And then it became email. They became what they did was pervasive to the way the company was portrayed. And then he was sort of like the dad of the group, but who also understood that what are the marketing numbers? What are the ways that we measure it? And that was my first understanding. I’m like, this was design experience versus just print. They weren’t a print shop. They were truly connecting like a textual experience, like tactile experience rather, to a business outcome. And it was like, oh, wow, I knew it was important. And as I saw over years that we moved into software design and software user experience and seeing it done right in some organizations, I was like, you knew that they got it and they understood the impact.
Absolutely. I think I’m a big believer of multidisciplinary thinking. And when you connect the dots, it actually is much more effective. Yeah, absolutely. I think the only thing when you said that that’s one reaction I see is like the creative kind. And yes, absolutely. There are a lot of people that are different and in the creative pursuit and so on and so forth. But it’s actually more of a mindset. And it’s a mindset that I personally advocate that a lot of people can get into, especially now that we all are equally, all the tools and systems and methods are available. It’s much easier to become an engineer if you want to watch YouTube videos and learn in the same way. Much easier to learn design and appreciate design. There’s just so much opportunities to kind of become a student of a lot of different systems. But yeah, I think design is kind of coming in. Most organizations in the Valley, as well as most tech companies, have some investment in design. What kind and where they are and how mature is a different question, but they have some investment. Just to give you one quick story, there is I started my career also in early 2000s, and my title still was User experience at that point with User Experience specialist.
And I had a scrum manager ask me like, oh, so what do you do? And I said, I’m a user experience specialist. I said, okay, what do you code in? I said, I don’t code in anything. And then he’s like, oh, so you just get paid to do boxes and arrows? And I was like, I get paid to do boxes and arrows. But that’s exactly fascinating. But then again, not in any real intention, but just how his understanding was. How can you build your experience without this? But over time, I still kept in touch with that master. And it’s fascinating. I mean, how much the profession has evolved.
If you think of those days. I mean, I remember coming through doing some work in telecom, in schooling, and I went to University, like took some part time courses, and it was all about information technology management. And they were teaching us about legacy telecom technologies that were like decades old. And that was at that time the beginning of what I started to see HCI – like human computer interaction, was beginning to become a subset of computer science. But only a handful of people moved towards it versus today. I would imagine that it’s actually probably core competency and core curriculum, I think, for computer science. So we’ve seen it, be understood the importance and the impact that it can have.
I think absolutely. I think just look at it. Right? I mean, what was that saying? That we have more computing power on our body than the space shuttle that went to moon? And that just is fascinating. I mean, the amount of tech that we have around us, the amount of systems we are interacting with, and if you do not think about the human in the loop and build that around that, then it just is an opportunity lost. And again, with the curve, there will be a lot of people adopted because it solves a problem. And just the same way as I would say before FaceTime and Apple brought FaceTime. And yeah, you could talk to person to person if you knew the IP, and then you kind of plug it in and then you do a thing and maybe kind of figure out the firewalls and all that stuff. But today it’s just like I click on a person’s face and I call them, and then I’m talking to them, and that just is the nature of how technology has evolved. And do they really care about what IP and which country and which location?
And they don’t because the systems take care of it and the human just wants it to work that way. But again, it works with an iPhone. But when I go into my home, it’s kind of a different context. So there’s a lot of those still, as technology is becoming pervasive, I just believe that there will be more opportunities for us to really think about human in the loop across systems.
And I think what we learn is that through those first iterations, just like with Teleconferencing, right. It was like you’d have a Polycom system in one office and a Polycom system in another office. And some poor bugger in the networking team is trying to set up sip trunking and point to point peering and all this really difficult technology to make one meeting happen. And there’s a bunch of people staring at the back of an It guy in one room and staring at the back of an It guy in another room. And then eventually the TV’s light up and it’s all right. Now we can begin and it’s wondrous versus now the natural expectation is I should just be able to walk up and click the button. And then I’m talking to Tokyo. Absolutely. Underneath it all the same, technology exists, right? But we took what was that problematic experience and we’ve gotten through it and we’ve automated and systematized it, which is, I think, where the advantage comes in. And also, like you said, it’s about iteration. It’s about listening, finding the customer problem, and seeing where just in the same way that any design business design, like lean practices, which ultimately came from the work of Toyota and Kaizen.
I read Eli Gold Rat and this idea of the theory of constraints and how this comes as far as flow. Well, experience flow is similar, right? Like find the bottleneck, subjugate the bottleneck, eliminate it, and then look for the next bottleneck and continue to do so until you have flow.
Absolutely. Yeah. It’s more science than art overall. And that’s why I say I’ve seen a lot more correlation with engineering, with creativity, which actually is one thing that because if you look at it, let’s talk about creativity and movie making. Right. If you talk to cinematographer and you kind of understand how they kind of compose the picture, it’s a lot of mathematics, it’s a lot of angles, it’s a lot of equations around light and camera angles and so on and so forth. But no one talks about it that way. You still have to equally be appreciative the same way as dancing, as so much math, steps counts, and all those things that you have to really think about a lot of nuances and designs are very similar. Design is very similar. In fact, I write in the book too about this, which is that a lot of times people pick up when you say design inspiration, it’s always looking for somebody who’s a designer in the craft sense. But I actually think that one of the best designers in the world was often not discussed in the modern context is Da Vinci. And because you think about him, he understands biology as well as he understands engineering as well as art.
And he’s good things to show in each one of them. And perfect. And if you can look back again talking about Steve Jobs or anyone, the construct of being a polymath, construct of looking at how things connect, that’s kind of where the magic is. And then you kind of apply that aspect of the flow and kind of looking at every aspect and every problem and then unlocking it. There’s just so many ways that you can make that magic happen.
And that is Da Vinci is such an incredible example of that. Like as both a creative mind and as an artist, a very literal artist, and what he could create, we could paint and his drawings, but his engineering. And when you look at the stuff that’s not the most popular works that we all know, you realize, like how many thousands of engineering drawings that he has. And this was pre-computer. This is very rudimentary tools that were given to him to do this. And he was creating something fantastic. On the Jobs thing too, it’s funny. There’s this weird thing that people often do is they say, oh, he wasn’t actually an engineer, but he understood the engineering aspect. He understood the technology, he understood the business, he understood the human behavior. And that may have been his strongest focus area. But he wasn’t just a marketing guy that made Apple big because he was really a marketing guy. It’s unfortunate that we kind of try and dumb it down to just like labeling somebody as they do this thus. That’s what they did.
I think it’s a really good thing to unpack. Right. And we say this at the firm of UX Reactor a lot. We say this always start with the user, understand the experience, then design it for them, and then look at the technology. And if you look at how Steve Jobs thought through it, he knew who the user was. He knew what experience he wanted to give them, and that’s kind of the whole thing. When he created the first Apple Store, he perfected it in a warehouse. He looked at every angle, how lights was formed, what the material surface was. He thought about that experience he wanted to give when people walked into the store. Then he thought about the design of all the nuances. And then he goes to engineering and says, I want this. Make it happen. Right. And obviously, engineering is when you have that level of a funnel of thinking, you are always holding engineering accountable for a very different aspect, which is like, I want to give the best experience for the user, and this design is going to look this way. Now, do you need to be the best engineer in the room?
Probably not. Do you need to be the best marketing person? He was a great storyteller. He could bring it down to the world. And I think that is often something that’s not told as much. Now you put it in the marketing hat. Absolutely not. He knew what users care about, and he would tell that well. But the fact is there was a lot of scientific approach. And his process of as you kind of earlier shared this, that aspect is kind of very valid. Now, what’s also interesting is Elon Musk calls himself the chief designer at SpaceX.
Yeah.
And it’s fascinating how he picked that title out. I know many people there’s a lot to read on that line. He’s the best technically the best person in space. I know there are so many other people there’s technically the best engineer on that system. Probably not. But the way he thinks about, again, what’s the vision for the system that he’s building and then percolate down and then get everything done, which is why the designer word, and I call it big d-thinking, big design thinking and not the small craft thinking. And that’s kind of where these people always played.
The Musk example is very interesting, too, because people have trouble trying to fit him into what he does. He’s incredibly technical, he’s incredibly intelligent, so much so that it’s challenging to have discussions with him because he’s thinking at a different level as a great interview experience. I watched and it’s actually tough to watch sometimes these ones Lex Friedman, who’s MIT robotics professor and designer and doing some very interesting stuff. And he’s a great podcast, talk some really amazing people. And Elon on and he talked about how do you think about where it can go wrong? What is it that you do in designing for failure, that if maybe it won’t work, that we aren’t going to get to Mars? Something that was the premise of the question. And it was the most fantastic thing to watch as an interview, because Musk just turned and you could see his eyes were like they’re darting back and forth. He’s formulating it. And the fact that Friedman gave just said, don’t say a word, didn’t cut them off, didn’t try and fill it. It felt like 30 seconds. It was probably ten. But that’s an eternity. When you’re watching an interview, you’re like, is the microphone still on?
You’re literally like, you’re not sure if they’re still on. And he’s like, well, we don’t think about that because there is no option. Failure is not something that we designed for. And he began this, but the fact that he went through and he was looking for the correct answer, not the fastest answer that would sound good on microphone. And it’s a very unique thing. Now he’s a Polarizing figure. Obviously, it’s a challenge to have a conversation about what’s good or bad about Elon Musk’s with a lot of folks. Actually, here’s another one. I bring this up because we did talk about this. You may know this text and this professor. Well, yes, which is why I said I wanted to wait until we got into ethics. I’m a student myself of stuff that BJ Fogg has brought to the world. But before we understood the impact, and now that we do understand the impact and he himself has almost had to kind of put a label warning on his own work because he sort of understands how much he empowered people to take it and do things that were not healthy or potentially not ethical with it.
Let’s talk about ethics of design.
No, it’s interesting. On a side note, actually, my master’s thesis was either studying persuasive technology, which is obviously at that point, or was human robotic interaction. I decided to take human robotic interaction. But I’ve actually been a student of persuasion, how systems like that can be built right if done right, obviously. I mean, because design the way to it just the same way as you kind of showed the coin trick. There’s a lot of illusion to design. There’s a lot of ways that we can get people to do what they want to do and how they want to get them to. If you’re getting them to do it for the right thing, obviously it is what the user intended to and where they got to. I think that’s all ethical when you want them to get to things that you intend to, but not them, probably. And that’s kind of where it gets into the other side. There’s so much that’s gone with the advent of technology. We have just seen a lot of other social aspects of it. Much deeper topic much. But personally, for me, I’ve always tiered here, at least as a firm.
We always said that we want to solve life problems, not lifestyle problems. And there’s still so much more opportunity. But on the highest level. I mean, I’d rather get a student to study better on a doctor to kind of be effective more or financial transactions to happen faster than actually trying to get you to do something or buy something that I don’t that is not right for you or anywhere. There’s a lot of other aspects to that. But the power of design is very much there for us to do anything we want. You’ve seen that over the last four or five years where triggering of polarizing news can get more engagement, getting you to click on a fake queue can get you more clicks. Again, it’s easy to do that because I control the environment that you’re in, and therefore I can manage that. But at the same time, I must say what some of the firms are now doing as a stand to kind of give more power to the consumer and power to them. I actually feel that there is more corporate responsibility that’s coming in. But overall, I just think there is a larger system that people need to realize that technology is getting more powerful and tools that are available are getting much more powerful. And we just need to know that we have to be aware of it.
Yeah. And I’ve applauded the work really, of Tristan Harris and the center for Human Technology and sort of that group that’s wrapped around it. And there are so many people that have really come to the fore who were ultimately all students of Fog and those practices. And I think that’s a good thing. In the same way that if we look at what Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky did in winning a Nobel Prize for economics as behavioral psychologists, that in the same way you talk about design, that it’s matching the business to the human experience and measuring it, that we’re going to use a lot more science to describe the art than the art. And that’s pre Kahneman and Tversky, all we thought was that this was art, that this was anecdotal information. And we were lucky more than right on describing what was happening. And when we took and we put science and data behind it, all of a sudden you can really understand what was going on in that behavior. And I truly like, that user experience is ultimately behavioral understanding, right?
Absolutely. Because I think users have intent, and intent kind of reflects in behavior. Users have trained behavior. So there’s a lot of those elements that you kind of do that. So it’s truly a cusp of that’s why I say you have to be a psychologist, you have to be a student of cultures. As an anthropologist, you need to look at be a technologist, you need to understand. So there’s so many aspects that you bring together to make that magic happen. But, yeah, it’s a powerful system that many companies and I see a lot more companies becoming much more aware of it. It’s just that they don’t get it right because they go in with one quick solution and so on, so forth. But it is a big mindset shift. But once it’s done and people understand that there’s a whole science behind it and a structure behind it, there’s a lot of opportunity.
Yeah. And it’s an interesting mix of, like you said, such a multidisciplinary thing. And even like, marketing campaigns are very much wrapped around creating an experience. And so the words we use, they’re so simple when you get them. But the work to get there. So that really can bring up the question of who was the reason why the first Apple really went to high output? Was it Chia Day because they were the marketing agency behind it? Was it the team that fed them the right data to give them that campaign? There were so many players. But in the end, internally, especially as an organization, when you’re creating a software centric business, user experience design is now fundamental. And this is not something that you can go on to Upwork and Fiverr and find. Absolutely.
I think you can get a lot of people on Fiverr. I think before we start this conversation, anybody with a computer and Internet can be a user experience designer. But to become a really good one in that it takes a lifetime and you still learn. And the technology, as I said, you kind of really broaden up and then also build the depth. And it’s more importantly, I think, something that you called out, which I want to kind of further elaborate on. It’s a very collaborative profession, and it’s not necessary that the most creative person is somebody with a designer title. It’s actually the system of bringing people together, ideating, building it, iterating on it. It is a collective process, and it’s one of those professions where literally two plus two is not edited. It’s multiplicative in a lot of ways. So therefore, it’s actually a fascinating thing. And I’ve seen so many people who go through a design process, they’re like, man, this is so fun. And I’m like, absolutely, it should be fun because you’re getting your creative juices, you’re trying out a lot of things, and you’re doing it with a larger group of people. And then when you build a structure around it. It kind of gets much more engaging.
Let’s talk about the bringing this to the market as a playbook now. So the user experience design is a practical playbook to fuel business growth. Fantastic introduction to what people can do. And it is such a well laid out, full, true experience in the playbook. Everywhere I went, it made sense. So I can imagine the work that went into creating this has had to have been a lot of hours, a lot of iteration, and a lot of design. But first of all, it’s beautifully done, just visually. And the reading of it, it’s like they say about user experience, when user experience is really great, no one notices. When it’s not great, it’s immediately obvious.
Absolutely.
So talk about the book and what drew you to put the time towards this? And I’m going to tell people, get the bloody book is fantastic.
To be honest, the book was never an intent on our end. It all started with I really was about eight years back, I was fairly frustrated in my career because I had spent close to that point about a decade trying to build that user centricity in organizations and teams that I’ve worked on and felt that my career was fairly mediocre. I didn’t have much to show. I had a lot of effort, a lot of activity, and I was just concerned at the same time, you look at the apples, the Airbnb, the Zappos, and all the folks that have actually been able to unravel and deliver much more impact to user centric practices. And I said, I really need to go back and look at it. And I said, either I keep to this profession, in which case let’s go back and understand and study why some companies are able to get there and why some companies are not able to get there. And that became my pursuit for a large level and to do that UXReactor as a firm was created and with my brother, who’s also the co founder and also the very good researcher and this line of work.
And through that last seven years that the company existed, we ran a lot of experiments. We worked with a lot of companies. We kind of understood what are the key things that make it work. And then we finally came down to what was in our we call it the BVD system to drive business value by design. There are four key aspects that need to be thought through, which is the right people in the right process, following the right process with the right mindset in the right environment. And that is what makes a good company in this process of being user centric versus a great company. And what we then started realizing is that we would get questions that a lot of our stakeholders would ask, like, how do I build a team? What’s the structure that goes into it, how do I build a carrier for them? How do I build a roadmap around a user that I care about? There’s a lot of these things that started coming up and we’re like, man, we need to probably write something about it because there’s so much more need. Nine out of ten companies don’t follow any of this structure, though they intend to.
And so we said, let’s write it down and put it out in the public domain. And that’s when the book came to be. And it was also one of the pandemic babies in the pandemic. We just saw every company going tech first, digital first, and then struggling. Right. And education is a classic example. Like just throwing tech on it doesn’t help because what ends up on the user’s side is they have half a dozen to a dozen systems to interact with, one for assessment, one for instruction, one for textbooks. And then that student is having to deal with uncomplicating it, and then experience is the best way to kind of navigate through that and you realize that’s not happening. So the book kind of ended up there. And then we said we wanted to create it with an intent to be a playbook where people from a different perspective business leaders, design leaders, practitioners, collaborators, everybody could take away something from it as a play and then use it immediately. So that’s how the whole construct came to be. And then we took a lot of our tribal common knowledge that we had within our own playbook at the organization and then put that out there.
So that’s kind of how the book ended up becoming a book. And so far as we’ve gone through our own process of iterating and testing with different users who we actually want to leverage, that we hope would leverage this book. And so far, we have only heard great things. And that’s all we are traded on it, and we kind of built on it as soon as it publishes. I’m looking forward to kind of getting the reaction and getting out there. I believe it’s sometime early May.
This is the thing that we see often, right? Is that going I think of Gene Kim and the team that worked with them on the Phoenix project and ultimately the DevOps handbook. The industry may still misuse the phrase DevOps. I see people all the time. They’re like DevOps engineer too, right? Like, that’s their title by HR, and it’s not really related to what they’re doing. In the same way that user experience design will get co opted and misused as a phrase, some poor person out there is labeled user experience designer three. You know, like they’re going to get ranked according to some HR band. But the work that went in the research, the patience that’s required to live the experience and then to take that same patience to bring it to the community through a written work. I loved how that played out in what you and everybody at UX Reactor have done. And like I said, this is the proof in even what I’ve seen. When you tell me it’s still in draft form, I figured it was going to come to be in basically word format like this. If this is draft, then I’ve never written a draft this good in my life.
It’s very well done.
Again, good to great concentration, and I think it’s good right now. And I think we are still trying to make it great, but that’s a perpetual I said we will keep evolving it. We will still have ideas. But more importantly, I think it’s a good resource that we have pulled together from our own experience and roughly everybody. It’s a collective effort. And I hope that even if one company gets to drive this success and that’s kind of the way we are looking at it. And that’s the reason why we want to make sure that more and more people are aware it’s just one of those professions in adolescence and we wanted to mature fast and then start delivering value fast in a way that most users actually. And again, think about it, we have so many interfaces we’re interacting with, and it should be much more easier. I think I have a vision in a decade from now, there will be so much technology, but they should be a simpler way of how we approach it. And you don’t have to go to like, again, I see all these tech companies going through certification programs, training programs.
I’m like professional services. I mean, your system, if it has to be explained, that means it’s not been designed well. Your system needs to be certified on for someone to use on. That means that you haven’t spent the time perfecting it. And it’s just one of those things that I say that and then also because the last two decades has been much more web centric, mobile centric all that is what’s going to come and play in the next decade. So it’s actually a fascinating time altogether.
It is. It is a really wondrous time with the opportunity. Obviously counterbalanced with what we talked about was sort of the ethics and the risks that we do present. But I’d say the dominant work that’s happening is so positive and so just doing great things. What we can do to bring these technologies and these platforms and these opportunities to other parts of the world as well that are underrepresented. And this one I want to tap on before we finish up Satyam is cultural representation in user experience design because I fall victim to this all the time. Right. I typically speak to a dominantly North American market, and so you can use a cadence of speech that’s specific. You can use everything. Platform design, referring to stories. I can talk about a New York Bank or a West Coast health company. It’s almost ingrained into me. It’s all sort of a coded bias of speech pattern and experience design. But then when I speak to audiences that are in the UK, I know to refer to Barclays instead of bank of New York, Maryland. And I know to refer to Santander and to think about the NIH instead of Medicare.
Like, I’ve learned those things. When it comes to user experience design, how do you deal with geo experience locality?
It’s that inbuilt curiosity in a lot of ways and that’s kind of what you tap into. It is a global profession. So if I’m trying to build something for, let’s say Sapsahar in Africa, you either have to go and observe and be immersed in it like one like them, or you kind of go and talk to people there or you kind of find someone who’s kind of much more aware of that. Again, it’s a user research is such a critical facet that how do you understand those aspects or you do all of it and triangle. It’s no different from again, good user research is no different from an awesome intelligence analyst in the military or a financial analyst because you’re connecting dots, you’re kind of connecting this is what this person thinks in this context. This is what it is. And then you kind of build your hypothesis and build your experiments around that. And that’s the scientific part of building experiences. But first of all, being aware that a SubSaharan African student studying is different from the inner city student versus somebody has high end in an expensive neighborhood, because even the subtleties of getting internet set up or even the devices that are around you, all those things can become different contexts and situations.
But again, just being aware that the world is different around you and you are curious to see how they are different, well, itself open up so much opportunity and a lot of times people just go in and I assuming that what you think is the right thing. And I’ll end this with actually an interesting story with my professor when I was in grad school and he finished a class and then I went to him and I said, that just seems like common sense. And he said, absolutely it is common sense. But remember what’s common for you is not common for somebody who’s in the other part of the world or your grandmother. And that is what who we are. We are understanding what common sense is. And that’s actually a fascinating thing that stayed with me all through. And that’s why I’m always looking for what’s common sense. And when somebody thinks it’s common sense, that means I’ve given to them what they want in the context that they wanted.
That’s a perfect way to round it up and leave the assumptions at the door because it is a beautiful and sad to me, your approach is really great and I’ve learned a ton from you. I’ve definitely learned like just even when I’ve had a chance to read through the book. It’s going to be great so I’ll make sure to get this out. Hopefully not too long from the time that people are watching this and listening to it they’ll be able to get so I’ll have links and make sure to share it out. If people do want to get connected to you Satyam what’s the best way to do that?
Linkedin is the best way to connect on there’s also we’re going to create a small community for the playbook I believe. Uxdplaybook.com it’s going to launch around the same time on the book launches so again there’ll be different ways to connect. I really want to kind of be as available and approachable as possible as people are in this journey but yeah I think LinkedIn is a good way if they also can reach out through the company uxreactor.com so there’s different ways to get there. I’m pretty sure if someone wants to truly get to me I’m sure they will find a way but the easiest way is to get on LinkedIn and just send me a note.
There you go folks to follow the links down below because I make sure I have them in the show notes and of course on the YouTube channel this has been really great Satyam. It’s been a real pleasure and I look forward to success for you with the book and with UX reactor and hopefully we’ll get a chance to catch up again in future and here on the other side once it’s out in the world, how the community building around it because that is an interesting aspect that I’d actually like to explore again in future. So thank you very, very much.
Absolutely. Thank you so much, Eric. I appreciate it and have a great rest of the day.
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Welcome back, everybody. My name is Eric Wright. I’m the host of your Disco Posse podcast. Thank you for listening. Thank you for watching. If you want to watch, you can actually legitimately watch it’s over at youtube.com/discopossepodcast. Thanks to all the amazing people who are making this podcast possible and growing, growing like crazy. So super proud, having a lot of fun. Hope you’re enjoying the show as much as I am and all of our amazing guests. Speaking amazing guests, you’re about to meet Troy Hipolito. He’s the not so boring LinkedIn guy, but it’s actually a lot more than that. Troy is the founder of the Troy Agency. He’s got a really storied history in helping people with social promotion. But it’s not just about social promotion. He thinks big, and he takes that and applies it to social promotion. His agency style work and understanding of how to help people is really coming together beautifully. So it was a lot of fun. Troy actually was in the midst of a move, and he was kind enough to schedule something. This was one of those fun outreaches that he did a cold outreach to me on LinkedIn, and I actually liked it, and we got connected.
He was super fun. So I hope you enjoy this as much as I did. And talk about not so boring. Let’s head on over and remember the not so boring and fantastic people that make this podcast happen. So shout out to my sponsors, who all right, we got some announcements coming up very soon, so hang on to your hats. But in the meantime, go to vee.am/discoposse to get everything you need for your data protection needs, whether it’s on premises, whether it’s in the cloud, whether it’s bare metal. Metal, yeah. You got mail servers. You got to back those things up. You’ve got to back everything up. How about stuff like SharePoint, Microsoft Teams, Office 365? There’s much more. So again, just head on over to vee.am/discoposse, find out and let them know old Disco sent you over there. Speaking of going over there and doing it safely, protect your data in traffic, in transit, in every form. Head on over to tryexpressvpn.com/discoposse. I’m a user. I’m a fan because hey, I travel around, I move around, I’m on other people’s sketchy WiFi. It’s not sketchy because I use a VPN. So go check it out. Hey, even better than avoiding coffee shop WiFi, get your own coffee. Go to Diabolicalcoffee.com. All right, let’s get to the fun part. This is Troy Hipolito, the not so boring LinkedIn guy on the Disco Posse podcast.
Hey, this is Troy Hipolito. I’m with the Troy Agency. I’m known as the Not So Boring LinkedIn Guy. And you’re watching the Disco Posse podcast.
I loved your tagline, the Not So Boring LinkedIn Guy. And thank you, Troy, for jumping on today and for reaching out, getting connected. I’m a real fan of your content, your approach, your style, and it’s something that I even myself, I think. Good golly. There’s so many things I’m under utilizing around LinkedIn, around a lot of social network. You’ve really, really got some great stuff that you’re coaching people through and bringing them towards really strong outcomes. So for folks that are brand new to you, do not yet know about Troy Hipolito, you want to give a quick introduction and a bio and we’ll talk about what you and the team are doing.
Oh, yeah, I’ll even do one better and tell you the story behind it. So I am a designer and developer by trade, right. So I’m a programmer as well as a UI/UX person. And I was actually an award winning designer here in Atlanta, Georgia, several years in a row, like the top designer. And so back in the day, I had a company called ISO Interactive, and we were building video games. It was like the Rockstar programming. We’re doing virtual worlds, we’re doing app development, back end, front end. And it was really cool. We had a small team, about a dozen people. We paired up a designer with a programmer, and we created stuff that didn’t exist. We loved it. Right. So it was going really well until it wasn’t.
Oh, no.
In Atlanta, Georgia, they no longer depend on the agencies because the companies that you get work are the Fortune 500. They’re very corporate. And so they use agencies up to a certain point, and they pretty much cut a lot of that work off. And the agency started fighting each other. So I was thinking, I got all this great work. I did CocaCola stuff. I did Xbox Mobile, did Harry Potter movie releases. We even had our own Harry Potter fan site that we developed a full 3D, pseudo 3D virtual world using multi-user technologies. And it was just like, why can’t we get any work? Well, the agencies grab a lot of these people and brought them in house and really cannibalize the whole agency model. And so they were really fighting over pennies. We had to find another source of getting work. And so I asked a buddy of mine, he was actually doing well, and he had a competing agency, and he was putting all his work through LinkedIn. I was like, LinkedIn, you’re getting all your work through LinkedIn? He says, yeah. And then I had a sales buddy of mine in New Jersey, and he said, yeah, it’s LinkedIn, man.
It’s LinkedIn. I thought LinkedIn was a bunch of stuff for resumes. And they said, no, you have to build a relationship and all this other stuff. And I realized something. Those relationships were like, analogous to old-fashioned dating. And again, I realized I was a terrible dater, like in real life. So I have type A personality traits because I’m very technical, right? And what I and other people were doing and what a lot of people do nowadays still is they date wrong. They go in there. It’s like me saying this beautiful woman and walking up to her saying, I find you very beautiful. I’m going to have two babies with you right now. It doesn’t work you end up getting slapped in the face. And that’s the technical equivalent of what people are doing on LinkedIn. And so we had to revamp it. It worked really well, and we had a bunch of clients, and then we fired those clients and we rebranded our agency. And people asked, Troy, why did you fire all these clients? I said, Because they weren’t the right type of client. They just wanted to sell. And so my type of clients that I hire on the higher end, the high end type of clients, we look for people that offer value like they’re human.
So if you reach out to them, they’re there to help that person, they’re there to engage, and their audience exists in an active forum on LinkedIn. And so that’s a very narrow band of people that are authentic. They’re willing to kind of contribute some time to help those individuals. I said, yeah, I need to find like-minded people. And that’s when we changed from return client to the Troy Agency. So we only pick up maybe one or two primary clients a month, and it’s residual, works out fine. On the other end, we have course materials, and we have our own show, a monthly show that covers that type of revenue stream as well. So it works great as long as you have something that someone wants and you’re there to help them, don’t sell. If you help them solve their problem, there’s really only one of three things can happen. So I’ll take a 15 minutes meeting. They said, Troy, I’m doing this, and this. I’m having this issue. I help them solve the problem on LinkedIn. I said, this is the thing that you need to do to solve that immediate issue. And there’s one of three things that come out of that.
You put out good energy in the universe. They’ll never talk bad about you. Number two, it works so well that they’re into their business and they realize there’s 23 other things that only Troy can fix, and they hire me. And the third is they’re so happy they can’t afford what I have going on. But they like me. They like me enough to send a recommendation. And being recommended by someone else is ten times easier than you tooting your own horn. So it’s all about being human and doing what you say and helping those people get where they need to go, that’s my story. Little long version anyway.
No, it’s perfect. And a lot of folks that are listening to us obviously have a LinkedIn profile. I say obviously. Many folks would have a LinkedIn profile and they use it for a variety of purposes. And look, my dms are littered with these people that just don’t get it. I sort of say this is the common interaction is, hey, I see we have some common interests and like, all right, I’ll bite – accept, right. Because I also use it as a broadcast channel. Right. So I’m ultimately, all my content is going pushing to LinkedIn. I’m not really using it interactively as much as some people would think. And then the next one is, hey, thanks for connecting. Really great. Like what you’re doing with X or interested to connect and chat more. And then 4 hours later is hey, so what do you do about blah, blah, blah. And they immediately are pitching a product to me. And then the next day it’s like bumping the top of inbox just in case you didn’t see this then it’s not sure if you’re getting my messages. And then eventually like seven messages later you get the hey, I know you’re probably busy or you’ve been eaten by a bear or like there’s some kind of witty thing that they read worked once and so they just reused the same meme. And I’m like, no, this is not the way to use this platform.
You know what that’s called? It’s spam. They’re spamming, that’s what it is. I had to release a client because he wanted to spam people. She says, I always want to help people that need help right now and send this one message to everyone and keep on sending it to them. I said spam. Why is spam? I said, that’s the definition of spam. I was telling me that is what spam is. You want to communicate. And so that communication element is important. So what you’re talking about is seven or eight touch points that people think. They’re thinking, well, I have to get between 12 and 14 touch points before they connect with me. But they’re not connecting the dots. So that doesn’t mean people on sending them messages on your LinkedIn dm, it means how can you connect with them in a more authentic way? It’s okay to send one or two messages, I think. But I don’t like the selling portion. I do like the idea of getting to know that person for a particular reason. And so you want to do things with strategy. So a lot of people will use these systems and they’ll just bombard it and automate it and that sort of thing.
And LinkedIn, they’ll crack down on it, you get enough complaints, shut your account down. And so you have to have good habits. One of the things is like how can I come across authentic? The other thing is that how can I have them come to me? How do I separate myself from every other LinkedIn guy out there or in your business as well. Whatever you do, how do you separate yourself where if there is interest, they acknowledge that and they come to you. So you want two way traffic. And one thing that I do, what I don’t do is I don’t do sequencing on LinkedIn. I will have a witty connection message, and I’ll have maybe one follow up. But the follow up is usually a welcome message, and it’s unique to that individual. Right. I have a daily process, so when I pick on a client, I help them with the profile top to bottom, help them with targeting, help them with their initial messaging, and I help them with the day to day process. And that day to day process is really what’s going to keep you sane. Like, oh, I can be on LinkedIn 12 hours a day. You don’t want to do that. That’s insane. You want to spend between 15 minutes and 1 hour a day to do whatever the things that you need and get out because you have a business to run. And someone says, well, how can I get people to actually book a meeting with me? I said, that’s easy. I can easily get between 30 and 50 meetings a week if I wanted to. I don’t know. I think my camera is getting a little blurry. I don’t know what’s going on here. I think it’s the lighting.
Yeah. It’s the joy for folks that don’t understand. Poor Troy just moved, and we’ve made them do podcasts in the middle of a move.
I just moved in. It was like 80% of my stuff got wires and stuff in there. So it’s like the living room of the stuff.
There you go. That was funny. As soon as you move back in, it refocused.
Yeah. So if you get a process down. I said, well, give me a tip, right? I said, okay, how are you authentic? You’re authentic by understanding who you’re speaking to and creating some bit of information about them specifically. It’s not selling. So when you connect with someone instead of spamming them, why don’t you just use your LinkedIn app and open it up to the video option and you can send a native video to them. That’s what, 20 seconds long, maybe 30 at the most, and just thank them for connecting. Thanks, Eric. I really appreciate the connection. And I noticed that you have an interesting podcast called DiscoPosse Podcast, kind of tongue tied there, and I’d love to learn more about it. I said, if you have a moment, just take a look at my profile. I said, if you see any dots to connect, feel free to send me your booking link. I said, I’ll schedule some time with you. Thank you very much. Have a great day. That does a few things. That’s a unique message. You took the time to address them and what they do. You were not selling. And it’s appropriate time for them to look at your profile.
And if they see anything they want to talk about, the onus is on them. Send you the booking link and you’ll schedule with them. So it’s not me, me, it’s you. And so that concept and smiling and of course I didn’t smile. I did it quite quickly. But that idea is very powerful. You are communicating with them as a human would. And that’s just one of many of the tips and tricks. And I think the other thing we were mentioning was all the touch points. Well, there’s all these different things you can do depending on your strategy. Why are you connecting with people, you know? Are you connecting with them to engage with their network? Are you connecting them to sell them something, which is probably not a good thing. What do you have to offer them? How can you help that individual? You have to get down to the human level. So people think, well, I think I’m going to do this thing for their company. I’m going to do it for the team. That person doesn’t care. I mean, they may care, but they don’t really care. They care about themselves. We’re human.
So deep down inside, you have to figure out how can I help that individual? What does he want? Does he want to be the hero? Does he have a problem he needs to fix? Does he get something off his chest? Can I pass the litmus test? And the litmus test is – you know the old fashioned litmus test, when you dip it in there and you figure out if it’s a certain chemical or whatever, if you passes the test, the acidic thing. The litmus test for LinkedIn is – if this guy would go out and have a beer with me or a drink at a high end bar, because you have to think during covid time, your time is valuable. I’m not going to go off some stranger and have a drink with him because he could be creep. And I’m telling him all my secrets and stuff. So if they feel they could have a drink at a high end bar with you, you pass the litmus test, you pass the friend test. And that’s really where you want to be at. Maybe instead of just sending connection requests, you could take a look at five people a week and see, I want to engage with these five people because of their profile, the type of person they are, their network, whatever the case may be.
And I want to see what they’re posting. So engage with their post before ever sending a connection invite. If you engage with one or two or three of their posts and they respond, the chances of them of accepting the invite goes from there 30% to 90% and it goes all the way to 90%. You’ve not just done that one thing. The second thing that you accomplished is you move the relationship down the line. Your ask has to be appropriate to the relationship. Anyway. I blab a lot, but I think you get what I’m saying. Eric.
That’s a pretty one. We’re here because of your method, right. You took the right approach. I get dozens of inmails a day and people who are like, give me that. I’m like, I get it. You read Jeb Blunt, you want to get to 15 touches fast, right? So you think this spamming out my inbox is getting you to the 15 touches. But that’s not the case. And I get often and get outreach for people. They’re like, hey, we’d love to be on your podcast and like, thanks, booked up. But when you reached out, I did do exactly that, right. I looked at your profile, looked at what you’re doing. I’m like, yeah, here’s my booking link. Right. And here we are. So the proof is in the number of times I’ve said no to people. The one thing I always joke about too, is like, I want to make an explainer video of how not to sell people explainer videos on LinkedIn. Because I swear to goodness, about eight a day, people are like, hey, explainer videos are a great way to do whatever the first thing they do is. They’re like, here’s my calendar link to book your meeting, to set up your explainer video pitch session. Like, Nope, this isn’t going to go well for you at all. But welcome to my broadcast network, right. So for me, I’m like, hey, it’s another audience member. Good luck receiving my feed. But the real genuine connections where I could do, like you said, actually reach out and ask for time and meaningfully give back to them where they will care enough to take that time and give me that time. It’s a beautiful, like, it’s a bi-directional relationship of giving time and effort and attention because this is the real big thing. Right. We’re in the attention economy. And how do you get access to that attention?
Yeah, LinkedIn is so different than anything else. Here you have to come from a place of service. You got people that have, like, these Instagram models and what they call the thirst traps and all that. So that’s a different thing. Linkedin is really geared towards career change or building relationship building, working from home, B2B businesses or high value services. So these cheap off one methods that don’t work well, maybe they work well for a widget, right? We’re not selling widget here. We’re selling conversions to business. I have a client right now. One job that he gets is worth $200,000 per job. He’s trying to get one a month. Right. And not every method will work on his audience. And we may have a method that works perfect for me and awful for him. And it’s our job to figure out, well, where does this thing break apart? And then how can we bring it back where it will convert for them. Or we have to cover those dots to figure out how much is this client willing to do. A lot of these higher end people, high up individuals can’t do a lot of things.
They do certain things well. And if it’s outside the scope and not able to do, how do we cover those things? How do we simplify that process where we can cover those areas? And he can still be that person that can communicate. So it really depends on the strategy and what you’re trying to do on LinkedIn. But LinkedIn is known for a lot of that high-end B2B conversions. For example, I don’t really make a lot of money per client, but I’ll gain between one and two new clients a month, right. They’ll pay something like $3,000 or $4,000 upfront and then $1,100 per month. Right. You think over the course of a year that’s pretty good money because you’re compounding all the previous clients and they’re adding services. So that $1,100 a month could be $3,300 a month and so on. And if you got 20 clients at two grand, you’re making 40 grand a month on it and then adding to it. The trick is to slow down in order to speed up. So it’s not about rushing, it’s about just doing those things right. Another thing, too, is we have our courseware, and I couldn’t have done it without partners.
So partnerships, networking to build really solid partnerships is a really strength of LinkedIn. If it wasn’t for my partners, I wouldn’t have my courses. I wouldn’t have kept the Troy Show. I have a LinkedIn event called the Troy Show once a month, and I don’t want to do it all myself. It’s too much work. So we want to figure out these partners that have ancillary skill sets that will really possibly impact your business. And I even tricked my partner. His name is John Michelle. He’s another LinkedIn guy, a really good guy. And I said, you know what? I said, John Michelle loves to do these profile things, right? I said, Let me get him on a meeting. And so this is an example of a way that I tricked him, but it was beneficial for him. He got three clients out of it, right? So I know he’s going to be I’m a give. I’m a giver, right. I’m going to give him clients. But I said, hey, John Michelle. Hey, Troy. How are you doing? I said, pretty good. I’m redoing my profile. I was wondering if you can jump on a meeting with me, help me out.
He said, well, you’re a LinkedIn expert. Why would you want another expert? I said, well, because there’s crossover and there’s a percentage of stuff you do differently than I do. We have different flavors. I’m more branding, and he’s more SEO. And he’s in a certain type of details versus what I am. So we had a video. It’s 45 minutes. And I was challenging him on certain areas, and it made a good banter back and forth about why certain things. And I even disagreed on just a few blow points just to make it interesting. And he says, well, that was a pretty good video. And I chopped it up into seven pieces that may have a whole series of videos to show on LinkedIn for posting. And then I took those seven videos and I put them together on a LinkedIn article. Then I have an Evergreen article that reaches out to it. And he got three clients out of it. He said, thank you. Why did you give me these clients? I said, well, I mean, you helped out with the profile. He said, not really. I said, Well, yeah, you did. It was entertaining. It was good for my audience.
I said, but your audience is now hiring me to do these profile things. And he charges several thousand dollars, whatever it is, just to do the profile part. And I said, oh, that’s fine. Just keep the clients, you know. I guess. Well what do you want? I said, you know what? You think this would be a good series, maybe a course or something? He says, yeah, this make a great course. That was my goal the whole time, right? So he did the whole course, and then I did the series of courses. Now we have hundreds of videos and courseware now. And then we got people that have a large audience. Now, when I reach out to LinkedIn, other LinkedIn influencers and things like that, they have a large audience. And I said, let’s give them 25%. Let’s have them sell the course, and then they can get 25% and we can split it between the other partners and stuff like that. He says, well, are you okay for only getting a portion of it? I said, sure. Well, my method is if there’s not enough pies, you know the slices, they slice the pie up and you’re slicing it so thin you’re not making money.
I said, well, my idea is just make more pies.
It’s such a good way. The one thing that people are often too short-sighted about this stuff is they just immediately think like I can just hammer up this course and then I can sell it, and then I get 100% of the revenue and there’s literally dozens of ads that people will get a day. Once you click on one, you’re now in a loop of people selling this card and that card.
Oh, yeah, you’re going in a rabbit hole.
But if they don’t do what you did, which is open up the door and give the opportunity to collaborate. And collaboration is bi-directional. Sure, you saw that it would have been great to be able to create courseware with these folks. But in the end, you did it in giving back. You gave before you got.
Yeah, he was already in it before he knew it. And so I don’t think that’s mischievous, but because regardless he was going to get clients and he wanted to do the courses. And he has a certain experience, and I may have a certain audience, it just makes sense. And then we have an email person that comes in to run some of these shows. And so we convert on that, and we bring clients through it. And now we’ve attracted people that have large audiences, and we’ll give them a portion of it. As long as their network is right, everyone makes money. So it’s not a me, me thing. It’s how can we help each other in a way that everyone benefits. And that’s one thing that a lot of these solopreneurs are missing. They’re just like, I can do everything. Well, I’m a programmer, I’m a software engineer, and I’m a UI/UX person. I’m an award winning designer. I can do a lot of stuff well, but I’m a little older now, and I only have like 45-50 hours a week. I’m not doing anything more than that. And so the designer that designs 50 hours a week, and that’s all he does. Maybe he should do those things. We should distribute it out where we want. Because if we do everything ourselves, there’s no growth opportunity.
Right.
Because you’re wearing so many hats and you’re not able to go beyond a certain area. And so that’s where someone’s business processes and actually relationships come in handy.
There’s a great quote that I got from a book, and so I’m going to look it up right now just because I don’t want to miss quote, I want to call the title out because it was one that I really enjoyed, and it was called Twelve Months to 1 million. Ryan Daniel Moran, really fantastic book. But one thing that today says, it’s not a business if you walk away from it and it falls apart. You have to really build a machine around it because it’s easy for especially, we are as creative people as a designer, like, you know, maybe you could make $50,000 off a single client for a six week batch of work. But if three weeks into that batch of work, you have to leave, then you aren’t going to get half the $50,000. You’re going to get zero of the $50,000 and you lose your reputation. So what you do, you wrap a team around it so that you can contribute to it and share in that wealth and also get the benefit that you’re creating future opportunities, because now you can scale versus if you just be Troy Hipalito solopreneur for the rest of your life, something happens where you got to take care of your family, you got to move, you got to do stuff, and all of a sudden what do you do?
You just tell your client story. Work is stopping for the next four weeks because I got stuff to take care of.
Yeah. You definitely want to minimize upsetting your ongoing cash flow. I mean, that’s what’s going to make or break you. All these other things. You can make more money. Like I may make more money in the courseware, but not right now. It was an investment. It’s an investment. It’s building relationships. And on the tail end, you’ll end up making a good chunk of change. So I actually have an article that talks about documenting and creating your SOPs – your Service Offering Procedures. It’s not really a LinkedIn thing, but it’s more of a business thing. And so by having these service offering procedures, you’re actually teaching certain areas of your business so you can hire out. And the truth is, everyone says if they’re perfectionist, you are in the worst boat because you can’t screw yourself up. The person who’s doing his task. You say, it’s true, I can do the job with seven people, but I have to hire one person for one job. And I’ll give you a perfect example. Back in the day, I was the creative director of a company, and it was tied to another company. And they wanted me to engage the engineers and other web people on how to do a project. They’re doing government stuff, and I was doing civilian other stuff. Right?
Yeah.
And they had to create a website for this, this and this. They wanted me to engage with them. And they said, oh, yeah, this is a six month project, seven people. It’s a six month no. How long would it take you to do it? I said, it took me three weeks to do the whole thing. I was just being on. I was naive because I was a designer programmer and I knew all the bits of it. And they said, okay, you do it then. And that was done in two weeks. They never spoke to me again. I screwed up the relationship because they have different processes and stuff. And you have to be kind of careful about because you might be able to get that one thing done. But these longer relationships you can ruin if you don’t have a way to create this service operating procedure, to hire out in order to do certain tasks. And even if they do a task and they’re not 100% as good as you are, do they need to be, you think? Do they need to be exactly like me? I mean, what is really good? Like really good is better than most people.
Look at a program module, someone says, oh, we have to create this one component where it’s reusable. And I said, well, would you reuse it on another project? We probably could. I said, but you’re not. And you have to understand that the client is paying X amount of dollars and you might want to create this reusable component that eats up the entire budget and it makes no difference. So they have to think intelligently. How can I create these service operating procedures so people are taking certain tasks on that they’re good or good enough. And when I mean good enough, I mean very good, but maybe not exactly to what you’re used to doing, because we all are a little perfectionist in our own way.
Yeah. One of my funniest examples of this was like, I was like, 19, and I was building houses. I was working as a landscaper, and we would build houses during the fall when it would be lower in the landscape side. And I worked with this roofing crew, and it was like, such a funny thing that this is their full time gig. And they were run and gun contractors. They knew what they were doing. They come in, they got three days to do a thing. They’re going to stand it up, and they’re working on this house. And it was a friend of mine’s house. So I’m kind of, like, acting a little different because I know the guy that owns the house. And this guy’s hammering in a nail, and it goes in crooked. And then you see him, he’s, like, trying to back out the nail. And it was so funny that the guy’s name was Lumpy. It was his nickname. He said, Jesus Christ, Lumpy, we’re not building an F in piano. Just hammer it in. And it was so funny. I’m like, my instinct would be like, yes, do it right, spend the extra time email.
The other guy is just like, whack. He just hammers it in. It bends it in good enough so that it’s flush. And he’s like, then put another nail right beside it. And the difference of like, look, we just got to get this done. And like you said, it’s weird that we use phrases like good enough or whatever. Like, good enough is good enough. It’s good. It’s not barely good enough. It’s good enough. Most people don’t even do good enough. So it’s like this unfortunate scale that we, and you hear the phrase too, like, if you aren’t embarrassed about your minimum viable product, you waited way too long to put it out.
Yeah, my IT company, I had a lot of people saying, oh, I need to scale it to this. And I just had to tell them the truth. I said, look, you guys spend about $150,000 on this MVP, and once you get funding, you’re just going to rebuild it. Why would you rebuild it? I said, trust me, because investors going to come in because I went through investment many times. So I already know, like the process. They’re going to come in and say, oh, this is great, but our market that I want to hit is this or this is a cool feature and you can’t fit it in afterwards. A lot of times, especially, you have to get stuff done in a very small amount of time. So some people create MVP to take care of the functionality of a certain group of people or a maximum X amount of people. If you get beyond that, sometimes it’s okay to just take that idea and rebuild it, because sometimes the concepts and ideas are half to work. So you really have to think along what is realistic, what is good. When I say good enough, everything that we put out is very good.
But I have certain people that like my writing style. I look at the person and I figure out their personality and I write according to their voice. And another writer may not get that. So I have to figure out everything about the person. So I understand the vibe. And sometimes they don’t like telling me certain things and I drag it out of them. It’s like, okay, how did you grow up? What do you like I said, okay, are you gay or straight? Like, I’m blunt about I need to understand where you’re coming, what’s your audience, what’s your typical kind of client? And I blend that in. I said, okay, I think I got your voice. And I write it down like, wow, this is pretty good. And they make their tweaks to it because when someone looks at your LinkedIn profile, they’re looking at a person, they’re looking at the story. And the reason why we call these reality TV shows are so popular, it’s because it drives the story. I was living in my car and now I make a million dollars. So they want to know that story. How did you start from here and get over there and be successful. Especially in the states, they love a success story. They love the underdog, and they want to relate to you. That’s one reason I work with a lot of clients that have families. They’re family oriented. I understand that they have a bigger care. I work with people that maybe have a similar background because I understand what they’re going through. I have people that try to be sincere. At the end of the day, this is kind of where you’re going. And I’m bluntly honest with my clients. I tell them, okay, I’m going to do this. When you get your first client, I’m charging you more money. I’ll tell them, and we’ll make this thing work. And I think that personal relationship and engagement not just makes him feel good, it makes me feel comfortable and happy about helping other individuals.
The sincerity piece is always an interesting thing because I’ve had people say this. I can help somebody by writing content with them in a sincere first person voice. I can represent their personality. And like, you’re so fantastic at this, right? And then someone would say, like, well, is it really sincere if you’re getting someone else to write it for you? No, but that’s not the point. The point is they don’t have time to create this content. They created, they read it and they’re like, hey, this sounds like I wrote it like, bingo. Yeah.
They may not be good writers. They’re like coaches for this. Coaches by coach. Coaches hire coaches. That’s kind of what I am, and I’m not doing everything for them. Doing the first draft, I feel this is what you’re talking about. So if you’re a good person that does websites, you may be a terrible copywriter. If you’re a good 3D guy, you may be a terrible UI guy. If you’re a good coach that helps women, maybe you’re not that good at helping guys. I don’t know, making stuff up. So everyone has their strengths, but they have this passion inside to do something. And it’s our job to present that passion in a way that makes sense. Like a LinkedIn profile is really about 70% visual. But once you get past the visual, they start digging into the story. That story is the bit that will convert them. So the visuals will bring you in and the story will help convert. Of course, you have your LinkedIn SEO optimization and all those tricks too, but you have to have that balance where they said, you know what, this is someone I want to talk to, and that’s where you want to be on LinkedIn.
And it’s a mixture of all of those things, right? Like you can have great SEO, but then they get there and they go, okay, it was easy to find, which ultimately SEO is about searchability discoverability. But if I have great SEO for a restaurant, but the food’s trash, that’s no good. You can get people there. And then your role is to teach them how to keep people there and engage them and give that sincerity. Tell that story.
People can’t do it. That’s kind of funny. People say, I just want to sell stuff. Well, if you don’t want to put your human out there, maybe it’s not for you to convert in that way. Maybe you’re a high end CEO that uses it for PR purposes, that’s fine. But if you are converting, if you’re trying to get a career going on stuff, you need to have all your ducks in a row. If you’re trying to convert B2B or high value services, you have to have all these things in a row. Because when someone makes a decision, it’s usually an emotional decision first. And second, it’s based on stats. That’s how most humans work, right? And they look at you and you look like a douchebag on your photo. They’re not going to know it. But in the back of their mind, something is off with this guy here. I don’t think I want to work with them. You don’t know why, it’s your douchebag photo.
t
Exactly.
Something simple as that. So making a decision to work with you, they may have 2, 3, 4, 5, 10 criteria, right? Whatever it is. And they don’t know it’s ten or five criteria. Say five is easy number. But all they have to figure out is one that you’re not qualified to not work with, you know. Like, how do I separate myself from all these other LinkedIn guys? Right. Well, I’m not as serious. I’m more human. That’s why I put the not so boring LinkedIn guy. It’s just funny enough to separate. It’s not really super funny and super off. My other line was actually better, but it didn’t apply to LinkedIn. When I had my gaming company, I was known as the number one Swissipino game designer in the world. Right. Because my mother from Switzerland, my dad is Filipino, I’m half Asian. And so my mother has blonde hair, green eyes, and my dad’s like, really Filipino and so I’m Swissipino. And that would be such a great pickup line of the bars. They would say, really? I think so. I probably number one Swissipino.
The irony is this, Troy, that you’re the second Swissipino person I know. I have a friend, somebody who’s Sonia Missio. She’s actually based in Toronto, and she also in that interesting split. But it is so funny that you say that. And like you said, that the genuineness comes out. And look, the truth is, design is important. User experiences, that engagement is important. If design didn’t matter, then there would be sushi milkshakes.
Yeah.
We like the fact that someone spent way too much time making it look good so you could eat it. Otherwise we would just be having nothing but Soylent milkshakes. And, like, there’s a reason we do stuff. You walk down the street, there’s flowers on the thing. Like, you see somebody’s profile, and it’s like half of their girlfriend or boyfriend’s face is in the shots. It looks like they’re on a fishing boat. That’s great photos.
That’s another thing I tell my clients. Oh, my goodness. Well, I don’t know. Do you have time to make money? I tell them I’m blunt with them. What’s going to cost me so much? I said, how much is the client worth? That’s my closer right there. I said, how much is a client worth to you? Okay. Then you’re going to have to do A, B and C or pay to do whatever. Because it’s like you want to be honest and you want to be authentic. But there’s also a fine line from kissing someone’s feet. The client doesn’t want that. Client wants to know that, hey, Eric knows what he’s doing. Troy knows what he’s doing. If he tells me something, it’s for a reason. It’s not because he’s blabbing. It’s because he’s trying to get me money. And those are the right people. Well, for my market anyway. Those are the right people to actually engage with because they’ll actually take the steps to do a process that works for them.
Yeah. There’s a really interesting thing you talked before about the kind of like firing your client. And it’s an important piece because as you look at where you can deliver real value. Right. And you’re selling value, you’re selling a specific outcome. And I’ve had this for an advisory with startups. And you start talking with them, and as you give them advice and you give them direction and you give them guidance, and they’re just, like going the opposite way on each thing. And then they say, I don’t understand why this stuff is not working. Well, I don’t know, maybe because the last three things I’ve told you that you should do, you’ve kind of gone in the opposite direction. And then at that point. I’m like..
Well, you’re nicer than I am. Yeah.
It feels like I don’t think I’m adding value to this. So I’m going to just step back.
Yeah. I had two clients I remember firing, and there’s a very specific story. One was, I have CPA. Anyone that has a high value of service I could potentially work with. Right. If they’re trying to convert on LinkedIn. One was a CPA, and he was from, I don’t know, the UK somewhere. We moved to Midwest. Older guy in Balding, and he was there. He was very dry. Right. And he used to take Zoom meetings like this. It pissed me off. Right. Like what? He wouldn’t even looked at the camera. He’s talking and he has his accent and all this other stuff. He says, Troy, this is not working very well. And I looked at him with a straight face. I said, didn’t you just get 14 clients in 45 days? How did you know that? I was like, I bet everything I do, I’m a lot smarter than, I don’t tell them that, but I’m a lot smarter than I look. Okay. Because I said, I talked to your VP two days ago before this meeting. He was trying to not pay and get these clients. Right. I don’t like that. That’s being very dishonest. He just wanted to do what he wanted to do.
Right. And I said, you know what? I’ll let you out of contract. Forget about 30 days. Maybe it’s not working for you. And he said, yeah, maybe it’s not working. Oh, it was working for him, but I don’t want to work with people that are trying to lowball me or lie to me. I had another guy, he was in cyber security. It’s another big area. And he was doing training, certification stuff right there’s. All these.
Yeah.
And he wanted to sell the certification to individual LinkedIn. I didn’t think it was a good idea. Right. I don’t know about cyber security. But I was like, yeah, I don’t think this is, is your audience receptive to this? Yes, it is. Yeah, I don’t think so. It’s kind of hard to sell these $4-5,000 courses and stuff. And I said, you got funding for it. And then I said, you know what? You might want to just partner with other security people and use this because you’re an ancillary, you’re an extra. And they already have the in on it. In on this company that’s doing this stuff. And they’d probably need his certifications anyway. And he said, well, I don’t have any partners give me two days. So I went to a security event here in Atlanta, Atlanta, Georgia. And I paid my bills to get in, $500 to get in and was talking to these people and I talked to twelve people. I would love to talk to this person. I said, hey, I said forget this whole what we’re doing, just forget it. I’ll give you meetings. I said these clients are worth a lot. I said, this one client here don’t miss the meeting. And he’s traveling and all this stuff. He agreed to the meeting, he missed the meeting twice, right? Twice.
Frustrating.
Yeah. And the other people who were not, I don’t know what he was doing. Some people do their business, shoot by the hip. He was going and he was from Texas and he was going to another country and I was having meetings with them and I told him directly, I said, hey man, I like you, but I don’t want to see what’s happening in their background because he was at his mistress house or something and that’s not cool. I don’t want to know that personally. I don’t care if you have two women or you’re married, you’re single, you’re gay, you’re straight. I think as long as you treat people well, that’s important. But what I have a personal issue with is deception because that means you’re not going to run an honest business, right? So I had to let them go. I like the guy. But if you can’t make the meetings and you’re in these compromising things and stuff and you’re trying to cover the campaign, don’t do that. So you have to work with people that have the same, I wouldn’t say moral structure, but integrity, right. Integrity, that’s a good word to have the same kind of ideals that you do.
Because you know that at the end of the day, if he’s going to do stuff right, I know that I won’t get paid. I’m not going to fight over payment. I would just can you and stop all your services and you won’t make any money. It’s really simple for me. You can’t manipulate me. I’m here to help you to convert. And so you need those individuals that say, you know what, I will make it to this meetin., I will go in here and help this individual do what they need to do and I’m going to make business. You have to have a very clear head on. Like how am I going to get to point A to point B and then know that next month you may have to jump from A to C. You have to figure out the connecting the dots, you have to do some AB testing on what works and then you have to figure out like this works better. And it’s okay because you didn’t know that before. It’s a process. So people think that, oh, I get this automation thing on LinkedIn, I’ll make a million dollars. No, it doesn’t work that way.
It works against you. Linkedin will shut you down. And if that’s the main channel, it’s not going to help you out. So a lot of the lower end and not lower end is money so much, but lower end and thought process and being human and helping, they don’t do very well on LinkedIn, where a lot of coaches that have a little bit of a brand, a little bit of flair, something that separates them from other people, you got people that like them, actually like them, they can engage with them. And every personality works well. Had this one guy really dry personality. I told him, you are dry as toast. I told him, you’re dry as toast. I said, that’s your brand.
Be proud.
I said, yes, you are. I’m telling you are. I said, you know why you could say dry jokes. And it’s funny because you’re such a straight face. It works for you. And I said, and you’re a CPA. Do they want a funny guy to be messing with their money? No, they want a serious dude. And you have to kind of think about it like that. You have to think about what is my personality. And so I actually am somewhat dry. I’m kind of funny. I got dry humor. That’s what it is, right? Not so boring. Linkedin. I’m kind of boring. So I twisted it upside down to do that. And I would love to be the number one Swissipino LinkedIn guy in the world, but it wouldn’t make sense. LinkedIn, they wouldn’t know. It doesn’t. Because when you’re doing gaming, it’s a little more fun. And they’re going to ask, what is Swissipino? But on LinkedIn, they’ll be like, this makes no sense at all. So you have to apply a brand that kind of makes sense to that audience.
And it goes to your approach to it. Right. Which is about adaptability, because even where a method may work for one company, one brand, one person, that same thing. If you just automate it and try and sell it to ten other clients without gating, is this appropriate without evaluating? Is this going to fit their persona, their audience? It’s both sides of that experience, too. It’s not just about you. Two funny people are not two funny people. There are two funny people that each have individual audiences. The one dry CPA guy, like you said, your clients are going to dig this. They want to kind of know that you’re the dry CPA guy. Somebody who’s hiring a real funny person if they want them for a keynote speaker for a CPA conference. Perfect. But if you want, it’s like matching and mapping skills to value, to perception, it is a real like, you achieve a really interesting mix by being dynamic, having the integrity, being genuine through the process. And then making sure that those people then parlay that genuineness, that integrity because of how you work with them.
Yeah. And part of it is clarity. When you’re creating a brand, you don’t want to say, oh, I can do this. I don’t really talk about all my development other than in the story. But in general, when you look at my profile, it’s very clear that he’s a LinkedIn guy. He’d get me clients. It’s very simple concept. But if you say, oh, by the way, I can do website design. I did Coca Cola stuff. What are you, a LinkedIn guy or a programmer? You end up looking like a flea market, and that’s one thing you have to avoid. You want simple clarity. You can add a little humor in it. For branding purposes, you want a separation, but what are you known for? I picked up a client last week, and he says, you know, I want to help professional women, right? They’re owners of businesses or they’re higher up in the thing and they feel like something’s missing. I said, I totally get it, okay? I can help men, too. I said, no, men will come in as ancillary. What do you mean? I said, you can’t say, oh, I helped a lot of women, but men can come in too. Well, no. You want to concentrate on that. Your main nuts or your main fruit, low hanging fruit. And by doing that and doing it well, your interaction with them, they’ll give you another client. You have your clients to come based on referral. I don’t care what kind of system you have going on. We got systems where we have direct message campaigns and stuff, but they’re not sequenced. They’re teaching the client how to reach to certain audiences. We have posting campaigns and stuff like that that we have a whole series of things that are done that promotes authentic conversations. And so a lot of things that we do, we have to slow down, have less but better conversations. By doing that, you convert. How many clients you really freaking need.
Right. Yeah. And the thing that you hit on there is like that clarity and crispness. Like, even when we talk about going to public speaking, I coach people in this all the time. When you go to give a keynote, your opening slide should not be, Hi, my name is Eric Wright. I’m a product marketer. I work for a company, and prior to this, I did 20 years working in financial services. I was a systems administrator. Started off as desktop support. Made my way to me. Prior to that, I was actually a landscaper.
Or you could start with that and say, Just kidding and move on. Right?
But it’s like that’s the first thing they do is they do that, and then they end the presentation with a thank you slide. You’re like, no, what you should do is how many times have you gone into the office and realized that there’s no door by the bathroom? That’s two way door.
Storytelling, yes.
And you immediately get into this thing. And that’s what your profile has to tell a story. But you’ve got 160 characters to do it in. So you just can’t dilly dally around. You got to get to it and it’s got to be meaningful, engaging. And like you said, it’s got to match the other stuff. But it’s hard as the person, the self, to have the humility to step outside and create that. That’s why having you come in and do this with them, it’s like such a boost, because it is balanced voice.
Because you have character limitations. You have SEO on Google as well as SEO on LinkedIn. So Google has searched everything on LinkedIn, and LinkedIn has their own search as well. And LinkedIn tends to do things a certain way, so you have to do things a certain way. For example, you’re on individual jobs, right. Linkedin tends to pair you with people that are similar to you. Right? Well, that’s not what you want to do if you’re doing B2B sales or your coach.
That’s right. It’s trying to find you a job, not a client.
Oh, I need another programmer. Like, I know a Zillion program. You know what I mean? You’re trying to get business, right? So one trick is to actually put your target market in your title. It’ll start pairing you up with your target market. And people don’t think about that. You know, one thing to do is when I say I’m a Not So Boring LinkedIn guy, right. That’s the first thing I have underneath my name. And it’s not SEO optimized, but I don’t care. It’s more important to have that brand. And then I have the other things that are very searchable. And then when you’re telling a story, this is an easy way to explain it. I want to show the scars, but I don’t want to show the wounds. Right? You can over inundate like you can say, yeah, I was homeless. My mom died. My brother died. He had an overdose. My girlfriend was cheating on me and left me. I was living in the shit. No one can hear that. That’s just horrible. That’s just too much. I mean, you don’t want to say my life is awful, but I’m trying to make it.
That doesn’t work. So showing the scars and then not the wound, that would be showing the wound.
Right.
Showing the scars could be like the dating story. I told you I was an awful dater. It’s funny and it’s true. I am so direct. I used to go straight for it and it works sometimes, but most of the time it didn’t. So taking the approach of old fashioned dating into business just to get to know someone, just to see, I think dots connect. Are you in the same area? You have some commonalities? Is there something that you think he needs that you can help that has maybe nothing to do with your business? Maybe it’s someone I can connect them with or, oh, he doesn’t need a LinkedIn guy. He needs to fix his freaking email. I got an email guy. And people say, oh, I got great deliverability. No, you don’t. People don’t realize that a good portion of emails never make it. And I could tell them, look, LinkedIn is great, but LinkedIn is not everything. Like, we pull stuff off of LinkedIn and create a video funnel series through like dub or some kind of component that makes it more interactive because some people don’t reply on LinkedIn. So what are you going to do? You have to figure out what works best to help convert the goals of that client and a lot of it is technology based. And can you imagine sending a proposal to someone and they don’t get it? And the client says, well, I never got it. Well, the clients not thinking, oh, it’s a mysterious email. No, it’s a you problem.
Yes, right.
You screwed up and you lost the deal. So people sometimes don’t know how important these little components are to fix because it’s a cassette of dominoes. You remove one or two dominoes, it doesn’t complete. And I think a lot of people are so geared about volume. I mean, if you do a high value services, I’m good with one client a month. One, there’s a lot of work for me, maybe two maximum. A high value clients worth at least $1,000 a month compound monthly. You can compound that. My other client, like I mentioned, one job is $200,000. When you take the work in, can you deliver the work? And then maybe you can grow your business and your service offering procedures and training, and you can slowly grow out in that way. But I think that everyone, not everyone, but many people are about that volume and that volume will work against you. Can you imagine reaching out someone’s interested and they reply back and you don’t have time?
If they all come back and say, yes, if you’re not ready for that and it doesn’t have to be many, it can just be, like you said, one or two of them. They say, yeah, go for it. And you’re like, oh but I can’t go for it now.
Yeah, stabbing yourself in the foot. So you have to realize what is appropriate. And it’s okay to have a small business. It’s even okay to have a job if you’re doing career changes. I got a buddy that’s a sales guy for servers. I don’t even know what he does. Right. I’ll be honest with you drinking buddy. We go out, we talk. I said that dude makes a quarter of a million dollars a year having a job. So it’s not all about entrepreneurship. It’s about his ability to build relationships with clients. And whether you’re entrepreneur or having a job, you have to charge what you’re worth and you have to deliver what you say.
Put that on the card. There you go. Well, Troy, this has been fantastic and I tell you that’s a great way to wrap because it is important, right? Whether you’re selling yourself into a job where they’re selling yourself into a service, whether you’re selling a team, whatever it is, there’s the way you do it to bring that personality, that integrity through, I’m glad genuineness that you bring to this is enlightening and it was really great to share this. So for folks, if they do want to reach out to you, they can find you on LinkedIn, I presume.
My first and last name Troy last name is Hipolito. H-I-P-O-L-I-T-O. There is another Troy Hipolito out there, that’s actually my brother but he’s in the army so that’s a whole different guy. I used to be an army. Anyway, long story but I’m the most popular Troy Hippolito out there, right?
Not only is the top Swissipino but he is the top Troy Hipolito.
In the world, yeah.
Well, there you go. Troy, thank you very much. This has been really great and encouraged folks do reach out and taken your content through the great I love the way you approach things and yeah, we all need a little bit more Troy in our lives so thanks for taking the time today.
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Al is a big fan of Letterkenny. He thinks it’s one of the best, funniest and most inclusive shows to come out of Canada. His wife Tanya thinks he’s crazy, so Al has created this podcast along with his friends Mat and Victor to try to convince Tanya that he’s not crazy.
That is just the beginning of an amazing story. We have a really fun chat with Al, Tanya, and Mat. Victor couldn’t make the show unfortunately but that just means we have to come back for a 2nd show!
Welcome back. This is Eric Right. I’m the host of the DiscoPosse podcast. And thank you for listening. Oh, and thank you for watching. If you want to see this episode in as real as real life can be on YouTube, you can go check out Youtube.com/discopossepodcast because this is definitely one of those fun ones that’s worth watching because there’s a ton of people on there. It really gives you a sense of who’s talking when because this features the team from the produce stand. Now, the produce stand is a really fantastic podcast. That’s about the show Letter Kenny. You’re probably saying to yourself, who are the produce stands? What is Letter Kenny? Well, you’re going to want to dig in because this is Tanya and Al Squirrely Matt. We were missing Victor because he’s the number four Mike on the whole crew. But this is absolutely a fun one to watch and listen to. So check it out.
We talk about podcasting, the idea of making first a show about a show and then even more so, the absolutely super involved in interactive community that they’ve built around it. Really, really cool. And I got to say that I’m proud of what they’re doing. They definitely are worth a listen and hopefully a watch. Let’s get them on YouTube as well. All right, speaking of YouTube and speaking of things, listening to and watching and that are worth it, I got to give a shout out to the sponsors that allow me to do this, that make this amazing thing happen. And I got to start with our fine friends over at Veeam Software, because whatever it is that you need for your data protection needs, they got you covered. Reason is today is a dangerous time. We’re losing data, we’re losing servers, we’re losing applications, we’re losing time. Don’t do it. Protect your assets, whether they’re on premises. Whether in the cloud. Whether they’re physical servers, whether they’re cloud native, use their casting platform. All sorts of really cool stuff. And hey, don’t just back it up, but actually do automated data and backup and full application recovery. Really cool team. Great products. Go check it out.
Go to vee.am/discoposse and you can see the very customized way in which you can get involved. Go check it out and listen to old Disco sent you. All right, speaking of really great things you got to check out. Also go to tryexpressvpn.com/discoposse. Get on a VPN because the world is weird and you got to protect your data in traffic and in transit. So let’s do it. Oh, right. One more thing. Get coffee, diabolicalcoffee.com. Also a sponsor of the Privacy. All right, let’s check it out.
Hi, my name is Tanya, and we’re here today with Al and Squarely Matt from the produce stand. And we’re on DiscoPosse podcast.
This is the fun part because when you get to have professional podcasters on a podcast, I get to just walk away like, I’m done. You folks can run with it. Thank you all for being on this side of the bike. This is weird, too. The last time we chatted, of course, I was a guest on your podcast, and thank you very much for that. And you are all part of something really cool. And if it’s new to people here, I hope they obviously check out the podcast. They check out the show the podcast talks about. But you’re much more than that because it’s a bunch of you. I got to go around Robin here. Now, the good part is we’re all going to sound as Canadian as possible, which is hilarious. People never know that I’m Canadian until I talk to another Canadian. And then for whatever reason, our accents kind of bleed pretty heavily in those ones. I’ve been watching some of the Ottawa trucker protests, and I think that I sound Canadian until I watch a live stream from Ottawa. And I’m like, oh, now I know why people think Canadians sound funny.
Well, they hide it there.
Those Canadians in particular. But we won’t go there tonight.
There’s a different breed altogether. So. All right, I will go in order of importance. Tanya, you’re up first.
Oh, you should know by now I don’t like going first on our podcast.
That’s exactly why I shoved you up front.
Fantastic.
Isn’t paying attention.
So if you want to do a quick bio and tell folks what brought you to the produce stand.
All right, my bio gosh, we’re not doing weight heightened measurements. What brought me to the Product Stand was, of course, Al, my husband. You watched the whole thing. And I would get snippets of it here and there. When I was coming into the room and ready, the kids were down for the night, and I was coming to sit and watch a show with him, and he’s like, oh, this show is great. This show is great. And he tried to force me to watch a couple of them, and I just thought it was the stupidest show I’ve ever seen in my life. And none of it made sense. None of it I liked. It wasn’t my kind of thing. It’s an acquirement that I have grown to appreciate and like, and in some cases, love. But yeah, he then came to me and said, I have an idea. This is during Covid. I want to do a podcast, and I want you on it. And I think my jaw dropped. And I was like, are you kidding me? Why do you want me involved in this? I don’t like the show. Like, you’re not going to make me like the show.
And he’s like, no, here’s my plan. Here’s my idea. I’m going to have Mat, I’m going to have Victor and you because you all have different outlooks on the show, and it will make for interesting podcasts. So it’s his brainchild. And I just kind of tagged along and there was nothing else to do, it was covid. So I’m like, hey, why not? And it was actually the best thing for me, for us. I think the whole team has all said that this is just one of those steps out of life and a moment to just sit back and laugh and share and enjoy something that is not anything to do with anything going on in the world today. And yeah, that’s kind of my thing.
We definitely need that. And yeah, it’s been great. And it’s funny. Like you said, the mix of voices and styles and opinions is what makes it good and Al, of course, since you’re next on Mike, I’ll pick on you as the next bio deliverer. Sure.
I’m Al Grego, and I am the producer and host of the Produce Stand Podcast. It’s a pandemic project, as many projects that started in the pandemic were. But I’ve always wanted to do a podcast since I knew what podcasts were. I’ve been listening to podcasts since probably 2003, 2005. I can’t remember now. And my first exposure to kind of an after show type podcast, which is what we do, was the Lost Jay and Dan podcast. And I really loved it because this is a show that I really enjoyed watching. And then I was starved for more content in between episodes. So I’d look online for anything I could. And I found this thing called the podcast, and I listened to it. And it’s all people who have the same interests as me talking about a show that I loved. And so that’s what we’re doing with the produce stand. And yeah, Tanya is right a little bit selfishly. I asked her to be on just because I knew this is going to take up some of my time. And if she was involved, she couldn’t complain about it.
But also..
We joked about that yesterday. Yeah.
It’s a great show. And I know superficially it looks like dumb humor, but there’s actually a lot of, like, heart and a lot of smartness behind the dumb jokes. And it’s a very accessible, it’s a very progressive show, despite on the surface what it looks like and I wanted to get the word out. And I looked it up and I saw what other podcasts are out there that talk about Letter Kenny. And one of the bigger ones is Dean and Tiara down in Seattle, who we’re going to have on tonight. They’re our biggest competitor, but they’re also our closest allies have been doing it a lot longer than us. But in terms of Canadian view for this show, there was another one based in Toronto, but he just didn’t – he stopped doing it after a while. I don’t know why. I reached out and I haven’t been able to contact them. So, yeah, it’s a Canadian podcast about a Canadian show. And we’re here to kind of translate all the Canadians on the show to those who want to watch and listen. And we have so many viewers from all over the world, and we’ve got an amazing community that we’ve built. And it’s been our recipe from all the craziness that’s been going on.
Yes. And that leaves the perfect final intro to what makes up the reason why you call yourself Squirrely Matt. Definitely a good show reference. And we should also know that we are missing Victor, who could not make it to the broadcast today, but also another great voice on the show. But Mat., you’re up.
Yeah, thanks for having us. So, yeah, Matt Belonje, aka Squirrely Mat. I’ll pull on everybody demand there. Father of three, hubby of one as he starts his off. And yeah, it’s been a blast to go back to the initial thing, how we got into it. It’s the same idea. This was definitely a joke. Love child out of covid boredom. I know Alan and I have known each other for years through work. We played around with some podcasting through work and other things. I have a bit of a media background that was sort of where I started. My career didn’t follow that path. Priorities change, some interests change. But I originally had some aspirations to be involved in film and television in some degree. So even though that’s not directly what this is, the media world and anything connected to it around it has always been a real passion and interest in the background. So, yeah, like Tanya said when covid kicked off, and then Al reached out to me one day and said, hey, do you want to be in a podcast with me or do you want to come to a podcast? I didn’t even ask him what it was about. I just said, sure. And then I said, well, what are we doing on? And then he said, Letter Kenny. And I laughed. I’m like, oh, really? Okay. All right, let’s do it. And I was really excited because I don’t know if you mentioned it, but I think I was the one who got you into Letter Kenny. Originally. It was definitely a show I was aware of. I watched, I was a fan of, and then I got out onto it and he got hooked. And I think he’s become the super fan of our group. But that’s okay. We all love it. And it just took off from there. And I think we were all very surprised and kind of thrown back a bit by what it’s become. And that’s been the real thing about it. I know Kobe hit people a lot of people very differently. I know early on I joked, but it was truth. I didn’t step inside another building outside of my own house for over 100 days. I’m not talking grocery stores like you name it. My wife did everything early days of just general concern. So we dedicated one person. So it was a very strange time, and it still is. But this definitely very quickly became that weekly escape where we could just put everything aside, come together with friends, laugh, argue, debate, have some fun. And regardless of what happened, it was just, we’ve had nothing but a blast. And now we’re trying to figure out how to keep it going because we’ve caught up to the series. But it’s been a blast. And I’m very thankful for what Al has led us through and what we’ve created as a group and now where we are here.
Well, if you talk about the fan base, too, you’ve got sort of competitors in the marketplace. I think of the days of message boards for talk radio groups, and there’d be like Ron and Fez, Nope and Anthony and all these talk radio was huge. Of course, we didn’t have much. We had Humble and Fred in Toronto and they’ve moved around a bit. You would have someone and someone. It was always like a goofy duo. Maybe they had a third person on who would be a bonus voice, the stunt boy, or whatever it was going to be. And then you would get these message boards because that was sort of the way that people communicated outside of the show. We didn’t have YouTube, we didn’t have these other ways to chat. So people would go on these message boards and then you’d get three message boards and they’d be sort of like warring for who was the top message board for whatever radio duo was. And it was hilarious because that was this fun competition. But obviously you’re all fans, so you’re not really competing. You believe in a common purpose, and it’s a fun community way to do it.
But now podcasting changed this, that you can be broadcasting, you can get your voice out there. Their limitations for access to this stuff is so good, right? It’s much lower and production quality. You folks do a really great job with production. As a guy that does zero post production. Like, I literally will record this. I will cut off the front in the back, and I will push it to air. Like it doesn’t get much treatment. I got a huge respect for the amount of work that you do, you know, as a group, I don’t know who wants to raise the hand. I imagine Al, you’re probably as the technician behind a lot of the stuff because I know you’ve got a real talent for that.
But yeah, a bit of background in audio engineering, obviously. It’s what I went to College for. Podcasting is a marriage of my love of radio, which I was a big fan of radio growing up. And my audio engineering background and just wanting to create content and knowing that I have a voice for Face for radio. But radio doesn’t exist anymore. Podcasting is just so much more accessible, for sure. I mean, I credit – I come from a corporate training background for 20 years. That’s how I made my living, working for various companies. But just recently in my latest role in my latest company, I started using podcasting as a training tool. And so that’s where I kind of started doing that and having some fun with it. And I credit actually Toronto Mike, who’s a big time podcaster in the Toronto area. I call him the Canadian version of Mark Marin. And actually today he just released his $1,000 episode. So kudos to him. He invited me into his house and he showed me his set up in his studio and we had some great chats. And he didn’t charge me for it. He was just, yeah, come on over because he knew I was a listener and a fan and we had a great time.
And from that knowledge, I went back to my office and I bought the equipment. I started podcasting, and that got the right amount of attention. So that when my company decided and I’ll mention the company name, Mineris, decided that they wanted to start a podcasting strategy of their own. I’m the one they tapped. So I went from training to marketing in the company, and I’ve never been in marketing before, but they saw me as kind of the resident expert, and that’s where now I make a living. Like the Protestant is a passion project. I make no money doing that. But now I’m making my living as a podcaster, which is amazing. I love it. Five years ago, that would have been unheard of now.
Now, Mat, you mentioned you had early aspirations for TV and broadcast stuff. What was your exposure to it? And then what was the diversion that took you out of that game?
Yeah. So I originally went to school, Loyalist College out in Belleville, Ontario, for television and new media production. So I was on the full production side, learning how to use a camera, edit graphics, direct, you name it for production. I very much enjoyed it. I will also say I was in my much younger years at the time and not so focused, so that definitely didn’t help. And then when I came out of it, I had a couple of co-ops and internships, and one of them which was actually up in Barry at the A channel at the time, which I believe is now CTV north or something like that. And it was also the time for Canadian folks I know Belglow Media Buyout. So Chum Media at the time got bought out by Belglow Media. And the industry was kind of in a weird spot where there was a lot of hiring. I think it was more firing as they were sort of dismantling and rearranging that. And that was the time I was trying to find a job. So it made it very difficult. I thought I had this great in, and then they pretty much put a freeze on at the station and that kind of derailed a little bit.
And it’s one of those industries, if you don’t stay close to it, you quickly get far from it. Right. It doesn’t take much. It’s like buying a new computer. By the time you buy and take it home, the better one’s already on the shelf, right? Same idea with these industries. You start stepping away from it, the longer you’re gone, the more difficult it is to get back. And then there was some things on the personal side. My family, we kind of had some movement around and I had to find a different gig just to keep myself going. And again stepped aside and side before I knew it, it was kind of felt too far. And then priorities changed. I had my oldest son a couple of years after that. And at that point I was like, I just need to keep my head above water. And it just seemed like a distant dream at the time. That said, as the years have gone on and I think Al too of the work we’ve done in our company, I’ve worked in fraud. I’ve worked in a number of other things, nothing to do with media.
But through his work and some of the cross stuff that we do, he had the opportunity to dabble with podcasting, dabble with internal videos for training materials. And he was nice enough to invite me in, knowing I had a bit of a passion for that in a former life. So he and I work closely to set up the green room and things of that, another green room, like the green screen space and do some lighting and play around. So he’s kept me close to that taste of that kind of life. And it’s been fun to play around with that. So when this came up to do podcasting – again, I’ve never had a ton of experience with podcasting, but I knew what it was right. I’ve always liked radio as well. But I’m like, I’m in. This is just going to be fun. And it’s really paid off as something that’s kept that flavor going. I’m also that nerd for film and television. I know when I drive around if I see a bunch of pylons on a road that actually I think they say TPS or something like that. I’m like that’s a film production and all often slow down.
I’ll sneak into what’s going on here. I get this weird excitement when I get near productions and I just want to know what’s going on. I know I won’t be a part of it, but it’s great. And we’re in Toronto, which is Hollywood North, right. So there’s productions all the time. Even my neighbor, he’s in a film crew and working on Titans and a number of other things. So I get to talk to him and banter about the industry a bit. So that’s good enough for me and my point of life. But yeah, that’s kind of what the diversion was. Priority changes. I’ll put it that way.
Yeah. And I think what’s great about it, though, like, look, 20 years back, ten years back even, when we think of the industry, like film, radio, you would get a job as an intern. And that was like a magical thing, right. You would be just getting exposure, the magical feeling of like, well, at least I’m in here. You’d get a pittance of a salary for the pleasure of doing coffee runs and grabbing production pieces and doing crazy after hours editing. Whatever it’s going to be to make that two hour show amazing. You get near zero credit for it. If you’re lucky, you get a little bit of credit for it. You never get mic time. You never get camera time. It was a very sort of like there’s a lot of machine wrapped around it. And they were like, you got to do your time, kid. You got to earn your keep. Then you eventually get up. If you’re lucky, you audition. Maybe you get an overnight show. It was a battle to get in. Nothing. Fuck it. I got an SM seven B. I got an Internet connection. I run a radio station now.
It’s awesome. The other big thing, I think a lot of it, looking back, my own growth and self awareness is confidence. Right. I look at younger version of Mat doing even this seems a stretch. I always had sort of my personality, but I had a real confidence issue when I was younger. So trying to step outside my comfort zone and put myself out there in a place of vulnerability, it was very challenging. So I didn’t do it, right. Now, I could give two fucks. I’m like, I’m going to do what I want. I don’t mind putting myself online, even in my line of work, even though it’s not related to this. I talked to people at all levels of the organization. I have no problem sort of calling out what’s what, because I’ve seen success. I felt what it feels like to be vulnerable and then see the outcomes of it and how it can be successful. And it’s not something that you should shy away from. Right. But when you’re young, you don’t know that you’re kind of forced into the system and find education. You know what you want to do, and no one really does.
Some people do. And, man, I wish I had that, but a lot of people don’t. And you kind of go through this whirlwind of trying to sort yourself out. And in all reality, it’s not till about your 30s that you figure even half of yourself out. And then I’m also at that time supposed to have had it all put together. So it’s challenging for sure. But again, it is what it is. And I’m very happy now with what’s going on.
Well, you mentioned too, new media, because I remember that’s kind of what it was called race time when you were going to school and you’re at Trevis, and we had other folks who we knew, Travis Watts, good friend of ours who we were all together with. We had a bunch of folks and they would get jobs in this like new media, which meant basically you’re doing Dreamweaver and funky early stage 3D animation and passing media. Macromedia was a product like a company that was worth investing in back in the day. Right now it’s just gone. But it was almost the same thing. It became this elite, you were just happy to be beside it kind of experience. And now it’s so just democratized and accessible. It’s fantastic because those limitations are gone. And I think kind of what you’re saying, Mat, like 20 year old me while being in a different mindset, because if I ever said if 20 year old me met 49 year old me and I said, I’m coming from a place of vulnerability, I’d have punched me in the ear, right, because I just would never thought I would ever think like this. But this is the truth. But 20 year old me would be more confident, I think, because of the accessibility of platforms and software and capability. Like, there’s no less of a barrier now. Other than your personal sort of choice to grind it out.
Less of a barrier but more of an overwhelming option, if that makes sense. There’s a lot more out there. But you’re right, you can get at anything you need to.
That young confidence, though, came more from kind of ignorance and not knowing any better, not so much. Because when I was at that age, I wouldn’t know where to start. Right. I would just start and then hope to work it out.
But yeah, I’m still doing that. What are you talking about? This is my approach to life.
The beauty of what I took in Trevis, the multimedia, is it kind of let me dabble in everything. Video, web, graphics, audio. And that suited me just fine now because now I look at any kind of job in marketing or any kind of creative work or content creation, you need to know all those things. But the tools are such so that you don’t need to have the same kind of level of knowledge that I had growing up. Because now a lot of it is pretty WYSIWYG and pretty easy to do. Point and click and push a button, apply a filter and you’re done. But still having that kind of foundation and also that well rounded knowledge of the different media, you know, video, audio, graphic art and stuff. I’m not a graphic artist, but I know good graphic art when I see it. So I know who to go to when I need a poster made. Right. So, yeah, that’s really served me well. And I think that really prepared me for what the world it is now.
And I guess for the folks that get to watch this on video. If you’re listening on audio, head on over to the YouTube channel. You can check this out. Speaking of posters, you have a plethora of really cool posters behind you, Al. And I know, of course, these are the Royal Pains posters. So you talk about the Royal Pains and give a little brief history on what the posters are from.
Well, I was the weekend rock star before everything shut down. And I was blessed to not only have a great band, but my guitarist was an insanely talented graphic artist who when we first started playing, he’s like, hey, do you want me to design some posters? And we’re all like, yeah, that’d be great because we knew the kind of art he did. And then he said, and then we can just kind of reuse them for every show. He’s like, no, I was going to make a poster for each show. I’m like, really? And he did. And so what I have on my wall here are just some samples. We played over 120 or so shows. We have a poster for every single one, and they’re all equally amazing. Again, we were blessed with talented musicians, but also talented artists in our band. Sadly, the band is no more. We can thank COVID for that. But yeah, continue rocking on and hopefully one day I’ll be back on stage again. But until then, we’ve got the memories.
You and I shared a stage a couple of times ourselves as well back in the day.
So that was poised for the worm. Yes.
That was still your Twitter handle too PftW, right?
That’s right.
Well, you know what it is. I mean, Gmail finally came and took away my Hotmail. Or else I’d still have my Hotmail, too. Because once you have that online persona, it’s kind of hard to switch, right? So poised for the worm. That was my persona from 20 years ago. And I just kept it because it was just easier to do that than find something else.
You’re talking to a guy that’s known around the world as Disco Posse. I get you.
This point.
I went to a tech conference in Paris, and this was hilarious thing. So it’s like a bunch of people showed up and of course, they’re common community. So in the tech community, we’re basically like Carney’s. We just go from town to town and it’s a different town, but it’s the same goofy asshole in the tent every time. So we just go and we would have a show. And I was speaking at one of the events. And there’s a guy who I’ve always been keen on chatting with, and we knew each other on Twitter, right? That was kind of how we communicated. And so this guy, Randy Bias, if you’re into cloud computing, he’s the guy that coined the phrase pets versus cattle, if you ever hear that phrase. So he’s the one that was the originator, we believe, of that phrase. Ray is a great guy, really wild personality, interesting character. And I’m just walking across this random sort of place in Paris and all I hear is Disco Posse yelled across. And I look. I’m like, what’s going on? And I look. And there’s Randy Bias finally for the first time meeting in person and you don’t call and yell Eric, everybody would be a bunch of them, probably.
So Disco Posse, there is only one I’m a safe bet there.
It’s funny when you have the online world kind of mixed worlds and you meet people in person for the first time. I remember Toronto Mike had one of his listener experiences where a bunch of listeners came together in person to meet each other. And we all had to have name tags with our online personas on the name tag.
Name, right.
Yeah. No one knew my name was Al. They knew I was PftW or Royal Pain or whatever. Right. It’s just hilarious. So we all had name Tags with nonsense at names on them or whatever. That’s awesome.
Well, I remember the first time I’ve even seen, like, cereal boxes when they wrote the Twitter handle on it for the company name. And I remembered thinking, like, I think this is when it’s going to take off. I was already on Twitter and you started to see it being talked about and news channels would have it in the Chiron and there’d be more presence of that stuff. And then it became that. And then the funny thing was choosing your identity, especially if you’re associated with a brand. Like, imagine that you were brandnew to it, then you’d be like @monarisAl. Right. That’s what people would often do is they put their company in there. And I was lucky enough that my presence was so separated from everything that I did that it never conflicted. So I would go and people would just know where I work, but I didn’t have to tag it along. And it’s funny that there was a time when you had to choose MySpace, Twitter, like all these things. And where do you put your effort to grinding up your audience?
Yeah, I’ve gone through a couple of handles all in I know in my early ICQ days and MSN days, it was dopeyxtc. I have no idea how that came to be.
Not a far cry from Squirrely Mat then.
Not a far cry, yeah. And at some point I realized I don’t think that’s going to work going forward. And then I landed on Dude North, and I don’t remember how it happened, but one day that came to my head and I laughed and I’m like because I was very much a specially a kid in high school, even when I was still dopextc, I almost only wore things that had a Canada flag on it. Like I was one of those weird hardcore Canadian Patriot guys. Like, I had 17 different T shirts with different slogans, and it was obsessive at one point. It was kind of weird. But anyways, and then so when Dude North came into my head, it made me laugh. I’m like, I’m the dude from the north, right? And it just stuck from there. And I’ve really held on to that one. So even when I didn’t even use Twitter in the early days, I went and set up @thedudenorth on Twitter. And then I walked in just in case. I started to use it more. And I’ve held on to it since because I’ve just really enjoyed that name. And as long as I’ll be able to keep it, it’s going to keep going, right?
It’s a solid brand. Oh, it’s a call.
I like it. Yeah.
Who the fuck knows what pftw is?
But to be honest, I’ve known you a long time. I think that’s the first time I’ve heard what it actually means.
I guess Pink Floyd the Wall.
Now, Tanya, you’re the interesting one of the bunch because you have zero online presence.
No, not zero. She can explain that.
Hold on, before you start growing her. So we have a great community, Eric, because you’re part of that group. They’re dying. They’re begging for Tanya to join the group. And she has joined the group because I made her join, but she won’t go on. She won’t go on and interact. She’s allergic to networking, which is hilarious.
But we’re going to find out after the fact that she’s probably been there the whole time. It was some other thing. It’s probably like, Dude West.
Babe West.
I’m so much like Wayne. It’s not even funny from the show. Like, I’m a person to person. Like, phone me. Mat tried sending me a bunch of messages, and I think after the fifth messages, I’m like, Screw this, call. I’m like, what’s going on? What do you need? I’m like, at work, I have a thousand emails a week, and it’s just so overwhelming on the computer all the time. And I’ve never been interested in the tech world. I would rather see somebody and sit with them and talk to them than look at Facebook pictures of what is going on in their life. I’ve not ever connected to people that way.
She doesn’t follow.
The whole thing of living your best timeline. You know what’s better about living your best timeline? Actually fucking living your best timeline like living it, not living it through the camera.
I think when the whole wave of cell phones, like I’m gonna sound real old. But when the wave came through and I disconnected for three years, I was home. When we had our daughter, I was home with her. And there’s just not a whole lot of time. There’s so many things that need to get done in a day, and I just never found the energy or the time to get on and connect with people that way. I was just picking up the phone and calling people.
You also have a bit of an addictive personality.
I do have.
What happens when she does get hooked onto something is she spends way too much time.
I can be very obsessive.
She’s in it to win it at that point.
Yeah. If you’re a fan of Fred Flintstone, you’ll know that reference. But I’m on the oldest of the bunch, so I’m the only one here who will understand that. Maybe a handful of listeners. But you see people at concerts and it’s like the same as if I was doing this podcast and I was doing this the whole time. It’s better. Like, I used to yell at people. I’m like, you know the show’s there, right? Like, not up there. You’re watching it through a three-inch screen. I don’t care if it’s bloody nickelback. Watch the fucking show. You’ve got eyes. You’re going to remember this. You’re never going to watch it. It’s like a wedding video. No one goes back to watch it.
[00:36:35.190] – Squirrely Mat Yeah, it’s true. I definitely don’t hold up the whole time. And I go to concerts, I often will take a moment, catch a couple of moments. But even recently, I went back through my phone need to clean up some space. And I think every single concert video, especially I deleted, I’m like, that was cool. But watching it back, I’m like, it doesn’t take you there like you thought it would. It’s a memory, but the memory is the better part and you just want to hold on to that.
If you want to see footage again, just go to YouTube and watch the professionally shot.
Yeah, it’s all there.
Or one of the 1200 other idiots who’ve got their phone in their hand. Right. Like it’s going to be out there. I can understand at one point where it was a rarity to be the camera and to have the online presence and to build an audience. I’m going to bite myself by the fact that I’m answering the question of why people do it. Right. Because they want to be creators, they want to have something. But it’s more like, I’m with you, Mat. This idea that capture a snippet may be posted up on Twitter or whatever, but then that’s it. Enjoy the rest of the experience. It would be like having your kids chasing your kids around with nothing but a video camera. I take videos of the kids I don’t trust. I got four kids. I got to remember some of the early days. Right. But you put it down, right? You enjoy that and then you put it away. Some people say they wish they’d taken more. I’m like you’re saying that ten years later you got a memory.
Yeah.
Well, it’s even like in the photo side of things as I was clearing it through. It’s a whole exercise. I need to make a lot of space. I used up all the memory of my phone. And I started deleting all these scenery photos as well. And some of them were quite nice. And I’m like, but then I thought about it. I’m like, some of the places are like downtown Toronto or when I was in New Orleans and things like that. I’m like, yes, very cool. But that same photo has been taken a million times over. So if I really want it, I can Google it because like you said earlier, we have access to everything these days. And there it is. I don’t need to store it as a photo. If I’m in the photo or my wife and I are in the photo, very different story. You can hold onto those because that shows you are there. It takes you to get to that moment, but just generic photos of buildings. I’m not a photographer, so it’s not like I’m building a portfolio here. It’s a cool concept, but they don’t hold up over time.
And if I want it, like I said, I can go find it online and I’ll be just as happy.
Now. The one thing that we should really get back to, the origin of the podcast itself and the content. Letter Kenny is one of those shows that has become anything like this corner gas Letter Kenny. There’s a few that are so Canadian, but then they make it beyond, right? And when I grew up, it was CTV, right? That was the whole thing of watching stuff like that and 3D movies. It’s like this goofy things that you remember about that even. So, this is a funny story. I had a friend who her apartment was John Candy’s apartment on Roehampton Avenue. In it’s right its Eglington. It’s 100 Roehampton. And it was the one where they tossed the TVs off the balcony for the opener. That apartment is 100 Roehampton Avenue. And they’re very local things because, of course, we’re Canadian. We didn’t have much choice. You had Uncle Bobby, you had the Friendly Giant, and then you had whatever Canadian television you watched.
House of Freightenstein was one of my…
And Billy Van is actually like an incredible creator as far as other things he did just sort of an underwhelming presence in the industry, but he did a lot behind the scenes. You see, look at this idea of these Canadian, purely Canadian shows. And then now they go beyond like, I can find it on Hulu. I live in the United States and I can watch Letter Kenny on there. And I see random things on Reddit. Like, I think I told you guys I was searching for something for a space reference, and I wanted to get a picture of Roberta Bondar. And so what do I get? I’m scrolling through Reddit and I see this thing and it says, here’s a picture of Roberta Bondar underneath it. Was she sitting at the bar, crushing old fashioned. When you took this photo. So a Letter Kenny reference being written randomly on Reddit. He realized that these shows have a community and they have a reach that’s farther. And then you choose to create a thematic podcast. So let’s talk about the format of the podcast and what drew you to that style.
Well, like, I kind of mentioned a bit in my intro. It’s an after show. So just like other after shows, first of all, I talk about our weeks, and then I do a bit of a synopsis of episode recovering, and then we talk about it. We critique the episode and what I like about it. Again, we have these different voices and characters. Tanya came in as she was the person who hated the show until she loved it. Victor is a curmudgeon still to this day. Mat’s the squirrely one, and I’m supposed to be the parental figure to try to keep everything allegedly. Often I lose control. But that’s cool because our listeners love it. But yeah, we take it off in 20 to 25 minutes show and we basically make 2 hours of content about it, which is insane. But for the most part, people have really been responding to it.
Well, you really treat it like a morning show. Like I almost said Morning Zoo. But really that idea of a collaborative group of folks that talk about what happened the night before, like recapping the news and that’s like the opinion and the fun stories out of it are what makes that stuff fun. That’s why Humble and Fred did well, better between the music than they did during the music. And eventually when they started their podcast, which is actually one of the early sort of successful Canadian podcasts, because there wasn’t much of a podcast industry at that time. It was Mark Marin, who are the other guys. But it was like seriously, the early players in the game.
American Life, Prairie Home Companion, kind of the CBC and NPR podcast. But then you’re Mark Marin, you’re Kevin Smith’s smodcast, Adam Corolla, those are some early pioneers.
And that was funny. Back early on, there was a guy that found and bought up the patent rights to the idea of distributing an audio over RSS. So basically a podcast, and he went and bought up a bunch of patents and then sued all of Adam Corolla network, Mark Marin, Kevin Smith, all these folks to try and basically just see if you can get some cash out of it. Didn’t pay out because they’re like, you’ve got the concept, but you don’t get the content. And it was an interesting sort of legal challenge that happened
He was claiming ownership over the standard over the RSS.
Yeah, because he was saying that I owned so I should get a piece of royalty of everything that creates revenue based on the technology that I own a patent for.
Yeah, that’s like somebody trying to collect patent on HTML. It’s not going to happen. Every single website that ever existed would have to pay you a royalty because you have a website. That’s ridiculous.
It’s surprising how lucrative an industry it is because people like Rim just sold off a bunch of their old patents. And this is like all this company that bought them does is buy up thousands of patents and then ultimately look for licensing deals out of it. And actually, I know a few people that do it legitimately where they’ll license their patent because somebody says there’s no novel way to do what you’ve identified doing other than the way you’ve identified. Can we license your patent to do it? So it’s a weird thing that happens behind the scenes. I love this idea that you went with this after show, where did some of the concepts, the poem.
Our very first episode and the one we’ve actually marked as You Can Skip. This was our production meeting for the rest of the podcast. I recorded it because basically I brought everyone into a Zoom call and I said, okay, we’re going to do this. Let’s put some ideas out there. There are no bad ideas. Can’t get too precious. You try something and if it doesn’t work, you have to be ready to let it go. But yeah, it’s just evolved, right? It’s been an evolution. And the limerick happened maybe halfway through. And I think it happened because one of the cold opens on Letter Kenny was started with limericks, and then I started writing them for ours because it just made sense. So called Letter Kenny, he opened it with a Limerick, of course, and it’s been great in the Mat reading them and stuff. And now again, the community is amazing because there’s so much prep that goes into it. And almost the very last thing I do before we start recording is write the limerick. And it’s always a source of stress for me because..
All the pressure is on.
There isn’t a lot of stuff that you can rhyme with Letter Kenny or Djens or anyway. But now some of our listeners have stepped in and they’re writing them for us. So we’re almost like crowdsourcing now, a lot of our content, which is great. I love it.
Yeah, you’re not wrong. I mean, we talk about the community. I think I commented earlier, but that’s been the biggest surprise of this whole thing. It started off as a fun game, fun thing to do every week. And then we did invite a few people early on. So every third or fourth episode we might have a guest. And then at one point hit where we just had a line up and where at first it became sort of a fun little add on. It now became an ongoing absolute part of our show where we’re inviting our friends, I’m going to call them friends. We have made real relationships with many of these people onto the show to join in on the fun with us because that’s what this show. And if you’re a fan of Letter Kenny, the show is all about community, right? Everyone a lot of different people coming together in a show that may have differences here and there. But the end of the day, they all care about each other. They’re all this big sense of community. And all the people we met around the show who love it with us, all bring that to the table as well.
There are some amazing people out there. This show really does bring out a real interesting and awesome group of people that follow it and enjoy it, and we’ll continue to do so. We’re very thankful for all that as well. It’s now one of our favorite elements. I know I Ping out every week, oh, who’s joining us this week? Who’s joining us? And if I don’t know, I’m like, oh, yeah, someone new. And if it’s a repeat, like, I already know what to get ready for, and I get excited about it. So it’s one of my favorite elements is who’s joining us?
Some of Twitter, too.
It’s like rip notifications. You all have the most chatty, awesome DM group that goes on.
I did go on Twitter at one point, and I am on it. And I think in one day I think it was like only a couple of hours. And then I went and looked and I’m like, there’s 400 messages. I’m like, how on Earth does someone like, this is a full time job? I don’t have time to go through this many messages. Oh, my gosh.
And most of the conversation has nothing to do with Letter Kenny. There’s a full, active conversation right now happening about possums it appears. So it goes all over the map, but it’s all entertaining. It’s all in good fun. And sometimes it goes serious. Sometimes it just is banter. And I can’t keep up, though.
The amazing thing about that is what a difference of I can obviously choose my podcast as a different example of. I started mine through work, and I was like, hey, it’s a selfish reason for me to just try it out as a platform. Like, it’ll be fun. I got a bunch of nerd friends. I can have a nerd conversation, but get the story behind the tech, get the story behind the person and why they did something. I’ve always been enticed by the storytelling aspect. And then at one point they said, I probably saw the email somewhere saying, it doesn’t look like it’s actually leading to anything in pipeline revenue. So let’s just not spend time on this. All right? So I did a couple more, and then I was like, all right, I’ll just let it go. And all of a sudden, like three, four months later, I went and I looked on itunes. For some reason, I was searching something like, oh, I forgot. Probably got this podcast up there. I should check to see what the last episode was and I looked and there was comments and they said, I love the conversational style of the show or something like that.
And I was like, oh, man, I got to do it again. I got to keep it going because there’s someone listening, there’s somebody out there that’s going, like, refreshing their thing, going, Where’s the next episode? I’m like, all right. And I kind of committed to it. And that interaction was what made it gave me a reason to do it. And now, obviously, I’m a couple of hundred further in and it’s growing. But if I had a DM group, they would be me and maybe my wife. Don’t give a crap about this podcast to talk about it on a real time basis, but you’re the community side of what you do. Like I said, it really harkens back to that message board, super active collegial thing. And like you said, Matt, you could talk about anything. I love watching the random, like, these sort of non-sequitur things just show up and all of a sudden there’s a stream of like, what’s the right way to shave a Possum’s belly before you take it for its operation? Whatever bizarre thing. And then there’s somebody that’s got a real like, oh, yeah, I had to do this last year.
All walks of life are represented.
I always knew we had to form a community for the podcast to grow, right? Like, without a community, it’ll just be us yelling into the void, and maybe one or two people might listen. But the interesting thing, too, is the tool used for the community. Twitter dm isn’t exactly a community tool. It’s one on one, maybe a few on a few chat function at best. We have 75 people. We’ve maxed out our DM group. We can’t have anymore. We’d have to kick somebody off in order to add somebody on. And so there’s always been like, oh, maybe we should move this to a discord or something like that. But we tried that and it failed. People don’t want the immediacy of Twitter because it’s already on an app on your phone and you’re getting your notifications right away. For some reason that lends to the discussion because now you don’t have to log onto an app to post something. It’s Twitter. You have it with you all the time. It’s almost like an ongoing conversation wherever you go. And you just go on and answer whatever the latest question was, and you don’t have to worry about what thread you were.
Also, I don’t have to read all that.
No, you really don’t.
You don’t have to feel daunted about that.
A little add going, ok 400, let’s take this 1 hour at a time.
But if you accidentally tap it twice, it goes to the bottom. You’re like, oh, I missed a lot of conversations. I got to scroll back up and find my starting point.
And that’s great. Whatever like there are those, I mean, I try to because it’s always good to know what’s going on in that community. But if I log on and there’s like 400 messages and then a lot of it’s like deep cuts on Star Wars lore or some shit like that, which I’m not really interested in, I’ll just skip it. It’s no problem. They’re having fun with each other. No one’s fighting, no one’s misbehaving. So we just move on. But it’s funny, we hit a critical mass on Twitter DM, so I’m like, maybe we should move it to Discord. No one wants to.
Can you call the Twitter people and ask them for more?
Get an edit button. Just give me a larger DM groups like that true community type of aspect.
It makes you wonder too, if ever they decided to add maybe a threading function in your DM or whatever, would that be better or not? Is there something about the restrictive nature of a DM group that makes it work more entertaining? Maybe.
I don’t know, because it’s just weird.
And I think it’s platform of immediacy. Twitter for this type of interaction is like bike theft. It’s a crime of opportunity. You walk by, you see an undone chain hanging over a bike frame, you get on the goddamn bike and you ride like you stole it. So when you think of Twitter, it’s like I’m there doing other things. So I just tap that tab and I’m on there versus going to Discord. Now if you’re a developer or a gamer. And the reason why Discord is uper popular, my hypothesis of why it’s super popular with developers is because a large community of developers are also gamers. And Discord is a place, so they at night are on Discord. So they love like, why not just leave it running all day long and next thing there’s developer communities.
We have a 15 year old son and he’s got three monitors and one of his monitors is always on Discord. That’s the way he communicates with his friends. It’s a different mindset for I say younger people, but I know I am on Discord, but I don’t log on very often.
This is the funny thing. Every once in a while if I talk about my age with people that I didn’t grow up with, I don’t care. When I talk about you, I’m like, God damn it, now I remember everything. We’re actually old. This sucks. But it is amazing to think of that. And it used to at one point be, I want you to get real friends, right? And I remember even my oldest son, he’s 19. And this idea that getting told, like, I wish you would go out and find real friends and said, well, if you bring four of his friends together, they’re going to bring their laptops with them and sit in the room on Skype and game anyways. So why not let them do it wherever they are? And it became a practice of doing it and that’s why I think, like, podcasting, as a pattern of consumption, is such a popular place now because people can get it on demand. They can turn it on or off, they can download what they want, they can binge it, they can listen in the car. And I’ve been told over and over again, like, well, going long form will bury your podcast listenership because they said at 20 minutes, people have their attention goes like, well, that’s if you’re like, pitching or doing something, like, I’m having a conversation. You just get in or out whenever you want.
And I used to tell people, do you read books? Yeah. Do you read it from end to end? No. Well, how do you do that? How could you possibly put it down in chapter two, he’s like, Sorry, kids, you got to eat. Too bad I’m in chapter four, right? I got to keep going. You put it down. Your brain is the capability. And I found that it’s actually been better because the freedom of having no gap of, like, I’ve got to hit this time frame. I like that freedom.
Even early on, some of my favorite comments from listeners were always around, listening to your show, it’s like hanging out with a bunch of our friends, and they just wanted to be. And they felt like they knew us and they felt like they could see themselves sitting and hanging out and having the same conversation, which is probably part of why we invited them in anyways and said, well, hey, come join us. And that’s part of where I think a lot of it’s grown from. People just feel part of our discussions.
Yeah. The campfire sort of aspect of it, it really does feel just like a bunch of friends hanging around a table. Even though you’re physically separated, you really do sense that you’re sitting across from each other. You have the ability, especially over time, to get the queues of who’s going to jump in. And Zoom is the only thing that Zoom is a bit of a drag. And I’m sorry, I’m domain to trash Zoom just because I’m using signal wire. But the reason why I actually did this platform that I use is because it does multiplex audio. So if all four of us, like, all three cameras, started chatting at the same time, it all goes through.
Oh, really?
And the weird thing, though, is Zoom has trained us like idiots to be like a 1920s telephone system where one signal goes through, okay, pull that cable, go to the next one. As soon as you hear somebody talking, we all stop. Yeah, right. And it goes. It’s like Wayne and McMurray. Yeah. The advantage with this is that and Zoom is getting better, I think, where they allow more cross talk now, but it used to be really bad. We have, like, company meetings and people say, like, we’re going to welcome all the new recruits. Right. You got a bunch of new hires. Okay, everybody come off mute and let’s give them a round of applause. There’s 400 people, but only one of them gets the audio.
One of the early bread ideas we had from our production meeting was Victor is a really good guitarist. And we thought, oh, he could play a little guitar in the background while we’re talking about something. I forget what it was, and we tried it. And of course, Zoom doesn’t allow that. It gates. Like, if we’re talking, you can’t hear Victor playing, and if he’s playing for sure, that one didn’t last very long.
The only thing that I wish we had as far as this, like, for your show, is that idea that you could literally, everything should be commercially viable because you have such a fantastic group of people and a beautiful way of really being together and to actually see you folks sitting in a room. And I just wish you could get paid to do that because you do a great job of it. Right. One day. Exactly.
You can pay us a little bit more. And we’ll do well.
Talk about an avid community. As the co owner of Diabolical Coffee, you all contribute a lot to my success. I’ve actually got quite a few folks that are coming through the produce stand that are buyers. And it’s cool.
I mean, this sound a surprise, really. It’s working, though, showing any your commercial is the best.
Yeah. So this is the funny thing. People always wonder about sponsorships. Look, I’ve got sponsors, and I feel bad having them sometimes because the thing like, no one’s going to buy stuff because they listen to my goofy show. Right. But in the end, it actually does create awareness. And so the psychology of advertising is not about, I heard about a thing, quick, pause it, let me go buy that thing. But your community is very strong, and they do support brands that you mentioned and stuff like that, which is cool. And I see you got a couple of TPS hats there, which are very cool.
I love that. My favorite hat.
It’s fun to support. And trust me, if I made more money, you’d make more money. That’s the only problem. Your support is only limited by my revenue.
We appreciate all like the support you given us, Eric. I mean, we’re buds from before, but at the same time, it was great. It’s been great to have you on, and hopefully we continue as Shoresy starts up. I don’t know how big a story that is down there, but up here we can’t wait.
That’s going to be wild. Now, here’s the interesting thing. I think you and I may talk about this early on. At one point, I said, you’ve got a team, you’ve got a method, you’ve got a knack, you’ve got all the right things. In kind of the way that a salesperson can go from working for podunk widgets and then they can go and work for whiffle whaffle widgets, or even better, they can switch and they can sell cars or real estate. If you have the practice and the method, you can apply it to any industry. And so I’ve always listened to you as a group, as individuals, and think this is bigger than Letter Kenny. You have much more to bring. And I do hope that you kind of go, that you can find another thing that you can do, because as a group, you just keep grinding it out. As a guy that’s been grinding for a long time, I don’t know that it’s been worth anything more than having the fun of it. Right. But I’m seeing other benefits that are coming now, and you are all too good to stop because Letter Kenny stops.
Well, thank you. Appreciate that.
In a year and a half for almost two years, it will be two years in July. So maybe we’ve missed what, one week, two weeks? I mean, I’ve missed more time at my actual paying job than.
So true. And the other hilarious thing is if we’ve got such a defined schedule, if we shift things around, which is often my fault, we get yelled at by people saying like, oh, so I guess there’s nothing to listen to Friday morning, right? They get upset. I say upset, but it’s become a very comical thing. And Al gives them lots of notice as much as he can to say, hey, govern yourselves accordingly. We’re moving things around this week.
There is always that kind of reluctance, because without Letter Kenny, it’s the produce stands. We could talk about it. Sorry there’s an echo there. I don’t know if you’re getting it or not.
All clear here luckily.
Anyway. It’s called the Protestant, so really, I mean, it’s kind of only tangentially tied to Letter Kenny, so we could just continue doing it on other topics. The fear for me anyway, because we don’t want our feet to go stale. We want to make sure whatever we pick won’t alienate many of our regular listeners to go away. You know what I mean, right? Sure. He’s a good bet, because it’s a spin off from Letter Kenny, and there’s a lot of excitement happening there. So hopefully that happens in short time. Season eleven will launch, so maybe we have another runway of hopefully three or four months that we can continue doing this. But yeah, then the real work is going to start. What do we do next? What are the ideas? We need to get really creative with it for sure?
Well, if you think of the TPS report, right, almost as a joke of the office based thing, you could carry that through. And whether it’s commentary on anything, the tough part, which is weird because I’m an older fellow, I’ve got a reputation to preserve, and I’ve got a couple of nephews who are fantastic podcasters. The first thing they did was they got into, like, politics. I’m like, I can’t touch it because you want to be careful that you don’t ultimately alienate a big segment of your audience. So I’m very generic. I don’t talk about politics or religion or anything. And maybe it’s a Canadian thing too. We just steer clear of that stuff. But.
Doing some movie reviews or whatever, I had a notion that maybe we can review pilots, like during pilot season and then apply our kind of rating system and then see what shows will last. But I mean, even that’s different now because there’s no such thing as a network floating a pilot anymore. And then maybe they’ll pick it up now it’s like a whole season will get dropped. And then if they like it, you’ll continue. Right. So I don’t know, it’ll be interesting to see for sure. It’s a good problem to have now.
Oh, yeah, that’s it. And maybe you could go to the community in a way and kind of say like, hey, we’re going to test out an episode or test out a concept. And it could be whether it’s an Internet show or something that you pick and switch up the content and breaking it down. Look at me like, think of movies, Matt. Look at your background, right? That idea where you see something you’re like, I totally get it. Like a cold open. What the Hell’s a cold open, right? Just explain to people. Break down the format of a show. And my favorite thing, although you mentioned the right thing, though, forget about the pilot. But even just season one, episode one, just call it TPS. E. One. The best of every show is episode one always goes downhill after that. One of my favorite shows was Eastbound and down. Hilarious show, yes. But the moment that I watched the first one, I was like, I don’t know if I want to watch the second one because that was so God damn funny. And so it’s like Lost. Like if you watch Lost beyond the first few shows, shit goes sideways fast, right? And that’s why they ended up with all these bad threads, because they started to write for the audience, not for the story. That’s why I love The Wire. They’re like, we’re done. We wrote the end when we wrote the first episode, and we’re just going to film in towards it. So like, picking stuff like a first episode of something and saying, why did it work? And where did it break down? The jump, the Shark, episode two. Like that idea of oh, boy, let’s talk about why this one broke down.
When aliens visited. That’s when they lost it there.
Even if I look at YouTubers now and I’ve got young kids as well as older kids. And so I watch a lot of these goofy YouTube creator shows, and they’re like Vlad and Nikki and little Diana, and you’d see someone, they’re multimillionaires doing these YouTube enterprises. And then my wife and I were joking because you see a bunch of them that have, like, two kids and they’ll have, like, a five year run of content, and all of a sudden there’s a baby and you’re like, oh, that’s like the kid that showed up on Family Ties. They just added a new character, and it’s going to go Sharks now. But do what you do. You’re really good at it. And for people that don’t already subscribe, go check it out. It’s the produce stand. You can find it online. And I hope to see you all on YouTube, because I think as far as production capability, you’ve got the technical chops to deliver it. And I think it would be fun. Like, I’m living vicariously through your capabilities because I have no idea what I’m doing, and I’m just hammering ahead.
You got some cool-ass gear there that I wish I could use.
But it’s getting there.
We’re just getting a Victor a better mic. Yeah.
Victor is the only one. Every time I see him, he’s, like, in a train station and cappascasing or he’s always, like, dial in from somewhere remote.
It always seems like he’s struggling with unicorn.
It’s by design. Like, Tanya was saying, he has a better mic. He just refuses to use it. It’s a little frustrating, but I think it has to curmudgeon in nature. I think people like that about them. I don’t know.
The diversity of voices is really neat, which gives people a chance to do it. But now the fun part is, like, in four years, when do you all break up as a team? Be like, oh, now you’re competing against each other, right? So there you go. For folks that do want to find you Al, give them all the socials. Where do we track down the produce stand and see what’s next?
I try to make it as easy as possible. It’s @producestandpod everywhere. Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, even TikTok – @producestandpod. And if you want to join our DM group, it would have to mean that we’d have to kick somebody out.
This is a special members only club.
We still try to have as much fun as we can on Twitter. And every once in a while we do our AG hall socials. So not next week, but the following week will be one of our AG hall socials. And that’s when we invite any of our listeners to join us on a Zoom call. And this one’s extra special because it’s our 100th episode. And what we’ve got planned is we’ve asked our listeners to come with clips of their favorite moments of the previous 99 episodes. And we have no idea what’s going to be played. So they’re going to play them, and we’re going to react to them, and it’s going to be hijinks are going to ensue. I hope that is awesome.
There you go. TPS reacts. That’s your new YouTube channel. Get on it. I want to see you all become successful. Further success, right. You’re already successful and that you’ve really done a great thing. So it’s great to see and just the fact that we can do this and fit it into our day and it’s fun, it’s just fun. That’s success in my mind, right? I love doing this stuff. All right, crew. And for all the folks that do want to check it out. Of course, like I said, check out the podcast and I was lucky enough I was a guest on a couple of them. You can hunt it down and check out Letter K too. It’s a wicked cool show. Please do it. So there you go, pitter patter. Let’s get at her.
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Matthew Hunt knows that no one likes to be marketed to, or sold to, especially prospects. After scaling and exiting 2 search marketing agencies, he’s committed himself to teaching busy B2B CEOs how to more easily scale leads and sales with less effort, less time, and less money.
His company, Automation Wolf, is known for helping clients generate a full month of LinkedIn content in just one hour per week. This was super fun and inspiring.
You definitely want to listen to every minute and enjoy Matthew’s take on things.
Welcome back. This is Eric Wright, the host of the DiscoPosse podcast. Thank you for listening. You are in for a fun one. This is Matthew Hunt. He is the Automation Wolf, and he is somebody who I really really thoroughly enjoyed a conversation with. We talk about the concept of creating snackable content for LinkedIn. Look, you got to go check it out. Absolutely. This is a great way to get your voice out there, get awareness, and take your message to the world without you having to overthink how to get it there. So Matthew and his team do a great job. We cover the gamut on a ton of different stuff in this conversation. So if you’re at all interested in using social media and getting your message out there and you’re a founder or if you’re just a human, you want to check this out. All right. Anyways, in the meantime, I also have to give a huge thanks and a shout out to the fine folks at Veeam Software who are making so much of this podcast possible. We are in like, this is episode 209, and that’s crazy. And this is because I know that I’ve got the support of a great community and also great platforms that I thoroughly believe in.
If you want to check out everything that you need for your data protection needs, regardless whether it’s in the cloud on premises, it’s cloud native, containerized, Office 365, Microsoft Teams. There’s stuff that you are going to lose that you don’t even realize is at risk. Ransomware – rip, ransomware. Hello, Veeam. It’s just that easy. Go to vee.am/discoposse. You can check it out. And I definitely recommend you also go on the old wayback machine. And I had Danny Allen, who’s the CTO of him on the show. It was just fun to chat with Danny. So highly recommended. So go check it out. Go to vee.am/discoposse. We got a big year ahead. Let’s make sure that we’re protected all the way through. Speaking of protected, don’t forget to protect your life, your identity, and your data in transit. I’m a user of VPNs because there’s a lot of weird stuff out there. There’s a lot of bad people out there. There’s a lot of bad technology out there. So if you can protect yourself in every possible way. I use ExpressVPN, I recommend it. So if you want to go to try ExpressVPN.com/discoposse, you can see why I use it and hopefully you dig it as much as I do.
Oh, and one more thing. I also have a coffee company. And I think it’s really good coffee. It’s also amazing swag. So devilishly good. I recommend that you head to Diabolicalcoffee.com. There you go. Full disclosure. It’s my company, but it’s great coffee. I love it. I drink a bunch of it. And also amazing shirts, amazing hats. But talk about amazing, here’s Matthew Hunt.
This is Matthew Hunt. I’m the founder of Automation Wolf and I help busy CEOs and founders create all of their social media content in 1 hour. You’re listening to Matthew and Eric Wright at the DiscoPosse podcast.
Now, the funny thing when I saw your name come up, Matthew, and now finding out that we are fellow Canadians, always a bonus when you get to share some connect airspace, even though we’re on different sides of the 49th at the moment. I love what you’re doing and I love the name. The first thing I saw was an Automation Wolf. And your tagline about being able to get people there in 1 hour, I just thought of like the Winston Wolf. You’re 2 hours away. I’ll be there in an hour. That’s kind of where it’s at. And looking at the folks that talk about what they do with you, Matthew, it’s working. And so I got a ton that I want to dig in with you about what you’re doing, how you came to do this, and really what the huge opportunity is for businesses to turn content into opportunity and how to do it in the most effective way.
Sure. Sounds good, man. Looking forward to it.
So for folks that are new to you, because they haven’t had a chance to be able to study your bio and look over your content like I have in advance, if you want to give a quick intro and then we’ll jump into what it is that you are getting people doing.
Yeah, sure. I’m a three time business owner now. They’ve all been agencies. And so I exited two of them, one in 2014 and in 2018. I started the first one in 2010 and I’m a glutton for punishment. I just can’t get enough of it. So I decided to do it all over again and start a new one in 2020. And so 2020 was sort of figuring out what the product market fit was. And then 2021 is the startup stage, 2022 is stay up and then 2023 will be scale up. So that’s where we are with the company right now. But this business at the end of day came about from a real problem that I was experiencing in my previous two businesses. And I noticed that a lot of my peers, first time founders and CEOs or really any CEO or founder at the end of the day, anyone who’s just extremely busy had this problem and there’s just not enough minutes in every single day to get it all done. And the one non-renewable resource that everybody has is time. And so I was looking to solve that problem because most of my clients right now, they all know how to do it.
They even know what they need to do. It’s just a matter of they just don’t have enough time to do it. So I was on a mission to solve that problem. And so they all know they need to build a personal brand. And most of them know that it needs to be done on LinkedIn if you’re a CEO or founder. And they know it’s all about being consistent. But their problem was being very inconsistent or being able to find someone, even if they wanted to find someone who goes right for them to do it for them, it’s hard to find their voice. So I said, I think I know the solution to this. We’ll lead with video as the lead domino. And I thought at first maybe the solution was just to slice and dice long form content that they were already doing. But I discovered a couple of things. Some of them were not doing it. And then even if they were doing it, it was a pretty difficult task to do. Because long form content has the intent of being long form. And long form content doesn’t have a place in social media news feeds.
In social media news feeds. We are there to either be to procrastinate or to be in discovery mode. And we’re looking for snackable content, things that are short. And so if you’re going to create short form content, you have to actually lead with the intent of it being short form. It’s almost more about being like, you have to actually create content that’s more like when you become media trained for the 06:00 news. Yeah, we have your sound bites down and you’re able to communicate very clearly and articulately in 60 seconds or less. Some sort of message that piques people’s curiosity. That’s why I always call look, step one, if there’s three pillars to demand Gen, is short form. Step two is Longform. Step three is controlled form. And so, short form is a way for you to stay top of mind and consistent. And you can get transformation from people if they already know you. However, if they don’t already know you, the short form stuff is the hook where they’ll hopefully ladder into more of a long form. So the 1 minute video leads to a two minute video. The two minute video leads to five, then a ten.
Then all of a sudden they’re listening to you for an hour. Next thing you know, they’re binge-watching you like a Netflix series. Well, if someone’s binge-watching you as a Netflix series or engages with you for an hour, they are a pretty big fan and you’re going to get some sort of transformation. And then the trick is to how do we ladder them up into a controlled form, which is a form of community. And so if you’re a SaaS company, this would be a channel partner program. If you were maybe a consultant, this would be maybe a private Slack community or Facebook community with maybe a course that you can get some transformation around. But the point is you’re putting them into a controlled format where you can build goodwill, reciprocity, and continue to keep banking that trust equity. Because you can’t control when someone’s ready to buy, but you can’t control the trust you built to them. And the reality is, over time this compounds and the more energy you put into this over time, the better it is. Most people think they want more leads and more sales, but if you’re a high ticket price B2B business with a long buying cycle, that’s not really probably the best approach to go about it.
It’s probably more important to focus on how do I build more trust and more community with my ideal buyers at the end of the day? Because if you really pay attention to the people who are buying from you, they don’t spend 50,000, 500,0000, $3 million, whatever your ticket price is without knowing who the hell they’re buying from. And rarely is it based on your marketing funnel or your website or all your content that is there. So what you’re trying to engineer is how do we go from zero to building trust right away? That’s the whole system. At the end of the day, what I realize is there’s a lead dominos to this. And the reason why there’s a lead domino to this is, we got to start somewhere with these busy founders and CEOs and usually that first place is creating their stack of content in a consistent way on LinkedIn. Once they lock that down, they can then do the next thing because what we’ve done is we’ve been able to help them create their content in an hour and a half per month, 1 hour to create it, 30 minutes to approve it, or provide feedback so it can get syndicated.
If you can’t commit to an hour and a half to doing the most basic thing around demand Gen, how are you supposed to get into the other things that require a lot more time? And so whenever I’m talking to someone, I’m always asking them most important questions. How much money do you have or what do you want to do or what’s all the cool things. I always ask them, how much time do you have? How much time can you commit to this particular project? How much attention can I get of you? And that will determine what is the right tactic and strategy to pursue.
This is the challenge that I’ll say like content marketing and awareness and brand marketing. It’s like exercising. It requires consistency, commitment, and not necessarily feedback in the early phases, but you don’t get the benefits of the hundredth day without the 99 leading up to it. And we really struggle, especially with small businesses and solopreneurs. People that are focusing on product building or other things that are core to the business. And they don’t have the mindset of like, hey, if I just like talking to a camera for 20 minutes and with a function and a goal of like three pieces of value that I can emote into this camera and someone else can slice it and dice it and do that trust, building that brand awareness. It’s personal brands, too. I often tell people, number one, we’re all in sales. That really twists people up, right? I’m not a salesperson, but I also know I’m in sales. We call it selling yourself. Right. Like, you’re selling yourself short when you’re doubting yourself. Like, it’s in the nomenclature for things. But that’s just it, right? So if I’m a founder, I’m thinking I should be talking to a client in this hour instead of somebody, well, how do you get that client?
Right? Take that time with a good partner, somebody who knows how to do this, and then what will happen is 100 days, 120 days, 150 days in those little snippets suddenly are all over the place. But it’s really, really hard. Like, if you were a founder and that’s what you’re really good at, you’d be the founder of a content agency. Most people, if you’re a product founder, even, like I said, a solopreneur, it’s great to have a coach. Like, somebody like you can just say, look, I know I’m your audience, right? I’m the one that I hunt down people on LinkedIn, and this is how I find them. And you get the chance to be overly aware of how to be effective in that minute versus when you give someone like, I need you to talk and tell me what you do for a minute. And it’s like, well, it’s complicated. And, you know, like, I send all these people to Donald Miller. I’m like, go to watch the Story Brand one-liner workshop. And like, what is it that makes that foundation up? And they really really start to understand it. And then the funny thing is you get to consult with them.
And then there’s that weird barrier where they’re like, you’re going to create me 20 snippets of content and you’re going to charge me how much? You’re like, well, because I know exactly what those 20 snippets of value are. And if they wait four months, they’re four months older, no content. And then all of a sudden they’re like, Matthew, I want to talk to you again about that thing we talked about before. Because if you don’t do content, it doesn’t grow, it doesn’t get discovered. And was the Chinese proverb that says the best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago. And the second best time is now. And if you’re waiting for the perfect landing page, the perfect script, the better camera, whatever it is, and all these YouTubers that are millionaires now, they started on iPhones, bad iPhones, because they just got in and did it. And when you can imagine, you can shave off that coaching to tell you, like, I can save you the first year that those folks did. I can teach you how to make their content. And then time becomes the discovery model that helps you to amplify it.
I know we’re sort of like preaching to the choir a bit on this, but I want people to understand, I see it every day. And you shouldn’t have to be good at it. If you’re a founder of a company, you shouldn’t be this good at this part. Getting a coach, getting somebody to push you through it is such a fantastic thing. So bravo to you, Matthew, for what you and the team are doing.
Thanks. Yes, it’s kind of funny. A lot of people sign up because they think they want more leads or sales or more content or brand awareness or whatever it is or thought leadership. But the reality is, the first piece of transformation that happens for them is because they’re forced into a routine of sitting down and creating content with us. And because we’re doing it privately, not in a long form, where we can have interruptions and talks or retakes, they start to lock down how they communicate with their sound bites. And by them becoming a better communicator, they actually become a better team leader. They actually become better communicator with their existing clients. So they get more up sales and more referrals. And then once we put it publicly, the same thing happens. The first thing they always talk about is like, oh, my God, I’m getting way more referrals in my warm network. Well, yeah, because they’re top of mind continuously. That’s the first growth. And then after once they get through that, then they start creating a little bit more, and they start realizing I need more leverage in my life because I realized how much this transformed their lives, that they’re able to be consistent and people with their marketing on a regular basis, at least organically.
And the cool thing is this organic stuff can easily be sponsored with paid advertising and controlled if you want to amplify it. And the best ads actually don’t feel like ads. Right. So this is actually even better type of content to amplify. So the reality is they have this also transformation where when they start working with us, I start challenging them on a lot of beliefs that they think they have. So they think they need more sales people. I say you don’t need more sales people. Usually they’re the number one salesperson until they exceed at least two or $3 million in revenue. You really don’t need to be hiring salespeople. They just need more leverage. They’re just used to doing sales appointments as a one to one experience. And then once we teach them how to do it as a one to many experience through a workshop or through ten minute amplifier videos where they can find more leverage for themselves so they don’t need to do a demo. The idea of having more people to be able to do this melts away, which means they have more money and they also have a lot less problems because the reality is more people, more processes, more problems.
I know Vicky said more money, more problems. It’s more people, more processes, more problems. Right. So the next stage is always to develop that long form content format that allows you to create one to many selling. They also start to realize that when they’re consistent, like you said, we’re always selling. We’re all salespeople in a way. I don’t think that that’s necessarily the intent that you want to have. I think you want to have the intent to always be helping but not always be selling. But the idea at the end of the day is that is a form of selling in a way, content marketing and adding value and building goodwill and building reciprocity by putting helpful information or processes or systems or swipe files into the universe. That you get to attract the right people and hopefully repel the wrong ones as well too, is when we do that process, they start realizing, I see what I really need is more leverage. There is a time later on for multiplication, but it’s usually much later on in their journey. And these are why so many of these busy, particularly first time CEOs and founders, have so many false starts.
And it takes them so much longer to get there is because they haven’t developed the decision tree of asking how much effort do I need to put in for how much impact? Or can I do less effort for bigger impact? Or what would be the actual lead domino that knocks down all the other dominoes? Right? Right. Can I just focus on that one little piece? I know people talk about it like the 80-20 rule, but really you have to think of it a little bit different than that. Because that’s a later thing of analyzing, which I find is reactive versus proactive. This is another thing I always tell them is, they also measure their indicators of success a little bit ass backwards. And what I mean by that is – almost all of these people, when I start working with them, they’re always looking at lagging indicators of success. And that’s way too late, right? It’s just too late. So for every lagging indicator of success, you need to have at least two leading indicators of success and know really clearly what those KPIs look like. And if you do, then you will be able to pretty certainly know that the lagging should work out at the end of the day. Particularly if you’re following someone’s footprint who’s done it before several times, because success leaves footprints.
And so you don’t have to guess. You don’t have to make your business the training wheels on something, and it could have been someone else’s business that did that. But if you have that and you have the leading indicator of success, you really pay attention to those dials. You don’t need to worry about the lagging ones. That’s just the confirmation that it did work. But if you’re only looking at the lagging, well, you’re screwed, right? That’s a whole year gone before you figured it out. So always figure those things out. Like I always tell people, if you’re going to outreach the people, you don’t need to have an inbound. You need to have an outbound strategist, not sales or marketing, because you know who your ideal clients and customers are, generally speaking. So why not build the Dream 120 list, right?
No. And it’s funny you say that, like leading versus lagging on indicators. Lagging indicators are only most valuable when they’re tied to the leading indicators and measured as a function of success across the sales cycle. If you’re using hindsight to define what was successful, you’re backing into the answer. And we will always like, so easy to put confirmation bias into this stuff. Or if it took you nine months in a sales cycle to then look back and say, oh, well, this must have been the thing. Then you try that thing. Well, you’ve got nine months to complete that measurement cycle. What you should have had was upfront like, this is the thing that I’m doing and I’m going to measure it. And even when I read the most successful sales authors and speakers and full guy Jeb Blount, who’s got great stuff around the idea of how much it takes to generate leads, turning them into prospects, turn them into opportunities. Like that whole flow. Jeb is a fanatical prospecting, literally. But his whole thing is, what does it take to get to a warm perspective Leads that becomes an opportunity. And in the end, to your point, Matthew, it’s like, don’t just keep selling all the time because that’s not going to get you.
You create awareness. Awareness is built with trust. So don’t tell me that you’re selling to somebody, telling them that you want to be their trusted advisor and all you do is shove your product into their throat all day long just trying to like, you need this. Everybody’s failing because they don’t have us. Just share their problem with them.
Well, the problem is this is that inbound and outbound marketing is extremely limited thinking.
Right.
It really is. And it was cool at the time. Both work. So outbound was a very 2010 thing because of predictable revenue. With Aaron Ross and Salesforce scaling that business, it was the model. And so then every other business thought they could do the same thing. And then fast forward 2014, the hot buzzword was inbound marketing because of HubSpot and what they developed around there and the content. And it was really cool. And then people got crazy ass crazy with all these sort of like what I call Rugo machines were like this funnel to this funnel. There’s lead magnet to this trigger to this, all this fancy stuff, which is super cool. But most of it is just a lot of busy work. And now that its fast forward 2022, it’s not fancy anymore. No one’s wowed by it anymore. And both marketing concepts are very limited. Thinking because you’re only focused on the 1-3% of the people who are looking to buy from you right now. And so the example that I always tell the people is the biggest businesses in the world are founders and CEOs who understand the concept. They understand two concepts, short term pain for long term gain.
And they also understand in a very deep level the laws of compound interest. And this is why Einstein said compound interest is the 8th wonder of the world. Those that understand and earn it, those that don’t pay it. And most people are such short term thinkers and they think in such short term that they only focus on the bottom 1-3% who can buy from right now. So I always ask people this, I go, look, it doesn’t matter what it is that you do, but let’s just take it a really simple example. Let’s just say you are a web design and front end development agency that specifically markets for, I don’t know, let’s say B2B coaches or fractional CMOS. Like something really specific. Hopefully you’ve picked a very specific niche in your marketing. And if we took a thousand of those fractional CMOS or B2B coaches consultants and put them into a room and you were to ask them this question, you said, hey, who here is looking for a new website or a website redesign or possibly a marketing funnel? Okay, in the next 90 days, well, 1% to 3% of the people are going to raise their hand, which is a very small part of that 1000 people.
But what if we change the question? We said, who here out of all this group of people here, these fractional CMOS and B2B business coaches, who here between now and the end of their career will require a website or a website redesign or a marketing funnel. Well then probably 98% of them are going to raise their hand so they can all buy from you. Right? At the end of the day, the challenge is you just don’t know when they’re going to recognize the problem and decide to have money to throw at solving that problem. But what you can control is take that 1000 people. If you had them at an event, you already did it. Put them into a controlled environment like a community. We can continue to keep building that relationship with them so that when they are ready to buy, you will most likely be the first choice for the only choice, or at least you’ll get invited like be able to throw your hat in the ring to participate. And then I find in general what’s great about it is if you truly do have trust, then you can suck at sales or have less sales people, which saves you money.
Less people, less processes, less problems. And you can usually charge more because we don’t buy based on price. We buy based on trust. At the end of the day, it’s the devil you know versus the devil you don’t know. Rarely is the price ever, I would say almost ever really an issue. Most of the time, if anything, the price is higher, usually makes you much more attractive and instantly gives you some advantage and positioning from all of your other competitors who play in the sea of sameness. Right? At the end of the day, this is why I say inbound and outbound marketing is very limited. But what we want to do is we want to take some of the best practices from that, use the inbound and outbound to shake out those that are in market right now, but really lead with demand gen. And that’s what demand Gen is today. The challenge why people throw up these things like, well, how do I know that that works? Is it always comes down to they can’t track it in their silly Attribution software because they can’t have like a neat PNL sheet where they can show where things are working or not working or they haven’t actually just figured it out yet is why it always gets shut down.
It defaults back to the inbound or outbound stuff because it’s very simple metrics for them to be able to see a sales pipeline. How many people do we spam to get into a demo to then get into a close call or et cetera? Or how many ads, how much money do we spend in ads? Do you have people that download our white paper lead magnet, which then are SDR spam to get them into our demo or whatever it is? It doesn’t matter what kind of consulting, doesn’t matter whether they can see it. It’s easy to kind of like piece together, but what they’re realizing is they’re attracting usually the worst clients. They’re treated like a commodity. And when they really do add up all the costs for all those people and all the energy and stress that comes along with it, it’s not a very effective system at the end of the day and all they need to do is ask. They just need to do two things, which is create a process on their forms, on their intake forms as a blank form that just says, how did you hear about us? That’s not like a drop down option.
And they’re going to start to get feedback loop on very clearly on what is working and what’s not working because they can’t track all these relationships. But if people really know at the end of the day, we know like going to the golf club, the ski club, the supper clubs in the private slack communities, YPOs, all these really, those are things are actually driving the very best clients and business for us. At the end of the day, things that are tied to a real relationship, you’ll start to see that appear when you do that or it’ll come from the content marketing or long form content, short form long form control for one of those three buckets is going to come from usually all three, you’ll be told about that. And then when they get into the sales process, you have to teach your sales team or yourself to ask three questions. The question again is to reconfirm, how did you hear about us? Let your customer prospects and clients tell you what they remember, even if it’s not accurate, it’s what they remember. Two, how long have you known about us? So you can understand how long they’ve been the buying cycle again, it’s probably even short.
Like whatever they tell you, you can probably multiply it being longer times two, because they just didn’t realize they were in your marketing funnels. And then three, you ask them what was the thing that you really appreciate that we put out there? And they can tell you what content pieces or podcasts or white papers or lead magnets or blog posts or whatever snackable piece of video that you created that just blew their mind. Help them. And then you can do more of that. And there will be a pattern that starts to show up very clearly. If I look at my sales pipeline right now, literally half of it is from referrals, which is what it should be like, unique referrals. And the rest is from literally, they say LinkedIn. The other one says my community. And then I know there’s a bunch that I get through doing like mastermind dinners and things like that too. This is just crazy. People are working way too hard, spending way too much money, creating way too many processes to accomplish something really simple at the end of the day.
Well, this is the very interesting thing, right? The example I’ll give as an anecdote is people think like, imagine that the kids that play video games today, they’re so good at it. Their hand-eye coordination is fantastic. They’ll become amazing game developers, they’ll be amazing game creators. And then you have to remind them, like, you know, that amazing game that your kids play that gives them this hand-eye coordination that you believe will be the foundation for their future and game development was written by somebody who had Pong. There was no game. So the skill of today, this idea, when the cookie, that was it, the cookiepocalypse came along and they said Facebook, Google, they’re having to shut it all down. Gdpr, all of these things that were the end of marketing. I had to remind people, I’m like, you know that all these companies that are multi billion now trillion dollar companies were built without cookies except the ones in the break room. Like that. If you had to go back to fundamentals. And that’s what I always tell people, products go away, data goes away, what do you do? And that’s it. Even if you just talk to somebody, say, how did you hear about us?
Every sales call, it always kills me, I tell people, ask them, how did you find us? Oh, that’s awesome. How long have you known about us? And it’s so funny that these fundamentals, because immediately they may be a bit guarded, which is natural. Like, human instinct is like, you never want to be like, oh, okay. Why? I specifically downloaded five white papers. You want to say, like, yeah, I saw you on the web. Okay, cool.
Right?
So somewhere on the web, we’re getting closer, right? Or I saw you at an event and you should go into every conversation with that question leading, because the worst thing that happens is you get a fantastic SDR with a fantastic machine behind them. But because they’re so confident, they see a lead that came through a website or an event and they just immediately go to like, you did this. So therefore you’re ready for this. Like, they start to lead with, we know about you. And I’ve seen it time and time again where you don’t know, how do you know about us? Should have been the opener. Instead of you were at X, they say, well, no, I wasn’t there. I’ve been talking to you guys for a year and a half, or like, there’s get them to share with you, and if you get no answer back. Okay, cool, right. You know, they’re probably much more guarded, but it’s a bloody conversation. Take the cookies, take the marketing machine out of it. You suddenly have somebody in front of you who’s keen to know more.
Yeah, totally. I mean, there’s even a problem. At the end of the day, it’s always funny. As we’re talking, what you’re going to start to realize is exactly this. It boils back to the fundamentals. Also, it boils back to a mindset. Like, most people don’t have business problems, they have mindset problems. And I’ve been guilty of it. And I constantly still suffer from this problem. It’s an evolving thing. As you get to the next level, you’re like, oh, my God, I didn’t realize that I was being so limiting in my thinking or so forth. So the reality is, even with SDR, again, it’s a mindset thing. It stands for sales development reps, right? We got to rename it. It should stand for starting deeper relationships. And then the way we reward them is based on commissions and appointments booked or closed deals or whatever it is. The comp plan is even structured more to incentivize the wrong things. What they really need to be treated is really starting deeper relationships to build a relationship or community and reward them more. Like, I would actually pay them the same way you’d pay a client success person and give them the same kind of bonuses based on that.
Because it’s about really being helpful to people and getting them pointing in the right direction, not hitting some weird arbitrary number that the sales manager or sales director or VP of sales farted out to make the CEO and board members and partners, et cetera, happy. It’s really crazy. So again, it comes back to this mindset thing and this limited kind of thinking. And I understand it the other day. I’m not trying to get old woo woo and that we can’t have things accountable and that we can’t grow. But I’ve generally found in general, working with so many businesses now like Holy B2B business, specifically thousands of them at this point in the last 15 years, including my own. And you have no problem growing when you focus more on trust and community. It’s a happy byproduct. You never miss your targets. But we tend to miss them when we’re focused on I need more leads, more appointments. I need the calendar full. We need more SDRs, we need more BDRs, we need more demos. Because again, it’s all about, like you said before, it’s about me, me, right? Instead of you, you, you, right.
One is inwardly versus the other one is outwardly. Outwardly thinking businesses always tend to just do better.
The weird thing of the consultative approach, the first thing any consultant has to do is get somebody to share their problems. Which means you have to get them to trust that they are willing to share their problems. Because they know, like, I’ve been on the other side of that phone a bunch. I’m going to lie to every cold call I get, of course, because I’ve been researching this company for seven months. So when they called me, cold call me, because I finally accidentally fill out a bloody form with a real email, I always will be defensive. And then their reaction to it is what makes me care about opening up to them. And it’s something that we feel like everybody is human. And if we help each other, then in the end, like, look great account executives, great account reps, folks that are in that level of selling. There’s a reason why they’re relationship sellers, because they will work for Company X. They will reach penetration and good market, and they’ll do good quotas, they’ll do good numbers. And then the following year, well, that number just adds 30% to it because we have to keep going up and to the right.
And they know they’ve sort of exhausted their main relationship pool. So they go to work for Company Y and they talk to the same seven strong relationship they’ve got, and they sell them the product of Company Y. But by listening, because they know they don’t want to burn it down because they want to go to Company Z or Z for those folks, they want to be able to do this. So they’ve got longevity in mind. But we need to move that up. And SDRs is a classic. So I’m a nerd, right? I came up in tech building technology, and I remembered the SDR is like help desk. And both are fantastic, valuable, necessary, amazing groups of people. But what I was told, because I wanted to be in server development or in larger scale stuff was, well, we’ll get you a job at this company on the help desk and then we’ll get you a real job from there. And it horrified me because to the recruiter, to a lot of people, that’s what it was. But I’m like, no, you understand, this is your front line. This is the most valuable entry to the vision of your company – is how they will handle the relationship in five minutes of a phone conversation.
And it’s like it’s such a forgotten thing because we just think like, oh, let’s get better call center systems. Let’s get better ways to track, attach it to their account, tie it to Salesforce, do all this stuff great and necessary things in other ways for understanding the intelligence of the customer lifecycle. But in the end, having all that amazing software that ties it all together doesn’t do you crap all good. If people just want to race to get off the phone because they’re displeased with that frontline experience and that’s the trust, that’s the build. Like when you’re going LinkedIn, I’m not going to watch the second minute of your video. If the first minute doesn’t make me actually pause and go, yeah, I get that. Make them care. Then you can talk about stuff later. It’s like Glenn Gary, Glen Ross, Ricky Roma sitting at the bar going just talking about wives and friends and family and cars. And then 4 hours later someone’s like, So what do you sell? I don’t want to talk to you about that. Obviously there’s deeper psychology underneath it like they are in the end going to move towards the sale.
But it’s like when it’s ready.
When it’s ready. Yeah. And it’s very true. You have to be very patient and people don’t really care what you do until they know why you care. This is the whole Simon Cynic thing, right? Start with why at the end of the day. And so it is true when we’re creating stack of content. This is why we follow the Aces method for clients, which sometimes throws them for a loop because they just want to do authority content all the time or expert content that makes them like thought leaders. And so Aces method stands for this authority, connect, Engage and Show or Sell. I prefer show than sell. And so authority is anything you want to be an expert on. You can be a thought leadership or helpful tips on your expertise, but connect is something they always avoid, which is anything that hits the heart, the gut or the funny bone. And when you do those pieces, that’s what makes you likable. People always forget we only buy from people we know like and trust. And they can’t trust you if they don’t like you. And they can’t like you if they don’t know you. So knowing you is about being consistent and increasing the frequency both through paid advertising as well as organic advertising.
Like is making sure you hit all the different notes on the piano. So I tell people like, look, if you’re going to play one key, if you play one key on the piano, it’s really boring song, you want to play all the keys. And so authority, connect and then engage is another one that people forget all the time, which is you don’t need to be the expert on everything. You need to start changing your mindset from being the talent to the talent Scout and being able to go to your community and tag people and promote other people, interview other people or ask questions. Be a really good host of the party to start conversations, right? Be a provider of goodwill, a person who thinks in collaboration in general. And when you do that, you get far more engagement at the end of the day on your content and it’s actually easier to do. Sometimes you just need to ask a question, run a poll and let other people feed in and tag other people who are really smart. The last one is sell or show. I prefer show. I think that’s just where you demonstrate your existing clients transformation.
Where you show before and afters, where you show how to do something really cool that gives you credibility, that you know what you’re doing or you show you give something where it fast tracks someone, where you can make someone instantly awesome, right? Like they can get it and immediately apply it. Not end up in your marketing funnel where you’re going to try to convince them to end up on your demo or sales call for consulting or services or whatever it may be. But at the end of the day, that is a form of selling. And so many people forget those different notes. Like you said, they’re not going to get convinced by just hammering over the head all the time. Sometimes you need to do other types of content and it doesn’t necessarily have to be hard, but if we don’t like you, we can’t trust you. We got to focus on the like part too.
I’ll give a funny truth in how it works. Story of measurability not defining strength of the product. So imagine that I started this podcast selfishly to figure out how to do it. I’ve always been keen on doing it. So let me do it through work and do it completely with no attachment to work. And it was hilarious because they’re like, So you’re going to talk to customers, you’re going to talk to whatever partners I’m like, no, I’m just going to talk to people that are basically going to tell stories that are meaningful, that people who are customers would like to listen to, regardless of what we do. I’ve been lucky, right? I was given a lot of rope, a lot of time, and so I did it. I ran this continuous experiment and I even had some people from the company. It was always meant to be an adjacency to work, as a way to build trust, to just give away content and also sort of like figure it out on my own. Because in the long run, I thought it would be neat to start my own. It kept going. And then at one point someone says like, hey, wait a minute, we have to pay for the hosting for this thing.
So what’s the ROI on this? Where are the metrics? How do we attach? And it became a thing of like, how do you attach when people listen to when they go in the funnel? And I was like, you can’t, there literally is no mechanism to do this. And I was just told like, well then maybe we just need to pull the plug on it. I was like, oh, okay, no problem. Makes sense. Totally get it. So then I just rebranded it called it My Own Podcast. And then the funny thing was from there, I never changed what I did. I lengthened it, I did other things, but what I did was always core. And the funny thing is now, in hindsight, more people come on sales calls and like in product calls and open event discussions and they’ll say, oh yeah, I listen to your podcast and it’s hilarious because the sales people are lit up. They’re like, oh, wow, that’s awesome. Like, how did they know you? And I’m like, Because I just keep giving away stuff and it builds familiarity and trust. And if then they come to me and I show them something that I’m passionate about that my team is passionate about and I trust because my trust is on the line too.
If I sit in on a sales call because I’m not in sales myself, I’m giving my reputation to the experience that customer is about to have. So I have to trust my sales rep is not going to pound them in the head telling them that they need this product or they’re going to go away. It becomes a bi directional. But the first thing I have to do is just give it away. If they come and find it, it’s fantastic. It’s a beautiful experience. Because then same thing for like, LinkedIn content. And I see the way that people are getting so much mileage out of this stuff because like you said, it becomes a muscle that they flex because you do it in this format so that they just know, like, Ah, it’s accessible. They’re training their amplification muscle, their sharing muscle to this format. And then you get somebody that’s really good at getting them to that main point. You are like a personal trainer for that process. Hey, in two years they probably may not be a customer anymore, but that’s fine because they’re kind of self sufficient and that’s the best thing they can be, right?
Totally yeah, it’s interesting. Just in general, like even when you talk about the mindset wise, at the end of the day, the people who want to build a boat around their careers and businesses focus on a community and build a media channel around that community. And they build at the end. I think it’s Geoff Kelly first wrote about it. Your 1000 True Fans was the essay that was first written back in 2010 or something like that. I know Tim Ferriss is a big promoter of it and there’s been different iterations of it since then. But the point is if you do that and you build True Fans or subscribers, right, versus sponsors. Okay. So like when you have sponsors, you’re a victim to the sponsors. If the sponsors don’t like what you’re doing or your boss, like in your situation, well they can just take it away at any time. But when you have subscribers or a community around your immediate channel, well you can decide what you want to do. There’s a lot of power in it, there’s a moat in that business. So even like this time with this third business, one of the things I learned from the first and second business is I quietly made the money and did well with those businesses.
But I never and I had a bit of a community privately, but not a public one. And I realized, oh, I want to do it again. I was like, Holy crap, starting over is hard. And I realized this time when I do it, I’m going to build it publicly as well and much bigger. And I picked a niche that I could live in. So my niche is B2B C. As the founders. There’s a lot of things I can create and sell anytime that I want out of that. And if you have a real relationship with them, you do what Gary Vee and other people are doing today, which is they just ask the community, what are your pain points? What do you need to have fixed? And then go solve that problem and boom, instant business right away because you already own the trust in the community. You just need to make a really simple offer and you can have an overnight business that’s a smashing success right away because you chose to be a media company and have subscribers versus sponsors. You don’t see Joe Rogan with sponsors. I mean he got one through Spotify recently that’s his sponsor, but it was $100 million sponsor.
And you go back and look at his first podcast like there is a joke. But what he did instead was he built subscribers, stay curious, focused on community, focused on relationships with these individuals, and understood the short term pay for long term gain. And a decade later it’s different. And I can’t remember Tony Robbins or if it was Bill Gates, one of these individuals that said we greatly overestimate what we can get done in a year, but greatly underestimate what we can do in a decade. And the reality is so true. We really just don’t think of it that way. And these are all things like what you just said are hilarious because you keep building DiscoPosse podcasts. It’s just going to lead to infinite opportunity for you after opportunity after tuning. And it builds a moat around your fucking career. Nobody can touch Eric Wright. You’re untouchable.
Yeah. And it is an amazing thing. And the hardest part of things to tell people and connect and to make them understand is that it’s a grind. And it’s like Gary Vee, like you mentioned, I kind of laugh now as we look at five years ago, Gary Vee was the guy who looked like he had Coke sweats on stage screaming at people that if you’re not grinding, you’re dying. And 20 hours a day is typical. And if you’re doing less, you’re a failure. He was all about this kind of they called it struggle porn. Right. But that was how he got to that point. And then fast forward five years later and he’s doing like, cartoon art on the back of napkins and then selling it as an NFT, probably making more money than his first business did. Now, per month off of adjacent things. But because he has built this community around him and he’s built this authority, built this trust, built this world, now people are going to in another couple of years, forget about struggle-porn Gary, and they’re going to be like, he’s got it. It’s like fortune cookie Twitter, as they call it, for like the fortune cookie BCs.
They’re the people that are five major exits deep. And people are like, oh, you’ve got all this money. You’ve just got nothing but time to go and be pious on Twitter. Like, no, but this is the next iteration of their career that will get them the next five successful exits because they’re then dispensing this advice that got them to this point. And yes, there’s hindsight bias. Yes, there’s all sorts of things in it, but they’re then giving into a community that will grow with them and evolve with them to the next thing. And that’s kind of always been my thing. And like, what I should have thrown away when the boss said there’s no value in it. Well, this is going to be like episode 208 and go back to pick Rogan as an example. Right. His 208th episode was him talking with his goofy comedian buddies over a really bad video connection and just pushing it out to YouTube or wherever it was going at the time. Right. Now, on the other side of things, we have to be careful when we reference certain large scale things like Gary Vee and Joe Rogan. There’s a lot of opponents as much as there are proponents.
But take the methodology, take the specific human out of it, make it whoever you need to be. It’s like it’s the methodology that we’re mapping to that successful. But most importantly is, credibility is given to you not coming from you. And authority – so that’s what I want to talk to you about. How do you create authority but do it with credibility? The first day I published this podcast, it said the leading technology startup podcast, zero listeners. I have to do it right. So it’s working out. I’m catching up to the moniker. When I was careful, I mean, I wasn’t making a huge bold statement. The number one downloaded or whatever. So when somebody’s getting started, Matthew, what’s the way that they can with credibility, create that authority as we continue to seek?
Yeah. So I think at the end of the day, if you genuinely are actually trying to deliver real results and then actually do it, the results always speak louder than themselves. So my cheat always is do it like execute on it and then use that execution so that you can create testimonials. If you look at my silly little website, there’s literally a ten minute VSL on there video sales letter or what I call an amplifier video, which is like a demo of my services.
Best thumbnail of a video ever, by the way. So people need to go there. I’ll have a link to them. You’re magnificent. I love this.
Well, we’re speaking the truth. The truth is people don’t like to be marketed to or sold to. In the minute they feel it, their guard goes up. And so all your marketing should feel invisible. That’s what I call invisible marketing funnels. Some people are smart enough to know that it’s actually happening. But if you can make the right people and when people are sick and use that kind of thing, do the opposite to make it invisible. But the point is, if you actually deliver results, then all you have to do is people are very happy to share the results that they had and that instantly becomes your copy and your stories afterwards. And before you know it is snowballs, you do become the number one person for that at the end of the day. And the reason why what I would recommend is that the only reason people don’t get that transformation is they’re usually trying to bite off too much to chew to begin with. So even in my whole demand Gen system where I talked about short form, long form controlled form, I have twelve other steps that you can do. But our first year, the only thing we focused on as a service was step number one.
How do we create the best content, snackable content for super busy CEOs and founders in B2B. Right. And just do that smashingly well. And then what ends up happening is they end up rolling into the next service as the beta for the next one and the next one depending on the product that we’re launching. Our source of time, it’s going to be 90 days to twelve months to fine tune it just perfectly. The problem is most people try to do the whole fucking thing, right? And that’s probably just pick one thing, one problem you can solve better than anybody else and just smash that one thing repeatedly and you’ll watch yourself become number one for that thing before you know it. You can always expand into other things later on. Other verticals, other services. But just do one thing.
Don’t start with sitting on the couch and then starting CrossFit. And that’s what it is when people do, they don’t realize they’re like, why don’t you just maybe go for a walk and then maybe go for a longer walk and then go for a gentle run. And that’s how you get to that thing. You don’t just immediately think like, I got to go buy a weightset. I got to head to GNC and get some protein powder. I got to do all this stuff. That’s what we do. I got to get Marketo. I got to get HubSpot, I got to tie in this. I got to get Salesforce. Then you’re $12,000 a month in products, having somebody from you’re hiring somebody to set up your landing pages, and you’re doing all the stuff. And it’s like, all right, well, what do they get when they go in that funnel?
You don’t need it. Totally. Yeah. The person who comes to mind, who’s really good about backing this off and doing that, as James Clear, a really smart dude. Tomic Habits. He wrote as a book, but I prefer his blog at the End of the Day, which I think his book is just snippets of his blog, which I think you can sign up for free and get from. But he’s a big proponent of that. Like, back it down. Like you said, instead of trying to even go for a walk, just stand on the treadmill. Just stand there for five minutes a day, and next thing you’re going to go, Fuck, I’m standing here. I might as well walk. And the next thing you know is ten minutes or instead of doing 20 push ups a day, three times, just do one or just add one per week or something like that to make it so easy that you can succeed. And what ends up happening at the End of the Day, Eric, is this – the reason why people grow, become number one is it’s really about success, beginning success and confidence. Because you can’t win if you don’t feel confident.
And so if you engineer, guaranteed wins for yourself. It plays well with my understanding of how the human brain works. And it’s been like this for hundreds of thousands of years for humans. As we move away from pain and we move towards pleasure, the problem is people set these goals or have set these expectations, even for their companies. Internally, this is the same thing for your team. You want to demoralize a team, set BHAGs that are impossible to hit and then beat everybody up that we didn’t hit it or keep telling them how you’re missing it. It’d be better for you to set very realistic goals that are very achievable and engineered because then people’s confidence goes up. And like I said, success begets success. Just back it down, back down the goal you want to do and build off of that. And if you realize you have a runway of a decade versus a year, you’re going to get there.
Well, you hit on the beautiful point. Especially James Clear is a great example. There’s many others like this, right? Tim Ferriss’s four hour Work Week was his blog organized as a book. Atomic Habits is taking working blog content and reorganizing it in a book. Obviously, he may have had, James Clear may have had the idea of the greater vision he was trying to aim towards, and he may have structured his blog in order to do it. But in the end, snackable content is when compiled correctly, is large, long form, valuable content. But you don’t say, like, I’ve never written anything before. You know what I’d like to do? Write a Tolstoyesque level of book, because I think I’ve got it in me. And I tell even like technical white papers, like sales white papers, people always get this thing of like, I need to write an eight page white paper. I said, well, it’s really hard. It’s actually much harder than you think it would be to write eight pages and have form and have beginning, middle end. So don’t write eight page white papers, write one page blogs and then write a three that kind of relate to each other.
And then, well, guess what? You’ve got an eight page, six page white paper right there. Right? You take that, you put some more visuals in there. You put a what’s the customer story at the front of it, at the end of it your call to action of how to get there. When you go into it with the purpose of just sharing content that’s valuable for someone to consume without having a strong CTA and everything, create stuff that people will care about. And then in the end, you can package it together and all of a sudden you’re an author. That’s just how it begins this time and time again. We see it. And SModcast was like one of the early podcast, too, is Kevin Smith. And he did a book just like literally just took them and put it into a book format. And it became a best selling book. You know, we can go countless examples. Ricky Gervais did the same thing, took his BBC podcast, produced a book on it, became a New York Times bestseller. Now, granted, other things got him to that point. I certainly couldn’t take this and turn it into a book just yet. To make best seller list. But I always had it in my mind of doing this. In fact, I did a little series specifically with Founders, and I got it down to like five key questions. I asked every founder. And I was like, oh, this is cool. That effectively could become a book. It’s always there.
That’s what Tempers did. That’s what Oprah did, even that’s what you’re aware. They’re actually experts of nothing. They’re just really good at fighting experts and asking them the same questions or questions of what to look for and look out for on behalf of their audience because they care about their audience. Even all the Tim’s books, except for the four hour work week, as far as I know, are just snippets of the same question over and over again to 100 different really smart people this big and a number one best seller. And then what he ended up doing by interviewing that many people, it became a co marketing book because everybody’s featured it and everybody’s going to promote it. So it’s going to immediately make it a best seller right away. It’s the smartest thing to do in the world instead of making it myself, because now they have a stake in making sure that it’s successful because they like to say, yes, I am listed with these other hundred really smart people in the world.
I’m alongside Bill Gates, I’m alongside whatever tribe of mentors. It’s a really great book. And it’s like each chapter has its own standalone thing. Founders at Work is another great one. And goodness gracious, I’m terrible with names, but the author, she also happens to be marries to Paul Graham of Y Combinator Fame. And she just interviewed these founders and like I said, just asked the same fundamental questions. The stories built around them were compelling and just packed them together in a book. And it was great because it’s anecdotal stories that if you just read it, maybe at the end you find out. Oh, she also has a business consulting firm. Right. Like, oh, well, she asked really great questions. I’d actually like to connect with her.
Yeah. Well, what ends up happening is this is actually called the law of transference again. So this comes back to physics, like actual science and stuff like that. But the law of transference is here you are, Eric. Right? You are the host of the podcast. And then you interview expert here. And then next expert comes in. Next expert comes in. Next expert comes in. Well, all the experts come and go, but the constant is you while they’re there, they pass all of their expertise and authority to you. Right. It doesn’t matter. Joe Rogan is interviewing or Schwarzenegger or David Goggins or the vice President. He ends up getting all that transferred to him and he could actually play it dumb and be like, I’m just a dumb comedian, but yet everybody just remembers that. So you get to tap into what I call other people’s authority OPA and other people’s audiences OPA. And it’s much easier to do that just to be a really good talent, skill and a really good curious individual who cares about your own community to pull it out of there. And it becomes all this coworking stuff. People are working way too hard. This is a much easier way about doing things. And anybody can do it right. Like anybody could do this. If you just genuinely care and are interested, then you can do this. It requires almost no skills whatsoever.
Example, Harry Anderson, who if you’re an older fellow like me, he was Harry the Hat from Night Court, but he was a magician and he purposefully did weird bad deals. Like he was a guy that would take people in poker. He goes through his career as a bit of a sham in how he got some of his money. But it’s really cool because one of the examples he gave, I forgot the name of the book was too. But it’s basically how to fool people. And he said, I can take the ten greatest chess players in the world that you can throw at me and I will win more than 50% of the games, even though I don’t know how to play chess. And so he got somebody to take them up on this deal. He says, But I get to set the scenario. So you find me, your ten players and I win more than 50% of the games. And so the way that the set up was, I’ll paraphrase it was they all play at the same time. Ten chess boards lined up. Black, white, black, white. He’s black on the first one. First player makes their move, he goes to the second board, he makes the same move.
And what ends up doing is he’s not playing chess, he’s just moving the pieces, they’re playing each other. And he may pick up a move that he can inject in, right. And this is what doing this podcast has been for me, it’s like I can refer to ten other guests that have similar things every time now because I’ve just been listening and learning enough that now I’ve got an anecdotal history pool to call from. It’s kind of cool. And that’s again, the other thing I always tell people up front is they say, like, how do I talk about my product or my service? I’m like, you don’t need to, because I care way more about your message coming out than you do. You just be you. And this is why I only take guess who I respect in what they’re doing and why you’re here. And so you don’t have to sell your services. I’m going to sell them. Right. Because if I was looking to connect somebody to somebody that I believe in, they’re going to go to the links below and they’re going to go find Matthew Hunt.
Right.
They’re going to see what Automation Wolf is. This is your integrity didn’t need to be given to me. I found it. And that’s also the network effect too. It’s like you said, your community that all of a sudden you find yourself re-meeting people and maybe their company names change, maybe their life situation changed. In the end, we all find each other. And community is such a perfect description of that at its core. That’s why I like the tech community. That’s kind of how I started was just finding other people that had the same problems that I had and kind of just like sharing trench stories of like, oh man, remember that time we had like a server that went down? Or it was like just goofy, nerd technology stuff. But next thing you know you’re hearing like, oh, they’re like blogging about it. I was like, oh, I should do that, right? And we all grow and learn together. And then eventually, whatever new venture you’ve got, you’ve got this baked in community, not audience. They may be an audience, but they’re always if you treat them like a peer community, that’s such a much more respectful way to grow whatever’s coming for you and for them, because they will one day sell you something.
Right? And it’s okay, it’s cool. I say sell it. Sell is almost like a pejorative. It’s a sad thing that we attach negative things to it because there are so many vacuum salespeople. Kind of like methodologies. But also I’m old enough that I used to have vacuum salesmen. Maybe I’m dating myself on that one.
Yeah, it’s true at the end of the day, birds and feather want to flock together, so they want community. We want to understand each other. I mean, people drive around the world to meet other people with the same cars or in the golf or to the same artists. Like people make websites, but a particular person. And then even then those people want exclusivity to that. That’s why you’re going to see all these NFT membership tokens where you can get access to individuals. This is why only fans worked, right? People wanted access to certain individuals. That is a little misrated, but you get the idea. So this is the way to go. And I like the same thing you said. Building a community is better because you’re thinking outwardly versus inwardly. I always think of it as building followers or an audience is one to many broadcasting. But really you’re trying to create a situation where it’s one to one where it feels personal. At the end of the day, you can make it feel like a belly to belly experience. Like you both broke bread together at dinner. That’s how you want it to feel and appear. And when you get that, then you know it’s a true relationship.
And that’s how you know someone will drive 500 km to go have coffee with you or whatever it is. And that’s when you really produce true wealth. At the end financially, but true wealth at the end of the day of meaning and purpose. And that’s what ends up what we’re all really after at the end of the day.
Yeah. But for folks that definitely want to dig in more and will say that they absolutely should and this will not be the last time we chat for sure. Both.
Thanks for having me on, man.
This is really cool. So how do they find you, Matthew, if they want to get connected?
Well, there’s only two places I’m active so you can go to LinkedIn and search my name. That’s the only social network that I’m active on currently. It’s important sometimes to know what to say. No to delete and delegate is what I would say. And the other place is Automation Wolf right now which is spelled exactly the way it sounds. Automation and then wolf.com
And it’s worth the trip. Like I said, being able to spend time with you has been fun. I probably spent way more time talking on this podcast than I should have but it was just fun to you know, you inspired me understanding why stuff has been meaningful. And sometimes that’s what it takes and that’s why even when you’re coaching people and helping them to understand what’s meaningful it’s like the outsider is much better at pulling meaning out of what we do than us digging into 100 hours of content and finding the one thing that’s like let somebody pull you through that are a guide and that’s why I love this. The method you use is cool. So there you go. So if you all go to automationwolf.com, you will be richer for having done it, I can tell you that. And just it’s been a real pleasure. So there you go, folks. Follow the links below and yeah, hang tight. We got hundreds more of these podcasts coming. I can say that confidently now. I’m like there’s a day where I was like I don’t know if this is going to work now. I’m like this is it.
It’s so much fun and I learned every day and you taught me a lot today, Matthew. Awesome.
Thanks, Eric. I really appreciate being on the podcast.
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Stu is considered one of the top thought-leaders in the non-profit sector. He is also the Director of Thought Leadership and Advocacy for Omatic Software, a data-integration software for non-profits that allows them a complete view of their donors, promoting data-driven decision making.
Founded in 2002, Omatic Software has also made the ‘Inc. Magazine’s Inc. 500 | 5000-America’s Fastest Growing Private Companies list’ for 5 years!
We have a great conversation around the power of technology and data for doing good, and how a personal mission can become a career.
Just imagine being able to say that you literally do good. And someone says, how are you doing? I do good. This is somebody who does good. Stu Manewith is the guest on today’s DiscoPosse Podcast. Had a really fantastic conversation with Stu, we’re going to dive into why he and the team in Omatic Software are doing really cool things. But in the meantime, speaking of doing really cool things and people that do good.
Good stuff is doing things like protecting your data. So shout out to our sponsors and supporters of the podcast, including the amazing people over at Veeam Software. I can implore you that this is the place you need to go to get everything you need for your data protection needs, whether it’s On-premises, whether it’s in the Cloud, whether it’s Cloud-Native, protect yourself from ransomware, protect yourself from just day-to-day making mistakes on the keyboard, accidentally hitting delete, maybe Microsoft teams, maybe Office 365. Look, we’re losing data all over the place. Don’t do it. Just go to vee.am/DiscoPosse and you can make yourself completely protected for just such an occasion. Don’t be a victim. That’s something I’ve learned the hard way.
I lost some data here and there, then I got Veeam and I got good. So speaking of good, also what’s really good, not just protecting your data, whether it’s at rest, but delivering it in transit safely using a good VPN. I say this because I use a VPN all the time, especially when I’m traveling or when I’m moving around. I’m using other people’s Wi-Fi. There’s a lot of weird stuff that goes on on Wi-Fis when they’re not yours. Heck, even when they’re yours. Let’s protect your data, protect your identity.
And if you want to use a great VPN, you can head over and try out ExpressVPN. I’m a fan. I’m a user. So if you go to tryexpressvpn.com/DiscoPosse, you can get set up. And it is absolutely a must have in this day and age. It also helps you to cut down on some of the spam, the noise and the adjunct. Very, very cool. I also use it for web testing. All right, one more thing.
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All right, let’s get to the good stuff. This is Stu Manewith from Omatic Software. He’s a thought leader and advocate. Those aren’t titles he gave himself. Those are what the world gives him. He’s a great person. This is a great conversation. Enjoy this.
This is Stu Manewith from Omatic Software, and you’re listening to the DiscoPosse Podcast.
Stu Manewith, thank you very much for joining. I love when I get a guest submission, and it takes me all of, not even hitting below the fold before I think, it’s an absolute yes. You are among a list of the type of people that I have a real respect and adoration for in what you’re doing both directly. We’ll talk about Omatic software. We’ll talk about what you’re doing today, but beyond what you do in your day-to-day, I’m a big fan already. I loved your other podcast. I got to listen to some of the other stuff you’ve done, so I’m excited to be able to share some time with you.
But for folks that are new to used you Stu, if you want to give a quick bio and an introduction, and we’ll dive into your world at Omatic and beyond.
Great. Thanks so much, Eric. I’m Stu Manewith. I work at Omatic Software. My title is Director Of Thought Leadership And Advocacy, but that means a lot of different things. And I think we’ll talk more about those things as we talk for the next little while. I have been in the field for 30 years. I’m a man of a certain age. I started out working in the nonprofit sector the first half of my career. My very first job actually was in the performing arts. I worked at the Repertory Theater of St. Louis producing children’s theater.
But in doing that, I learned that you had to raise funds and you had to engage granters, etc. And I was mentored, thankfully, by a brilliant director of fundraising who showed me how grabbing funds from funders and then putting them to work is the best way to show how those funds are used. And so I learned a lot about the fundraising field. And I went to work for a small educational foundation, and then in 1996, I’m aging myself. I’m getting myself. I found myself working in healthcare. I was living at a big hospital foundation, a big part of a big medical center.
And I really learned a lot more about constituent relationship management and how to deal with donors and supporters and decidedly how to use data. How nonprofits use data really as the nourishment, as the lifeblood of their organization, to interact with people, to raise money from people to find what makes someone tick and then kind of hone in on it in a really good way, not in an exploitive way, but in a very positive way to help them meet their philanthropic goals and philanthropic challenges.
So I worked there for about seven years, and then I was called some might say to the dark side. I thought it was a great experience. I went to work on the technology side of the nonprofit sector. So I went to work at a company called Blackboard, which is at least one of the world leaders in technology for nonprofit organizations. Fundraising, CRMs, accounting, educational, education system management exclusively for nonprofit organizations. I worked there for 13 years from the beginning of 2003 to the end of 2015. And then at the end of 2015, I moved to Omatic software, which was actually started by an employee of Blackboard to build a better mousetrap in terms of donation and I’ve been here in Omatic for the past six years.
I just celebrated my 6th anniversary, the end of last month.
Wow. Very cool. The thing that I really like is this progression and the interesting realization now. I get into this often in the tech side of the world. So I came from the customer side of technology, working in financial services and designing systems, and then moved over to the vendor side of the world. And I like you described sort of like the dark side of one side of the business to another. And what was interesting is the more that I worked in the technology. I realized the business was intrinsic in how I would do technology because I understood the business side, and it led me to make technology decisions based on the business.
And then when I work for a technology vendor, I made decisions on how I did technology marketing based on the business usage, and then the sales team. The connection started to move together, and I started to realize, oh, I think I’m in sales, like, in a way, there is sort of a general acceptance. But the difference is I’m understanding the story. I’m using data to drive decisions. I’m working with the relationship sellers, and it became a simple thing of understanding, what is the funnel? How does the buyer’s journey work?
So now I’m a nerd, right? I look at nerd technology, but the first thing I think of is like, kind of what’s the buyer’s journey, what’s the adoption curve? What are all these things? So I look at your progression as well, career wise. Lived experience that then you bring towards attaching a business wrapped around it. So it’s a beautiful and natural transition to them running or going it alone, so to speak. So you’re clearly not alone. Omatic is growing well. And congratulations on all the work that you’re doing there. But now it’s this thing of combining those things together and realizing that there are systematic things that you can do in philanthropy that will help to promote giving power and value to those, like philanthropic investments, which is people have trouble understanding, where does my money go? Like, what does my money actually do?
It’s so important that donors and supporters and volunteers, anyone who is engaged with an organization that they feel that their time, their money, their input is that it matters. And what we want to do is we want to help organizations use their data to do all of that, to benefit them from the bottom- up, from the top-down, from the sides in every possible way. But the point that you make about how we engage, how we engage supporters, how we engage. People generally don’t start out with an organization giving money to them immediately. They need to have some connection. Was I cured? Was I educated? Was I fed? Was I given a basketball to play with as a kid when I couldn’t afford one? Was I given food during the pandemic, when I lost my job? And now I’m back working and I can give back. So people need to have, generally, have some emotional tie. And then that’s where organizations that are technologically savvy start collecting and using data to engage people. And one of the things that has changed over the past 20 years. And let’s be honest about the time frame is how many different platforms and systems organizations have used.
When I worked at Barnes Jewish Hospital Foundation in St. Louis, we had one system. We used one database system. There wasn’t online given in 1996. Not very much. There wasn’t email journeys or email marketing. We just had a single system. Fast forward 20 years, and organizations are using one or very often multiple online giving systems, email marketing, peer to peer fundraising, special events, volunteer management. There may be a separate system for membership or for ticketing or for any of the different things that are needed. And those all lead to multiple data repositories. And so organizations that 20 years ago had a single system where all the data was stored now are facing. It’s not unusual for the organizations that we work with to have at least four and often up to eight or nine different places where their data comes from. And that doesn’t even count all the spreadsheets that people keep. Right. So it’s a challenge.
No, seriously, it’s a challenge to amalgamate all of that data and keep it clean and keep it from getting stale and keep it from being siloed.
People always they ask me, what would you name as the top used software in the world? And I would say it’s Microsoft Excel.
Unquestionably. What we find is, and I’m digressing a little bit. But what we find is people have shadow systems. It works for them. They are successful at their job using this spreadsheet. But what they don’t realize is they don’t have the benefit of data collected. Let’s say you’ve got a major gift officer, and she’s working with her list of 150 people, and she knows what their gifts are, what their giving history has been. But she doesn’t know what emails they may have opened based on some newsletter that they received from the marketing team that talks about a specific program. And so she doesn’t know to talk about that program the next time she calls them. And so she’s got a blind spot. Does that make sense?
Absolutely. Yeah.
And this is where people would look at, especially sort of large giving philanthropy. And they often think it’s purely a relationship and a life position type of opportunity. And obviously, that’s a big player right there. Where there’s sort of like friends of the school, friends of the university, friends of the hospital. They are generally people who are at a particular financial level in life, and they’re familiar with the brand. But what we don’t realize is that’s almost like Pareto’s principle, but that’s a big portion of it. However, the other gap is hundreds, potentially thousands of donors, of participants in philanthropy where you don’t have a direct relationship. And look, the truth is that relationship seller has learned over time that, hey, I may have some key contributors, donors, whatever they want to talk about as discussion point or how we call them. But how do we acquire new faces and introduce people to this organization to this brand and then excite them about stuff? And so long gone are the Rolodexes where it’s like, Jenny has a good friend and he likes to support the university. Okay, great. But what happens when Jenny’s friends suddenly doesn’t give money?
Jenny’s friends actually has a friend who came to the newsletter. And like you said, they clicked on the link because they saw something about a school program and like, oh, you can start to then use that data.
Absolutely. 100%. I mean, you’re hitting the nail on the head there. It’s very tactical. It’s not sexy and exciting. It’s very tactical, but it’s collecting as much data on these touchpoints coming from various sources. These days, most are different systems, like email opens, email click throughs, what people are clicking on, or volunteer opportunities that people even express interest in and they may not follow through. But it’s all of these data points that you can amalgamate and then leverage by using other data about these people that you’ve collected and then figure out a story or a journey that makes sense for them.
And in the perfect world, there’d be a very personalized journey for each $25 donor. That’s not practical. But with data, organizations can at least group people reasonably into reasonable sized groups, depending on how big their staff is and what their resources are and then build relationships back up based on that. And I am always surprised at really how well that works when people feel that you care about them enough to talk about something that’s important to them or on the flip side. And this happens to me by personal experience. And this is again, I’ll kind of weave in some of what Omatic does, but I made a gift.
I guess it was the beginning of 2020 pandemic. So early 2020 to a large, well known organization. Everyone. I’m not going to say the name because I don’t have their permission to, but everyone would know the organization. Very well known, does great work. I made a gift. And not surprisingly, a few weeks later I got a solicitation for another gift, but I got two emails, two separate emails. And then I got two direct mail pieces. It may have been that one was addressed to Stu Manewith and the other Stewart Manewith, and they may have had my name in their database from a long time ago. And then I made a gift in March or April of 2020 that they didn’t realize was the same guy. And so I started getting two of everything. I’m in the business. So I take it with a grain of salt, maybe. But people who aren’t thinking, what the heck? Don’t these people know that I’m only one person? Or what kind of systems do they use? They’re mailing me two letters. That’s twice the postage they need to pay. So it works both ways. It can bring people closer to you.
And it can also push people away if you’re not careful with how you’re using data. And again, to weave in what Omatic software does, when we move data from, say, online giving to your main CRM, we check that we prevent duplicates. We will pop up and say, oh, and it doesn’t work exactly the way I’m telling you, which is on screen with a user interface, but it’s saying, oh, this guy, there’s an 80% chance that these are the same people. Do you want to merge them? Do you want to investigate further, or are they really, maybe the senior and the junior, and they are, in fact, two different people. But at least it gives you. We give database professionals the opportunity to make those decisions so that they are really ultimately treating their constituents, their donors and their supporters as best as possible.
Yeah. And that really is the thing that we experience, and we get it all the time. So I’ve got my little trick that I use when I go to, like, events, and I have to sign up. So I signed up in my name. I put it E-R-I-C, but I put the E and the R capitalized, so that when I get an email.
You know, it’s yours.
I can tell automatically whether this was me actually signing up for something. Or it was just an auto sign up from me just showing up at an event.
You know what that also does. It also tells you who’s selling their lists to whom. I’m serious.
It does. So this is the funny thing. Suddenly you get an email from a company. I’m like, I didn’t go to their booth. And you’re like, wait a second. How did this happen? And you realize, like, oh, wow. So they’ve probably done. We call them list swaps, right? Or contact swaps, which in fact, is illegal. I’m old school. We touched before we record because I’m Canadian. For people that know me and my odd voice and things I say. But we introduced something called CASL, Canadian anti spam legislation.
I’m familiar with it.
Yeah, it was onerous to deal with this. I worked for a major financial services institution. So we suddenly went to the point where every system has to be able to recognize CASL, and it was opt-in required. It wasn’t automatic. So there was like, if you have an existing business relationship, that was one thing. But there is no way that someone could even. If they go to your booth, they had to actually opt in, and it sort of switched the industry around. So it was funny. But like I said in that experience, if I’d get something from a company and I know how the systems work. So I’m like, sometimes just curious of, like, now it makes sense to me, but I know how the machine works, and I see past it like you said, but most people would be like, what the heck? I didn’t go to this company, and now they go through their personal list of, like, I’m not giving to anybody because this is what happens to my data. And it affects the whole industry when bad practice, unfortunate practices, even. Like you said, just a simple thing of like, we accidentally sent a thank you, and it included somebody’s name when it shouldn’t have or whatever.
Even like my dad, bless his heart, will key in all uppercase. And then he’ll get a letter that comes back to him in all upper case. And he’ll think, what the hell, what the heck? What are they doing with my data? Not realizing that he’s the culprit. But there are tools like Omatics, for example, that will fix that. It’ll clean it up along the way. So that data are pristine. And so people really feel like they are important to the organization. There’s two pieces. There’s that piece. And then to your point, a little bit ago, it is then reflecting back to people that their money was used wisely, what their money was used for, that the organization is being good stewards, that they are making nobody individually, but that together they are helping the organization make its mission impact, make the impact that is consistent with the mission that it’s trying to propagate.
Yeah. I was lucky. I had Emily Jillette, who also for people that know the name, she happens to also be the wife of Penn Jilette of Penn & Teller, but I had Emily on. She’s strong in the world of philanthropy, and I have a huge respect for her. Through a friend, we got connected. And that was this whole thing of like finding an organization that you believe in their mission, and you believe in their ability to do good with what you give them.
And every little interaction you have can influence your belief in the actual output of good and understanding the breakdown of the dollar I give to what the recipient will actually get. We hear for years about this, the difficulty of the cost of management. You hear about charities that have issues with overpaying staff, underpaying the actual people that should be receiving the money by doing what you’re doing, you get rid of the need for that to occur, right? Like, by giving good practices, giving good data management, we don’t have to throw high dollars at administrative stuff because it allows us to be more effective and efficient.
Yeah, it’s both. And you’ve made me think of two things that I wanted to talk about, and I’m happy to be given the opportunity. There’s efficiency, there’s reducing expenses. That’s very tactical. And then there’s using better data to be more effective in driving revenue. And both of those things, directly and indirectly, they generate more funding for an organization to use towards submission, whether it’s money that is saved from being more efficient or more money that is raised, not necessarily through fundraising, but maybe through programmatic fees as well, or whatever the direct program in revenue. But let me dig into that just a little bit more. On the expense side, if you can make your data management activities more efficient to use a very broad example, if it used to take you, I’m making this up 8 hours a week to key in data by hand. Philanthropic data or accounting data or what have you. And now through technology, it takes 1 hour. That’s 7 hours that saved. That where people can be redeployed and you’re spending this end as an executive team looking at it, you’re spending the same amount of money on someone’s salary or on someone’s job, but now you’re getting them not to be doing data entry for 8 hours, but doing data management work for 1 hour, and you can redeploy them to do other things that need to be done for seven more hours.
And so that is you’re driving mission impact because you’re redeploying people to do work that wasn’t. Otherwise you had to pay extra for or that just didn’t get done. That’s a on the flip side, if your data is processed faster and it’s better quality and it’s no longer siloed and it’s all amalgamated and consolidated and it can be used effectively, then you are better able to be strategic about being able to get people to renew their donations, being able to convert people who were involved with the organization but not donors to become donors. You may even be able to get them to increase giving or for organizations. My first job I told you was at the Repertory Theater of St. Louis. When I think of revenue, non fundraising revenue, I automatically go to ticketing. But if you can use data to get somebody who’s a single ticket buyer to buy a subscription or someone who has bought a subscription to buy a second subscription or anything like that, you are increasing earned revenue, and then you can similarly use data to improve fundraising activity by again having it faster, having more of it so that you can segment better.
You can talk to people more personally. You can communicate with them at the right time, and all of that is going to grow revenue. So by using technology to save money and by using technology to drive revenue more strategically, all of that is more funding for your mission. I know that’s a mouthful, and I get kind of passionate about it.
That’s Perfect.
It’s 100% true. And we see that every day with the customers that we work with that were paper everywhere or that were spending hours keying data in and now they can or putting stuff in spreadsheets that someone else had been keyed in. It’s funny, we work with accounting systems as well. We have a big piece of our business is transmitting fundraising and other revenue data to account to general ledgers so that it doesn’t have to be rekeyed. And I said to somebody, I said, you know what? When the term double entry accounting was coined, it didn’t mean enter here and then reenter it here. That’s not what it meant. A big piece of that time savings is we help organizations take that those revenue transactions and transmit them directly to the general ledger perfectly without having to be rekeyed and also easily reconcilable. So there’s not that hunting and pecking for a missing transaction or something that got delayed in transit to the bank or etc.
It’s a very important thing, too, when you think of. These are organizations that may not even realize that this kind of data flow, this kind of analytics can drive things. Like you think about a regional church. I had this joke with somebody that said, Imagine you’re starting a brand new church. You don’t sort of think of like, okay, who is our prospect audience? And I got four potential prospect parishioners. I got three moving into strong upside this week. Like, in the end, the sort of funnel dynamics are always there. We just don’t use the name. We talk about new contacts and their leads, their contacts, their prospects. They’re in stages of funnel.
But all that really is that there are signals within the data that we understand about them in their journey, whether it’s the buyer’s journey, the givers journey, whatever it’s going to be, that if you look at the signals, you can better guide a positive experience towards the ultimate goal, which is to acquire, get funding for donations, get funding to drive good, and then the bonuses, then you can spend the time showing them the value they’re getting from that money going in which then leads to, oh, right. If I send an email with a response, it gets more reintroduction, they will be more likely to give a second time.
Absolutely.
Status reports.
Absolutely. In the fundraising field, we refer to that as stewardship. Similarly, stewardship is the way the term is used in faith based organizations, but it’s absolutely a cycle. And there’s been some studies that have shown that for a new donor to an organization, if they receive proper stewardship meaning, thank them for their gift, tell them how their gift is being used or how similar gifts have been used and then re-solicitation within three months. They are four times as more likely to make a second gift than without those things. And that kind of retention and being able to leverage that kind of statistic is imperative but it’s all based on that cycle, and again, using data to properly tell people what they’re interested in knowing about and then re-engaging with them at the right time. But, Eric, you said something else about when you mentioned a church, something about technology that wouldn’t have happened other than when the pandemic started is really interesting, both in the faith-based subsector and also in the arts. The visual arts sub sector, even performing arts to some extent. And that is, organizations were able to broaden their reach to audiences that they never imagined that they would with online technology.
Museums can offer exhibits across the country, around the world. Churches. People can attend church services whatever time they want, whatever church they want. And nobody has to know. If you’re Catholic, you can go to a Protestant church if you want to test it out and from the comfort of your own living room. But what that has done is it has opened. It has expanded the reach of organizations the way they never imagined. I know of a woman who lived in Maine that sent her daughter to drama camp in Florida because she could.
Yeah.
Or we looked at an exhibit in Boston Museum of Art from the comfort of our living room in St. Louis. And that kind of reach is something that technology has afforded because it’s driven by the pandemic. But obviously it will continue well after. And it gives organizations the opportunity to reach audiences, prospective donors, even possibly prospective volunteers and supporters in a way that would never have been thought of, even with the technology the pandemic made it, you know, necessity is the mother of invention. It made people think about different ways to leverage technology in order to be able to stay alive, to stay in business.
Well, the thing that I always look back and said, what are the positive impacts of what’s the most difficult thing that in my lifetime we’ve experienced, right? And it’s tough to even say it because how could you think this put something positive like, well, think about it. We’ve democratized access to systems and services that prior to being forced into having to do this, right? How many organizations struggled with work from home like, well, it would really break up the dynamic of the company. There’s no way we can operate, like in November 2019. There’s a lot of companies that you’re like, hey, you can’t get a job there because you’d have to come into an office and it would be a massive impact on your life. Well, all of a sudden, especially for Canadians, too. Back when I was getting into technology, you had to work for a Canadian tech company. There was no option to cross the border to work remotely. You had to live near the financial center. You had to live near mark of Ontario. You had to live near a tech center or drive to it.
Right or so. Same difference.
Yeah. So now in everything, in every sector. We suddenly, as you said, the invention has had to occur because of a real adverse situation. But goodness, we really have learned great things from it so that if we do go back to a more location centric existence, we will really value why we do it more so than you’re forced to do it. It’s not a good time to be in real estate, investment trusts and such.
Right. Commercial real estate? Yeah, I know.
I saw a commercial the other day, and it was one of the things like investing. You’ve got people that are selling gold and silver and all. God bless Bill Davey. He certainly must own a lot of silver and gold. But there was somebody that was pitching some kind of an REIT. And at the end, of course, it’s like past performance is not indicative of future results. I would not be putting money into REIT right now because those are going to be vacant spots. Sadly, I really feel for the folks that are in that sector because it’s going to be a struggle for quite a while.
Yeah.
But the other thing that really hits me, too is when you can connect what you do with the real outcome. And sort of the joke I always say to people when someone says, how are you doing? I’m doing good. Like, no, Superman does good. You’re doing well. So grammatically. We have to correct that all the time. But then I tell people and I use this story at work, and I showed people I like to use strong imagery when I’m presenting I’m working for a tech company right now. I talk about what we do with software automation, and I show like, a picture of a rocket. I’m a big fan of rocketry. Like what does SpaceX do? And how do they get to do that right? And ultimately tying the business outcome to what the technology does. And like, my thing that I close with often. You’ve probably seen the video of it. A little two year old girl who receives a cochlear implant, and the video is her hearing her mother’s voice for the first time in her life. And like, if that doesn’t stop you in your tracks when you see that stuff. So here I am like an audience full of people who are like a bunch of tech nerds, and they’re just like, you really inbring this thing forward.
And they said, this is what we do. The Salesforce system you built. This is what happens because of what you do. And I tell them we do amazing things with technology, and it’s beautiful to be able to tie it to that.
It’s interesting. It’s actually something I’ve not thought of, but that our technology, which again, I know I’ve probably said this three times already, which provides very tactical solutions for organizations. If they leverage it properly, it allows them to leverage other technology. Like, you’re talking about right now that really can solve big problems, like big medical problems or climate problems or animal welfare problems or medical research. All of the things that vaccine research. I mean, all of the things that we think of when we think of technology for good, we don’t necessarily think of importing data faster or transmitting revenue transactions to an accounting system, but that’s really kind of at the basis of it, because if we can figure out a way to streamline that kind of stuff and to make data more accessible to organizations to use, they can go ahead and make more money, frankly, raise more money, build more revenue to support that really cool tech that will help the little girl with the cochlear implants or put a fast track on fixing our environments or building a new wheelchair. I’m making it up doing and doing those kind of high tech things that people really do think of when they think of tech for good.
Our tech for good is kind of the bottom of the pyramid. But I guess, in my opinion, it’s the most fundamental. It is making sure the systems are working effectively and efficiently so that organizations can drive the big stuff.
It’s the perception, even in the way that we describe some of the things which is tough. Imagine if you got a friend who’s, like, I’ve got a friend of mine. He’s a plumber. He makes a disturbing amount of money doing it. And he’s like, so people talk about, like, oh, it’s just the plumbing. He’s like, I’m right here, dude, I’m in the room. Yeah, I drive a Mercedes. That’s just the plumbing. Like, pardon me, but guess what goes through a toilet. I deal with your stuff so that you don’t have to.
Right.
We have difficulty sometimes in seeing the importance of those tactical things. But really, this is the opportunity for us to create a connection of turning data into insight and then turning insight into actionability and whether it’s empowering your sales force or your donor outreach force and whatever it’s going to be empowering them to do more with what they’ve got today and to find more signals inside the potential noise of the amount of data that’s out there. This is massive, right? This is effectively almost a Gutenberg revolution in the fact that we can take what was seemingly an intractable problem of just like, hey, this is just the way the systems work.
People talk to people and they give money. You’re like, no, no. What if we find out why? What if we actually use, like, Kahneman and Tversky taught us more about economics and their behavioral psychologists. They won a Nobel Prize for economics as behavioral psychologists because they taught us about the heuristics that drive prospect theory. And then how did they do it? Well, they took research and data and anecdotal information. They combined it. So when it came to this stuff, where whether it’s giving back, whether it’s local and regional churches, whether it’s global giving organizations. If you can take that data and turn it into true insight, you find something incredible in the same way that Kahneman and Tversky figured out that if you tell somebody they’re going to lose money instead of they’re going to get money, their risk profile alters.
Yeah. Changes. Yeah. What we want to do is we want the organizations that we work with. I think I mentioned it. We work only with nonprofits, exclusively with nonprofits. We want the nonprofits that we work with to understand that we can make it possible for them to amalgamate data from as many sources as they have, as many sources as they need, whatever engagement tools they find best to engage with their constituencies. We want to help them amalgamate that and then use it exactly as you say, to build insights to drive the next strategic thing they do, to continue to engage existing supporters, new supporters, people who have been with them for a long time and are looking for something new to leverage those connections, leverage those relationships, and it becomes unstoppable. It becomes a ever growing concentric ring. That’s the image that comes to my mind of data relationship stewardship. And then using that data again to drive the cycle. Does that make sense?
Yeah. Absolutely. It’s fantastic.
So looking in your own personal stories throughout your career, you stayed close to this ecosystem. And so I would tend to think from there that there’s something meaningful to you in being in an area to help with giving. What drew you to this as a choice, even when given a business, you talked about sort of going to the business and going to the tech. But it was always in an area where you’re working with people in this ecosystem, in this opportunity to be able to give and create giving.
Well, I’m glad you asked it. It’s a good question because I think that nonprofits are underserved. They are under something I’m trying to think of the right word. People don’t give non profits in general in the US anyway, the credit they deserve. And when I was in the trenches when I was a fundraiser and a non profit finance director, I was focused on my thing. And I was focused on my organization and on success for that organization. When I went to work with Black for Blackboard, and I saw how many different organizations we worked with at the time. Back in 2003, Blackboard had about 20,000 customers. Now they’ve got twice that. What that helped me understand was all of the different organizations that need help that do things poorly, not because the staff aren’t intelligent or not professional, but because they’re spread so thin and they don’t have resources. We could help Blackboard and Omatic, for sure. We can help organizations just do better. And that just is to say a turn on. Is that a bad thing to say? That’s just a turn on for me is to know that we can help organizations be better, do better, be more effective in how they, now in formatic, use data.
But when I worked for Blackboard, we use systems to just be better at what they do so they can get more basket balls to poor kids or get more meals to families, or get the next vaccine developed or educate people. Give them scholarships, give them a rewarding, faith based experience, give them a great show to watch and exhibit to see. I’m trying to look at all the different sub sectors that we work with, but just to make them be able to deliver their mission better just is very rewarding for me. And what I learned was, I can do it more and better working for a company that serves the sector broadly than for any individual nonprofit. There’s plenty of great fundraisers and nonprofit executives out there. There are less of us who work in companies that are committed to serving the sector and bring the best technology to them. And I’m proud to be able to do that kind of work.
And it is the beautiful combination of your personal giving to the world through what you do and that you can have a greater impact both directly and indirectly, with this. And this is why I really enjoy. In fact, your progression is like I said, it feels like that true natural progression of number one. I can directly give back, right? I’m on the ground, boots on the ground, day to day, making sure that my organization is able to thrive and our community can thrive so we can give back to them. Then you move to understanding the systems approach of things at a larger scale. And then from there, you say, well, I know how it works directly. I know how these systems are built in order to support this industry and this ecosystem. But I see the problem, right? So now you ultimately have gotten to the problem statement because of the scale at which you could work. And then you make an active choice to say, I’m going to go and solve this, and I can’t do it here because my role mission would not allow me to sort of step out and say, like, hey, folks, I think we got a problem here.
They’re like, “Sorry, Stu, you got a day to day gig here. This is neat that you’re doing this stuff”, but you do have to go out and say, okay, true. Sort of first principle startup methodology. Let’s go solve this problem. And in the end, young Stu benefits, middle career Stu benefits. And now you are able to benefit because you can.
New me Stu benefits, right?
That’s right. Yeah.
And it’s a beautiful thing to be able to find opportunity to do something that can have a greater effect than the hours you put in your day.
Well, thank you. I appreciate that. I’ll say that our team at Omatic generally is aligned with the nonprofit sector. These are people who are talented engineers, developers, and even the people that work in our sales and marketing team. These are people that could easily work for companies that serve the insurance industry or the manufacturing industry or anything else. And they are equally as passionate. They have chosen to work for a company that serves the nonprofit sector because it’s just so important. It’s so important to provide tools and technology that will help them make the processes better.
Now, I like your role and your title. That’s one that as a technology evangelist. Before there was advocacy, it was evangelism. And so I always sort of joke, one day I’ll change my title to map to the rest of the world. I’ll become a developer advocate, which is sort of in the tech world a similar thing. But the idea of advocacy and thought leadership is important in that you’re representing the larger sort of system through words, writing, communication and ways to engage with the broader community and introduce people through thought leadership is always a funny thing because there’s a lot of people that they usually say I’m a thought leader. Like, if you say you’re a thought leader.
No, you’re absolutely right. Someone is a thought leader when others say they’re a thought leader, and I have no idea this whole thought leadership thing is I’ve been doing it only for about two years, two and a half years, when I joined Omatic, I was in implementations. I ran the implementations team. I’ve graduated to this role and we had a little bit of a struggle coming up with my title. We knew what we wanted me to do, which was to advocate for the sector, whether they were customers of ours or not. We wanted to know what their challenges were and build our products and deliver services that address those challenges. So I really very firmly consider myself an advocate for organizations in nonprofit sector, and I would encourage anyone who’s watching or listening if you’re in the sector and you want to talk to me, I love talking to the sector and finding out what makes you tick, what you’re especially in the area of data quality and integration, what your needs are, because that’s what a big part of my job is know, is trying to get a handle on that so that we can build better products.
But thought leadership, Eric, to your point, is kind of the evolved advocacy. It’s taking all of that information that interaction with the sector with your market and then building thought provoking questions and answers around it. I want to say more than dabbling. I’m getting a handle on that. I get a handle better and better as each month progresses.
Well, if I were to put somebody at the front, there are two personalities. There’s the self proclaimed thought leader, somebody who’s very good at public speaking and storytelling. That’s fantastic. Right? There are people that are great stage presence or the real person that I want to carry the title that you carry and the responsibility that you do, is somebody like you who’s doing everything you describe yourself. You never describe you at the front of anything. You talk about advocacy and graduating into your role and being given opportunity as magical, right? It’s actually rare to have somebody who has put yourself into opportunity, but do not take credit for it. You are absolutely in the right world, and I need the world to contain more Stu Manewith’s.
Well, thank you. I appreciate that very much. You know, I don’t like to be the center of attention, and so I tend to focus on the customer or the process and kind of extract me from the situation. But I certainly appreciate your words. Thank you.
I always tell people the greatest thing I will ever achieve will be helping somebody else achieve their greatest thing they’ve ever achieved. And it’s a great thing when you can do good, you can bring something to the world where you can empower people to achieve more. Now on the data side, this is the interesting thing, too. Obviously, you’ve got a strong technical background. You led the services and professional and services and engagement side and implementations. So this is probably a fun, real career positioning where you can take all that experience and now take those progressions and then bring them back in stories and in connecting to the world, it probably does feel exciting. Did you think five years ago that you’d be where you are today in your career?
No, I didn’t. You know what? I’ll give a plug to our CEO, who’s Canadian, he’s from Toronto. Who, Daniel Kim, who about two and a half years ago took me aside and said, I need someone like you to be our company advocate to advocate for the sector, and we’ve never had a position like this. So we’re not exactly sure what it’s going to look like, but let’s partner in building used to being our domain expert and subject matter expert and being kind of out in front going to conferences, writing blogs, writing white papers. The irony was, so that was summer of 2019, and of course, conferences kind of went the way of all things during the pandemic. But again, we’ve had an opportunity to do virtual conferences and to kind of promulgate our message to again, a broader spectrum of people than would have ever come to an in-person conference. So there’s the benefits of that, too. I was just going to say, sorry, but I have loved that progression that you’ve reminded me of, is kind of being in the field and working directly with customers on a one to one basis for so long and then amalgamating all of that experience to be able to tell stories, to figure out how to help organizations that are the organizations that have yet to come.
Well, this is the important thing is never disconnecting from that. And this is often what happens when folks I work in tech and the tech evangelist was that one that funny title that everybody’s like, I want to be a tech evangelist. So they end up working in technical marketing for a while. I left right from working for the customer world to going and becoming a technology evangelist for a vendor. And it was like as if I bypassed working as a sales engineer and working in technical market. I just, rocking it right through that. But I’d been a blogger. I’d been doing a lot of stuff and understanding how to connect value and storytelling and such and every step of the way. I always make sure that never forget how you got here and never forget who you helped get from their morning to their evening. Right? And that’s the customer stories and sitting with customers and listening to them is such an important part. Advocacy is, in fact, a two way, much more inbound than outbound.
Yeah.
And it’s something that people don’t realize. So they see this with like, oh, yeah, Stu, you just see a professional speaker. Stu is grounded out in the trenches for a long time, so he bloody well deserves where he’s at and first of all, and it’s earned. And then I guarantee. How much of your time do you spend still directly connecting to the people that are doing the thing? I guess.
One of my most fun parts of my job is I get to write case studies, so I interview. We call them customer success stories. I interview customers who, first of all, are willing interested in having their story told. It surprised me, actually, how many are circumspect and I get it. Non profits, and I worked at three before I went to the dark side. As I said, there’s a level of privacy, and I understand it. But I also expected organizations to also want to gush about how happy they are, not with our product necessarily, but just in general when something’s working. And so there’s not as many as I would have thought, but it’s so rewarding and exciting to interview customers and then write their story up and then send it back to them and say, this is what we want to use to help others do what you’re doing. And that’s one of the most fun parts of my job, is writing our customer success stories. And also, I do get pulled in to one part of my job. I would say kind of is the universal translator. So if there are people, whether it’s in our products team or our sales team or whomever marketing and they need someone who really deeply understands the sector who can help be an intermediary so that everyone’s communicating on the same wavelength.
I was a fundraiser for so many years that when some fundraising function comes up in discussion and there’s a lack of clarity how I may get pulled into a conversation. So I love those conversations because then I can let the prospect or the customer know that we get it. There are people at Omatic that have walked in their shoes. We know what their challenges are, and we can describe solving it in a way that makes sense to them.
It’s funny. I hate to make it a thing of sales and psychology, but it truly does work. And I do it all the time myself, directly, because I know I can say I’ve lived your experience. I’ve walked in your shoes. I’ve been on the other side of the computer, running a data center at scale, doing whatever it gives the credibility to your thing you’re attached to. So ultimately Omatic benefits because the people that you’re talking to say, look, I literally know what you do because I did it for years.
Right.
And it builds a comfort with them because they’re more likely at that point to be sort of disarmed. They’re more open to discussing things because you have a peer relationship with them, and it helps.
And we speak the language. I can use terminology and experiences if I need to. That just build a level of confidence and trust. And again, not that I want to talk to people that don’t get it or that are argumentative or that are circumspect. But I love the opportunity for people to understand. Yes, we really do have your best interests at heart. We really have walked in your shoes, and our technology solutions will help solve your problems because we know what those problems are. And we’ve designed our solutions through a nonprofit lens from the bottom up.
Yeah. The converted are often the most exciting parts of it. Right. When somebody comes to you and says, Stu, I saw what you guys do. Where do I buy it? Okay. That’s neat. But I want someone to go like, I don’t know if I see a fit you’re like, no, trust me.
When I was doing this. I kind of know what it was like. And this is an example of where I wish I had it. And also they’re like, okay, I’m interested. Let’s go further. And you’re like, all right. I feel excited now.
That’s exactly right. And it’s like something as simple as, now do you have to add a bunch of columns to your spreadsheets in order to get them to import? Yeah, that takes me so much time. That’s what I used to have to do. And it just becomes an easy conversation with a lot of confidence and a lot of trust built because of our background in the sector and just knowing what our customers are living through.
Nowadays, especially that we’ve moved to a dominantly digital experience. Every organization struggles, the ability to pair up with in person events and be able to have a presence there, gave you visibility. Well, now we are using mailing lists, and we are using digital outreach. This is the new door-to-door. This is the new in person relationship is we have to begin with digital, survive and thrive in digital. And then when an in person opportunity comes, it’s actually further in the engagement. Right?
Exactly. I was just thinking the same thing. The relationship has already been established and even built upon in a digital way, so that when you do talk to somebody, you’ve already had email conversations with them, you already know about them bluntly, you can look them up on LinkedIn or Facebook and learn about them and vice versa. It’s a two way street. And so the relationship has been established already.
It’s a beautiful familiarity. And when you connect the face to the name, when you get to break bread and press the flesh in real life as. What used to be the first stage was we’d begin there and then move through the digital journey and then hopefully meet again on the other side as a customer. Now it is a great thing for us to leverage the tools that we have available do more good with the data we have and then see that little girl, that little boy, that person that’s given a home where they didn’t have it, somebody who has a shelter tonight because they didn’t have one last night when we can connect and really impact the world in small, positive ways every day and use what we have, the tools we have, Stu, of data and storytelling and connecting it together.
And ensuring that the tools that you, if you’re a nonprofit and you’re listening, the tools that you’re using are going to ensure that your data are right so that the processes that use them do what you want them to do or better, and you can engage more people and raise more money and have that available to do more calculator implant research. Or I always go back to buying more basketballs for the underserved so that they can enjoy their after school time where they wouldn’t otherwise, or any of the non profit missions that all of us are familiar with or the things that are most important to us.
That statement right there should be in the front of your website. It’s beautifully said.
Thank you.
So, Stu, thank you very much. It was a great discussion and it’s been a pleasure and an honor to share time with you. If folks want to connect with you, what’s the best way they can do that?
Thanks, Eric. It’s been a great conversation. Thank you so much for having me. omaticsoftware.com. Info at omaticsoftware.com. You can also email me directly at stu.manewith@omaticsoftware.com. Thank you.
Excellent. So this has been great. So definitely folks, however, you can get connected, and if nothing, you can at least be inspired by what any of us can do in some way of connecting the end to the day to day. The tactical stuff. It seems unsexy. Sounds like plumbing, but we can work some pretty good magic with it. And when you can see a real worldly impact, it’s one of my favorite things to be able to do so. Thank you very much for all that you do, Stu.
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Specializing in strategic planning for multi-location and franchise SEO campaigns, Steve Wiideman, of Wiideman Consulting Group, considers himself a scientist and practitioner of local and eCommerce search engine optimization and paid search advertising.
Wiideman has played a role in the inbound successes of brands that have included Disney, Linksys, Belkin, Public Storage, Honda,Technicolor, Skechers, Meineke Car Care Centers, Applebee’s, IHOP, Dole, and others, with emphasis on strategy, planning and campaign oversight.
Welcome to another episode of the DiscoPosse podcast. You’re listening to a conversation with Steve Wiideman. Steve is the founder of the Wedding Consulting Group.
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All right. This is Steve Wheatmann. Enjoy the show.
Hi, this is Steve Wiideman. I am the founder of Wiideman Consulting Group, an adjunct professor at two different universities here in California and the author of SEO Strategy and Skills. And you’re on the DiscoPosse podcast.
Now, this is the fun part because I also made the critical error up front, Steve, that I mispronounced your name right out of the gate, which is probably like, the worst thing you could do. So thank you, Steve, for joining. Yeah, it’s always the trick, too. When there’s two Is next to each other in a text. You’re never sure. Like when you type something into Google, it’s always like, I think you meant wide, man. I’m like, no, it’s Wiideman. It is Wiideman.
You know in high school, I was Wildman, and in the army, my peers just called me Weed because it was shorter and easier and lazier. But, yeah, it’s all the things. But the W-I-I is like the game system, right? You call it the Wii. So if you associate it with Nintendo, you have Wiideman.
So the chat today, we’re going to cover a lot of really interesting ground because we’re in a digital cornucopia. And as such, you want to make sure that you’re eating from the right side of the funnel. When you’re trying to make sure that your content, your voice, your persona, your company gets to people in a meaningful way. This is one of the things that everybody struggles with and whether it’s just somebody they’ve got a little side hustle and they’re looking to up their game. They’ve got a Shopify store, perhaps a coffee company as one would have as well.
It’s a really seemingly black box world to a lot of folks who are just trying to figure out how to get an idea to the market, and they probably aren’t able to really fund a strong SEO person. So just, like many things, we kind of go it alone, and as a result, they learn bad habits. It’s like I’m going to learn how to swing a golf club, and I’m going to learn how to swing it badly. And then when I go to try and learn how to do it properly, it’s going to be really hard to unlearn the bad things I’ve learned.
Anyway, I’m excited about the chance to chat and learn from you. You’ve got a lot going on. So, Steve, if you want to give a intro to you, we’ll talk about Wiidman Consulting. We’ll talk about the work you’ve done, your courses, everything and get into the fun stuff.
Absolutely. I’m just a digital marketing nerd, like the rest of us. Been in the game 22 years. Started as a freelancer, I got to work from some exciting companies like Disney. I ran the paid and organic for Disneyland.com and Adventures by Disney back in the 2000s. I left the corporate and agency world in 2010, decided to be a family man, be closer to home and see if I could develop my own business and went through that scary entrepreneurial transition. And fortunately because I was already freelancing, I had some existing work that could carry over into that so I had a bit of a handicap.
And having worked for Disney also made it a little bit easier to get new clients. But yeah, so since 2010, I’ve been helping multi location brands like Public Storage and myNike and Skechers and E-commerce brands also Sketchers and Bob’s Watches and some other really fun companies. Belkin and Linksys to develop a strategy to make sure that they’re appearing more often in search results, not just in Google, but in Bing, in some cases YouTube and Amazon as well, and to develop a strategy and cadence to make sure that we’re continuously growing and improving our visibility and search.
A couple of years ago, I decided I wanted to look back at what my dream was ten years ago, and it was to teach, and I’m like, Wow, I’m getting close to that ten year Mark. I better get out there and start doing it. So I started doing some adjunct teaching for certificate programs at UC San Diego and Cal State Fullerton and even at the community College here in Fullerton. So I’ve enjoyed that process. I’ve kind of curated my own content to create our little Academy of search that we created to help business owners that are struggling with figuring out what’s in that black box.
So we’ve sort of uncovered everything that a business needs to do to create a plan, whether they do it themselves or whether they hire someone to do it. At least they know the what of what needs to happen, and they let the resources manage. The how. So that’s been an exciting journey. About a year ago, I got tagged to help write a textbook for Stukent and support the courseware building for certificate programs. So not only will you get to read some really organized SEO content with the textbook, but you’ll also get some cool courseware and lecture slides.
So if you’re a teacher and you want to teach SEO, talk to the folks at Stukent, ask them about the SEO textbook if it’s something you’re interested in teaching. And then you have the vision for us for the next year or two is really just to continue developing courses and programs that allow us to scale outside of just being on the phone, consulting with clients and we’ll see how it goes. But the journey has been great. I get to hang out with cool people like you and talk search and geek out on nerdy technical web design topics and have some fun.
Well, this is the fun thing now that it’s becoming part of curriculum. It’s such a great thing, because quite often I remember taking, like I was already in tech, and I said, Well, I better have a high school education. I sort of snuck into tech at the timing. You and I actually came into tech around the same time frame. So I was finding myself suddenly working at Sun Life Financial doing desktop support and then working up the server support and then really launched up into it.
You were playing Oregon Trail and Odell Lake on your Apple II, just like me.
So I had this, like, sort of getting through there. And I said, I better go back and actually back up. The luck of getting into the hotness of tech in the late 90s because nobody had accreditation. There was no course for doing what we were doing. There was no Windows support, no Vale support in universities. So I said, while you went to Ryerson University in Toronto, and I started taking a certificate program, but they were teaching stuff like old networking that was long since dead. And I work day to day at Sun Life.
We have some of the oldest systems on Earth, and they’re newer than the stuff that we’re learning in this textbook.
Wow.
It really taught me that, like, the fundamentals that make it through as part of curricula do not get updated very often because it’s hard to keep up. You can’t just keep swinging with the latest moves and fads. So there’s always this gap. So now it’s great to see that, like, true digital marketing and SEO, and it’s making it there where people can learn this instead of just getting out to the world and having to find a peer that can say, all right, come, let’s sit down. I’m going to give you a fire hose of information over the next couple of hours.
Yeah, that’s unfortunate. And it happens more often than not even in the contract that we have right now with Stukent. We’re required to update that book every year now. So I’m like, maybe we should update it every six now, let’s just do every year. But it’s tempting because Google just made a round of four updates just over the last couple of months. So it’s so dynamic and changing the results look different every year. They’re moving things around, adding new features and elements. You’re seeing videos now with the different time sections in the search results in a web search, not a video search.
So, yeah, it’s a very dynamic field to be in, and any information from three years ago should be scrutinized for sure.
It is interesting to see that shift is like I go to look for something I had the other day. How do I drain my dishwasher when it hasn’t drained properly and you just type in. How do I drain this model of dishwasher? And it comes up in the first result. it is like four minutes and 17 seconds into a 22 minute video from some rando who just posted this thing. It has literally like, 117 views, like this isn’t even, like viral videos that are getting indexed, but it somehow said, like, at this mark, you got what you want, and I clicked it and they’re like, by golly, I just learned how to do this.
And what an incredible opportunity for emerging brands that are trying to build trust and credibility and drive remarketing. We did this in public storage. We actually created twelve different videos similar to what you’re mentioning, like how tos such as how to store impact glassware, how to move your refrigerator, how to store a piano. All these tough questions that people were asking. So we got with a local college and got a fun little team of sort of not necessarily amateur, but in training. Folks help us with this really creative, funny videos.
We created pages for them, and we were able to see $0.01 cost per views on YouTube and other video networks because nobody was really using that kind of upper funnel content to build brand awareness. Like you said, it’s your common Joe’s video that’s showing up, not these branded videos that could have a little bit better production quality and benefit from a paid element to that. Instead of just being organic, they could augment that with paid and organic and have double visibility. So for cheap, because there’s not a lot of competition for that type of content.
So I’m with you. I think there’s a huge opportunity for every business to take a look at and look beyond that lower funnel myopic view that we have around just get customers to, let’s build a brand. Let’s get people to know about us and how we work and what to do. Let’s provide as much helpful content as we can possibly come up with and optimize it so it shows up in universal web search results, in Google Video Search, in YouTube, and Image Search. Just make sure that all those elements of this content we plan to create are optimized so that they can be found.
And I see a lot of business owners that are just like, I just want customers. I don’t want to waste any money on anything that’s not going to drive immediate customers. And it’s like, well, this content is going to drive a ton of customers for you in two to three years from now. If you can have the patience to build that foundation, it’s going to drive a lot of brand visibility and trust. It’s going to help with your remarketing and your marketing automation process. And you’re going to generate a lot of business.
But you’ve got to get over it. You’ve got to decide, I’m going to create really good helpful content. I’m going to use tools like AnswerThePublic or SEMrush’s question filter or Conductor Searchlights buyer journey phase tool to find some of those opportunities, map them out in a big list and then just start chipping away at it. But I’m glad you brought that up, because that’s amazing that some guy with 117 views was able to displace brands that have millions of dollars of budget and they’re not even paying attention.
Yeah, when this is the company that makes the bloody dishwasher didn’t even show up in any of the searches like that.
The bigger the brand, the less of the branded type marketing they do. We’re doing that right now, and I don’t want to put them on Blast, but both Applebee’s and IHOP, neither of them have a blog. Neither of them have content marketing. You could use a site operator in Google, site:applebees.com, site:ihop.com. And all you’re going to find are menus, news releases about new items and specials and promos. But no how to, where to, why to recipes. None of that. In fact, some of the branded questions that people ask about those brands, if you just search for them, that show up in the questions people ask, they don’t even have content for.
So other websites are getting their branded traffic. So we’re working through a plan right now to address the branded first so that somebody does do a search for anything that includes our name, that we’ve got a page of content that answers it or a section of content on a page that answers it. And then we’re going to go into some of those non branded opportunities. So you’re right. You hit it on the nail. The larger the brands, the less resources they put into digital because they don’t think they need them.
My boss at Disney said that he said we don’t need SEO, we’re Disney. None of our pages are showing up in Google search results because you have one page with a big Flash feature on it. And Flash can’t be crawled by search engines. And there’s no pages for all these different, travel to Ireland, family travel to China type pages. So it’s convincing stakeholders that the brand itself isn’t powerful enough to be number one for search terms that we need to augment our digital marketing strategy to include really well, keyword rich, optimized content.
The funny thing. Yeah. There you go. So somebody searches out for an Apple-tini, and they’re going to get some mommy blogger with, like, how to make an Apple-tini at home because they are 100% aiming at, like, question and answer content, recipe stuff, menu stuff, especially every industry has its own struggle in the end. Like you said, Disney, in effect, is fighting property management and travel sites who are saying, like, get to Disney, stay at Disney. They’re going to own that, like the behavior of the person is not to go to Disney.com and work backwards, they’re going to Google or go to their search engine of choice and say, “When’s the cheapest time to go to Disney?”
Like finding Disney blogs and so forth. And none of the actual Disney owned content. It’s incredible.
Well, and this really, there’s two key areas that I want to drill in on. Number one, you mentioned it in the early part. There is patience. So the patience of SEO, what’s the formula to understanding the path to success in SEO? And obviously, what we’re saying is not the ultimate like, do this thing and it works every time. But what has worked because it is a moving target. It’s not just keyword stuffing. And then showing up in Google the next day, there is a path. that’s a lengthy one, but it has a long and beautiful thick tail on it.
Right. I think it’s a two part question. Part one is setting expectations of what’s involved and how long it takes. The second part of it is building that strategy you mentioned so that you’re not just doing SEO, but you’re following a prioritized roadmap of areas to focus on. So the first part, and having so many years of experience in it, I’ve had to get better and better and better at it, is setting expectations. As we do start to work on a single page to get that single page to show up in search results.
The first thing we want to make sure that we’re doing is addressing the needs of what the visitors looking for. So we look at those top ten results that already appear for the keywords that you’re thinking about optimizing for, and we look for themes. What are they showing? What are they displaying? What are the questions that we see in the People Also Ask section. What are the related keywords that are used in the search results? What other search terms of those pages receiving traffic from to help us to create an outline of how that page could be written, that’s the first part, is getting those top keywords where they need to be.
So that initial crawl when Googlebot and Bingbot are crawling your website, they find those search terms and they go, okay, I’m going to test this page for those words because I saw them emphasized in the title, in the heading or in subheadings. Once they’ve done that, that keyword part, that keyword component is almost a mute point. It’s not about that keyword anymore. Once they’ve already identified those words and they’ve cued you up to see how your page performs and their results for those words. Now it gets into that second phase.
So let’s just say that content itself. Once it gets on the website and Google can crawl from your home page through your navigation links to get to that page. It’s not just orphaned in a place where they can’t get to it. They get to that page, it gets indexed, and now you’re on page. I don’t know, three, maybe within three months, you find yourself at the end of page two of the search results. Now they’re going to look at off page factors. They’re going to look at what they find across the Internet about your brand and how it correlates to those keywords or other people across the Internet using those words when they’re searching for you.
Are they searching for your brand and those words and those words in your brand? Are they just searching for your brand? So getting people to search for you in correlation to those search terms and getting crawlers to find the search terms that you want to rank for adjacent to your brand name. And of course, the obvious links to your page. PageRank that Larry Page created back in the late 90s was what drove Google in the first place. They said we don’t want to just use what’s on your website.
We want to use what other websites are saying about your website and your content. So if you go out there and do a little bit of research and you find who’s linking to those top pages, you look for creative ways to get other industry websites to share your content and link back to that page. And there’s this nice pattern of links coming in over time. Think of a line chart and you’ve got this. Over time, more and more links coming to this page. Google is going to recognize that.
And we’re going to say now, we’re on the tipping edge of page two, page three. Those links help us move up to page one. Now we’re at the number ten spot on page one. Within about six, seven months or so, we see ourselves on page one at the bottom. How do we get to the top? How do we get to that number one spot? That number one spot is the issue that a lot of SEO agencies get fired during that period because the clients just don’t have the patience.
You said I was going to be number one for this keyword. Spend six months. Forget it. I’m done. There’s this trust factor. Those pages that already rank, a lot of them have ranked for that keyword for years and proven to Google through their history that they’ve been good results. You can’t just make one of them go away. There’s only ten, right. You have to earn your way there. So the links help you, the content helps you. But what’s going to help you move up to that number one spot is how users respond to your page.
Let’s say in a search result, Google has 100,000 searches a month happening for a certain search term, and your page has been on page two and page three is now on page one. They’re going to show you higher and more often, we’ll just say 10,000 times out of that 100,000 times and they trust it like, hey, it’s actually performing really well when I display it. Now I’m going to display it 50,000 times out of 100,000 searches. Now I’m going to display it 75,000 times. So you start to show up more often and more higher as they begin to trust that people are clicking on and staying on your website.
So the action item here is to pay attention to the user behavior signals of getting people to want to click your listing because it stands out because it’s got rich results or thumbnail next to it or star results or questions and answers that are attributed to that particular page, maybe even in some industries, getting creative and using emojis and call-to-actions and titles and descriptions. And then once they do, click on your listing because that’s the goal, right? With user behaviors, get them to click you more often.
Don’t just call your friends and say, click on my listing because it’s not sustainable and it doesn’t follow that lying pattern of behavior over time. It’s going to raise a flag if you have it all of a sudden and then drops. It’s making sure that it’s a natural, organic thing, not trying to get in the search results. Then they get to your page. If they go back to the search results and choose a competing listing, then Google starts to infer in being that maybe that listing wasn’t very helpful and they start to demote you over time.
So how do we get them to stay? We get them to stay by using common web design best practices, mobile web design best practices, and maybe following some hints from Google’s guidelines. So we’re going to pay attention to things like security and using a valid SSL. Privacy, is there a link to Privacy Policy? Is it updated? Is there an updated date? We’re going to pay attention to accessibility because some of our users have impairments, we’re going to really focus in on our mobile user experience. Do we have a floating call to action so that we know the users know what they should be clicking on without having to flick the page up and down to find a button somewhere?
Did we make it usable for them? Can they search our website? Can they call us? Can they verify that we’re a real business and trust our site without having to go back and do a search for your brand name? Plus the word reviews. So all of those things play a component and it could take up to a year or more. And it’s really funny how often we look at our results for a single page that we created and what happens at that one year point? If the keyword is, we’ll just say medium in terms of competitiveness, right?
It’s somewhere in the middle range. Right at that one year, our little line chart that’s been growing slowly suddenly turns into a hockey stick, right around one year. It’s really interesting, and that hockey stick just kind of continues for the next part of the following year. It’s really exciting for a competitive search term that could be two to three years as long as every month you’re chipping away and having better, more helpful content, earning more links and mentions off your website and continuing to test different ways to get more people to click on your listing when they see it in the search results.
If you’re focusing on those three things every month, even for a competitive keyword, like credit card or online casino or whatever, you could see yourself on the first page or higher within three years. But that’s the expectation, right? That’s the thing that business owners typically don’t have the patience for. But then you look back. You’re like, man, if I would have done this ten years ago.
That’s right.
If I would have done this last year. I’d be in hockey stick right now. I’d have my best December ever if I would have done this a year ago.
And that’s the mentality I’d love to have business owners be thinking about next year when they remember this podcast and go, damn, I should have just, it went by so fast, I should have just done it.
As the proverb goes. The best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago, and the second best time is now planning to do things. And look, I’ve been a victim of this myself of like, yeah, I should build a content plan, and then you get behind. And then you spend more time doing the planning than just carving out content. But you look at, especially when you get into the areas of capturing inbound content and affiliate marketing processes, it’s exciting to watch that world, because the whole thing is just, like, just keep consistently putting content out that’s going to eventually get in there.
And I’ve seen the conversions where all of a sudden I’m like, oh, wow. You go from showing up in no searches to showing up in searches, but no click throughs, then showing up in searches with click throughs. And then, like you said, all of a sudden there’s this thing and you’re like, this random page that looks like it should have just sat there and gone away is suddenly getting some heat. And then, conversely, I actually bought an existing domain that had a lot of traffic and sort of let me try the other side. Game the system.
So I actually started taking the original inbound URLs, which are now four-folding because the site had been gone and I was moving them to other pages, and I was getting click through, and I was actually seeing results. But then I let that site wane in the activity and the content for, like, six months. And I go back and the hockey stick turned down because it’s a consistency game. It’s doing all of these things together. But it’s hard to explain to people, especially in an organization they say like, I work at flood dergulon.
No one could possibly know more about Flug dergullian than I do, or we do. So of course, they’re going to end up on our website. And I would tell them, like, when you search plug dergullian, the first thing that comes up is your competitor, and it’s a paid ad. So, Congratulations, you’ve got a competitor who wants to own you, but guess what. You’re a target for them, and they’re winning, right?
Yeah. That happens more often than not. And the second part of that story, that expectations is important because it gives you a better picture of how long it takes. But the second part is, what you mentioned is, actually having a plan. And one of the things I tried to do when I started teaching at Cal State Fullerton and started kind of borrowing some of my own content to create our own little simple training program was to try to fold in the specific audits and the specific strategies that you need to follow to be successful in search for all the things we just mentioned, the keyword research element and building out what that content map should look like and how the pages should be optimized the off page visibility features you just mentioned broken links.
We recovered somewhere close to 5000 broken links for one of our restaurant chains that had 15 different URLs for this promo they ran every year. And they four-folded every year. There was Veteran and .gov and these other big websites that were linking to these pages that are no longer there. We finally helped them create a permanent URL, redirected all 15 of those and recovered thousands of really helpful links that Google is going to use when they’re scoring our site, holistically. But, yeah, having that plan.
So we put all our templates in there, the same templates we use for those brands I mentioned. So if you wanted to do a technical audit and follow the 72 different things we recommend looking at from page speed and accessibility and all those things we mentioned, they’re all in there with a little video on how to do it and the Google developer link that you’ll need when your webmaster comes back and says your SEO person doesn’t know what they’re talking about and you can say, Well, it’s not them, it’s Google. Here’s the link.
And they’re like, Fine, I’ll just do it. Developers and SEO don’t always play well together. That’s the component. I wouldn’t jump into SEO cold. I would definitely start with a strategy, map out all those URLs you already have on your website, put them in a Google sheet, and then go column by column on different SEO focal points, such as titles and headings and image names and page names. How many internal links from other pages on my website do I have pointing to that page?
And what words do I use in those links to help the search engines as they’re crawling? Sort of define what those pages are about before they even get to them. So I would start there. Build that strategy, get that tech audit squared away, get your content and keyword research ready to rock in a Google sheet somewhere or in a project management system. Figure out where you need to be getting links, where competitors have them. Get some creative ideas going on ways that you can build links by getting other influencers and subject matter experts involved in that content process so that they feel somewhat obligated to participate in the visibility of that content.
And then lastly, get a baseline report going. So that in a year from now, when you’re like, hey, check out how great my organic traffic is going and how well we’re doing with our SEO. Well, great. Where do we start? I don’t know. We didn’t create a baseline report. I don’t know, but we’re doing really good. So it’s good to have that and pay attention to it for sure.
Let’s get into the fun. What are the myths and truths of Core Web Vitals? I’ve struggled with this one because I sort of have a poke at the folks at Google. God bless the folks at Google. But they drive me a little nutty sometimes because they’ll have something like they introduce this idea of Core Web Vitals and the idea that you’re going to get effectively deranged based on the performance of your page. And then the bitter irony of it is that the blog that Google wrote on their developer site about Core Web Vitals doesn’t pass Core Web Vitals.
I know we were laughing about that, too. Some of my students were doing that, and I’m like, you guys are brilliant. That’s so funny that you use the actual site. And we did the same thing on the accessibility for the ADA Accessibility Guidelines doesn’t pass ADA Accessibility Guidelines. So much for, practice what we preach, right?
Yeah. So the thing I really want to separate for people is a guide. It’s a factor, but it’s not literally like you fail CWV and you’re off Google. That’s my hypothesis. So correct my people that are not smart and they listen to me.
I always try to focus on being principle based, and the principles we’ve already talked about, right? Is be relevant to the search term that someone’s searching for be visible off the website and be helpful when they do find you in the search results. And when they do get to your page. Like we said before, if you’re nurturing those three areas, you’re probably going to be affecting your Core Web Vitals in the process because you’re trying to make your page faster and better over time. So I would say if you’re still focusing on those three things, you’re going to worry less about little things like a Core Web Vital or one of the many tools that you could use to sort of test or audit your website.
But I know John Mueller made a point about this recently at Google. He said that it’s more than a tie breaker. My first thought about it was just one of those tie breaker things where if our content is just as good and our links and visibility off the website are just as good and our click-through rates are equal, then they’re going to choose the one that loads faster for mobile users and looks better for mobile users as a tie breaker. But he came back and said, no, it’s more than that.
And then the conspiracy started coming in from my peers, right. And they’re not always wrong. One conspiracy theory is that Google is trying to save some money. And if websites are faster to crawl and to navigate to and to collect data about that, it’s going to save their servers a bit of money and having to wait for things to load and to render assets that take a long time, like images. So they want to make the Internet a faster place. And with 60% to 80% of your users being on mobile devices. For our restaurant chains, 84% of them are mobile devices.
It makes sense that they’re continuously pushing us to provide faster and better user experiences for mobile users. They’ve been telling us about that since the early 2010s. They started putting information out about it in 2014, and we saw the Pivot in 2014 from more people going on mobile than on desktop. So it just makes sense. It’s a natural evolution of how we want to improve experiences overall for users, not just for Google, but for our visitors. And if you haven’t, since 2014, been working to provide a better mobile experience, that’s not Google, giving you a penalty that’s you being somewhat ignorant to the fact that your users care about their mobile experience.
You want to tell people, like, ‘When’s the last time you waited until you got home to search for something?’ No, you’re standing outside of the store and you’re looking at a chair and you Google, how much is this chair at Target or wherever? And of course, that’s the pattern of usage. It’s funny. Like you said, we’ve got this dichotomy that there’s better bandwidth, faster networks. And we obviously are putting more rich content in there, but it’s counter to what you would imagine. You would think that with the level of streaming capability we’ve got with all of the work we can do that now is when Adobe Flash should be taking off, because the ability to do really high res, rich media experiences should be there.
But because it is client side versus service side processing. There’s a lot of other reasons where we’re moving towards. And also searchability. Right? Like if I put that up there, it’s an effective black box even putting myself like I’ve use Vimeo.
Yeah.
So I use Vimeo for hosting a lot of content that I have on a couple of different websites. I’ve got because I can sort of control the end user experience better. But then realizing, Dang it, I’m getting just ravaged on searchability because I’m not doing the right things versus if I put it on YouTube, it’s like auto chaptering for me. It’s doing a lot of really neat things that now, I’m like, okay.
Yeah. Exactly. They’re huge boosts for potential. So I’ve got to merge with the way the systems are moving versus the way I would like to run my operation.
Right. Yeah. But just big picture wise. Like we talked about, if you have a strategy and you’re paying attention to those principles that we know are going to help our visibility. And I have to tell you, these marketing students that I’ve been working with, I think I’ve taught probably close to 400. Now they are dying to get practice for free. A lot of them. So if you feel constrained, like you mentioned earlier, Eric, like all these things I want to do. I want to do my content map, but if you let go and you delegate to somebody who’s really interested in learning digital marketing, like one of these students, thousands of students across the country that you could talk to that are in digital marketing certificate programs.
Reach out to the teachers and say, hey, you have any students that want to volunteer and do some SEO work for us? You have the teacher is going to be a guide. I never recommend a student go to a client and not stay to some degree to make sure that they’re doing a good job and that they have what they need because I want to see them successful. So not only do you get the student, most time, you also get the professor. So something to think about if you are kind of feeling overwhelmed, like, hey, there’s a lot of stuff here.
I just want to run my business. I don’t want to have to do all this digital marketing stuff. I suggest talking to a digital marketing student and seeing if they can get involved. Have them take a course that’s holistic across everything that we do in search, whether it’s our Academy of Search site or a LinkedIn Search Academy or a Yoast Academy or Distilled SEO Academy, there’s all these different certificate programs that are available that go through the gamut. Ours, by the way, if your listeners want to stick our $600 course for free, just use my handle SEO Steve, and I’m happy to give them that opportunity to kick the tires.
And all I ask is that you give me some feedback and let me know what you think and what you’d like to see changed or improved. But just go to Academy of Search. Use SEO Steve or send your marketing intern or marketing student to that course and then have them contact me if they want a second set of eyes or anyone on the team here.
Nice. Well, thank you for that. I’ll definitely do what I can to load people into there because I think this is like you said, it’s a rich opportunity there. It often feels like joke. You’d go to the community mailbox, and on one side of the mailbox that says, ‘Lost Dog’ with missing part of right ear, answers to Lucky, whatever it’s going to be. Then you go on the other side and just says, ‘Found Dog’ with no collar or missing part of ear. And you’re like, literally there’s on opposite sides of the same box.
But if we just connected you two folks together, we could do some pretty incredible things. And there are students who, they want to get real world implementation and stuff. And you may find your next employee as a result. Right?
That’s our team. They started as interns here, some of them five years ago, and now they’re creative directors. Now they’re web analytics experts. It’s just giving them a chance. One of the reasons I like this idea versus hiring a veteran. I don’t want to beat myself up since I’ve got 23 odd years of experience is that the students aren’t ingrained with practices that are outdated. They’re not going to do something that isn’t really beneficial to SEO. They’re using fresh content, and they’re thinking in today’s world, they’re not going back to 2002. 2003 and reading ebooks.
So there’s an advantage, not to show this my peers. But I can tell you that.
You mean my Sam’s Publishing guide for SEO from 2004 is no longer valid.
My ebooks, too, are floating around out there. And when I see one, I’m like, hey, why don’t I give you the updated version of that or whatever? So yeah, I think that’s an advantage that you’ll have over some of the competitors who are working with some older SEO folks that aren’t staying up to date with trends and tests that could be ran to improve search-in today’s search results. Right. So lots of opportunity there and lots of students that would die to have a chance to work for free for you just to get their hands dirty.
Because in effect, these folks are most likely the next economy. Right?
Like this. As we look at today, we’ve gone through, like, just such a, I don’t even know how to describe what the world has experienced in the past 18 to 24 months now. Bizarre is an understatement of just how unexpected so many things are. And as we see people looking at this kind of, the great resignation as they’re calling it, because they really want to control their outcomes. And there’s potential to do this. And these are the ideal folks that they can start a true digital-only organization company, product, blog, whatever it is.
When I started in blogging, it was never done with the intent of running it as a business. I did it because I was just some goofball assistant man who kept bumping into weird problems. And so I’m like, I’m just going to write this down because it forces me to document it. And then the first time I saw this little boost of like, this is a tiny little post on how to fix one specific thing with VMware virtualization. And so I’m like, okay, so I just kept writing these things.
I kept writing these effectively, like, how to articles and how to fix this thing. And next thing you know, you’ve got 40,000 views a month just because I wrote down what I was doing once in a while.
It wasn’t even purposeful or intentional.
You’re documenting your own resolutions to problems you’re finding. I love it.
Yeah. And then I was like, okay, now what if I was actually purposeful with this? Then I met a lot of folks who went that really to the next level. And they’re like, I’m going to begin looking for the questions that need to be answered, and they effectively, were able to go completely independent because they just said, I’m going to do this. I’m going to go with the advertising route. At that point, it was potential. So it’s really interesting. And we’re now at that new point where you can make this foray into a self starting world.
It’s got to be done with purpose. It’s got to be done with a plan. And hopefully, as the side hustle economy, it’s not just about GaryVee yelling at you that you’re not working hard enough. It is truly about the opportunity of, if I just took a couple of hours a week and I always tell people, like, I posted this the other day as a joke on Twitter. Everybody keeps telling me they don’t have time for a side hustle. I said I found it, and I sent a screenshot of the screen time part of your iPhone.
Like, if you took an hour off of social media or off of something and just wrote something down, answered a question, found a way to engage a world that you don’t even realize it’s out there. Next thing you know, with purpose and with intent and schooling. Right. So there it is. You go and you get involved in the Academy and just take that and put it into action. It’s such a beautiful opportunity for so many people right now, for sure.
I know a lot of my students, even people who have been to my meet up groups over the years, have developed businesses, in some cases, just selling technical SEO audits. Like, hey, do you want to know what’s wrong with your website and why it’s not showing up in search results? For $500 or whatever, I can run an audit and tell you. And then they outsource the outreach to local businesses like the Philippines. Then they outsource the actual audit work to the Philippines, and all they have to do is the quality assurance.
And it’s like, how much money you’re making a month right now. One guy is like, I’m making $8,000 a month selling $500 audits. I’m like, oh, my God, what am I doing wrong? I can retire. There’s so much to be made in this industry because it is like you mention, like, a black box. And starting with an audit gives clients a plan. Here’s what you need to work on and whether you hire a developer to do it or bring someone at house or work with an agency, at least you know what needs to be done and let them worry about the how.
The path to here. It’s interesting. Like you said, I’m going to counterpoint your point earlier. You said it’s good to grab somebody who’s kind of fresh eyes, right? That they’ve got no, how it’s already been done, baked in. How do you make the path from OpenVMS to SEO specialist? You’ve got a lot of history, a lot of stuff that you’ve had to be very good at and then shake as you move into the next thing. So you progressively became new in a lot of things. So, Steve, how do you make that jump?
A lot of late nights in the beginning, not long term. I get home at a normal time now, but there’s a time where I worked a lot of late nights. I volunteered. That was the biggest thing. Like, hey, can I do your website for you? Hey, can I be your SEO person and do some SEO stuff for you? Because I’m playing around with all this knowledge that I’m learning. I’m really interested in it, but I don’t want to get paid to do something when I don’t have a lot of experience.
So can I just do it for you for free? Help your DJ business, your local locksmith business, or your florist business? Can I do some work for you for free to get some experience? I did that as a freelance while I was working full time at IBM and just got more and more passionate about it. I went back to school. Like you’d mentioned, I got a degree in ebusiness management, where I got to touch all the different areas of digital marketing, from setting up the server on Windows and Apache to learning about how databases work to graphic design and web design and user experience, and then project management, pulling all those things together into a project plan.
So the freelance hours up till two in the morning, sometimes no sleep, just digging in and getting my hands dirty with it, to building processes on how to get better at it. Each time I did it, I was like, all right, I’m not going to do that mistake again. I’m going to put that into a process and then eventually going back to school and deciding this is what I want to do as a career. That was the transition for me. Was one, acknowledging that I had a passion for something that wasn’t running bash jobs on an open BMS system to something that was really fascinating to me, which is the Web.
And you don’t have to go through all of that again, because those of us who’ve already been through it for you have created lists and guides and helpful training programs so that you don’t have to go through that journey. So I would start there. One of the things that we do here at Wiideman, is every morning, when we’re getting our morning coffee, we spend 10,20 minutes reading through our Feedly account, Feedly, F-E-E-D-L-Y. And after the call today Eric, I’ll actually share a link to the file that I use, and it’ll give you basically a newspaper of what’s going on in digital marketing today.
I like to look at the news feeds first from Search Engine Land, Search Engine Journal Marketing Land, all of those. What’s happening right now in the industry first. And then below that, it’ll be blog feeds from some of my favorites authors on topics such as local SEO and multi location search, e commerce, usability and conversion rate optimization. All of those are bucketed into their own little groups. So whatever you’re interested in, you can view it that way. And every morning, we sort of sharpen the saw and we find what’s being talked about in those industries.
And as you start doing that, you start finding rabbit holes and you dig into them and you learn. So every day you’re learning for 10 to 20 minutes while you’re getting into the office. And it’s a great way to start the day, because now you’re thinking about what you learned throughout the day and getting smarter and better at digital marketing.
And just as a practice of life, it’s such a great way to do it right. Enrich your mind first and your body with a little tasty coffee. Nothing wrong with that. I like that. This is definitely putting it into passion. And I’m always seeing the interesting, again, sort of split of people that say, follow your passion is the best thing or the worst thing you can do, but it’s follow your passion towards a viable future. And I really think that’s the thing that you’ve done. It wasn’t just like, oh, I’m really excited about reading websites or learning about the thing.
You probably had a plan of, like, I want to be able to do this and have this be the thing that I do. And it gives you that sort of very purposeful outcome. And it gives you a bit of a goal setting process to head towards something.
Yeah. You become kind of like a futurist. You start to think about where things are going to go. And if I were to start today and I was brand new and really curious about this SEO thing, I think where I might start is becoming a voice search expert. I think I would start by sort of coining myself as a Google assistant or an Alexa voice search expert, and I would start mastering the different areas that you want to focus on, from voice to text APIs with Google to playing with the Google Action console and Alexa Skills consoles, getting into those and really kicking the tires around how people are using voice search.
With 180 voice search devices going out every minute now to different homes and offices, it’s going to be the next evolution of how we search as we start to untether ourselves from our mobile devices. So I think if I was going to start today, I would learn the basics of SEO, but I think I would focus my energy around things that are to come, such as voice search. When I got into it and I decided I want to be in digital marketing. It was because I had this idea that all businesses would be online someday and all businesses would have a website.
And I’m glad that came to fruition. Because of it, I’ve created a career.
The old famous Gretzky line of, you skate where the puck is going, not where it is now, right? And there’s a certain element you have to be able to make sure that you could do a thing that’s viable financially for today. And I think this is where people often get sort of stuck. They’re thinking about SEO. They’re thinking about their website. They’re thinking about a few different things, and they either think, it’s too early to think about SEO. I just launched this company. We just came out of stealth.
It’s too early to think about SEO. Alternatively, they say, Well, there really is no SEO because Google keeps changing the rules and changing the game unpack those two myths.
Sure. Well, the latter is leveraging your paid search data. Right? So if you’re unconvinced about SEO, look at your paid search insights at what search terms are actually converting and what placements in your display targeting are generating business for you. And have that be where you start. Start with your own data from what you learn and using the paid search side of search to augment what you’re doing on the organic side. That way you’re optimizing around what’s actually converting not necessarily what’s driving the most traffic. So I think a data driven SEO strategy can not only make sure that you’re driving the right visitors to the website based on how you’re optimizing, but it can reduce your costs on the page search side, because now because you’ve edited your web pages that you’re sending traffic to from paid ads, they’re going to give you better ad relevancy scores.
They’re going to give you better landing page scores, because now your keywords and your ads match the copy and the words that are used on the page itself. So I think that’s one myth of, organic doesn’t work anymore, it’s just paid. And if you believe that, then start using paid and leverage the data to create a better organic strategy. And either way, you’re going to see better results in paid. And I think the other part is you mentioned there’s a lot of myths, I think with search. Just getting started with it, it can be like you said, overwhelming like a black box a little bit.
I think what I’ve noticed successful business owners do is they reach out to somebody who’s a seasoned consultant and get a score. Ask, how am I doing in this area? I do email marketing as part of our business. How’s my email marketing doing on a one to ten scale? Hey, SEO person, can you take a look at my overall SEO and give me a score from one to ten? How am I doing?
How much can I improve? I’m doing some paid search. Hey, paid search expert who used to work for Google. Could you take a look at my Google ads and my Bing ads and my Facebook ads and give me a score? How optimized? How much more could I be doing? How much better could I be doing, go to the experts, spend the 250 for an hour of their time and get them to put you on the right path of where you could be improving. And maybe depending on your budget, you only do that once every six months.
Hey, help me recalibrate. How am I doing compared to six months ago when we talked, I did those things you mentioned. It looks like I’m getting better traction. What can I do next? Just do a little bit at a time if it helps you. But don’t try to figure it out yourself. If you’re overwhelmed by it, go to somebody who’s a seasoned expert on it, have them build a roadmap for you, at least get you started. So that way you don’t feel like you’re just winging it.
This really is the thing, too. And also I tell people all the time. Don’t ask the people that work at your company how your company is doing on visibility. Like it’s the way that people who don’t know about you are refining you that I did an email campaign for an organization that I’m an advisor to. And it’s hilarious. The only people that don’t open the bloody emails are the ones that have the domain name of the company. I’m trying to sort of say, we’re doing this really neat thing.
And in the end, I realized, well, all that matters is that the people that are prospective customers are making it all the way through this customer journey and their conversion ratios are lining up. The fact that I can’t get the sales people to read the bloody emails because they’re already sort of bought in and it’s captive audience. They’re not my target audience, really. But it’s hard for us because we look and we’ll say you’re going to come into our organization. They’re going to say, hey, this is Steve.
Steve is going to tell us how we can do our SEO, and then that person is going to go and the head of sales is like, no, the way we do this is we grind it out on the street. I remember having this funny, not an argument, but sort of an interesting back and forth conversation with somebody one time. And he said, in the end, marketing sales greater than marketing when it comes to business drivers and business growth.
Interesting. Okay.
And I said, Well, it’s funny, I said. It’s actually got to be a plus, not a greater than. And in fact, without marketing, there’s nothing to sell.
Right.
And I said, I’m just curious, how do you think that that salesperson gets the prospective customer list? And he says, by hitting the streets. And I said, how do you think he got the addresses to go to? It’s email list. It’s Pixel tracking. It’s customer journeys. It’s all of these things. But depending on your, I’ll say your sort of anecdotal experience, it’s very easy for people to lose sight of. It’s a group of things that come together beautifully. Certainly, you can’t just shed your sales team and be 100% successful with just a bunch of landing pages.
But put these things together and think about it as a machine. And I think that’s kind of where you need to be.
I think we might have actually found a benefit of this whole great resignation, too. Some of those folks that were furloughed and aren’t coming back, we hope, are those that are sort of tied into their old ways. And some of the new people that are going to be coming in are going to look at things and go, why were you doing things like this? Hopefully, some of those smart new people are going to come in and help reinvent the way that we approach everything in sales and marketing.
And I’m already seeing that. And many of the enterprise brands that we’ve been working with over the last couple of months have brought in new people that are interested in being involved in MarTech that have questions. And that’s amazing, because now we have buy in. Now we have a partner and we’re not trying to consistently convince our clients of why we need to do something. They’ve got these new people that aren’t set in their ways that want to know, why are we doing this? Ask me why eight times in a conversation.
And I know you’re somebody who I want to work with. Anyway.
The way we do things, what I do think that we’ve gained as a benefit was that every organization that said there’s no, sorry, you can’t work from home. It’s going to break up the team dynamic, and we will be ineffective as an organization because of that. Well, you all learned some hard lessons and we adapted. It was bought by choice for sure. And I would gladly trade everything away to go back to the angry office worker lifestyle, just to know that we could avoid what we’ve all gone through as a society.
However, the fact that you immediately went back to first principles like, okay, everybody’s working from home, how do we keep them connected? How do we make sure that we rapidly responded? And then we kept waiting new things would happen. And we’d have to go back again to sort of very Socratic first principles approaches to things over and over again. And when you start with a company, the first thing they do is they say, What’s your 30-60-90? What’s your 180? At 90? It just is like, no, we should always have a 30-60-90.
We should always be questioning and rethinking and looking at what’s out there, going to your feed late in the morning and seeing what’s happening in the world. Adjust your day, your week as a result. Like, life is a series of sprints, not a well planned marathon that goes with it.
Yeah. I think a lot of us that are in dynamic industries like SEO, really feed off of new things, new apps. We nerd out over different ways to try things. Hey, let’s try this Agile process. Let’s try this new project management system. Let’s switch from the spreadsheet program thing that we’re using, and let’s experiment with some templates in Google sites since we’re already on Google workspace, and we’re constantly open to the idea of testing new things for the appointment betterment. And that mindset of let’s see how we can do better this week than we did last week.
Let’s see how we can do better. Like you said, 20-60-90. I think it’s something that creates an amazing culture. I think people who don’t fit into those cultures, working from home especially, will find their way out quickly on their own because they’ll see everybody else engaging in conversations on Slack and in projects that we’re working on. They’ll see them interact and be part of our weekly meetings and discussions and those that are quiet, those that don’t participate, those that kind of do their own thing, those that, like habits and routines and not interested in trying new things.
They are going to be part of that great resignation or find an older type business to work in. That isn’t as exciting and vibrant as what we do in digital marketing.
Yeah, the opportunity is incredible for folks that want to grab onto it. And by no means, there’s obviously a lot of people that this type of thing is tough to wrap your head around. It’s the idea of going it alone or whatever. It’s certainly not for everybody, but in the same way that, there’s people that have a thirst or they need a little nudge. Oh, wait a second. You mean I can go and I can say, SEO Steve, and I got a free course. All right. Let me give this a whirl, right?
Like, just give them that little nudge and make sure that we can do this. And that’s what I have a huge respect for your approach to it, Steve, because that is right. We’re blessed that we are able to do these things. And then when we do a little bit of a give back, like you say, next thing you know, that person that took that free course is like, hey, I’ve actually started my own little mini agency, and I see that you’ve got a job posting. That’s where it all comes together.
Or even just making a connection. And you don’t have to be the one that gets the direct benefit. But you connect to people that need each other, a business and a platform, for example. And they remember that the platforms will come back and say, you’ve send a lot of business at our direction. We want to do something, give back to you. And next thing, you get some free marketing and get invited to some fun events. So it’s great. It all kind of plays together when you give and you don’t expect anything back I think the universe recognizes that and reward you down the road.
Yeah. The most rewarding, monetarily rewarding things, have been things that I gave away for a long time with never thinking about what’s the outcome to this. It was purely just it. I wrote a little ebook. I’m like, all right, let me try this. I was that guy. I saw a neat thing on Instagram. I’m like, okay, let me give this a whirl. And it was actually a company called SamCart. My shout out to those folks, they’re really slick. They had a really great, I want to be a student of how they did it, like, how they pulled people through, because I’m like, I know that this works.
So I want to see how this machine works. And it was worth the $300 for me just to see it in action. I was like, okay, so this is it. I got to do something with this now. I sort of joke. I said I rage road a book in a weekend. I was like, I’ve spent $300. I need to do something about this. So I wrote a book in a weekend and then used another company that they recommended called Beacon, and I had it done up in a PDF in, like, a day and a half.
Amazing.
And I put it out there, and it got just gentle. Every once in a while, people would pick it up. But it was just for me to test the process. And what it did was I went with that immediate thought. I went to my meeting from the marketing team at work, and we’re like, hey, we’ve got some new campaign we’re running. And I was like, you know what you need? Let’s try and do a landing page with basically a seven step flow. And I took this, like, SamCart methodology.
And by golly, it worked. Right? And like I said, I work with you and we do things. And next you know, I’m like, okay. So Steve says we should try this. I’m like, let’s just pick this page, do this, do these things, run this checklist and the fact that you’re excited to give it a whirl. And then what happens now? Many, many months later. I’m like, over a year in it’s like, I’ve sold a couple of 100 copies of this book without ever having to go back and revisit it.
And it’s great because then people now will come back and they’re like, wait a second. I think you wrote a book that I read, and it’s fun, because then those are people that you can do other things with. And that’s really the connection that I wanted. I’d rather give the book away. And so I literally just dropped it to $5. I’m like, I don’t care about making money out of this. I just wanted to pay for my annual membership. I’m done.
I actually had somebody go to one of my meetup groups in the 2000s when I was still SEO Steve, as kind of a brand who actually had me sign my first ebook, the Four Layers of the SEO model. And I’m like, I think you don’t get the idea of why it’s called an ebook, but okay, I signed it. I drove 50 miles from North LA to come hang out with you. And I’m like, awesome, good to have you. Can you sign my ebook? And it’s just an ebook.
It’s so weird. Yeah, that was strange. But the fact that you write something that people find value in, whether it’s a blog post, an ebook, or even a textbook gives you that sense of posterity. I’ve left something behind the people that will help them on their journey to get either where I am today or hopefully even above that.
Yeah, that’s what it is. So there you go. So you’re doing, number one, congratulations. Just in what you do on a daily basis as a company, you’re doing well, you’ve taken the right approach. And like I said, we could probably spend 4 hours nerding out about everything from OpenVMS and all the craziness we went through. It’s hilarious. That, like when I started, and this is just my last little closer. When I started at SunLife, all of the people that I worked with were like, AVP of system unit or whatever it was.
There were VPs and AVPs. And I would say, like, how did you get here? Well, they all worked there for 23 years, and they started in, like, the print shop. And it was like they literally were mailroom people that were now VPs. I’m like, this is like that Secret To My Success movie with Michael Keaton.
He took some shortcuts. Let’s be fair.
That’s right, he did. But here we are. And then 15 years later, I said I had a good friend of mine who worked in the mailroom, at the company that I worked at. And it was like, all I could think of is, you know where this guy is going to be in 23 years, he’s going to be the senior mailroom guy. He won’t be the AVP of a business unit. It’s a fundamentally different organizational style. And we don’t do that sort of progression through. But what you can do is you can take a skill and then apply it to maybe inside a business unit, and then maybe you go to a competitor, and then maybe you end up coming back.
And this sort of leapfrog effect now is possible. And nowadays, maybe you just do this a couple of hours a night and three nights a week. And you don’t have to worry about leaving your job. You just keep your job. And then next thing you know, this thing’s generating 30% of your income. And you’re like, okay, if I did it more, than you can.
And now you have a choice. And that’s the best feeling in the world is knowing that you know what? I don’t have to be here. I’m making enough money with the other things that I’ve been doing with my free time, that I can leave here and get a couple more of those other clients and do this full time if I want to. So sometimes it’s not just about the job. It’s about having control over your choices. And so many people feel imprisoned. If I leave this, I don’t know if I can get another job somewhere.
I don’t know if I can get my job back or if I’m going to be paid the same, or if I’m going to retain my seniorities and so forth. So they’re so worried after working that many years for a company that they feel entrapped. And I think it’s reasonable to feel that way. But there’s enough people who’ve survived. That if you believe in yourself, enough like you said, start doing it on your free time, prove to yourself that you can do it. And if you still like your day job and you want to keep it great.
But at least now you know that you don’t need that job. You can be more confident with your boss and your manager and make bigger decisions. And if they fire you, you’ve got something on the side that you can fall back on.
It is a great potential for many people. All right. And I hope that we can see more and more folks to reach out. If you want to find out about this kind of stuff, people are always, I do appreciate it. I would get a lot of good emails from folks who are like, hey, listen to this episode. I’m curious, and we get to dig in on stuff, and we’ve actually helped a few people take on new careers. And on that note, Steve, what’s the best way for people to reach you if they wanted to get in touch?
Sure. I’m SEO Steve everywhere. We also have the guys on my team, folks on my team that if you just want to ask a day to day question just Wiideman everywhere. W-I-I-D-E-M-A-N. We love to help small businesses. We do a lot of free work to try to give back. So if there’s a question we can answer, why isn’t my page ranking? Why is this competitor beating me?
Ask us. We’d love to help you, so hopefully we’ll see you on social media. SEO Steve or Wiidemen. Thanks for giving me the opportunity to hang out with you, Eric.
This was a lot of fun. I could go all day. Sadly, I’ve got another meeting. Still got that day job, so I got to. Thank you very much, Steve.
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Tyler Browder is the CEO and Co-Founder of Kubos, the world’s first cloud-based mission control software.
Kubos’s “Major Tom” software is a cutting edge mission control platform for low-earth orbit satellites.
This very fun chat delves into the challenges of creating a true “mission control”, the lessons of a founder, and also lots about how to build both products and a company. Super fun discussion and thank you to Tyler for sharing time with me!
Ground control to major. Oh, hey, sorry. This is Eric Wright of the DiscoPosse podcast.
And the reason why we started in that fun little way is because this is a great conversation with Tyler Browder, who is the CEO and co-founder of Kubos. They are doing really cool stuff around creating cloud based mission control software.
So this is like the nerd heaven for me as a space fanatic and a startup fanatic and also just, Tyler is such a great human. We talked about Kubos. We talked about the approach to the problem they’re solving.
Why it’s so unique and how they got to this level.
The pivots of the company, their background to some of their open source work and also TechMail. Really great stuff that Tyler worked with around incubation in the area.
So anyways. Let’s just listen. This is a really great conversation.
Tyler is a super cool guy, but in the meantime.
Let’s make sure that you also help to make this podcast grow and continue to bring these amazing conversations. Number one, you can head on over to our YouTube channel, go to youtube.com/DiscoPossePodcast. Click it on subscribe and make sure you get signed up. Hit the like button.
Do all those things because we’re now launching, simultaneously, on video and audio. Really fun. Beyond that, of course, head on over to make sure you support your data because your data needs to be protected. And the only way to make sure that that’s going to happen is to get everything you need for your data protection needs. With our fine friends at Veeam Software, Veeam have been huge supporters of the podcast.
And I love it because I actually trust the platform. I trust the product. I’m literally married to the company. So very cool. But if you want to do that, it’s easy. Go to vee.am/DiscoPosse.
They’ve got a really wide array of stuff to cover you from Cloud to On-premises to Cloud Native. AWS reinvent around the corner as I’m recording and publishing this. There’s going to be a ton of really great stuff around there. So become an AWS backup hero. Head on over to vee.am/DiscoPosse.
And of course, speaking of protecting yourself in space and in transit. Protect your data in space. Go to tryxpressvpn.com/DiscoPosse. Make sure that you ensure that privacy is a human right. And I believe that it is so do that.
Go to tryxpressvpn.com/DiscoPosse, get signed up. I’m a fan. I’m a user.
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All right, let’s get to the good stuff. This is Tyler Browder from Kubos.
My name is Tyler Browder. I’m the CEO of Kubos. We build mission control software for spacecraft operations, and you are listening to DiscoPosse podcast.
This is really cool, Tyler. I want to thank you for first of all, doing what you do as a fan of things that leave the Earth. I really enjoy. When I saw your name come up, I thought, oh, all right. We’re in a cool space, literally. So for folks that are new to you, Tyler, do you want to give a quick intro a bit of a bio? We’ll talk about Kubos. We’ll talk about what you’re doing, what the team’s doing?
This is it. And I feel like you have, like, acoustic guitar playing, Major Tom, as we’re going through it. People will get why, what that reference is about in a few minutes.
Yes, there’s a lot to cover there. Let’s start with Kubos. Kubos is a software company, right. We live in a hardware world, though. Space is dominated by hardware, right? People did not get in this space to put little bits and bites in the space. They got in to build a physical thing and launch it and communicate with it. But we decided to come at a different angle. And so we built a product called Major Tom, which is a mission control software for spacecraft. So it lives on the ground.
It’s a cloud application that we use to track our satellites to understand the data coming down from the satellites and then tell the satellites what to do. Right.
So it’s the primary tool once the satellites in orbit that people use to communicate and understand their satellite. Right. So it’s a pretty critical, not to beat on this mission critical piece of software that, it’s a window that customers use to understand their spacecraft. So it’s a lot of fun. We don’t actually send anything to space because we’re on the crowd side. Right. We’re listening back from it. But we’re pretty close. My background, though you asked about is, I got quite a non traditional background into aerospace.
So most aerospace professionals getting in to the business because they dream to be an astronaut or something along those lines. And it was a passion from early on. No one stumbled into aerospace by accident. Except for me. So my background is primarily in just entrepreneurship, business development. I grew up in an entrepreneur family and so I’ve done healthcare. I’ve done music industry. I’ve done property rental companies, and I got an opportunity. I became friends with a guy who was a software engineer who had worked in space, and he was looking to start a new company, and he needed someone to handle the business aspects of the new venture.
And he would handle the technology. And, yeah, and I said, yes, I didn’t know what a satellite was. I was never like a big space kid growing up, I didn’t dream of being an astronaut, I dream of being a rock star. So, yeah, I was fortunate enough to stumble into the industry.
One would say that these days they’re one and the same. You see, the way they do the walkouts. It’s not like on WWE. You just expect someone to be walking with a flag and people cheering. And it’s amazing to think of just the amount that’s going on with both commercial and public sector stuff that’s happening in space. And then the private sector, there’s an untold number of things that are going on in this area of development that are almost, they used to be more hidden. But now let’s just say it right.
Elon Musk made it kind of cool to really sort of push the envelope and make it more of a spectacle to observe and enjoy that we are doing some incredible development in the world of space. And then we start to see what people are doing with the CubeSat side of the world and all these small commercial stuff and almost hidden behind that, too, is. That’s amazing. But what we’re doing with the technology that we’re putting there is even more amazing. Right. So this is why Mission Control, mission critical is big, because it’s not just about getting it up there.
It’s about, we’re building systems on this technology that require us to now treat it like, this is big. This is really amazing.
Yeah. There’s a lot of different ways you could go with that. From the industry standpoint. Historically, space has been a government playground, right. Like only governments have the resources and the appetite to go after it. And that’s all obviously changed. Right. And that’s good. But that’s created quite this, like change in cultures in the industry because government-run programs were very secretive. It was all about national security. And so there was this culture of not talking publicly about what we’re doing, except for a very select few propaganda type things or big name things.
Elon has definitely done more than his share to move the industry into the public light. And so we’re seeing this really interesting, when you get down into it and talk with people, there’s still this culture of keeping things quiet, not talking about what we’re doing. And there’s other people who are trying to fall in line with what Elon did, talk about their projects and be very vocal. And so we’ve seen that from a lot of different, really interesting angles. But on the technology side, when it was a government program, everything was really special. Right.
Everything was custom built to achieve one objective and up and down the stack. Everything from the spacecraft all the way down to delivery of the data, including Mission Control. It was a custom program that was designed just for the operation of that particular spacecraft. It could not be transferred. What Q-Set has done is give us some standardization and allowed us to build more in bulk. Right.
And build more spacecraft than we ever thought. Instead of really big closed crafts, we got lots of little ones. And so the way we really like to position our product is that we’re an infrastructure play. Every piece of machinery in space has the same core components. They all need power, battery, solar panels. They all need a computer of some sort of to control, and they all need a radio. They need to be able to communicate back to Earth and then they need some way to do whatever it is they’re wanting to do. Right.
And that’s where all the custom stuff comes out, there’s the camera, the pictures or if it’s some sort of censored measuring, some sort of data in the atmosphere or whatever. And so what we focus on is the generic part. So the radio, the computer, the battery power, what they call the telemetry of the spacecraft bus, as opposed to the actual payload. Our platform does not support payload data image processing. We don’t do that. That’s what our customers want to do is they’re secret sauce. That’s why they built the spacecraft to begin with.
But we handle the satellite operation itself to help assess where it is, where it’s going, communicating to the payload to take a picture over Cairo next Tuesday, whatever the command is. And so we facilitate that whole communication chain to the spacecraft.
And you’re doing it. And speaking of public in the open. The fact that you’ve actually open sourced a lot of the work. There’s a lot of interesting things. I’d love to get your take on what stuff is very sort of community, world driven, and how much is interior special sauce, even in what Major Tom and such is delivering?
Yeah. So it’s a great question. I think, actually, to answer that question, I have to back up a little bit. When we started Kubos, we actually started with a different focus. We were focused on flight software, basically creating the operating system of the actual spacecraft. And that product was called KubOS, and it is open source. And it was very much modeled after the Android operating system. And so we would have a Linux kernel. We have middleware that we built and a bunch of APIs so that customers could build their own custom applications on the spacecraft to do whatever they’re trying to do.
It was hardware-agnostic. We could really shift around, went to bus providers or satellite manufacturers and got them to distribute it. And we built that all on the open. We had an open source community. The code was all open source, and we did that for a couple of reasons. One, we believe in that that was kind of the ethos of where my partner, who was a software engineer, came from. I came from Mozilla and Red Hat and big open source commercial companies. And so that was part of who he was as a person.
But also, the truth is from an export control standpoint by making it open source, we got around a lot of the export requirements of the software, and we could distribute it without having to verify who was using it or having to keep tight controls around that. And as a small company, that was a really heavy burden to do the export control. And so open sourcing gave us a weight around that. Major Tom, we shifted to that last year heavily, and Major Tom is actually not open source.
It is just a web application that we control the source code. And there was a couple of different reasons for that and why we’ve done all that and we could get into that if you like, but just for clarification, Major Tom actually is not open source, and our previous product KubOS, it still exists. It’s still there being used by people today.
Yeah. And that’s what I wanted to show. That interesting split of the line. I do a ton of work in the open source communities and a lot of different ones. And I’m a huge proponent for open source and open communities. But I also recognize the challenge in running a business and also commercializing on open source. There’s a lot of real challenge around. You have to at some point add opinion into software. You have to have an opinionated approach. And it’s really hard to do in a purely 100% open community.
And there’s a lot of great proponents for, well, they call it cost commercial open source. And then Open Core is another one. It’s hilarious because you’ve got these little, like, Occupy Open Source, Occupy Open Core. There really are, like, hardened, really strong minded leaders in these specific types of communities. And they’re also arguing over who’s more open, who’s more DevOps-y, like, there are all of these things. And in the end, while that’s going on, we’re trying to run a business to employ people to get commercially viable software out there that can then power other companies and deliver this.
This is why inside Major Tom, there’s probably open tools amongst it, but nothing wrong with in my mind, the front end needs to be purely opinionated, pragmatically built and delivering to solve specific problems.
Yeah. I completely agree with you. Sure. Inside of Major Tom, we do have open source elements. I’ll be honest. I don’t know exactly all of those. I won’t name them but we do use them. Right. And I think most companies, software companies use open source at some level. Right.
Everybody thought they didn’t until there was heartbeat. That was like, one of the most hilarious things were like that’ll teach you open source people to use open source stuff. And it’s like heartbeat. And then all of a sudden, 12 hours later, Cisco, Microsoft, VMware, every major company was like, you need to patch your stuff. And they’re like, why I thought we were using commercial software. We’re like, well, guess what it’s built on open source software.
Yeah. Right. Exactly. The problem with, I completely agree with you. We still have to make viable businesses and employees that generate revenues so that we can hire people and have economy and all these things. Right.
But the problem we had with open source in our industry is we were selling support contracts. So that was our main business model, is you would use our software, we would sell you support. And that works really great for Red Hat. But that really is a challenge for us. So we were going after companies that were building large constellations. So they wanted to launch a lot of satellites, hundreds of satellites. And then we’re going to use our software on all their spacecraft. Awesome. Let’s do that.
So for the first satellite, they happily paid us for support and we support them through it. We built some, reported to their hardware if we need to, we do some services in there to generate revenue and we were successful. We launched some satellites on it, and then they would be ready for their next 2nd, 3rd, 4th spacecraft, and they’re going to try to increase the speed, the scale of it and bulk up a little bit. And we had taught them everything they need to know about the software, and they really didn’t fall on to purchase sub-port for anything because they didn’t change anything.
They weren’t intending to change anything or anything significant. And if you imagine once the spacecraft is in orbit, you have some limited options about what you can do to change that. If you have a bug that is in your spacecraft software, how do you fix it? You do a software update. Now it’s more common. When we started, assume that you were able to do a software update, but it’s very risky, right? If you do have to do a whole new update to the kernel or to the OS, that’s a lot of risk if you make a mistake, that’s it, the things done.
There is no hold down the reset button.
It’s gone. And so it is not something that companies traditionally have been wanting to do unless under the most dire situations. Right now, we’ve gotten better as an industry, we’ve gotten better at testing and our procedures and our backups on the system so that there is a failure, we could do it. But especially at the time when we started, that just wasn’t the norm. Very few companies have been building and architecting their system with the intent of updating the OS. So there’s some limitations, right? There were some risk involved, big consequences.
And so anyway, it was a very hard model to get in, and then they sell cycles. It was other than we’ve given in the business side. But anyway, there’s a lot going on here. But anyway, open source is still part of us. There’s still that flight software called KubOS. Still up on GitHub, and I think the next launch is on is next month. I mean, it’s still being used by people, even though we’re not actively developing on it. I think the next launch that someone’s using it is next month, I think.
I guess it really brings the ultimate question before Major Tom, what did the stack look like? What was the previous solution that needed this to solve a problem?
Yeah. So there was a couple of different flavors of this, but they all were based around being on a server in a closet there locally at your station. And they were all focused on particularly one spacecraft. They were not going to handle 100 spacecraft. They were really good at two, three, four, maybe spacecraft. But if you were going to do more, they were really not going to be built for that. And they were expensive. You had to have the hardware and you had to have at least a skill set to set up the hardware, manage that.
And they were real, particularly focused on again, the single use case as a single spacecraft. And so that’s really where we as the industry started to move from big and expensive to lots of little. Right. The mission control didn’t keep up, right. We couldn’t scale the way that the industry was needing us to scale. We couldn’t be generic, we couldn’t be spun up quickly and we couldn’t be updated very well. If it was in a hardware, if it was in the hardware over there in the corner. No, we want to touch it.
So there was a lack of innovation. Satellites, as you deploy more satellites, you continue to tweak and evolve them. There’s different generations trying to push it. But your mission controls stay flat. So we need a way to update and upgrade the software to keep up with the demands and the needs of the ever changing system. So that’s really where we came in to fix. We built it on the cloud to give it that scale, to build it in a redundant, safe way. We built it within mind of operating lots and lots of spacecraft.
We’ve done further than that. So not only just operating a lot of the same kind of spacecraft, we designed it so you can operate a lot of very different types of mission control systems. And then the other thing we’ve done that we’ve really gone out and integrated third party services that you use on the ground. Best example is talk to satellite. You need a physical ground station somewhere in the Earth that will collect the radio signal and also beam up the radio signal. There’s services you can purchase.
You can basically rent by the minute of these ground stations. And we, it was always on the operator our customers to spend the resources to integrate these systems. And they were done poorly. They were done slowly. They were done costly. And so we integrated these systems out of the box. So there’s just a simple login and then you’re integrated with this. So we’re lowering barriers. We’re going faster. We’re developing new features for our customers for these use cases that we can roll out and not have to do a full new reboot of the entire system and lose valuable time on their spacecraft.
So that’s where we’re coming from.
Well, this really becomes the value of centralizing and giving opinionated outcomes to solving a problem, because you can look at five customers and then find the Venn diagram of crossover and then start to merge the diagram a bit more. You start to see more commonalities, but they individually are building a standalone system for each part of the operation. It’s just such a, there was a point where we all had to do it. There’s always the first time someone built a car. You didn’t start by building a factory.
You started by putting a garage in and then building the bloody car, but eventually goes, hey, the guy down the street is building a car, and I’m supplying parts to him. And it looks like you guys use the same parts. Okay.
One of the things that we bring is the aggregation of all the different data sets. So we’re not looking at actual people’s data per se. What we’re doing is anonymizing it so that we can better understand spacecraft operations. Right. And really where we’re trying to apply this is in the communication optimization. So, example, you have 100 satellites orbiting the Earth. They’re all moving around. Right.
They orbit every 90 minutes. And you have ten ground stations across the globe. Right.
And the connection time between a satellite and a ground station is about ten minutes. Right.
And so you got minimum windows and they’re always moving. These are walking orbits, right. If it flies over New York at 02:00 p.m.. 03:30, it will be 50 miles east of New York. Right. The walking. And so what we are building is the optimization on how to communicate. And so we could tell our constellation. I want a picture of New York tomorrow at 01:00 p.m.. Major Tom will say you need to send it to this ground station to the satellite at this time and get the data back down to optimize the network, to get your data, your command up there to tell the satellite to do get the data down in the appropriate time and really optimizing the network.
So we’re moving away from spacecraft being these pets that we love and are part of our family, to cattle, to herds, to big networks. We’re really more network administrators than we are satellite operators. And that’s the way we’re moving the industry to adopt those practices and apply them to the space environment.
Yeah. I tell you, when you get to the numbers, it’s pretty incredible if you think about what’s up there in the different layers of atmosphere. And I saw something that’s funny to me because I recognized this is such a, like, get off my lawn type of old person yelling at the clouds situation. It was like these photographers who are like, it’s really bothering me trying to get night star photography because there’s all these darn satellites floating around, you know, that the Internet that you’re putting your awful angry tweet on is powered by those very little lights that you’re complaining that are crossing your photograph in a time lapse.
Yeah. That’s a really interesting conversation in the industry that we don’t know what to do with yet. Right.
We’re going to launch more satellites. We have to launch more satellites. We have to launch more infrastructure in space, not just satellites but space stations, and we have to build more habitats and we have to move out there. But there’s also some consequences to that, right? Not only with photography and a nice guy, that’s one. But there’s also the risk of collision, these things hitting each other and causing damage. Right. There’s that risk. There’s risk of, I’m a big fan of, I just went blank the, Apple Moon show from on Apple+.
For all mankind.
For all mankind. Yeah. And the militarization of space, right. This is a thing that is not that far away from us. Right. And then we got to get into governments and we got to get into laws and policies and treaties in space that we’re not well equipped to deal with right now in our current geopolitical environment. And so there’s some fascinating things and some really hard decisions that are going to have to be made in the next ten years to really set up our humanity to expand.
Yeah. The policy side of it is wild. And you think of because today we think of geography. We’re so just bound in geography, even just the fact that as a North American, the raw arrogance that everything that most companies do is in English only. And we base it on Eastern time zone. It is just crazy that that’s like the standard of belief as we head into just internationally on the Earth, we’ve got a broad set of audiences that are so underrepresented and under acknowledged. And then we can’t even argue over the height over a skyscraper that is considered owned real estate by that developer.
What happens when you go a lot higher? Does it belong to the country because it’s over North America? Does it belong to the country because it’s over El Salvador? That’s my satellite right now.
Right. It’s really hard that things can be solved. And then you go to the moon or Mars. And how do we break that up? Should we break it up? Should we not break it up, right? Asteroids are the same way in different countries, making different laws and not doing it as a planet as an entire group of people instead of just individually as our own countries. I think it’s really interesting. I really do. And how do we solve these problems and who’s going to take leadership in these problems?
They’re going to stick their neck out and want to talk about space policy, because right now, it’s not on the mainstream, right? It’s not being talked about at a high level with people who could do anything about it. It’s just professor somewhere arguing about it. And so we need to bring that out. We need to talk about that. Anyway.
Most people’s exposure to this is just they’re like, does Bruce Willis and Ben Affleck available and can Aerosmith do the soundtrack? That’s our understanding of space for the most part.
That’s right. That’s right. Well, in America, saving the day. Right. And that’s not how this is going to work. There are more countries over the last five years gotten into space, being coming space faring countries than there were ever seen. Everybody come play. The countries that had never had a space program now can have a space program. And it’s not just for the United States. It’s not just for America. It’s all global. Space belongs to all. It’s really interesting, but there needs to be some structure there needs to be.
If somebody’s doing something with their satellite, how are you going to know what they’re doing, right? Or should, you know, right? Do you even have a right to know? But that’s a different thing. And that’s really fascinating to me. We can track where satellites are, but we can’t always tell what they’re doing and sometimes by the behavior of the satellite, what it’s doing. I remember when I first got into the industry, there was a story about geo. So this is where the big communication satellites live, and they’re locked to the spin of the Earth.
So they always are focused on a particular spot over the Earth. Right.
So they’re locked in geostationary orbit. And these are very coveted spots. These are very big spacecraft. This is big spy stuff, encryption, military, but also other types of communications. And I remember there’s a story about this Russian satellite just walking around out there, getting in between the communication channel and you can see it. You do it as a Russian satellite. You know what they said publicly. We were the same way when we said publicly, we’re not really saying what our satellite was doing. And it was really interesting.
I think it’s going to become more and more happening whether or not we hear about it or not. But it’s going to happen. It’s going to continue to happen.
Especially just like, it’s hard to imagine that if we go back to the days of before this decade is about. We commit to getting somebody on the moon. And you’re like, that’s crazy talk now you’re like no one would even question. They’re like, why aren’t we already there? Why are we going back? Why did we stop going?
I think the tough part we also see with the sort of publicity of space touristy-ing and stuff that’s going on. On the back side is an incredible amount of research, like the work that you’re doing. This enables incredible amount of real secondary effect stuff that’s going on. And going on the moon wasn’t about planting the flag, it was about learning about science beyond our Earth that’s enabled an incredible amount of things that is just we forgot. We forgot that’s what we did as a result of it, even the sort of the rich man space race that we’ve got going on right now.
The result of those advances will mean that as a government organization, especially at least in the United States, they’ll save billions of dollars because of the work that’s going on in commercial and private sector work. And we all personally will feel that benefit because it means that things will come that are advanced as a result of this work.
Yeah. So we do that in a slightly different way. But it’s the same idea. Right. We borrow a lot of technologies, best practices, not from the space world, but from the software world, from the general, from what Google and Facebook have developed as standard practices for how to develop large data sets and manage those data sets. So we’re applying those just like that Google had to develop in order to build theirs we get to use in a space. It’s all how this works, right. The space race is happening with Elon and Branson and the other guy, Bezos is ultimately going to be, at least to the industry, at least from the economics, it’s going to be beneficial. Right.
They’re creating technologies and they’re training people, right. Giving them new ideas. There’s this whole, like, flood of SpaceX employees, not flood. Floods not the right word. But there’s a group of SpaceX employees who are spinning out new companies now, right. This is the benefit of what he’s really built. Is he built a big company to do something really amazing and trained and taught these engineers how to build really amazing things. Engineers are going to go build amazing things for themselves, and they’re going to create new companies.
Well, every major company has done this. And now we’re going to see in the space there just hasn’t been anybody, like, break through that, right? We’ve all been government contractors working in classified missions and couldn’t talk about these days. But now that’s over, right now, that’s ending. And you’re going to see a lot of that’s where the real next push is going to come from. Right.
SpaceX has done amazing, great things. It’s very impressive and pushed the ball forward. But now you’re going to see a different ball being kind of moved away. So they really focus on solving launch and then getting people into space in large bulk groups of people, mass movement of people, the people coming out of SpaceX employees who are spinning up their own companies. We’re not even sure what they’re going to do yet. And it’s going to be really fascinating what they do, right? They already did this. We’ll think what else they can accomplish, right? When they want to.
That’s it. And it’s like the accessibility of this stuff now is huge. Right. And I always enjoy everything we have now has, like the sort of ice cream flavors of, like, one scoop, two scoop, three scoop pricing structure. Can you imagine, say, ten years ago that you’d be able to say, I’m going to create a mission control software that I can offer on the cloud in a distributed format, API accessible. And I’m going to be able to offer it at, like, pricing to you. It couldn’t have been imagined that this was possible. And yet here you are.
Yeah. Well, ten years ago, who knows what I was doing ten years ago. So that’s even crazier, right? I don’t even know what I was doing ten years ago, but, yeah, there’s just pull and push in the industry, right. We’re pushing the industry towards cloud adoption, to using, borrowing from the software industry into space to move the industry forward, move innovation forward. There’s still resistance to that, right? The truth of the matter is we’ve talked a lot about commercial entities and commercial business models in space. Really taking off the largest payer of space services and applications is the US government, right.
That’s the largest payer. And so it’s still driven by requirements in that very waterfall manner. And so that’s what we’re trying to do. Educate and move the industry in a different direction so that we can continue to innovate faster and not be put in these boxes that were built for 1960 technology and practices. Now we can move it forward. But, yeah, there’s this really interesting pool. The commercial companies want to go talk to a commercial company about using Major Tom. They get it. They understand what we’re doing, and we’re moving forward them when I go talk to the Air Force about it. Maybe they do, maybe they don’t.
So there’s an education that’s happening still in the industry about what not just what we’re doing, but what is the bigger picture. Microsoft and Amazon have over the last couple of years really put their money where their mouth is and got in this space and are building a space building services in space, educating the space industry. So it’s coming. The cloud is coming to the space market, which we’re part of the leaders of that movement.
Now, when it comes to that sort of ideal customer, this is a really interesting one because you have a very unique customer set. What does the profile of somebody that you, now your average person goes and fills out a form for a free ebook, and then you ran off with an SDR, right?
Yeah. Well, we’re not doing TikTok ads. Not yet, anyways.
So our customers are, there are different ways to top up or categorize our customers. Our customers are very educated people who are very passionate, motivated, and technical, which means they’re not really interested in fluff, in marketing design. And they really want to know what’s underneath in the details and the architecture of our system. We have to provide that we have to be technically proficient in our software to explain it to our customers. And so that is something that is not unique to our industry, but it’s part of what our industry is, right? Made of technical engineers who are running, who have a lot of say in what technologies get implemented on their missions.
Pass that, most of our people are not software engineers, too. Most of our customers are electrical or mechanical engineers or system engineers. They’re not software engineers. We have to make sure we’re designing Major Tom in a way that is accessible to non software engineers. Right.
So we have APIs. We have some customizations you can do with our system. We have to make sure that we’re building that so that it’s accessible by someone who doesn’t know how to code, which is great, which is just acknowledgement of who our customers are, right. It’s not unusual to go to a space company and they not have a software engineer on staff. That’s changing, it’s becoming more prevalent in the industry that we have software engineers on staff, but it’s not a guarantee. And so we have to build Major Tom in that way.
From a different angle, our customers really, what we’re doing right now from a mission perspective, is we’re really going after two buckets. The first one is new companies who are wanting to launch lots of satellites to do some sort of business application. Right. Or even if it’s not, even if it’s a government program, just wants to build lots of satellites, wants to go quickly, wants to scale, wants to be able to update and manipulate and configure and integrate it into their system. Right.
So they don’t have an architecture for their ground segment to really establish it. So that’s where we really fit in really well and start building out the architecture around Major Tom’s APIs. The other segment is actually the exact opposite. It’s those who are running long term missions in space who are wanting to lower their costs. Right.
It’s gotten too expensive to have this server farm or whatever over here. It’s got too expensive to maintain this 2015 year old software application that nobody else works anymore. And so there’s a whole lot of risk that it goes down or there’s some sort of issue. And then obviously, COVID is changing the mindset of where we need to do work. A lot of these older programs, you had to be in that office only. And then now, that is changing. And so Major Tom really can insert itself in there.
So we are lowering the cost by moving it to a cloud architecture, pay as you go type thing. They don’t have to deal with the infrastructure from a hardware standard. We host it all. And then it gives you that flexibility of remote access to your spacecraft. And so that’s another where we’re going and using the flexibility how we design the back end, we can really insert ourselves into preexisting infrastructure, as opposed to building a new one around us. We can be flexible enough to integrate. Those are the two big Buckets new ventures and those who are actually the exact opposite.
Older ventures who are trying to be more economically driven, right. Or reducing the risk because they have a single point of failure.
Yes. In the world of tech, I often, we use the phrase legacy, and I always joke, you call it legacy, I call it production. Like, this is stuff that can’t go away. But like you said, wrapped around a traditional architecture littered with single points of failure. And they’ve basically built it so it can be asynchronous, we’ve got opportunities. And then you build the right abstraction in front of it. And this is what’s neat. Now, when we talk about abstractions and cloud as an architecture, it’s fantastic. Because now we can basically trust that you are going to do more than just fire all your services in the US-East-1 on AWS.
Like most people do, whenever people say to me like, yeah, we’re using the cloud for resiliency as to how many regions are using. Sorry, what? Oh, no. When Route 53 goes away, the whole kit goes down. We see these weird little things like, I don’t understand what just happened. All of my caching just went away. All these sites went down around the world. Like, what happened? Somebody is just like they typed in a bad command on some software update. So you’ve got the ability that you can architect for scale resiliency versus the traditional architecture people that they should be focusing on their outcomes, their business, what they want to do with their hardware.
But now they can say, hey, Tyler has a lot of customers that care about this. So if Tyler gets it wrong, a lot of people get angry versus if I get it wrong, I’m just the only one that’s at fault.
Yeah. So from our world, we have to take it one step further, considering those. So we still are governed under export control. So we live in an evolving policies place like everything else. We’re governed under the Commerce Department on export control, which is what it is. We’re also under certain situations covered under the State Department, under the ITAR regulations about arms traffic. And that’s a whole different level of scrutiny and consequences. To be frank with you, and so we do run an ITAR secure clouds, which does, we use Microsoft right now that we’ve built on top of the Azure government cloud.
We also live in the public cloud. We also can and have done air gap. Now that is a little bit. And the reason is because I described this push and pull in the industry, and I have to live in this industry. And so while I’m pushing the industry forward with cloud adoption and using best practices and moving this way, there are still missions that deem Major Tom from just a pure feature standpoint, but need and have to have it in a military encrypted. Sorry, air gap environment.
And so we do deploy in those environments. It’s not something we particularly like doing. And you are losing some of the benefits of what we built, but our feature set for the satellite operators in particular, for the actual day to day operations, not just the architecture, but the actual features are valuable enough on their own, and they’re willing to use it without the cloud infrastructure. So we run in lots of environments for better or for worse. We do have non US customers who prefer to have their stuff, not in the US.
They don’t want the data in the US. So we have to do EU deployments that works better for us because the data is not actually coming in and then back out of the United States export control. Where things live and what environments and deployments, it’s a constant challenge that we have with trying to make sure that we’re on the same deployments, that we’re all being upgraded the same time, that we’re all maintaining it. And yeah, that’s one of the challenges that we face kind of on a regular basis.
I’ll say it’s the economies of scale or one thing, and also the economy of innovation at scale. Right.
So like every organization that would come to you, they would have to do this from ground up.
That’s right.
You have a vested interest in becoming particularly good at doing stuff at scale versus they’re just trying to solve a specific problem and then having to build architecturally around the infrastructure to support that problem. You are truly this sort of the cloud computing of mission control, because you can say, you don’t need to care about where it is. Obviously, we do. And you have to be transparent about that. But they don’t have to run it. They don’t have to have this network operations center with 25 TVs and people up 24/7 watching screens and listening to bleeps and boops and wondering what’s going wrong.
Yeah, that’s right. Some of our customers still choose to have those 25 TVs and everything going on. They like it, but they also want the benefit of what we’re bringing. So, yeah, we’ve talked about the kind of architecture into the actual application itself. We rely heavily on automating a lot of these process so that we don’t have to have person sitting in a monitor 24/7 because satellites don’t sleep, they don’t take holidays. They’re always constantly collecting and transmitting data down to Earth, and there has to be a system in place to collect that, right?
So Major Tom can fly. It can be your autopilot, right. For these satellites where you used to have to have teams 24/7 operations, we can now reduce that human intervention at cost from both from the employees and from the individual. Nobody wants to be up at 02:00 a.m. flying a satellite. Right.
That’s not a sustainable model. So that’s really where we’re moving into the application side, giving these tools and automation, both from internally in Major Tom, but also giving you the APIs to automate your own workflows for operations. And so that’s I think that’s really another angle that we’re coming at this problem at.
It’s funny that because you’ve been very focused on this is where you run. This is where you operate. There’s no Edge in any of the nomenclature around what you’re doing, because you are truly sort of the cloud, like Mission Control is the cloud for the Edge payloads, the actual workloads that are physically swimming around in orbit. But it’s funny that everybody is kind of like, I call it the edification. Like, it’s really just everything and anything new. And like, these glasses, they’re Edge glasses.
Now everybody is just, like, latching onto it. First of all, thank you for not just jamming Edge all over your website to try and be exciting to the Edge world, not to detract from them. All of my amazing friends who are into the Edge.
Of course.
Where do you see that sort of next layer of compute coming? And is it something that you’re interested in as a company?
Yeah. So we have thoughts around this and trying to understand what our role is in this wave that’s happening. Right. I think one way that we’re looking at it is as we continue to develop Major Tom and we continue to build out new capabilities, being able to optimize this network, right. For communication that we’ve talked about. At a higher level, I think one thing we’re trying to do, which I don’t know if this completely answers your question, but fine, is erase the differences between space and ground. Right.
It’s all just one network. It doesn’t matter if you’re satellite or if you have a server down here or you have an IoT node in the Sahara. It’s all just a network in erasing that there has to be some sort of division from a network perspective. And so we’re trying to move the reliability and the communication of space to where we have on the ground so that we can run Edge processes anywhere, whether it’s on the Earth or on the ground, be able to shift these things around, manage this from this perspective.
There’s also a lot of push right now for satellites to become smarter that they’re not just simple machines, effectively. Right.
Really complicated, simple machines. Right. We want it to be intelligent. We want them to make decisions on their own and not be dictated from the ground. Right.
That’s a movement that’s happening. So getting the compute power on the spacecraft to allow it to do the computation, apply the AI or machine learning in real time at the data source, and then be able to make decisions and execute from that without ground interference. So there’s really two trains of thoughts on that, we’ve looked at because of our experience in flight software. We know how to go play in the satellite world, right. We know how to go put stuff on orbit. And there’s an element of that long term that has potential there.
If you control the satellite software and the ground software, it’s a really powerful ecosystem that we’re building. So using containers, we can really push the security profile, the new application on the spacecraft, and allow Major Tom to manage that system. So we’re looking at where we fit into this whole thing. It’s still new. We have different restraints with compute power on orbit with just actual energy. Right.
And so these are constant fighting, and then the heat that they create and getting distance. There are a lot more complications. So it’s not as fast evolving as it is on Earth, but it is there. You’re definitely going to see space companies with Edge computing all over their websites. We’re not one of them. But there are those companies. And so we’re working with our customers to understand their needs, what they’re doing so that we can be a part of their ecosystem moving forward.
Well, the irony is that you effectively, you’re like Edge hipsters. You were there before it was cool, like Kubos, in effect, is the Edge OS, right? Like you could almost say, you’re tagging to be, we’ve been to the edge and back, right. It’s like because you realize the problem that you could have the most impact in solving was that mission control. Right. But you’ve understood the other side. You understood the payload, you understood the Edge requirement, and that allows you to be so focused and very pragmatic and fanatical on solving this problem with Major Tom.
So at down the road when someone says, hey, we want to take this a little bit further and we want to move it to another location. You do air gap, you do all these things. You’ve had to think that stuff out and execute on it. It’s pretty amazing that the company could go in interesting places, for sure.
Yeah. We have the technology and the experience to go a lot of different ways right now. In the short term, we’re all steam ahead on Major Tom. Right.
Building this product to really manage the ground infrastructure for your spacecraft operations. This is where we are, where we go in the future. We have a lot of different visions that we want to see come to reality. And it’s pretty exciting that what we can do. Software is really going to give new life to these missions to this hardware. Once you launch the hardware, that’s what it is. With software, we can constantly when we build that infrastructure and do it in a safe way. We can give new life and new missions to old hardware.
And I think that’s going to change things. There’s a case we made that they’re just new server farms in space. Right.
Amazon is just going to move all there. And you don’t care if it’s on Earth or it’s in space as long as we can increase that communication to make the latency go away. But anyway, there’s complicated problems, big problems at stall here, and where Major Tom fits in the future. We’re focused on communication, communication bandwidth optimization. That’s always going to be a huge problem with FCC frequency allocations moving forward. People experimenting with laser communications. This satellite-to-satellite communications is now a thing that’s happening. And so I personally believe that the communication bottleneck that’s going to be happening here, that we’re already filling the squeeze up is a major place that we want to plant our flag, that we’re part of this solution.
We’re part of the optimizing and really the communication channels of this network.
Most people would just even think about that, and they would get out of their business. You’ve chosen some hard problems to solve. And I want to say hard or difficult or challenging, but like, making it commercially viable, this is a pretty incredible thing that you and the team have taken on. What made you think this is a problem I need to solve. And I think we can do it.
Yeah. So KuBOS is how we got in the industry. My partner really had the idea for the flight software because he built satellites, and he was trying to integrate these different subsystems that were built by different manufacturers to talk to each other, and they weren’t standardized across any sort of platform. He had to build it all from scratch. Right.
There’s a better way we could build a better system that already is integrated with the system or make it easier to integrate these systems. So KuBOS came from when we spent time in the industry understanding the customers and our partners in this industry realized there was a huge need for how they were doing operations. There was a need for the scalability for new practices, new architectures, new development speeds that we weren’t seeing. And so we saw an opportunity to build Major Tom.
We had the networks. We had the relationships to present this product quickly to people. And so we did. And we’ve had success doing that so far. I didn’t come from the space industry, and so I had to really dive in and learn it, kind of from an outsider’s perspective and operations. You have three major phases of a spacecraft life. Right. You have the development phase where you’re building it, design and building the spacecraft, testing the spacecraft. And you have launch. That’s a big moment of itself. And then you have operations.
Out of the three, the longest time period is operations. Right.
But which one is more costly? What’s the most expensive bucket? And so it used to be development and launch as the most expensive bucket. So the industry created CubeSats, they created, also, Moore’s Law created cheaper components and faster components. So we lower the cost of development significantly. Obviously, SpaceX has come in and focused on launch problem. Lower that. But other companies like Rocket Lab have come in and done this to lower the cost of launch and the reliability and the speed of launch cadences. But no ones touched operations, operations of this long term expensive bucket.
And now is disproportionately more time and money than the other two buckets. So that’s really what we’re trying to solve. We do have tools for development and testing. But we’re really looking at lowering that so that if we lower all the cost of the entire life cycle of the spacecraft, then we will make space more accessible. And while that’s kind of a token thing right now that people want to democratize space, it’s kind of almost becoming cliche. Say, the truth is, if we can get the price down, right, this is going to increase development if we use skill sets that already exist in the world.
Like software engineering is a huge skill set that has changed our world completely, and we apply it to space, and we give them more accessibility to these skill sets, see what else we can do. There are more software engineers entering space, more software engineers building software or building software companies in space. So it’s just great. Anyway.
It’s a beautiful empowering loop. Right. And if you don’t mind, we got a few minutes left. I want to touch on TechMill and the ecosystem and your participation because, like you said, you weren’t born in the space race, but you’re in it now as an entrepreneur, what are the ways that you see excitement in that startup community and where we can give back?
Yeah. So TechMill started before Kubos. It was a nonprofit in the town in Texas where I was living. It was a bunch of technology and entrepreneur enthusiasts got together and decided we need to create some sort of organization nonprofit to help other entrepreneurs give at least a community feel to us. So we did events. It was actually the first co-working in our town, started a coffee shop. And we moved to an actual co-working space, and it spun off and done its own thing. That’s actually where I met my partner who started Kubos with.
He was the President of the organization. I was the Treasurer, and we started working. That’s how we met. That’s how we started working together. Kubos was born out of TechMill to some degree. And so it’s a nonprofit that’s still existing. They do like developer evangelist, education community, building a community of people who are interested in tech, who are interested in startups. When Kubos was taking off, when gaining traction, I stepped down from the board of TechMill so I could focus on Kubos and I’m now no longer in Texas.
I’ve actually moved to Portland, Oregon, at this point. So TechMill is doing great. But I don’t have any involvement in it and haven’t in a couple of years.
But it is amazing if you think of communities of purpose and there are so many out there, it is a beautiful thing. Ultimately, you are exactly the success path that any community of purpose should have, is that you shouldn’t be running it for 30 years like a lifelong member. If you can contribute and be a part of it is one thing. But you ultimately create something. You sort of parachute out of it into a new thing and prove that the value was there. And then somebody else says, hey, check it out. Tyler used to be our guy. Now that gives them something to aspire for, right?
Yeah. TechMill was a really interesting point in my life. I was coming out of another company that I just shut down. Wasn’t technology driven. It was a service based company, and I was looking to get into tech. It wasn’t space for today. I was looking to get into tech, and I needed new networks, and I needed new people to meet than what I had been exposed to. And so, TechMill, I went to just a community event being put on about people just wanting to share big ideas, right?
Don’t matter the context. I went there and they talked about creating this conference for technology people, for software engineers. And they were looking for volunteers to help run a conference. And I volunteered. So I think that’s a really great line in my life, is that I’m not afraid to do things I don’t know how to do. I didn’t know how to run a conference, but I jumped in anyway, that led me to start a nonprofit, which I didn’t know how to run. And it led me to meet Marshall to build a space company that I didn’t know anything about space.
It’s just a continuation. But you’re right. So TechMill has thrived and has done a lot of great things and support a lot of different startups. The company Kubos being one of them. So we have a special place in our heart for TechMill, but that is really what it’s supposed to do, incubate a little bit, give you some resources and connections and then kick you out. So that’s what we did. I did it with myself. And so that has worked out so far.
Yeah. And those things right there. And I think for folks that are listening, too. It’s just a reminder that there are great communities of purpose like that, that you can go out and whatever it is, they’re out there. And it’s very helpful, at least just to find people of the birds of a feather sort of opportunity, and it gives you a chance to share your ideas, to let them out with people. And if nothing, you just meet amazing people. Obviously, the in person thing has the lack of in person opportunity has drastically changed how we develop and nurture these communities, because it’s a lot harder.
Like we’re tired of staring at bloody Zoom screens and everything all day long. The last thing you want to do is like, hey, I spent all day on Zoom meetings. I’m going to go to a three hour evening Zoom session with people. I hope that we get to the other side of this all soon, and we can get back to those things. And you’ll see a lot of interesting stuff come out.
Yeah, I agree with you. It’s been a challenge, but yeah.
So I guess for folks that want to find out more and want to get connected to you. Tyler, obviously, we’ll have links to. First of all, there’s so much that’s going on, and I didn’t even talk about the super launch sequence you’ve had. August was a huge month for you. You’ve got customers that are doing incredible stuff. I feel bad that I didn’t open with that because I was excited on your behalf for all of the stuff that you were involved in, and that’s really cool. But for folks that want to get connected, what’s the best way to do that?
Yeah. Our website is www.kubos, K-U-B-O-S, .com. So that’s a great place. We also have a podcast there that you can listen to. We’re interviewing other, our customers or our employees and giving you an insight into kind of pushing the cloud adoption in our industry. Yeah, that’s great. I’m on Twitter if that’s a thing, but I don’t talk a lot, but I’m there. So. Yeah, our website is the best place to get a hold of us.
And students as well. Right. There’s a great opportunity. You’ve got the academic access path. There’s different ways that people can get involved, which is pretty cool. Thank you for doing all that you do.
Yeah. I appreciate it. Thanks for having me. Giving me the opportunity to speak to your audience and share my story and what Kubos is doing. I think we’re really in an interesting place right now.
Onward and upward, it’s going to be. I’m excited to see the future where you got a lot of good stuff in it. Thanks very much, Tyler.
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Jarod Spiewak is the founder of Comet Fuel, a boutique, strategy-first, agency that helps businesses run sophisticated ROI-positive marketing campaigns to fuel long-term growth, without all the typical agency BS.
We discuss the no-BS way to build your marketing presence, the challenges of products and automation that every entrepreneur and business needs to solve, and just explore lots of fun parts of marketing techniques and platform automation.
What’s happening? Eric Wright here. Host of DiscoPosse Podcast. Thank you for listening, subscribing, hopefully and doing all sorts of other things like that. Wow. This is really going to be a fun episode because I get introduced to somebody new and so do you. This is Jarod Spiewak. Jarod is the lead strategist and founder of Comet Fuel. He’s a really interesting character. And first of all, his approach to things, somebody who if you actually go to his website, jarodspiewak.com, it’s actually hilariously awesome how he puts his stuff together.
We talk about growth, we talk about automation, we talk about the human integration, with marketing. Really great stuff. So definitely you’re going to want to check out Common Fuel and much more. But in the meantime, speed of things you do want to check out. I am going to ask you a little favor, because if you have data out there, you’ve got systems, you’ve got anything. Make sure that you look at our amazing supporters, like the folks at Veeam Software who have you covered for everything you need for your data protection needs, whether it’s on premises, in the Cloud, whether it’s Cloud Native stuff.
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All right, let’s get to the good stuff. This is Jarod Spiewak. Enjoy.
Hey, this is Jarod Spiewak. I’m the founder and lead strategist of Comet Fuel. And you’re listening to the DiscoPosse Podcast.
Jarod, this is really cool, because when I saw your name come up on the guest list, I did a bit of background, and I always love to dig in. You are prolific in a lot of ways, especially for somebody who you seem to have about three decades of business sense in you, even though you haven’t got three decades on the ground. So we’ve got a lot of really cool stuff we can cover. If you want to give a quick intro about yourself before we get started for folks that are new to you, that’d be great.
We’ll talk about Comet Fuel. We’ll talk about the problems you’re solving, and also this is super close to me because I’ve got more and more folks who are really often struggling with how do they make the jump into better engagement. How do they get conversion. And really what’s the science and the techniques that we can wrap into them that we’re kind of unlocking a lot of just regularly good old-fashioned human behavior. But for whatever reason, we fail at it all the time.
There’s a ton that we could talk about that I think would be really interesting. But for anybody that doesn’t know me, my name’s Jored Spiewak, as hopefully you know by now. When you say that I have a lot of experiences because I got my start when I was 14, I decided that I was going to graduate early. So I started college at 15, graduate high school at 16, went to college for my marketing degree. I finished my degree a month after I turned 18. I was working in a corporate marketing job at the time, about a year into the corporate job, I was like, all right, cool.
I’m done with this. Just really not for me. And I signed up for a website called Upwork, which is much smaller at the time. Just after their merger of oDesk and Elance started working for about $5 an hour with the goal of, hey, let’s find another job somewhere. Did a bunch of interviews. No one wanted to hire me even as I was building up a portfolio, so that obviously didn’t work out. But pretty soon after, I had essentially resigned to, well, this is going nowhere. I got a full time job offer from a marketing agency which kind of transitioned me into, okay, great time to take this seriously.
I started off as an on page SEO. Within a couple of months, I was promoted to the lead SEO strategist. Over time, I freelanced more and more, went from full time, part time to no time at that agency. And then I was sitting with all these clients. I was like, okay, great. What’s next for me? Started my agency, Blue Dog Media in 2018, February 2018, and then throughout 2019 and 2020, planned the rebrand over to Comet Fuel and then early 2021, publicly launched Comet Fuel.
Now this is the fun part of, when you talked about Upwork and coming through that, I love to actually tap into that the transition from going from gig work to then agency to then effectively being agency. Right. So now you’d think that this could be a natural transition, but I find a lot of people get jammed up at stage one, and they’re still kind of grinding it out at Upwork. Or maybe they’re not even sure how to market themselves. And this is probably why you made the rapid transition from phase one to two to founding your own team on this one.
So maybe talk about how you started with gig work. What was really cool about it, but then how you made that jump to kind of go beyond.
Yeah. So I think that there were a couple of things that gave me an advantage over perhaps some other people. One was that I had a lot of agency experience going into this, which is that I worked for an agency. I had corporate marketing experience as well. So I had the more corporate refinement type of structure that anyone that’s worked in corporate is kind of used to. So I had that as well. So I had that sort of business sense. But I was also when I was freelancing, working for a lot of other agencies at the same time.
So it’s taking a lot of effort observing as to how things were run so that I would have an idea of how things would need to look once I went on my own, whether that was only freelancing in a more business minded focus or if that was to start my own agency. So I took a lot of observations there. The other thing that I did was I made sure that I had as large of a nest egg as possible where I was pulling in as a freelancer, multiple five figures a month in revenue, which made it a much easier transition than being like, okay, great. I have one or two clients, now let’s make this work.
So I was very slow in that transition on one hand. And then once I decided, okay, great. I’m going to make a shift here. I went from full time at that agency down to part time. So I had that extra levy that not everybody may have where I was half and half essentially. And I could build that up, make sure. Okay, great. This is sustainable. Cut it down to a couple of hours, just providing support over at the agency where if I needed to, I could have been like, hey, actually, my bad. I need to come back full time.
And luckily, I had a good enough relationship there that it would have been possible that transition part was kind of slow. But then once I officially left the agency, I took about two months to figure out what exactly I wanted to do, whether I wanted to keep freelancing or if I wanted to start an agency. And then once I decided, okay, great. It’s going to be an agency. I had that background, experience and knowledge to go this is what it needs to look like to a certain degree.
And then once I had actually been in the saddle for about a year, I then said, okay, great. I’ve followed what I saw from other people. Now I feel comfortable. Let me now follow what I think I want to do in my own way. So I would say, because of my experience, it was an easier transition. I had the opportunity to make it a somewhat smooth transition that I know that not everybody would have that opportunity or an employer that was understanding enough to be like, hey, go do your own thing.
We understand. But I was lucky enough to be in that position.
Well, I think part of it is you set yourself up for that opportunity in a lot of ways. Quite often we hear about sort of the Tim Ferriss’s four hour work week and his approach and a lot of folks that have adopted that style. It is actually okay to go to your boss and say, hey, I’ve got this thing like look at this, I’ve literally got a row of coffee beans behind me because I have a coffee company that I run and I have a full time job and I have a podcast.
There’s a way in which you can go to your boss and say, hey, I do these other things. And then somebody say, and these other things are actually starting to generate revenue. I’m here and I like this. And then quite often they recognize that you are going to go anyways, the best thing they can do is keep you and sort of leverage your skills and strength while you’re there, and they’re kind of more prepared instead of just suddenly going, hey, all right. I hear Jarod just had started his own agency, and he’s leaving.
More and more people are really embracing the fact that the best thing you can do for your staff is to make them successful in life, not just in their job.
Yes, I would agree. Unfortunately, I don’t think every business agrees with that. So some people will be in that position. Other people. Unfortunately, there are some people that go, oh, you’re thinking about doing your own thing. Okay. Well, you’re fired, and we’ll just find somebody else.
And depending on what state you’re in, sometimes they can just fire you for no grounds just because you said that other States do have laws against that. But for some people, it will be easy for other people. Unfortunately, they’re in a much more difficult position, and it might be where what they have to do is.
Okay. Great. I’m putting in 100 hours a week because I need to make sure this other thing is sustainable while also making sure it doesn’t impact my job, because I know as soon as they think something is up, they’re going to be hiring my replacement.
Yeah. I guess if I think of the captive audience, I’m probably calling on a select group of people who have been successful in it. There’s actually probably a lot of folks who don’t have that opportunity, but opportunity being created is much more self directed. And like you at 14 years old, you are suddenly on a different path than most people at 14 years old. And I bet that’s actually not the start. I’m betting there is a lot of entrepreneurial spirit that you probably were heading into preschool and thinking about selling the other kids some good lunches. There’s got to be.
You’re not entirely wrong.
So going to your origins. Jarod, what got you started on the entrepreneurial path?
Yeah. So I think some of it was I was just born that way. To be completely honest, I’m not intelligent enough to talk about this in detail, but I was just learning about how just basically scientifically, how chromosomes work and how 99.9% of us is all exactly the same. But that 0.1% of us is designated by birth, and some of that makes us less prone to being injured in accidents or more prone to being better at sports or whatever it may be. And so I think I was just programmed in a way that I was just always fascinated by business and management and making money where I’ve always been a big gamer.
But some of the games that I enjoyed the most were around resource management or tycoon business games like the old flash games I used to play all the time, and I was always interested in wanting to work in some weird way where when I was in, I believe it was fifth grade, I was allowed to watch a lot of movies that people my age generally weren’t allowed to watch. So I was watching a lot of older horror movies with my dad, like the old Child’s Play movies, Cube, Saw.
I was really big in the Saw at the time, a bunch of other movies like that. And so what I would do is I would go into the school library and I would basically just copy the plot of the movie into one or two pages, but have the setting, be the school and have everybody who died be my friends and everybody wanted to know how they died. So I would get paid one dollar for every copy of the story that I gave them. And it would take like an hour, maybe two to turn this out.
There was no story building. It was just okay, great. We’re at the school. We’re in this classroom. This person died because of that, whatever it may be. And it was just the same exact deaths in the movie as I could remember it. And I just did that. And then on the way home from school every day, I would go in to the corner store, and I would just buy a swim gym for one dollar. And then my mom was like, Where is he getting this money?
Because we don’t get allowance. And I think at one point she was like, ‘Are you selling drugs or something?’, which we weren’t in an area that would really happen. So it’s kind of funny, but yeah, I just kind of had that kind of nagging. I was always interested in it for some weird way.
I guess the more and more and talk to folks too. And you hear this. It’s not often necessarily the business itself. Like, people are not born to be business people, but they’re born creative and they’re able to use that creativity towards things. I hear the great quote it was from Jordan Peterson. Love him, hate him, people are on either side of that. But what he did say is that creative people tend to create a lot of wealth, but rarely for themselves. And it was a funny thing to hear.
It’s true, because I think of a lot of people that they would go to a job and they would get a great job and people love them and they do amazing creative things. But they lack that next ability to kind of take it to doing it on their own and kind of owning their outcome. And that’s why I loved your origin story is pretty amazing, because that then sort of gets amplified as you go and you take on, you see Upwork and you don’t just see it as a way to get a salary.
You probably went into it seeing an amplification opportunity much more than just I can get X number of hours of work done. You were probably immediately thinking like, how can I get 5 hours of work done in 1 hour? Can I get seven clients at the same time? That creative mind then the sort of tycoon lifestyle comes together in a really beautiful way. Is there anything else do you think, Jarod, that kind of prepared you for that?
So for me, a lot of it is just learning a lot. I mean, other things that I did across the time was I also signed up to Craigslist and I was doing gig work on Craigslist. And so I was meeting strangers at, like, 14, 15, sometimes going into their house. And there were literally times where I was getting more often than not, we would agree on payment, but people wouldn’t pay is like, okay, great. Here’s my business idea. Come into my house and hear it out and pick it apart.
Or if someone needed a math tutor. I guess I’m a math tutor. If someone needed a writer, I just happened to know English so I can put some words on paper for you, whatever it may be. So I just had that sort of knack, but I wouldn’t say it was necessarily skilled nor intentional with a lot of it. I think honestly, a lot of it was just luck in the way of probability, where luck isn’t necessarily random chance. But it’s just statistics. If you roll the die six times statistically, you’re probably going to hit six at least once.
Maybe you need to roll ten times, whatever it may be. So I was just taking those opportunities. And I think over time I started to realize what I had, which was that when I got on Upwork, it was because I was just frustrated with my job. I started trying to work for $20 an hour. Nobody hired me. I lowered it to ten, nobody hired me. I lowered it to five. I started to get hired. Once I got that, I moved it up a little bit on the platform.
I was like, okay, great. Now I have a thing or two. What if I add this to a portfolio and I try to go get a job somewhere else? Okay, great. No one else wants to hire me. Maybe I’ll look at this Upwork thing a little bit more seriously, and then, oh, wow. This can actually be something. So a lot of it was kind of stumbling into it that I could make it sound like I knew exactly what I was doing. But I honestly didn’t. But what I have always done is absorbed knowledge, like a sponge.
And when I got into SEO, which was kind of what cemented me within the marketing world for sure, was I created a custom RSS feed for, like, two, three dozen different websites, and I read every new article that came out over a weekly period. I did it once a week, but I would also go back retrospectively and over time read back about everything that happened over the course of about two years, and I would join all the forms and I would get really engrossed with it.
So what I didn’t have naturally, I would try to learn from other people by just absorbing a disgusting amount of content.
I could ask you the question. I remember getting asked this one time by somebody and they looked as I did a lot of weird. I’m always looking for things. I’m always doing extra stuff, and it’s partly like, I really respect your approach. What can I do to learn to be better at this, to learn more about it, learn the background to it. I was always sort of just enthralled by the idea of not just knowing something but knowing how it worked and it can go into everything.
I used to take stuff apart all the time, and I remember one time a friend of mine, he asked me, what would you do if you were suddenly broke and homeless? Like, just like tomorrow something happens and that’s it. You lose your apartment, you’re out on the street. What do you do? And immediately I think, okay, well, I live out. I was in Toronto at the time, like, I’m not far. I can actually run or I can bike down to the Eaton Center. There’s buskers there. I want to have a guitar.
But if I spend the day, I actually know a few things I could do. And I got to make enough money. There’s a coffee time and it’s open 24 hours, and they’re okay with people staying there overnight. I just kind of went through this whole scene of, like, I’ll do that. And then I know this place that does second hand guitars. If I have to, I can just make enough to rent it. Whatever.
And in the end, he goes, that’s why you won’t be homeless tomorrow, because the moment you were thinking about it, you weren’t thinking shelter. You weren’t thinking, oh, goodness. What am I going to do? You immediately go into response mode of like, let’s start taking action. Let’s start thinking about things we can do. And that’s why I really dig your personality and your approach to stuff, because I think more people, it’s in them. But maybe they haven’t unlocked. And it doesn’t have to be, like, big, but there’s introducing adversity almost like an immunization, is something I think everybody needs.
We have this problem that people don’t prepare for it. But it seems to me like you are automatic, but you just think like, okay, what if it all went away right now? I had to start again right now. I bet in five minutes you’d be having a pretty solid plan.
Yeah, I could probably have one right now. Personally, what I would do is I would probably go down to the local library, get a library card, and I have access to the computer there for, I believe, an hour or two at a time, unless they changed it since the last time was there. I’d probably go back on the site like a worker similar Fiverr and over one to 2 hours a day or whenever I can get access to that, start working on that, find any sort of job that pays anything.
Just so I have some amount of money. So I don’t die from hunger or thirst. And then at the same time, we’ll try to find another place in which I can do either overnight work or some sort of office work where I don’t have a lot of supervision. So what I would do is, for example, let’s say a hotel clerk overnight, like, it’s the desk job where not a whole lot of people are coming in, not a whole lot of supervision. Maybe one or two other people there.
I’d find a way to make enough to have a laptop, and so I’d be working on both at the same time, building up the income on the other side of things to eventually make that job redunting because it would be for placing the income. So I’d essentially find a way to work on both at the same time while building up something where I’m more comfortable with, which would be the online stuff, but have something a little bit more stable to make sure that however long it takes on one front, I’ll be at least somewhat fine.
And that really is amazing to hear just that thought process that goes in another thing that I really like. And let’s take into Comet Fuel a bit. One of my favorite things about meeting and reading about an organization and about a team or a person, anybody, whether it’s just the fact that when you go there and you say this is what we do, okay, of course everybody has that, right? This is the stuff that I’d love for you to pay me to do. In effect, that’s what a lot of businesses have.
But you’re a rare treat in that. One of the most prominent things you have is this is what we don’t do and immediately going to the market saying this is literally my niche, and this is where we’re going to be fantastic for you. So it gets that out of the way. It probably saves a ton of, oh, Jarod, hey, now that we got you on the phone, can you do this? Can you do this? I like that approach.
Let’s talk about what Comet Fuel does and let’s dabble on that what we don’t do. I love that you’ve given good edges.
Yeah, sure. So in a nutshell, Comet Fuel is a boutique strategy first agency that helps exceptional businesses fuel growth through Google ads, PPC, as well as SEO. And I, at least, like to say without the typical agency but yes. In terms of what we don’t do, it’s something that I see as a bit of a moving target because it’s something that we find out more and more over time. But it’s very hard for the average consumer being a business owner marketing professional to look at an agency and know how are they different from everybody else.
Because a lot of the stuff sounds the same, especially if you don’t have hands on experience with that particular marketing channel. And so I’ve tried to, over time, understand what the greatest advantages as well as the greatest pitfalls are. And some of them are much harder to put into words than others. But I do try to make it as clear as possible, and whether that’s through content or whether that’s through a discovery call or through the proposal process of our style of doing things. It’s one of the reasons why I like going on podcast so much is because when people want to potentially work from, with us, I don’t say go look at our case studies.
Go look at our testimonials. Go look at whatever. I say, go listen to a couple of podcasts because that will give you a much greater understanding. You’ll be able to hear me. You’ll be able to see how we approach things. Do I talk technical? Am I talking about a bunch of stuff that you go, that’s all really basic. We’re way above that. Okay.
Maybe we’re not at the level that you need to go work with someone that’s at a higher level, or maybe look at you here. And you say, wow, I didn’t understand any of that. What are these metrics? What are these KPIs? What does that strategy even entail that I can’t even imagine how much that cost. Okay, then maybe we’re at a level that you’re not ready for it, it wouldn’t make sense for you to be for. So I try to push the content a lot, because no matter how much time and energy I put into what goes on the website, as much as it’s informative, there’s still always going to be some effect of like, hey, we’re pushing you to sign up to a discovery call, whereas on the content, it’s much softer and say, Listen, if you go, hey, I don’t like that guy.
Okay, great. Then don’t reach out and we’ve just saved each other a bunch of time and money.
I love that. It’s funny, too. Like a website is always like a resume like, you want to put everything in there, but then you realize you can’t because it won’t get read. And then it’s always this really intricate sort of balance of detail and specificity to making sure people know you’re not just kind of one thing, but another area as well. If we could talk about this is, who’s your ideal customer, like somebody that’s thinking? All right, I’m digging Jarod’s story. I’m digging your approach. Am I a good customer or a good client for you and the Comet Fuel team?
Yeah. So this is something that’s been a very interesting point of ours, which is that when I initially started, everyone talks about niche, usually in terms of here’s the industry that we work with, or here’s the one service that we provide. So they’re either the SEO company for whoever or they’re the dental marketing company or the dental SEO company, et cetera. And that’s how we kind of started off because my background was in law firm marketing. So I started off very specific with law firms at the time, contractors.
And then it kind of expanded to service based businesses. And then over time, what happened is we’re running into more and more instances where it’s like, okay, great. Here’s a national company, which now means we can’t even work in this industry anymore because we’re working with one business. So it doesn’t really necessarily make sense. And I would rather, in my opinion, work with one business that’s like, okay, great. Here’s $50,000 a month budget. We can be really aggressive. We don’t have to worry about this content writer cost $0.12 per instead of $0.10 per word.
Is that going to work? And we have much more ability in scale for growth compared to working with maybe 50 companies on the same industry at two grand a month, which would be double the amount. But the progress is much slower and the retention is lower, et cetera. So over time, what I started to look for was more of a personality. And what I forgot to just mention is also there’s a big difference between a small company industry and a large company in the industry in which they can’t really be compared.
So what we tend to look for is businesses who are usually at the seven figure or eight figure mark, or they’re below that. Usually they tend to be high margin, which their profit margins may be roughly the same as companies that do more money there. And usually they have an intermediate understanding of marketing and both business, so that if we go into a situation and we’re looking at the lifetime value of a customer and maybe where the lifetime value is $100 and it’s $10 a month, but it’s going to cost us $20 to acquire a customer, then we start to have discussions around gross margins, net margins, operating margins, burn rates, because if you’re taking a loss at first, how long are you actually going?
Do you have the cash flow to support this loss for how long? It would take six months to be profitable in this campaign. Can you actually afford that? Or did you just look at the lifetime number values and go, yeah, it’ll work out eventually. We’re able to have these discussions. It’s an indication that we’ll be able to move forward while also considering all aspects of the business, which is something that we like to do, because with my background of marketing, business and finance, I tend to bring that to the table.
And us being a boutique company, we only work with about 25 companies at a time, and so I’m still able to be very heavily involved, which I enjoy with the actual clients. So we can get on a call and we can talk at a very high level about the business as a whole, the numbers, et cetera. And so we can’t have those conversations, it tends not to really work out. So I’ve been making strides to be able to explain this in a much simpler way, but a lot of it comes down to, I can usually jump on a call with somebody and then understand through the mannerisms in their voice and through the way that they talk about their own business, whether or not there’s somebody who is what we’re looking for, and what we also try to look for is just companies that we actually want to see succeed, which is something I’m pretty big on.
If I don’t believe in the company, if I wouldn’t be a customer of the company, or if I’m not already a customer of the company, because sometimes that happens, then it’s just not somebody that I want to work with regardless of what their budget is.
It’s amazing in that discovery call when you really do walk through that and you get them to explore what’s your customer acquisition costs, what’s your current strategy? Because that’s often the biggest thing is just knowing where they are on their journey of taking on and you get to very quickly ask critical questions that they won’t ask themselves of, like, is this an area that is new to you? Are you comfortable? Do you feel like your YouTube spend is working out like, do you really need to go to seven networks?
Do you really think you need TikTok right now? You can ask questions like that that they are afraid to bring to their own team because they’re just sort of looking out at the world going, I need to unlock every channel I can. Meanwhile, it’s actually counter because they may be spending so much in each channel that CAC goes hugely high. And then long term value and customer long term value is sometimes not even measured correctly. It’s really cool when you can just come in and say, all right, where are you at right now?
Where do you need to be? What do you consider success at the end of this discussion today?
Yeah. There’s a couple of really core questions that really break it down. And one of those when you mention, how many marketing channels are on and whatnot. A really nice question I like to ask is, how are you tracking Omnichannel now? A lot of that is honestly built into Google Analytics. We can be very simple as. Okay, great. Someone clicked onto Google Ad converted on Facebook. And now depending on what sort of attribution model you’re using will depend on how much money actually gets attributed to each channel.
If I’m talking to someone that doesn’t understand that, then that can sometimes be a really big pain when we’re running through a Google campaign and it’s, hey, why is Google only made $20,000 in revenue this month?
And we’re looking at, yes, but your Facebook remarketing has recaptured the people from Google, which we can see through analytics or an Omnichannel, two of one is being used. And if you look at it from a first quick perspective, Google Ads has brought in 80,000 revenue. If you look at it from a last click perspective, it’s brought in 20. If we look at it from this perspective, et cetera. And then do you understand how to really model that and understand that and look at that and allocate budget accordingly?
Or is it just very binary with what I see in the Google Analytics dashboard or the Google Ads dashboard? Is it? And okay, great. Let’s turn it off and then not realize that how it’s going to affect the Facebook ads because the Facebook ads were making $60,000 a month in revenue because they were remarketing to the targeted Google audience.
Is there a common set of problems that maybe we can try to unpack for people because if they look into their own current strategy or their current tactical approach to stuff, there’s probably some really fast things that we could love to light people up and have them go like, oh, man, I’m totally doing that.
Yeah. So what’s kind of funny is a lot of what I see usually I can go into almost any account of any size of business, of any marketing sophistication and usually find one or two basic things that aren’t aligned. Not because people aren’t smart enough to notice that, but usually when you become used to something, you stop reanalyzing every little thing. But when someone new comes into it, they have to look at everything they need that full perspective of everything that’s going on. So there’s a couple of things that I’ll see.
One, very basic conversion tracking needs to be set up within Google Ads. A lot of people that are experienced marketers will have at least the basic set up. But SEO isn’t always tracked. Those goals aren’t always pulled back into Google Analytics, where you have a central dashboard tracking everything from every channel together. Also tracking various types of engagement. Okay, great. You’re an e-commerce store. Somebody bought. Well, what happened in that process? How many people that clicked on this keyword versus that keyword added the product to the cart, versus made it to part way through the checkout page or whatever it may be.
So you can see where that breakdown is and not just go, okay, people from this keyword convert at 2%. People from this keyword convert at 1%. Let’s turn off the 1% and spend more on the 2% where maybe you realize that the people that convert at 1%, a lot of them make it to the final checkout page, and then they stop because it turns out the coupon code that you’re promoting to your ads was no longer valid. About three months ago. People are really frustrated because they enjoyed the deal, and that’s why they’re not converting because they feel so that they’ve been cheated.
When they expected something to be $70, they get it to the end of the car and say, hey, coupon Invalid. Please pay us $100 or whatever it may be. So really tracking everything end to end, if possible, gives you much more clear perspective as to where the breakdown is and not just where do we make money? Where do we not? For lead generation businesses, what you’re able to do for most, I would assume most marketing channels, I can’t say for all, but I know for Google Ads you can. For SEO is a lot more difficult.
It’s just how search works. But for Google Ads, you can pull in offline conversion, and you can pull that and tie that into your actual funnel stages as well. And so what you’re able to see is not just who filled out our lead capture form, whether you’re a software company going after a demo or whether you’re a service based business, going after some sort of consultation or whatever it may be, is what percentage of these people actually showed up to the demo or consultation, what percentage of them actually made it to the next step?
And then paid us whatever your funnel looks like. We are able to do is use a hidden form field to capture URL parameters, such as the GCLID, which is the unique tracking code that Google uses. And then when someone makes it through your funnel, export that into a CSV, upload it back into Google Ads, and then retroactively, you can go, which of these clicks actually went to customers and go, okay, great. Keyword A converts at 12%, but only 1% of people actually convert to customers where keyword B converts at 2%, but 50% of people convert to customers.
Clearly, one of those is way better, but you would only know that by pulling everything in end to end. So that’s one thing on conversion tracking. The other thing that I’ll see a lot, which I find annoying as a consumer. And so it’s one of the biggest things I look for for anybody that is e-commerce or software related or online education related specifically is stop remarketing to existing customers, especially if you’re on some sort of retainer like a software. I can’t tell you how many times I am using a software, and then I get an ad to sign up for a free trial of things, something that I already pay monthly or yearly for.
Very easily, even if it’s on the back end. Whatever page people log into. If they make it to the back end, have your Google Analytics tag on there with same property, and then just add that as an exclusion to your remarketing list. So people who have logged in are no longer on that remarketing list. If it’s e-commerce and you sell a product. Depending on what you sell, it can be too complicated to do this if you sell a bunch of stuff that people might buy again the next day or like, if you’re Amazon, it’s impossible to do it.
But if you sell a couple of products, let’s say you sell shampoo. How long does it take your average user to go through a bottle of shampoo? Let’s say it takes two weeks. Okay, great. If someone buys today, don’t remarket them for two weeks. If you want to remarket people over the course of two weeks include only people who have been to the website who have not purchased within the past two weeks. After that point, you can remarket to people to get them to try and buy again.
Simple things like this can save a lot of time and money. It can save money on clicks. It can save money on, especially if you’re doing any CPM bidding where you’re just paying per impression, it can save a lot of money there, but it just makes the data a lot cleaner. And I would say those are some of the easiest things to fix. But I also see in, like, 90% of the accounts that I look at.
I’m with you on this pet peeve, because every once in a while I’ll buy something, and it’s a very specific product from a very specific company that is not a repeat buy, and there’s no upsells beyond it. I did it. I literally am the perfect conversion. And then for two days after I’m getting ads for the thing that I literally bought, it just blows my mind. I’m like, sometimes just because I want to punish them a little bit more, I click the ad just like, I’m going to spend your CPMs then.
If you’re going to keep blowing up your own marketing budget because you failed to acknowledge that I completed the conversion. But it is easy, I guess, for folks to just think of it as like, we’re going to remarket and retarget. That’s not the goal. It’s like the quality of the retargeting because every penny spent becomes dollars. And then hundreds of dollars then thousands of dollars when you get to any kind of scale. When you go to a company and they’re ready to engage you, Jarod. How often do you go in?
And like you said, they think they’re doing okay, but they’re not questioning stuff like that. I would imagine it’s a pretty, it’s an easy hit. And people probably appreciate because they don’t have time to go get really good at this stuff. They’re just like, I’ve got Omnichannel marketing, I’m doing. I can’t know every single one through and through.
Yeah, I would say it’s probably 95% of the time, and we probably do it, too. I’m sure there’s tons of stuff within our processes that we just haven’t noticed that could be done better just because we’re used to the same thing and doing it the same way every time that it’s become automatic. A lot of it, in my opinion, is just having a new perspective kind of come in and take a look at things and go, why is this like this and someone go, oh, well, I never actually thought about that.
We set the remarketing list because we needed to get it done. So we just set it up and ran with it, and we saw that it was working. And so nothing in our tool said that, hey, this remarking list is performing under average, so we need to take a closer look at it. So it just kind of sat there. But one of the good things of the economies of scale is that if you’re spending a million dollars a month in ads, getting the same result while being able to lower your budget by 1% is quite significant.
That’s an additional employee that you could’ve hired by somebody potentially spending five minutes looking at your account. I was just looking at an account the other day that spends about $10,000 a day or so. Their goal is to kind of scale that to about ten times of what they’re doing now throughout Omnichannel, throughout Google Ads, probably about tripling what they’re doing now. And that was one of the things I saw was like, wow, you have such really sophisticated campaigns. There’s so much going on here a lot of this is functioning incredibly well to the point where I’m kind of jealous of it because I know internally that’s not their background.
And I’m like, how are you doing this? Well, in some of these areas without a background in this, like, this is really impressive. And then I go through and like, oh, here’s a really easy way that you can improve everything they’re doing, probably across not just one channel. But you probably use the same list across all these other channels because the list were created through Google Analytics, pulled in through Google Ads. And I have to assume most channels would also integrate with Google Analytics pretty well.
And so you’re probably using the same remarketing tactics. And if it doesn’t pull in, you’re kind of making them the same way, so that one observation could have saved a whole bunch of money across every channel, just kind of regardless of what’s just being seen in ads. So it’s quite common. And I don’t think it’s necessarily that someone intentionally overlooks on it. It becomes so automatic to see the same thing every day that a new perspective is going to question things. It’s going to take a little bit of closer look, because that understanding of how everything is set up, how everything works has to be built from the ground up.
Yeah. I think the new phrase we could always use is there’s no greater lie than one batch by Google Analytics. If you dig deep enough into those dashboards, you can put together some charts that always go up and to the right. But as you said, it’s the optimizations that especially at scale, they can really, really have a material effect, first of all, on just the cost. But just the efficiency, right? Conversion rates. And that’s one thing that people often forget is when we talk about conversion rates, we’re talking about 1% to 4%.
So if you’re spending money on 96% that aren’t going to convert, that 4% has got to count. And if you have to scale to continue to reach that four to five, like, there’s no way to get to 20% conversion. You just have to get really good at optimizing to scale to get to 4% with a larger push, right?
Within certain industries. And it also depends on what your offer is. For e-commerce direct transaction, Yes. For service based or lead generation, generally looking for 10 to 20%. Some of the accounts we’re working on will push 50-60% just because it’s been refined over such a long period of time. But what you’re looking for is not only a conversion rate, but anything that’s a percentage based is going to always be a very misleading metric. Anything that is an average or a percentage needs way more context for it to be valuable to you, because we’re not just looking for conversions.
We’re looking for quality conversions. Now, obviously, with something like e-commerce, you’re going to be able to see what the revenue was made or revenue wasn’t made. For lead gen, this is one of the big pitfalls is, okay, great. A conversion happened.
Let’s spend more money here because that’s not necessarily a quality conversion or one that’s going to be more profitable. And so looking at the bigger picture in those instances, such as okay, great. It’s a construction business, and they have a higher conversion rate in this area. But that area is 50 miles north. And so what happens is they’re going to have to increase their bids to account for travel time. They’re going to be able to do less jobs in a day because they’re further away from where most of their jobs are.
And not only that, but they’re probably going to be bidding higher than their local competitors who don’t have to factor in the travel costs nearly as much. They’re less likely to win those jobs in the first place. So even though Location B has a 15% higher cost per conversion, it’s actually more profitable to spend more money here because the bids are going to be lower. It’s going to be faster and easier for them to get there. So it’s less resources on their end. They’re more well known in this local area.
This is where the corporate headquarters are, et cetera.
If anybody doesn’t hire you on the spot from just your explanation of that, then they’re really not thinking about their priorities, right? Because again, I love this. The thought process that goes into the approach is really important. I work with a lot of folks that you can’t see outside of, I just need to create a chart so that every Monday, I’ve got something that goes up and to the right, and we fall victim to that. That becomes the thing you measure. And it’s really tough because like having gone through work with ads and I’ve used Facebook Ads as my primary channel for my coffee company.
And if you don’t measure it right, I’ll say I’ll spend $400 on an ad which is very simple small thing. Like first thing, I spent my 1st $400 on an ad and conversion rate was really cool. And I made all of my money back with no problem at all. And then you go and you toss another $400 at that with the same ad and then you get like, 3% conversion. I’m like, okay, so if I were to look at one versus the other, it’s not going to be a good sampling.
If I take the average, it’s really going to water it all down. But then like you said, what if I took the existing customers and then I did stuff like retargeting close to the cart customers and I did retargeting. And then I see that. And then customers that buy. I send a follow up three weeks later because I know they’re going to run out of coffee and give them a coupon that shows up in their mailbox three weeks after they buy and the conversion rates are incredible.
There’s like, that approach now that I tested them like, okay, this is where I know if I can get them to the checkout and get them to click buy. I know I’ve got good follow on and I’ve got good other things, and there’s physical retargeting. Actually, I’d actually love to get your thoughts on that one. When does physical remarketing and retargeting come into play with companies?
So to what extent if you can define that a little bit more?
Yeah. So like, sort of the postcards like a real material follow up because I get it when I shoot a recent guest on. She was fantastic. Michelle Seiler Tucker, and I have her book on my shelf here because I just read it and she sends, like, a postcard, a handwritten postcard. And I’m like, this is awesome. Even if somebody gets a service to write the handwritten postcard, it doesn’t sends me to then go back and double check your website and find out when the next book is coming out or find it when the next thing is coming.
Where do you get involved in that? I guess first I should ask Jarod, and where do you find that being effective?
Yeah. So difficult question to answer for that do we get involved. Because I try to be very specific about what we do, but at the same time, try to be as much of an asset as possible with clients. So in terms of do we provide that service? No.
But we consult with clients about a ton of different marketing channels and give our feedback where we can. So for something like that, I would look at it from a couple of different perspectives. One would be retention because there are some things that you just can’t measure, and those tend to be some of the most profitable things out there. The reason being is that everybody is way too focused on being data driven to the point where it’s causing a lot more harm than good. And so, in my opinion, it’s much better to be data informed, which is more complicated.
There’s more pushback. It’s harder to prove things, but in terms of being people, I think it performs better. Now on the matter of being more data informed, I know that if I take a more personalized approach, it’s going to drive a better experience, even if people don’t outright tell me that. For example, we were working with a company that we’re no longer working with, and they were an e-commerce company, and we kept finding various small issues, sometimes major issues with various aspects of the business that we were genuinely concerned about.
I’ll do this for some clients, but I never tell them that I do. So I went to their site and I ordered one of their products. So now I’m on their actual post sale process, and I get to see everything end to end. So the email marketing, very generic, and this is a product that is something where there’s not a whole lot of, a lot of the people buying are not generally informed about it and are kind of hesitant to try it. And so there wasn’t a whole lot of education happening in the email or anything special for being a new customer.
The SMS messaging was very boring and kind of generic. As a new customer, I didn’t feel any different than somebody who has bought a thousand times before. I didn’t feel as though there’s anything really standing out about this. And then I got the package in the mail and it was a general, like, flat rate envelope. I completely forgot what I ordered at the time. So I was like, what is this? I opened it up and the products inside. There’s no box, there’s no branding. There’s not only that, but the way that the product was described on the website didn’t really seem to be aligned with what I got.
And also the one that I ordered was the wrong time, but with the right label on it. And so from end to end, it was just a completely poor experience where it’s one of the big things as to why we no longer work with them is that I would never buy from that company again. It was just such a poor experience, and they’re not necessarily going to get that feedback from people because it’s just easier to go. Okay, great. That’s $20, whatever. That was a waste. I just won’t order from here again.
And so just by sending something like a handmade postcard, you won’t necessarily be able to track like people are. I mean, you can put tracking codes like oh, they’re ordering more. Maybe you A/B test, like, do people order more? We send this versus we don’t. And that’s all fine. But I know that long term way pass being able to easily measure this over the course of several years. People are probably more likely to tell their friends about me. If I’m sending out handwritten postcards, people are more likely to probably order for longer periods of time, which is harder to track, especially when you have so many different touch points happening and so many different.
Was it the emails? Was it the events that we’re doing? Was it the TV et cetera? And so for something like that, I would know it would probably work out in the long term. But for smaller businesses that have to be much more careful with every dollar that they spend, it’s something that would be very cost conscientious about because it’s something that maybe it helps over the course of three to five years, a lot. But maybe it slightly increases orders over the course of, like a year or two where it’s very hard to measure what’s happening.
So be a little bit careful there. But I always like to see how things can be tracked as much as possible, such as. Okay, great. We can track from a data perspective, when was this sent out? Roughly when they would have received it? And when was their next order compared to people that haven’t sent to sell? If you have enough customers, you can do an actual split test, make sure you’re actually running the test properly and you have enough that you can actually get a real sample size. Otherwise it’s just going to be data that doesn’t really mean anything.
But also, if you put a special coupon code, maybe on that, put a special maybe a website link, so you can track how many people actually visit from that website, or if you have a customer support number where it’s like, oh, thanks so much for your first ever order. We’d love if you would call us directly and even we’re not available, leave us a voicemail. Let us know what you felt about it. Or here’s an email that you can respond to, et cetera.
How many people actually contact that specific email or call that specific number? CallRail will cost you an extra dollar a month or Twilio, if you have a more technical background, it will be a lot cheaper. So I think it’s a good idea. I think it’s one of those things really difficult to track in the long term. And because of that, it’s probably incredibly profitable. But for a lot of businesses, that’s where it also becomes very scary when they go, okay, great. This is a very limited marketing budget.
How do I explain to myself or how do I explain to my boss that this is working? Sometimes you can’t. And a lot of that comes down to the data-informed side of things, which is that reasonably of the ten different coffee brands that maybe they’ve tried within the past year, how many of them have personally reached out to them?
Yeah, it’s funny. And it becomes a thing of measure what matters. And also, like you said, there’s the personalization. There’s the period of time over which it would be effective. I just need to get people and get that first customers and then work on the customer delight experience from that point forward’ there’s no point in like I said, thinking about how do I retain an 18 month customer when I have zero customers or 20 customers? I’m like, I just need to get to 100 customers, and then we can begin to backfill and do some of that post sales delighting type of thing.
And again, using data and anecdotal information to be able to inform that like you said, it’s data driven. It’s just been washed out as a phrase because people say, oh, we’re data driven, like, I can take any set of data and make it tell the story that I want to. But are you actually merging it with true anecdotal experience? And then, like I said, data informed as a much better thing. On the Google side of things, and I guess in general, Google is a moving target.
Everything is. We all saw the introduction of the Core Web Vitals in around July timeframe that kicked in leading up to it. Everybody was freaking out because they’re like, I’m going to get punished for my web speed and it’s going to affect my search ranking results. Is this going to affect my SEO and my ability to do CPMs? The irony was the blog from Google about Core Web Vitals fails Core Web Vitals, like the actual product blog from Google doesn’t pass their own test. So number one, is it real as a worry?
And number two, how do you stay on top of things like that? I would assume, Jarod, that nothing is done in your world. We have to keep revisiting. Am I right on that assumption?
Yeah, you’re absolutely correct. So for a little bit of context in 2018, maybe 2019. Don’t quote me on that. Google announced, I believe again, don’t quote me on this. It was the only time they’ve announced how many updates they’ve made to their search algorithms over the course of a year. And it was over 3500 changes over the course of a year. Most of these changes will go completely unnoticed. If you were to use a range tracking tool, which if you use a phone and we don’t, nowadays. It’s not going to be the end of the world.
But if you look and you see that fluctuation, we go from anywhere from five to three, depending on the day. You’re not going to be able to look at that normal fluctuation go, what happened? Where? Oh, maybe that was a Google update. And that’s why we’re now four more often than we were five. Or maybe it was just that you did something and then the way that Google’s indexes work is that they can come and crawl your website and then they render different parts of the website at different times.
It takes anyone with a technical background knows it’s much easier to parse HTML than is JavaScript. It’s going to take a lot longer with how much code is on websites nowadays. It’s going to take Google a long time to understand that long time in terms of Google. They just crawled half the way. It takes time to do that. And when you look at tiered indexes and when you look at ranking and reranking, look at all the sophistication that’s built in. It’s really hard to understand exactly what every little nuance is and what did or did not affect you.
What I’ve learned over the past ten years is that there have been very few updates that I have been worried with for the types of businesses that we work with, which is not something that are in very dangerous niches. And what I mean by that is your money, your life type stuff like if you’re in weight loss, if you’re in a very, if you provide a lot of financial information, especially on the more sketchier side of things like crypto, penny stock stuff that tends to be pump-and-dump happening all the time. And that kind of stuff like you’re, a lot of medical advice, things like that are very scrutinized.
Those tend to see the biggest fluctuations also on the affiliate marketing side of stuff which I have various sites in that those are always wildly fluctuating. But the average business I see barely move unless something has been done wrong over a long period of time. In which case then we’ll get a little bit nervous where sometimes we’ll be working with a client that has done some sketchy stuff in the past for links, and every time that there’s a core algorithm update, it’s like, well, this tank, who knows it’s possible?
Stuff that you did years ago can really come back to bite you. Which is why I usually recommend people be very careful with SEO much more than any other marketing channel, because literally stuff that you did five or six years ago could come back and punish you tomorrow. So when it comes to specifically Core Web Vitals. We all know that we need fast websites. It’s not rocket size. If your website takes 20 seconds to load, nobody wants to buy from you. This has been known for years.
I think 2014 or 2015. A study was done that showed the average person like 40% of people bounce if your website takes more than 3 seconds to load on a mobile. Page speed has been important for UX for a long time. In terms of getting past Google scores. It’s something I haven’t really worried about too much like it’s something where it’s like we do want to try as best as possible. Now that Google has officially made it a ranking factor, is trying to be in the good zone as much as possible, but also page speed is a very complex topic where it also depends on the connection that people are using the browser that they’re using.
How it’s actually being rendered will affect the user apart from how it looks at Google. And there was a point in time where it was just page speed insights. I took a flat HTML site that I built that was very clean code that loaded in .2 seconds based on every test you’d ever run. If you load it in mobile or your desktop, it would always load instantly, and it had like a 12 out of 100 and then a much slower version of that site. Objectively like you try to visit, it would take about a second and a second and a half to load, would have like an 80.
When it comes to speed, I focus much more on the UX side of things than I focus on the Google side of things. And realistically, if everybody else in your industry that is also ranking for the same terms as you loads in 4 seconds and you load in three. And Google says that your scores are bad. Chances are there’s a worse. So in terms of that factor, you’re winning. How much of an impact of that factor is how heavily weighted it is.
If you want to dive into the algorithm side of things, it’s always a question how much it affects on a ranking versus a reranking basis. There’s always questions in there. Maybe there’s a little bit more detail in the patents. Or if you look at Stanford, has a lot of documents that will detail how algorithms can work just because that’s how they can work doesn’t mean they’re necessarily in use. But for something like Core Web Vitals specifically, it’s something I went, okay, cool. That’s interesting. And then just carry it on about my day and then look at the stores when they come into search console.
But aside from that, I didn’t really worry about that. The only things that I’ve really ever have to worry about with Google is when Penguin 4.0 came out in 2018. I believe that was something that had been anticipated for quite a few years, and so I was very interested to see what was going to happen with that, because Google went from punishing you for bad links to being able to ignore bad links, which made things both more difficult and easier at the same time.
Right.
And then where I’m much more concerned right now is on the Data Privacy things.
We just saw Facebook. It absolutely destroyed with iOS 14, where you might be getting the same result. But now you’re only being able to track, like, 70% or 80% of the conversions, right? Google was originally going to get rid of third party cookies in 2022. They now push that off to mid 2023. And with that, the question is, well, if they don’t find out a solution why remarketing has gone because they haven’t found a solution for that, FLOC or the Federated learning of Cohorts is heavily disputed.
WordPress is saying they’re going to block it by default. Google has a lot of stuff that they need to do right now. There’s very little insight as to what the advertising world will look like in terms of digital. Come here, mid 2023, assuming that the deadline doesn’t move again. And out of everything that’s happened within the past couple of years, that’s the only one that I’m genuinely nervous and hesitant about, because I think that one’s going to be tough for the advertising world, but also even tougher for the people who are paying advertisers who aren’t marketers themselves.
They don’t necessarily have the acumen to understand that you might be getting the same result, even though we can only make a report on 80% to 90 of what it was before, especially for those accounts that are just barely making it through where they need to be. That may now show that they’re underperforming below their baseline, even though that’s the same. In short, Core Web Vitals, whatever like it’s something, not really too worried about it. I’m more concerned about the Data Privacy changes we’re seeing right now.
Yeah. It’s amazing that you think about that. When I saw what’s potentially and it could happen both quickly and slowly in weird ways. And Google, if there’s legislative stuff that comes down, you can see very rapid, strange changes, because part of the problem is that they’re effectively the only game in town as far as the major game in town. Facebook obviously same story. They’ve got a significant presence. These are the champions of ad media. It used to be the signs you drive by on the highway, and it’s long gone now, right?
No one does TV advertising the same way anymore. If we see this some shift, the trick is what’s on the other side of it, we went from print media to television media and radio media like you got what the change would mean. You got how you could measure it. This is the first potential change where we have no idea what’s on the other side of it. We are almost taking it back to the billboards where you’re just saying, hey, I see 20,000 cars drive by this an hour.
I can’t tell you what the cars are, what the demographics are, the people driving them. But I can tell you that 20,000 cars drive by it every hour. That’s all we’re going to be that level of lack of knowledge on the digital front, which is kind of weird.
Yeah. There’s a big consumer movement towards massively limiting data to the point where some of the more, I would say extreme groups want there essentially to be no data, no tracking like you shouldn’t know who does or does not purchase from your own website, even first party tracking, let alone third party tracking. And what makes it quite challenging is things like view through and click through conversions, in which case, you might find that a YouTube video that you’re running doesn’t convince anybody to convert. But what it does do is help educate people of your brand.
And when you look over a 90-day period, you can see that people who viewed this ad ended up more likely in a different segment that you’re tracking? Or are they more likely to engage with your ads on another platform? And then without that, you might just assume, okay, well, YouTube doesn’t work. So let me turn that off completely. So on one hand, allegedly, by the way, before, I don’t want to stand alone bills for everybody. But allegedly, from the last I’ve heard Google saying that FLOC would have about 95% of the same performance as of right now.
But what people are nervous about is that you don’t really know until you know, and if you were to know it was only going to be 60% the same, you definitely wouldn’t say that, because then everybody would freak out. And Google makes about $140,000,000,000 a year from just ads, I believe. So, there’s a very heavy incentive for them to get this as right as possible. But what we might see is that ad costs may actually go down because the tracking is less there. So people are going to be less likely to spend as much money.
And so that’s also the potential counterpoint to that. Which is that, okay, great. Well, if you can only track things 90% as well, we want to only spend 90% as much as we were per click or per impression as we were beforehand to kind of try and even that out. I think it’s a bit of a good time. Some of the changes are needed. Data is kind of like the Wild Wild West right now, but I am fearful that we might go from very far in one direction, which is collect any sort of data you want.
Like, no one is really going to know how it works unless they really dive into it. No one knows what you’re collecting. Some of it’s pretty shady. Like is my smart home device, like listening to me right now and transmitting that to a humans reading that is potentially personal information, et cetera. To the other side of things, which may be very little data, in which case, honestly, it’ll hurt the smaller businesses out of anyone. Target can afford to spend $100 million on an advertising campaign and go, you know what people know our name.
They’re going to buy from us, a small company that no one’s ever heard of needs a lot more data in order to know that this is actually working for them to use that money effectively. So in my opinion, is going to hurt the smaller businesses and the smaller advertisers more. Unfortunately, which is something that I don’t see being talked about a whole lot.
Yes, that’s a tough one. And it’s funny, like the assistants listening to us. People, often, I want to do just a podcast with nothing. Just every ten minutes, just say, Xbox turn off, Amazon order, you squeeze those things in. And that’s the stuff that I dislike. I don’t mind retargeting for ads. I kind of know what’s going on if I need, I use VPNs for a variety of just like, for web testing and for just general safety as I move around in strange Wi-Fi. I do stuff like that. And I know it will lock down some of that, but I accept that retargeting is a thing and cookie tracking is a thing and it will occur.
I know how the machine works, so I don’t mind. Like I said, there’s no listening assistance in my entire house for a reason. I don’t like that part of it, but yeah, I’m with you. This is kind of a wild time that’s ahead. And look for folks that are listening now, it reminds you that very few people are going to care as much about this as what you and folks like you are doing, Jarod. This is why it’s good to reach out to folks that do this.
That’s your focus, because my internal team, I can’t afford to have them care this hard about it. I need them to be good at knowing my business and then taking it to this is why comment feels important. And I think people got to head there. All, of course, have links to the website, and people should definitely reach out because this is the time now to leverage this capability. We’re still in a very weird spot as far as human movement in the world. So all of the traditional media, all of the traditional approaches, they got wiped off the map 18 months ago, and they are not coming back.
And this is the digital forefront. We thought the digital forefront happened already, but this is a chance more people don’t have to go back to work. They can start their own side hustle, they can use you and use the techniques that you’ve got, and they can unlock a really cool new feature for themselves and their families and their organizations. I’m excited in a weird way of like how strange it’s been because I want to find the good in all the craziness that’s happened. It’s out there.
It’s out there somewhere. Obviously, I would trade every positive outcome to not have to have the world go through what we’ve gone through. But, it’s happened. Like, let’s try and find something good out of it.
Yeah. And I mean, luckily, what it has done on the good side is, as you mentioned, from the technology side, it has pushed a lot of people to embrace technology. And not only that, realize how inexpensive a lot of it is. Go back 15, 20 years and okay, great. You want a basic website? Every tiny, every character had to be coded from scratch on more archaic systems, with a lot less automations and automatic press tab. And it finishes the line of code for you, et cetera.
So, okay, great. You want a really basic website, please pay me $15,000, $20,000. And now that same really basic website, you can just sign up to WordPress, which is free and open source, and then you select a theme or Squarespace, Wix, et cetera. Where if you’re looking for something basic, great, that cost is gone. So many businesses throughout the past year, almost two now have developed like, apps. I got contacted by a laundry mat, and they were like, hey, we just developed this app. And so now set people coming to our laundry mat.
We now have TaskRabbit like contractors especially. Basically the Uber of laundry. Locally, we just go to their house, we pick it up, and then they bring it to the laundry mat. They put in the machine, and then it runs its cycle. And when it’s done, somebody else comes and they bring it back there’s like a butcher shop in New York City that I can’t remember the name, but they absolutely exploded in growth, and they had to develop, like, an online ordering system and so many restaurants around me.
I’m in New Hampshire, which is not the most tech friendly place in the world. There was like, ten places that we would order from, because these are places that we can order online from.
Great. Aside from Uber Eats and DoorDash and whatnot. And almost everybody has their online ordering figured out. They realized that, oh, this isn’t this thing that has to be built from scratch. It’s going to cost tens of thousands of dollars, like it did when we looked into it ten years ago. But now our hand is being forced. Now we have to find a way to do it and a way to do it cost effectively. And, oh, we don’t have to build this from scratch. There’s literally an API that cost $5 a month that has already built the technology for us.
We just need someone to build us a nice looking interface for it.
It’s an amazing thing to watch occur, so it’s not slowing down. There will be more changes like this. And this is why, as I said, go to the experts. So there you go, Jarod Spiewak. What’s the best way if folks want to reach you? Of course they can go to cometfuel.com, if they could find out about you and the team if they wanted to reach out personally, what’s the top way to find you?
Yeah. So if you want to reach out personally, I’d recommend connecting with me on LinkedIn. And what I’m trying to do is slowly over time. When I have time is build up my YouTube channel. So if you just look up Jarod Spiewak on YouTube, there’s not much on there right now, but I am trying to make a much bigger push for it, so I’d really appreciate anybody engaging with me there.
I like your agency is Devon. That was really. But your contact is really cool. Like you said, we can look at websites all we want. Just spend some time with the person. And it’s been a real pleasure to learn from you today. And folks, inevitably, they should lean in because this is the kind of stuff. That’s why I love podcasting so much more than just like, even going long form too. Everybody said to me, like, don’t go long form. Like people don’t have the attention for over 30 minutes.
The data has not proven that out. I can tell you without a doubt that being longer for number one, list ability is higher. And number two, every single person has a can set of responses for the first 20 to 30 minutes. And after that, you’re actually having a real personal discussion with somebody. And it’s cool because they get to hear your nuances. Your character comes out, and it’s so much more effective than just like, here’s the three things that we do really well, I’m like they could go to your website and find that out.
This is why I love going longer. Well, if I’m lucky, I’ll be a client as well someday soon. So with that, Jarod Spiewak, thanks very much.
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