Episode Transcript
[00:00:07] Speaker A: Hey there. Welcome back to Rogue startups. I'm Craig Hewitt. Today I'm super excited to share a conversation with Asia Arangio from Demand Maven. You may remember Asia way back from episode 198 where we talked all about super deep marketing tactics and strategies. Today. Catching up with Asia. Asia, because it's been a while, a couple of years since she's been on the show, but she's one of my favorite marketing people to talk to, and I think you'll see why after digging into this episode. She talks all about customer research and the importance that knowing deeply your customer makes on your marketing efforts and how it can transform your customer acquisition strategy and results. I hope you enjoy this conversation with Asia Arangio.
Asia, it's been like, I don't know, two and a half years since we talked. So it's great to connect for folks who follow the show. We did. I think we called Marketing 2.0 a few years ago, which was a super deep dive into kind of more advanced aspects of marketing anything today, we'll kind of catch up because I'd love to hear about you and the biz and kind of talk some shop around marketing and customer acquisition.
[00:01:15] Speaker B: Yeah, I'm so pumped. Yes, I was looking at all the emails back and forth last time and 2019, which is like we are that's four years ago. Yeah, we are a different world, different people and different businesses. Like, it's like at every tier.
[00:01:32] Speaker A: Yeah, totally.
Well, aside from more gray hair and COVID and all of this that are past us, tell me what's going on with Demand Maven. Right, because I've known of what you've done for a long time, but I'm sure a lot has changed since we talked last. So where are you all today?
[00:01:52] Speaker B: Yeah, it's interesting. A lot of the work that we do now is it's very close and similar to what we have always done. I think the way that we have executed and delivered is to us at least night and day, different. So we still work with SaaS and software companies still very much have a soft spot, of course, for all of our bootstrap founders, all of our indie funded founders. And we also are taking on larger and larger projects, moving into the enterprise and mid market spaces. And when we do the work that we do now, it's really more in alignment with growth and then also strategy and research development. So when we are working with another founder or a team or ahead of marketing or ahead of product, it's either in the context of identifying what growth opportunities exist within the organization and then also helping them identify ways to improve growth. Growth specific to a KPI in the organization. So this could be acquisition, activation, retention, expansion. This could be operations or process driven. And then there's also the work that we've always done. We've just never, I think, doubled down, so to speak, on providing it as such an overt service, which is really just research. And I say research like, oh, just research, but there's product research, there's UX research, there's customer research, there's audience research, there's interviews, and then there's surveys. And I wouldn't say we have perfected the craft of research, but the type of work that we do now is so much more in that arena. In addition to growth, of course we still work within the context and capacities of marketing. I would say we really aren't the execution agency today.
It's so interesting. We've gone back and forth on like, do we become an agency, do we not become an agency? But it seems like there's still so much value to provide in some of the more, I would say, like qualitative aspects and also quantitative analysis. So like analyzing product analytics, analyzing the performance of the business. Those are really the areas now that we're digging into. And it's been a lot of fun. It's also been really interesting to see the natural progression. The conversations we have now are not limited to marketing. They really expand across the whole function and it's pretty wild. And then also we get to see so much more as well, both on the smaller side of SaaS and then also on the very high volume, high scale side.
[00:04:39] Speaker A: So when you talk about research and growth, I'm hesitating because I don't want to say like, my BS detector goes off, but I'm cynical. How about I'll say that right, I'm cynical and you and I have talked and I'm always you say, Craig, go talk to your customers. And I'll say, I am my customer, I don't need to talk to my customers. We're six years into this. I kind of know what we're doing. But I think it's not true, right? So when you hear that from a founder, what do you say to kind of position what you're doing and the value of research, whether someone works with you all or does it themselves? What is it that an existing company that's a few years in has a pretty decent degree of product market fit?
What's the place for customer and product and market research for not a new company, but that's at a million or.
[00:05:30] Speaker B: Two or five, it's 100% gaps. It has everything to do with every possible potential gap that prevents a customer from saying yes, there's at least eight yeses a customer has to give you in order for them to stay and remain and continue to be a customer, and a few more if they are going to expand in terms of revenue. And what I typically say to folks in that arena is customers certainly can't tell you exactly what to do to your business to grow it. That's our job, or in this particular case, the founder or the CEO's job. But what they can tell you is what the gap is and what's the blocker, what's the thing that prevents them from expanding from growing their account, from staying longer than six months or a year.
I was working with a company that had never done any type of customer research. And it was a very similar scenario where it's like, well, I am the customer. I know what all the things are. I know what to expect and what to anticipate. And where there is customer research, there was also quantitative analysis. So when we actually peeled back the layers of the business and looked at its performance, we found that the customers actually didn't retain longer than six months. But all of the other numbers pointed to health, like, oh, this is a healthy business.
What was interesting, because they made the assumption that, oh, well, because our churn is relatively low and all these other KPIs and things that everything was fine, but actually they literally have to replace more than half of their customer base every six months. Puts a lot of pressure on marketing.
And when talking to the founder, I was like, well, why are customers churn? Rate might be fine, but why do they leave after six months? And it was like, Well, I don't know. They just stop using it. And it was like, okay, well, the most obvious KPI for growth here is going to be having the customer retain longer and also increasing LTV average revenue per account. And the only way to do that is to talk to the customers, to survey them, to get qualitative insight and then mapping it back to quantitative insight and then deciding from there what direction you want to go. Turns out there's a lot of assumptions made about how these customers ultimately want to engage in a product like this and then also what their other potential needs are. And the other thing I'll say is when people hire a product, I mean, we talk a lot about jobs to be done. That's actually one of the core frameworks and approaches that we use to our research.
But what is 100% true? Always in every single we have conducted thousands of interviews and we have worked in dozens of scenarios with software companies. Customers hire products for an initial job, and then they undoubtedly have a second, third, and fourth job that they want to accomplish next.
[00:08:24] Speaker A: Interesting.
[00:08:24] Speaker B: And if we don't know what those are, they might not churn this year, but give it two to three years, another competitor comes along, they satisfy more jobs, they leave.
[00:08:33] Speaker A: Interesting.
[00:08:35] Speaker B: So that's why I say, yeah, I.
[00:08:37] Speaker A: Have two questions based on that.
We're going down this road for the rest of the episode because I have a ton of questions. Okay, great.
I think the first one is people listening to this, me included, will say, Got it. Cool. Customer research. The fuck? Like, how do I start? How do I do this? That's not a ryan Dice uses this term random acts of marketing, right? Just like, oh, we'll do this and then we'll try this over here. And this seems to me like the kind of thing that I would fall into the boat of being like, I'm going to go interview 20 customers this month and then I'm not going to put it into an airtable and I'm not going to do this. Very generally, how do you like companies like us again, one to 10 million, to have a process around, continually doing research with customers.
[00:09:28] Speaker B: Continual, yes, continual discovery.
[00:09:30] Speaker A: I assume that's the best way, right. Is like this should happen all the time.
[00:09:33] Speaker B: Yes, it should be a continuous discovery process of some kind.
The way that a lot of product teams will do this is they will work or collaborate with customer success marketing and have an automation that runs that after, let's say, whatever your value metric is or your activated customer moment is, let's say that's three months in, six months in, there is just a nurture that kicks off that automatically emails those people and says, hey, would you be open to a 45 minutes conversation just about you, about how the product is coming along so far, et cetera, and include a booking link to make it extremely easy? Ideally, it looks like it's coming from the CEO founder. If you are small enough.
This is actually a very powerful way to get customers on the phone to make it look like it's actually coming from the CEO founder. And if you guys are big enough, then it's very impressive when the CEO of course wants to talk to you. But that's the easiest way to just simply automate it. Automate it, don't think about it.
That's the easiest.
[00:10:37] Speaker A: After that, it really sorry just to hit on that. So we put that into place. We have thousands of customers.
I'd be looking at doing a couple of these a week. Is that a good cadence?
[00:10:50] Speaker B: This is where I think you do get to play by ear especially you have a team. Okay.
I think one to two a week is very healthy, especially if you are the founder. Conducting these interviews, I think let's say two to four times a month on an ongoing basis is what you need to mostly feel like you've got a pulse on. Things where you might want to increase the volume and or shift the targeting on. This is when Customer Success or support team says, hey, we're noticing there's a trend between these types of customers. Or your sales team comes and says, hey, we're noticing there's a trend between these types of customers. And then you might want to of course, adjust who you actually outreach to and also and or increase the volume and also the type of interview that you conduct as well can certainly vary or change. But these types of interviews are really more to enable the founder CEO to get really to keep a pulse check on what's actually happening with customers. Now here's the thing is the trigger. Again, the trigger for becoming a customer of the product is probably going to be pretty fairly consistent. What's critical is founder, CEOs need to be able to feed their brain.
They need to be able to craft their vision with insight. And what's important is not just like the, well, why did they like, what made them pull the trigger to buy the product now? But now what is the next thing they are hoping to accomplish? Because that's going to give you a sense for where is the market going and also are there competitors? Because here's the thing. Just because someone's a customer does not mean that they don't look at other solutions. They absolutely do.
The next thing is to really get a sense for, okay, now that you've accomplished this, what are you looking to do next? And this is where you get to work with your product teams, if you have one, on deciding what is the next iteration of the product and then where do we go from here?
But it is a hugely missed opportunity to not track and measure this over time.
Most product teams, I think, are really good at identifying opportunity.
I think where it gets lost sometimes is it's not getting tracked or measured in any kind of meaningful way. And then on top of that, that insight isn't being analyzed and passed on to the rest of the team. And then therefore CEO, founder of like, hey, it looks like there's a huge growing opportunity for people who want to accomplish this. Maybe our product goes in that direction or not, but that's how you create continual value. That's also how you create expansion revenue and also that's how you create longevity with customers increasing their average revenue per customer, increasing how long they stay. You might have healthy churn and putting that in finger quotes, but the dream is to get to net negative churn, which is you expand more than you lose.
[00:13:38] Speaker A: Yeah.
So just like putting my product hat on a little bit here, continuous feedback, really super great. That comes from our support team too, which I think is really healthy.
And then the decision always is like, well, everyone has limited resources, even Stripe or Intercom. We can only build so much stuff. How do you think about breaking up that kind of division of labor between new features for new customers or retention and expansion features for existing customers?
[00:14:10] Speaker B: This is actually where a lot of teams, if you don't have a really good pricing strategy or pricing framework, then making decisions like this can get really tough. So everything I know about pricing comes from Patrick Campbell for the most part. And I've been very fortunate, yeah, I've been very fortunate to have had conversations with him about a myriad of things. Everything from conducting research to making decisions in particular scenarios and contexts. And one of the things that I most remember from Patrick about scenarios like this is, even if you're kind of wrong from a literal sense, you have to be able to quantify what you think the value is of any new add on or feature. What I mean by that is, if we were to make this an add on, how much would we charge for it? And that's actually a question I think most folks don't know how to answer, and it's just because they don't actually have a real true pricing strategy, I think in terms of deciding what to build first, I think surveys. Using patrick calls it relative value preference, which basically just means instead of asking people how they would rank a feature zero to five or one to five, ask them instead to decide out of a list of features what's most valuable to them and what's least value to them. And you calculate basically the plus or minus.
You tally all of those up across several different survey responses, and then you end up with a number for each of those. And that actually tells you what's more or less important to people. And then it gets really cool when you can segment out best paying customers versus maybe like, not as great paying customers or freemium users versus customers, or there's all kinds of different ways to.
[00:15:55] Speaker A: Slice, too, probably, right, yeah, you can.
[00:15:57] Speaker B: Slice it by NPS.
But anyway, I digress when it comes to how do we prioritize, I always look at how can we quantify it? Can we quantify it? And if we can't quantify the feature, we might not understand it enough, or we're assuming it rolls up into a plan.
And if that's the case, then we kind of have to ask like, okay, again, maybe there's some research that can be conducted here, a very simple survey to kind of get people's gut check on this.
But I was to say, yeah, I hope that helps. But that's how I've approached it. Yeah, because it speaks. And I think that's the other thing, too, is it's not a huge disconnect that I see.
Maybe it is, I don't know. But a very common disconnect is between product and go to market, which sounds odd and surreal, but it happens where product kind of goes in one direction, but the go to market pricing never actually catches up. Like, Monetization basically doesn't catch up sometimes.
And Monetization is like the redheaded stepchild, I think, of go to market.
It gets very little attention until all of a sudden, one day, it just does. And this is something that I think is really interesting and it's pretty common.
It's not like, abnormal, but it is a huge growth opportunity. Most folks never take a step back and look at product and say, wait a second, what dollar value are we attributing to any in all of this? And I think when that happens, light bulbs go off of like, okay, maybe this is an add on. Maybe we can globalize this maybe we can add this to this plan and switch this around. And it's powerful stuff.
[00:17:37] Speaker A: I'll say for us, I think most of us are scared to increase our prices. We haven't increased our prices in four years, probably, which is insane. Like, everything is 30% more expensive than it used to be, and so we should too, arguably.
And the product is exponentially better than it was four years ago.
And I think that all of us, even people like me, who aren't developers or product people, just say, like, I'm going to give this away because this is so great, and I'm going to just include this for free for everybody, or we're going to increase usage limits, thinking that we'll get more customers because of that. And literally, we're still doing this today. We're going to roll out a new feature in a couple of weeks that's entirely free. And just like, we keep getting in this trap. I don't know, maybe what we're doing is building this kind of library of trust with customers to say in the future, okay, hey, we're not 19 a month, we're 29 a month now. And because we've done all this shit in the last five years, maybe that's it. I don't know. But I think that from a pricing perspective, whether it's add ons or metered usage or seats or just plans yeah, I think that it evolves so much more slowly than product. Right? Product's easy. You just develop a feature and release it, and that should happen all the time. And yeah, pricing is maybe once a year that it changes, in my experience.
[00:19:02] Speaker B: Just to clarify, you guys are Bootstrapped, if I'm not mistaken. Are you indie funded?
[00:19:07] Speaker A: Yeah, we joined Tiny Seed, and we raised a little bit more money about two years ago.
[00:19:11] Speaker B: Okay. Yeah. Okay, I can't speak for Tiny Seed, but what I can say about most indefunded companies and also Bootstrap companies, is that the beauty of it is that you don't have a billion dollar VC coming at you of, like, you got to grow at all costs. Growth at any cost is like it is for a very specific type of person, I think.
But the beauty of it is that you guys don't have to necessarily react to that type of pressure in the same exact way. And I tend to actually be very chill, actually, about monetization and pricing. But if a founder comes to me and says, we want to grow as fast as possible, and I'm like, pricing is almost always the first place I look, it's the easiest lever to pull.
You are absolutely not alone in this.
I think part of it, too, is there's so much data to collect and analyze to optimize pricing.
I think most people just aren't aware of it, even know. Patrick has done everything I think he possibly can to teach us about pricing, but there are ways to inform pricing, and I think if that were more evangelized, I think we'd all be a little bit less afraid of it. But yeah, you are definitely not alone in that. Very common.
[00:20:35] Speaker A: The thing I always say from a sales perspective is always like, it's not price that is the objection. It's value, right? And I think Patrick is the king of this, like, value based pricing. It's right?
It's this price now because you get this, this and this, which lets you then become this, this and this. So your future self is whatever, blue haired, on fire and super cool and all that kind of stuff. And I think that's just where kind of we don't take all those mental steps to put together and then you got to communicate that to the customer too. Both existing customers and all that kind of grandfathering whatever and the new customers like, hey, it's a little bit of branding, right? Like, hey, we're not the cheap version, we're not the middle of the road version. We're the super awesome high price version. And there's a lot of reasons people would buy just for that reason. I think that's a whole thing.
[00:21:30] Speaker B: Yeah, totally.
[00:21:36] Speaker A: Got it. Okay.
As you are kind of going away from the product and marketing side or product and monetization side to the marketing side as you're doing customer research and you talked about like, there's always a first job and then there's a second and third job that you hire people for.
One thing that we have struggled with over time is like one product, one message, one customer, right? And that's just what a lot of people say you should like our homepage should talk to a person about a thing and how we solve it.
What I'm hearing though is that you got to layer that in a little bit and kind of future proof the customer with your solution. Is that the case or the second and third job just kind of assumed in your kind of positioning.
[00:22:28] Speaker B: I think you eventually this is definitely not true for all business cases, but I think what the conventional wisdom is, whatever the primary job is, that's what your main homepage speaks to. But I think that the marketing site ultimately does have messaging around those secondary and tertiary jobs because as people become more familiar with your brand, they maybe sign up and become customers or are thinking about becoming customers. They might actually already be aware of those secondary and tertiary things that they want to also accomplish that comes up as they're doing their research and in the consideration phase. And it's important to still remember that having some messaging or marketing about this is extremely helpful and valuable.
When where do you put that? When do you inform the customer of that? Having it on the marketing site makes it self service, of course, but do you send an onboarding email about that? Those are types of things that with research you'll actually be able to identify when is the right time for this based off of that person's ultimate customer journey? And I think the other area of opportunity is actually the customer journey itself. Most teams also don't have an actual bird's eye view of the customer journey, not the buyer journey, which is like, oh, they became a lead and then they talked to sales or they've started a trial or whatever, but specifically the customer journey. So what is all the context that's happening before? What are they doing during and then when they become a customer, how do we know that they've activated? How do we know that they've actually achieved value? And then from there, what is the next evolution of that which goes into their secondary and tertiary jobs?
Most teams don't actually have that documented in a way that is easy to see what the gaps are. And I think I mentioned earlier, it's all about the gaps. Research shows us gaps. That's really what it is. And also research kind of triggers ways to overcome them.
But yeah, I'll bookmark that. But I think the ultimate goal in this particular scenario is to surface that information at the right time, ideally the right place. But in theory it's going to be on your website somewhere and I shy away.
I'm actually curious if April Dunford has any wisdom about this. I know for a fact she does actually. But I tend to shy away from feeling like your home page has to be everything to everyone. I do recommend there is a very specific context that your product shines in. Let's get that on paper and message it in a way that is applicable to as many potential paying customers as possible that are going to be good customers.
But beyond that, additional messaging elsewhere in the website can speak to other jobs, use cases, product features, et.
[00:25:18] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, hey, it's Craig here. While I love podcasting and long form conversations, like, I also really love writing and really love email newsletters. I have a newsletter called Founder Insights where every Saturday morning I share something I'm learning in my business that I think could help you grow your business, sustainably insanely and profitably as you go along this journey. If you're interested, head over to Craighewitt Me join to get Founder Insights, my newsletter, along with your cup of coffee this Saturday morning. See you there.
As you're talking about this, one thing that makes me think is and we can keep this at a high level because I'm sure it's a really difficult, nuanced answer.
So you're doing interviews and collecting data, doing surveys.
How much of this do you want to be quantitative and how much do you want it to be qualitative? And then I guess on the latter, how do you then synthesize that to get results without just a fucking giant airtable that you're never going to look at?
[00:26:22] Speaker B: It's so funny because Mark Thomas and I actually, we talked about this once and he argued that talking to customers is actually, to him at least, the easy part. It's the getting the insight and applying it operationalizing the insight.
Okay, so how more mature companies do this is they tend to have UX research teams, or they have research teams in general whose entire job it is to do exactly that. They are people who are dedicated to the cause and they are going to go and analyze the insight, spend time really going through it with a fine tooth comb, and then creating reports, documents, presentations for key stakeholders and their internal function. For very mature companies, this is essentially like a bi team or an R D team, sometimes both, I think for the what is minimum viable research in this particular case, and to me that is at some point someone has to analyze this information and sure, you mentioned the Airtable database. So we actually use Airtable as our customer research repository for all clients. And simply creating charts and graphs and creating filters gives us a wealth of information.
There are some data I'm going to actually analyze for a client. It's like 25,000, I think, records of customer information. I'm literally using Airtable to analyze it.
For someone who is not an R developer analyst, this is my way of doing it.
But the ultimate thing though is I think that there's two sides. I think for your original question, this is 100% quantitative, to me at least.
I actually think that the quantitative part is what most people miss because they attend interviews or they listen or they read transcripts and they kind of feel like they think something was the primary thing, but then if you actually were to tally it up, it's actually something else. Okay, so I actually think most people miss the fact that research can become quantitative. And that's actually to me a huge opportunity because if I told you that 70% of your customers were coming to you for this specific thing, you'd be like, that's either different than what I thought or it is exactly what I thought, but I didn't realize it was that much or whatever it is.
But I think the short answer is that even if you never put it into Airtable, someone is going to go through those notes and pick out, okay, out of the seven interviews, what were the common themes that we heard that then needs to be translated into someone needs to ultimately document that in a place. And then the question that you've got to ask yourself and also the team is, okay, now what? So what? What does this mean? What do we do with this? And you can do this as organically as you want. This could be a meeting, this could be a doc. But what is important is that you don't do the research and then do nothing. If you conduct the research, it's just like content marketing. Like don't just create. The content, distribute it.
Same thing. Don't just interview people, actually have a roundtable discussion of what did we hear, what did we learn, what are we going to do differently next time? And that is sometimes often enough to actually get action out of it. I know when we do research, we actually spell it out for clients. So when we do it, we say, okay, here are the top takeaways from this section that you just read. And now here's what you can do with this, right? All the stuff that you think is interesting. Highlight it, delegate it to someone.
And then sometimes we actually will run conversations with folks of like, okay, you guys read all the transcripts, you listen to all the conversations. What are your top takeaways?
[00:30:05] Speaker A: To me, the thing I hear when you're saying this is one thing we're very careful not to do is let the silent minority kind of tailwag the dog right of like this one, customers bitching in support. And so we're going to go build this feature. We very much try to not do that. And so I think the same would apply for us here. And so we would probably say like, okay, we're going to gather this data and then quarterly we're going to review it around the time we do OKRs or something, we say, okay, let's have a two hour meeting where we've synthesized the data and we're all just going to review it together. To me, that sounds like the right kind of cadence.
Too often you probably don't have enough new data to really action on it if you're doing one a week or something like that. Maybe at the beginning you would have more if you did like a survey to all customers.
[00:30:53] Speaker B: This is kind of where the more volume that you get, it's interesting because with the more volume, the more patterns you get, but also the more outliers. So there certainly will be variance with the more volume.
I've never once seen a perfectly consistent customer base, ever. It doesn't exist.
[00:31:10] Speaker A: No, sure.
[00:31:12] Speaker B: But what is interesting though, is there's a vast majority and that's generally like I hate to say the word generalize because it sounds so negative, but for the absolute best paying customer pattern match.
[00:31:26] Speaker A: I like that one.
[00:31:27] Speaker B: Pattern match. Yeah, you're going to pattern match.
But I think this is also where too, yes, we want to keep the process going of like, let's just make sure that we're always talking to customers in a non product specific way.
But then there's actually a lot of strategic challenges that focused research can 100% maybe not solve, but at least address.
Actually, I have a client right now who often forgets that we don't have to guess. Like we could literally go ask and they're always like, oh yeah, we can just do five interviews and get the answer. So for example, I have a client, shocker.
We have a website that we love, but we are torn on if it is actually there's something about its messaging. It's vibe that feels off somehow. And I've been feeling this. There's another person on the team that's been feeling this. And so we're like, okay, well, should we relaunch the website? And I was like, well, we don't have to guess. We could literally go and do we could conduct UX research and get feedback on this. And so that's exactly what we did. And found out that four out of five people of our target ICP hated the website. Like, hated the main homepage, hated the color, hated the whole look of it. And we were like, Whoa, we couldn't.
[00:32:51] Speaker A: And these are phone calls with people.
[00:32:53] Speaker B: Well, these are like zoom calls. Yeah. And I'm having them I'm actually running the interview, and I'm asking them more like UX type questions, still asking them jobs to be done style stuff, but then I'm really having them drive on the website, and I was amazed at how many stopping moments and things that they got confused about. I was, like, mind blown. And so took all those findings back and I was like, I don't think it's just a website overhaul. I think it's a little bit of a messaging thing, too.
[00:33:22] Speaker A: Our customers have call April Dunford. It's a positioning message brand thing.
[00:33:27] Speaker B: But in addition to that, also website. And it was just like, oh, wow. Yeah. So there's ways to get but anyway, but yes.
[00:33:33] Speaker A: Yeah. Interesting. Okay, I want to talk about me for a little bit because you got my mind going and just some context for folks who haven't listened to a lot of episodes. So casta's podcast hosting platform. I think we're in a relatively competitive space.
[00:33:55] Speaker B: Yes. We're customers, by the way.
[00:33:58] Speaker A: Yes, and you have been for a long time, and it's amazing. Yeah. And thank you.
I hate to admit this because I know that our investors listen to this. I have a hard time with other than I need to have a podcast, what is the jobs to be done that my customers have? And to take that kind of one step further is like talking about positioning, which I think is a little bit like what you're getting at with some of this, is like, what is the thing that people come to us for that's different than to Buzzsprout or Libson or Simplecast or something like that?
Maybe we can talk generally about if you're a podcast hosting platform or you're an email service provider, or you're a help desk software in a space where I'll just say, like, nine out of ten things we do are exactly the same as everyone else in the industry. How do you, as a founder or product person or marketer positioning person, take and throw that nine tenths away and suck out that 1% and really make it shine?
[00:35:03] Speaker B: Sure. Okay. So this is where I can speak to this, because I actually am a customer. Yeah. Okay. So in the jobs to be done world, there's two styles of jobs to be done. There's ODI style, which a lot of people, I don't actually don't know which one is more known. I know switch style from Bob Moista because Bob speaks to a lot of the big conferences.
Switch style is what I think most people are aware of.
ODI style is more about like job statements are actually just like a job statement is literally just publish a podcast, distribute a podcast, store a podcast, those types of statements. And then switch dial you get more of like when I am struggling with publishing my podcast, help me with a podcast publishing software so I can get my message out there to the rest of the world. It's more like that.
And we use both in different scenarios and I think when it comes to podcasting and really any industry or product or whatever that you have. So there's the very quick ODI style job, which is publish a podcast. But then there's a specific context upon which I want to publish a podcast. And that is actually, I think, the secret sauce, because when I think about publishing a podcast is the first job, the secondary job. And I can speak to Castos, obviously, because I use it. But the secondary job is to distribute the podcast and then the third is to store and organize the podcast.
And there's a fourth probably for others, myself not included, but just because I'm not the most consistent with my own podcast, truth be told.
But there's probably some others like I need to be able to publish my podcast specifically on my website or something else because I know there's like do you guys still have the website plugin? I can't remember. We do, yeah. I remember when we talked many years ago that was one of the big competitive differentiators of Castos was the plugin specifically with the first job of publishing, there's all of these specific contexts about the person who's doing the job and also the context that they're in. They're busy, they don't have a whole lot of resources on deck maybe.
And this is me speaking for myself. Research of course would confirm this. But then there's also like I am someone who is pretty tech savvy, but I really don't want to have to think about a whole lot of what I'm doing. So much so that I almost don't want the product to take advantage of the fact that I'm tech savvy. I almost want them to just almost do it for me in a way. But I'm not in a place where I could necessarily outsource this 100% at least. I couldn't necessarily afford that cost today.
So automation, scheduling, things like that are very helpful. And then we get into who I am just as a person. I am a very busy founder. The podcast is a way for me to distribute my message, but also it's marketing for me. It's personal brand building and that's a very specific context that I'm evaluating different products in. So it's interesting because when I was looking at Castos, I was looking at I think transistor is a big one and there were a couple of others that I remember looking at, but I remember choosing Castos because the competitive differentiator for me. While sure, I think some of the other podcasting platforms at the time had similar, if not the exact same features. For me, it was about the experience of publishing and also the price felt right. And then I think at the time, the automatic distribution was like I just didn't feel like anyone else was doing that in a way that would be helpful for me. Like, I had a YouTube channel, I still have like there were aspects about Castos that I was like, oh, even if the others have it, it's either too hard or too time consuming for me to actually do it in their products. It was way faster and easier for me to do it in Castos because, again, I'm a busy founder and I'm like lazy and I don't want to do stuff, but those are like the contextual things that that's me. But I'd be curious about if you were to go and talk to 20 people, what are their contexts?
And I was also starting my business. I'm relatively newer to the space at the time ish because I started my business in 2018 and I talked to you in 2019, if you can believe it.
But that was another contextual thing. I was earlier in my founder career, I really did not identify as well. It's so interesting because I follow a lot of the people who run their podcast platforms, some other CEOs and founders, and I did not identify as much with them as I did actually with you.
And so I think those are all contextual things right, that go into it. And I think, yeah, anyway.
[00:40:03] Speaker A: I want to kind of abstract a few of those things from my perspective because it might be helpful to other founders.
One, the topic of distribution and scheduling and stuff, I think falls for me very squarely under the of course we do that, that's just what we are. But to say and something that we struggle a lot with is this curse of knowledge, right? It's like, I've been doing this for eight years, I know everything there is to know about podcasting, whatever, relatively, and we just don't even talk about it. We don't even talk about like, oh, you just upload it here once and publish it and it's magic and it goes everywhere, you don't have to do anything, but I totally hear you. That is a massive thing for so many of our customers. And we have a customer that custom coded XML on their website and had to deploy new scripts every time. Like all this crazy stuff and they think that we're like God because we do this thing that's relatively basic for us.
The other one that I heard you said that I think about even now, is the advice that I would give somebody is like, you want to be the X for Y, you want to be podcast hosting for growth minded entrepreneurs. And I'm too chicken to put that on our website, but I know that's what we should do because you come and you're like sold, but then someone else comes, maybe they want to be that and so they're like, cool, that's what I want to be in the future. But then the person that's like, I just want to try this. I'm not really sure they're going to leave. And that's good because they would have churned anyhow.
[00:41:46] Speaker B: Exactly. Yeah.
[00:41:47] Speaker A: So I don't know.
I think at the same time and this is challenging, make it very basic. I don't want to say dumb it down, but make the value prop, really. Because you're just so in the weeds, right? Like, we are all so in the weeds with our products. It's tough to kind of take a 30,000 foot view and say like, oh, the really important thing we do is we're a publishing platform for your brand.
Just say that.
And for this type of person, even like we have thousands of customers. I think it's not wrong to at this point say for this person, for people just like Asia, it would probably be good.
[00:42:28] Speaker B: Absolutely. I have a client that's actually in the process of this now. So they're a $2 million company. They also have thousands of customers. And they have so interesting because our messaging has changed, truly changed. I've been working with them since 2020.
Originally it was like, oh, we want to focus on this early stage, smaller part of the market.
Their businesses are smaller, they're VSBs. And then over time we realized that that's still true technically. But what is actually more true is that they are early in their journey and also that they have a growth mindset. They have to be able to want to grow their company. If they don't want to grow their company, they are never going to be a good fit for us. And also they're not going to get the value that they need because they are essentially paying for a platform that they're probably not going to ever use all of. And so that's actually messaging that we're in the process now of updating on the website.
But yes, sometimes I think too, sometimes it's hard to point to a specific feature outside of the context of, again, like the person who's trying to buy it. So you might look at all the features and say like, oh, these are like one to one, a lot of the competitors. But I think from the perspective of the people who are drawn and attracted to the product, their context is probably what unites them and also therefore makes the product stand out. So sometimes it's actually reverse where it's like the customer is actually what's finding the competitive differentiator. Don't get me wrong, there's always room for innovation. I think something I'm trying to get a lot of more mature companies thinking about is like, okay, great, it's super easy to copy features, but you can't copy brands, you can't copy people, and you also definitely can't copy innovation. And those are areas that larger companies are going to have to invest in. And this is actually going to be something that I recommend to a 500 million dollar company that I really hope that we get to work with anyway. Yeah, it's interesting. Like I said, we see it all. Zero to a lot.
[00:44:31] Speaker A: Yeah, I'm 100% in your boat. We are in this process right now, which is why I reached out a few weeks ago because I wanted like a gut check on how we're thinking about this.
It's tough to say we're kind of like those guys, but if I think about it on a feature level, we're kind of like those guys. But it's really easy to just put like three words on the website and then instantly we're not like any of the rest of them. We're like this one thing over here and the product can support that. In a way. That's the easy part. I think the hard part is just like having the guts to put those three words on your site.
Podcast distribution for Growth reminded brands that's different than everyone else in the space. And then you could look at ConvertKit, I think does a good job of it. And Bento is doing a good job of it. And some of these people are taking these popular spaces and just carving out their niche. And it's not from a product perspective because the product zig exactly the same in what it can do. Maybe the buttons are different here and there and stuff, but functionally the product is all the same and it's also the easiest to replicate, right? Because you just get a bunch of smart people and build a product. But yeah, I think brand and positioning is where we're spending a ton of time. I'm spending a ton of my time personally, even though I know it's not super healthy to have the founder tied to the brand too much, but should.
[00:45:51] Speaker B: It doesn't exist, I feel like in non VC contexts.
[00:45:55] Speaker A: Right, yeah. I mean, I think I'm abstractable enough still, so it's fine. Yeah, I just see brand my brand, actually. I said this to our team.
I think I am probably the biggest potential growth lever we have.
You look at the really strong personal brands behind companies and they're the growth driver. And you and I have known each other and that sounds like it played a role or part in you choosing Castos, but very few people know me. I think and that's a pretty big opportunity. As opposed to the other shit that we've done is we have spent an enormous amount of time and effort on content marketing and SEO and email marketing. And the incremental gains we can get there are pretty small at this point, but the incremental gains I can get by going from 2000 to 50,000 followers on LinkedIn is pretty big, I think. And so, yeah, I'm spending a bunch of time on it these days, and I don't feel bad about it. I had one of our investors said, yo, what is kind of scary, like, you investing so much time in your brand on social media for the company? What happens when you go to sell the company at some point? And I was like, man, I just see it as the biggest opportunity we have. Plus, we're not like a business analytics dashboard company. We're like a media company. And to be a podcasting and media company and not be doing this stuff, I feel like is wrong. So I kind of think it's my.
[00:47:28] Speaker B: Job, like a part of there are founders who do this extremely well, and I think the one I think about most intimately, of course, because I served on the board of maz, but rand took maz to the size that it got before, of course he left the board. And then eventually we sold it, we got it acquired, and I think it was 2021. And there's a huge amount of capacity for founders and CEOs to really step into that more. It's a visionary role, and I think maybe a lot of folks we talk about it like, oh, we're building the founder brand, or we're building the personal brand, but it's also like, you're actually becoming more of a visionary. And I think sometimes I don't know if we forget that. I think it's just more of like, maybe we don't acknowledge it, but as you become more of a leader for yourself, and you show up for yourself, you also do the same for your team. And I think there's something really beautiful about that.
I don't see it as negative or bad, I think, if anything. And there are companies that have done this extremely well, and drift actually comes to mind. So David cancel has his own personal brand, mega v, but then there's Dave gerhardt, CMO, who I believe left and started his own.
Actually, I think he left and came back twice.
[00:48:58] Speaker A: Yeah, I know.
[00:48:58] Speaker B: And now he's doing something.
I think it's a beautiful thing. It can take you very far, and it can continue to take you to very interesting places.
The risk, of course, is when you sell, what happens, like, who replaces you? But I don't know.
I think the key to making that work is that you have to invest a lot in distributing your thought leadership to the rest of the team. So that way they can start thinking, like, how you how. And I think Rand actually did a really good job of this.
He was constantly creating content and memos, and he's a writer.
That dude writes a lot. I'm, like, endlessly impressed.
[00:49:46] Speaker A: Yeah. But anyway yeah, that's a trip. Yeah. I mean, for me, the way I look at it is if the business can be twice as big as it is now, and because it's mostly me, we take a 20% cut or something. That's a huge win. And I think those are decently possible numbers.
Yeah. And this podcast is a huge part of that. And that's why Dave was like, hey, man, I got to take a break. Six and a half years of you is enough. I was like, Dude, this is super important to me. I want to keep it going and to be able to have these kind of conversations is it I mean, this is very selfish. I do this for me, and then it helps everybody else. But this is just, like, such a cool way to have chats with folks like you on really interesting and deep stuff. I think that's missing from the world.
[00:50:32] Speaker B: A absolutely.
[00:50:35] Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah.
I think last question is folks who are like, Asia amazing. I got to get some of that.
What could they hope to expect? I think that's always something we're trying to help our customers answer with their shows. It's like, if I listen to this show, what can I expect? If somebody comes to you and they're like, hey, I'm doing this right now, or I'm doing this and they start working with you can't guarantee future outcomes. I know, but what's typical for engagement clients?
[00:51:09] Speaker B: My first reaction note to what you were saying was, she told me to talk to my customers, as per usual. What did I expect?
[00:51:19] Speaker A: I knew it going in. I had my shield up already.
[00:51:22] Speaker B: Yeah. Okay. What I can absolutely guarantee is clarity.
Working with us, you are not going to leave unclear about what needs to get done, what's it going to take, and what are your options?
I think the thing that a lot of folks forget is when they come to us, I think they're expecting one path, but there's technically infinite paths, but there's maybe, like, three to five that actually get you where you want to go, and here's what it's going to take to get there. I can 100% guarantee that if we work together on a growth perspective, so if we work together in terms of help me figure out what the target KPIs are and how we lift them, what levers we pull to get there, I can also guarantee progress towards those goals. I can't guarantee you ten X in six months.
I don't know if that's going to happen for anyone, not without immense investment in resources and a little bit of luck. But when it comes to progress towards goals in that growth capacity, absolutely.
I'm actually working with a company now. And I think that they were very skeptical at first, but we lift a number R by 40% since we've been working together, and they've been doing what I've been telling them, which has been great.
I can't take all the credit, they do all the hard work. I just tell them where to go because I've seen it a million times.
But that's the type of work that either one, whether it's you need clarity or whether you really do need support on the growth side across the whole business, marketing is certainly a part that we start with, but there is also other opportunity expansion. There is also monetization. We help with that as well. And then I think the other part is product looking at activation customers, and sometimes we even get into the sales processes, but it just depends.
[00:53:14] Speaker A: I wanted to have you on because I and I think so many other founders, you're so far along and you're like, all right, what now? It's so easy at the beginning. It's build the features and launch and content and all this kind of stuff. And then you get to a point and you're like, well, I've done that and we're here. And now what?
I had a pretty big existential crisis a few years ago about this when I started delegating roles within the company, too.
This is a huge tangent, but that was really hard. It's like, okay, I'm not doing sales anymore. I'm not in charge of marketing anymore.
[00:53:50] Speaker B: Who am I?
[00:53:51] Speaker A: And we scaled the team back a bit since then, and so I actually feel much better now, like, being really in the weeds and doing these things.
But I think just generally the data and the clarity that you're talking about is so powerful because I think as founders, especially as a solo founder, you're just like, you wake up every day and you're like, okay, I could do all of this shit and I have no idea what's right unless you have the data. And even then you have the data and then you have to have the conviction to stick with it for six months. And I think that's the hardest part. It's just like not just randomly saying, well, I'm going to get limbless today and start cold email, or I'm going to play around in amplitude all day and pretend that I am helping things. I think that for me, the data and the conviction around what the data is telling you to stick with something, it basically doesn't matter too, I think, right? You could just say, I'm going to do this thing, and it might not be the best thing, but just doing the thing for six months, it makes so much difference. And I flip flop and go back and forth and have add over stuff so much. And I think it's just the death of a lot of our growth is just being flippant about where we focus. So I think that what you're talking about.
[00:55:03] Speaker B: Clarity is structure and discipline.
I'm not an executive coach. I have done executive coaching in my own way, but I'm not like a purist executive coach, like fancy coach, like the business coach that I have, for example. But discipline and structure, those are extremely difficult things, especially if they are not native to you. They are not at all native to me. I have had to learn quite literally the hard way several times over and when I teach it to other teams, it's amazing how much of a difference it can make, but at the same exact time how hard it is. So you're right, it is the hardest part. Don'beat yourself up too much about it. That's why I tell everyone it's hard for everyone. But, yeah, the conviction to sticking to the thing and then doing the thing and then reminding yourself that, no, there is a plan, there is a structure, we got to commit to it, being flexible, of course, when you need to be. But the first part is hard. Totally. Totally.
[00:56:01] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. Just a quick a I have a coach, too, and I tell him, I talk about Mike on every episode. I say, Mike, we've agreed on this thing. A part of your job now is to keep me honest to it when in two months I come and say, oh, this didn't work. We're going to stop doing that thing. And he has several times now said, yo, Craig, back in July, you said to keep you honest about this thing and now you want to go chase this other rabbit like you're not going to because we agreed in a moment of sanity that this was the right thing to do and so you're going to do it.
[00:56:34] Speaker B: Kudos to Mike.
[00:56:35] Speaker A: It's crazy.
[00:56:36] Speaker B: Good job, Mike.
[00:56:37] Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, that's why he gets the bucks.
Cool. Asia. Best place for folks to connect with you.
[00:56:45] Speaker B: Best places are, well, demand maven IO. I was going to say Twitter, but it's X now and I just can't bring myself to call it that. Twitter at Asia orangio of course, but those are definitely the top two places. Also, hit me up on LinkedIn. If you do, make sure to send in a note that says, hey, I heard you on Craig's podcast, you were awesome. They were awesome, et cetera. But just so I know it's you because I get like hundreds a day. But apart from that, those two places are the best places to connect. And then I will talk about favorite places to travel and food and also music all day long. So if you ever, ever want to chat about any of those things, hit me up. And of course, sass stuff, too, but awesome. Got to keep it fun, too.
[00:57:32] Speaker A: Awesome. Love it, love it, love it. Thanks, Asia. Have a good one.
