Episode Transcript
[00:00:05] Speaker A: Okay, Mark, let's talk about your amazing videos on LinkedIn, because we are on Riverside right now talking about video, and your shit is so amazing. Tell me how all this started on LinkedIn and what's your process like? I want to hear it all.
[00:00:25] Speaker B: It. Well, I'd been making. I mean, I think most people actually previously knew me for kind of, like, quite dry content.
I'd been making pretty dry content about SaaS marketing.
I joke a lot of the time that I used to have genuine interests, and now I just talk about SaaS marketing.
Right.
But it was kind of true.
And what I was finding was that I was also sort of. A couple of things were happening. Firstly, I think the playbooks that we were talking about, or I was talking about a lot, diminished in value quite significantly in the last couple of years. And so I didn't feel great kind of selling that because I didn't really believe that it was effective in the way that my content said it was. And so that was one thing. The other thing was that when I started making these videos, which was at the end of 2022, the economy was crashing, right. In the US in particular, for tech businesses, which is entirely who I work, you know, both in house and just kind of as an agency where I was working at the time, just saw huge amounts of churn, companies cutting budgets. And I was like, man, this is rough. Like, I'm okay. But a lot of people who I work with, not in the company, but in other companies, colleagues, they're losing their jobs, or they're being asked to part with their teams and they have to do the firing. Right?
[00:02:05] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:02:06] Speaker B: Nobody wants to be told right now, here's what you should be doing differently. 99% of marketers think this is do this wrong. It's like patronizing, frankly.
And I was fed up of doing it, and I didn't feel good about doing it.
And so I was like, based on that, based on this terrible year that we're about to have, which is 2023 in the markets for SaaS companies, what would be the approach that I would want to take? And I thought, let's take a very human approach, and just instead of trying to tell people they're doing it wrong, I'm just going to try and make people laugh for the year and see where that goes, really. Which is very unbusiness like.
But the response turned out to be extremely business like and very enjoyable. People absolutely loved it. So making music videos throughout the year was great for my career, frankly.
[00:03:07] Speaker A: One of you in the bathtub, I.
[00:03:09] Speaker B: Saw one of me in a bathtub, I was fully clothed, in fairness.
[00:03:12] Speaker A: No, sure.
[00:03:15] Speaker B: And bringing in bits of my personality that frankly, I'd hidden to become more corporate and more sort of viable by a mass market.
Actually, looking back on it, that made me less viable for most people because I was very bland and I was unhappy with that. And actually, when I said, I'm just not going to do it anymore and just lent into being a creative person with a personality, I found that deeply liberating. And also, as I said, it was good for my career.
Win win.
[00:03:59] Speaker A: I've seen these threads on dead right, like SaaS and b to b marketing and content in particular is broken. But then the so what do you do from there? And there's only so many bathtub videos that we can make. And I think the question on a lot of our minds is like, okay, cool, we can go make this really different content. But then what's the alignment between.
I find your stuff amazing, but unfortunately, I'm not a podia customer.
How do you think about connecting those dots? I guess that's the question because I'm a media and content person, but even I have a hard time sometimes.
We just turned down a proposal internally for a new podcast because I was like, we're not getting customers out of this. And how do you think about that connection and justification?
[00:04:55] Speaker B: You say the b two b content thing there. Just to clarify, I think what we're saying is people who say b two b content doesn't have to be boring, right? We're saying those people, okay, so here's the thing. I use this analogy all the time. When you say that to someone and they say, I agree.
And you ask them, okay, well, what ideas do you have for changing this? Often their ideas are like, oh, let's do a whole podcast where we suck on sour sweets or something.
Okay, well, that's a gimmick. And there's only so many sour sweets you can suck on.
Or they'll go like, hey, you know what would be weird is if we dressed the CEO up in a chicken suit and made a video, right? But here's the thing about that. Chicken suits cost $25 on Amazon. It's not interesting. What is interesting and why I do what I do is because I know that there is something about the people who follow me that that really strikes a chord for them.
So b two b content has a purpose, right? It's meant to drive business.
The way that we align that to business and to the customer is by basically connecting the dots. So you take an insight about your customers and then you come up with ideas based on that insight, and you can only get that insight by actually understanding them deeply over a long period of time. And then you connect that kind of interesting idea to a business outcome. And it's the kind of balance of those things which actually makes for interesting, effective b, two b content. Now, the content that I make is meant to be light hearted and funny, but there are other takes on b. Two b content that are interesting that are not at all that. Right?
[00:06:57] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:06:58] Speaker B: The key thing is really, and this is what misses, I think, from a lot of this discussion, is like, well, why are you making this piece of content or why are you doing this creative campaign? Because as you said, greg, the connection there is like, well, we want our customers to pay us more money, so how is this facilitating?
And that's what's missing. So take podia. Podia is actually a good example here. So a lot of the content that I make is for kind of my own personal brand, like my kind of audience building.
But we do this at Podia as well. So I'll give you an example of a campaign that we ran recently. We had this idea that we could use our existing user base who are full of interesting people with their own audiences. Some of them have huge audiences on the Internet for the most niche things imaginable.
And because Podia is effectively a mass market product, if you have a business, or if you want to build a business on the Internet, it is for you.
We have to reach basically everyone.
We can't do that all at once. So we had this idea, well, let's go to these people who use Podia and like Podia already, and we'll say, we want you to produce content for your audience about podia. We don't want to tell you what to say or how to make it or what to do. We'll give you ideas if you need them. But we're not going to do that because we want you to create something that will genuinely resonate with your existing audience.
Why we did that is because these people have huge reach, some of them with people who may never have considered using a tool like podia before, because they don't know they need to create a website or create an email newsletter or sell a digital product.
But they know that the people that they watch on YouTube or Instagram reels, they know that those people like, use podia.
They know that they've bought products from those people or signed up for the newsletter or visited the website.
So we were like, let's just join the dots here. Let's pay these people to make content for us. The stuff that came out was incredible.
Some people came up with their own ideas. Some people took ideas from us. A couple of my favorite ones, we had a lady who made, she makes cakes on the Internet, on Instagram, and sort of sells recipe ideas and tutorials and stuff like that. She made a reel where she baked a purple cake and then iced it in. Like, it's almost like visual ASMR watching it. And it's like, I can't stop watching this. I don't care what the topic of the video is. Yeah, but the topic of the video is here's how I make the cake, but also here's how I use podia in my business.
[00:10:13] Speaker A: And it was awesome.
[00:10:14] Speaker B: Super watchable.
And another example, we had a mountain biking tutorial channel basically on TikTok who that game skate? No, not skate. Sorry. Horse.
In basketball, you shoot and then you miss, you get a letter. Well, we had them do Podia with mountain biking tricks.
[00:10:43] Speaker A: Oh, that's cool.
[00:10:46] Speaker B: Yeah, exactly. And they're watching it. They're watching this video, and people who follow this guy are watching it for the benefit of watching the video. They're not watching it for the benefit of learning about podia, but coincidentally, they're also learning about Podia in a really organic way. Now, if we had said, hey, let's just pay people to create content about Podia that doesn't really connect to a goal, because the goal itself is actually find under, find underused audiences on the Internet that we can afford at a price that no one else will be able to get because we're speaking to people who absolutely love us. Now, that connects an insight about our customers. They want more money because they're using our product, which is very much about generating revenue.
It also connects with their audience, who want more of the outcomes that they're seeing people get. And also, it aligns to a business goal in a really creative way that is exciting to me. So that's kind of like an example there.
[00:11:56] Speaker A: Yeah, no, I love it. I think that one of the themes that we see and seen for the last year or so is influencer marketing or user generated content. It's like e have invested heavily in content marketing and SEO, as Podia has, I'm sure, but see some kind of limit to the authority ability that we have just because we are the brand, right? How much can we talk about ourselves and kind of funnel attention and traffic as opposed to one of our customers or an influencer in the space, know, a trusted partner or something like, it's definitely, it's definitely a tactic I've seen a lot. And sometimes it happens, right? Like sometimes you're in a Facebook group and people say, hey, I'm looking for a course, know, who should I use? And a bunch of people say, podia, that's amazing. But what you're talking about is kind of like proactively doing that in social media.
[00:12:53] Speaker B: Yeah. And there's also a reason, kind of a bigger reason for this.
It's because the whole marketing industry is changing, not just within the industry, but how it works with actual customers.
So you can look it up, you can go to hrefs or Mars or whatever you want to use, and you can look at podia, our site and see that absolutely crush it in search.
Everything looks good, really high authority, loads of backlinks. And yet there is this sense that we are moving out of just being a course builder. We're now a website builder and an email marketing tool as well.
We're trying to reach new audiences for the first time. Huge audiences, not just little ones who are searching for I need and of course build a platform.
And so the challenge is there. How do you get all of those people who aren't searching directly for these specific products, bottom of funnel stuff? How do you get them into your orbit so that they can eventually choose to buy from you, even if it's only a small purchase or like a time limited purchase.
[00:14:18] Speaker A: Right.
[00:14:20] Speaker B: The goal is to get as many loose relationships. So by loose relationships, I mean in SaaS, we're absolutely obsessed with trying to increase retention.
The marketing science actually shows that's not the best way to grow a company. The best way to grow a company is to try to get a very large number of people to buy a small amount from you and not to worry too much about the churn itself.
[00:14:51] Speaker A: Interesting.
[00:14:52] Speaker B: Which is a very big change in how to think about SaaS marketing.
But to do it, you cannot just use search, you cannot just rely on paid media because the budgets that you would need or the input that you would need to make that happen. Absolutely extraordinary eye watering figures, right? Yeah. Or a long period of time which you just don't have.
[00:15:18] Speaker A: Yeah, no, that makes sense. I mean, I think we're probably in similar kind of stratosphere as podia in terms of average revenue per user or something like that. To where for us to get paid back for paid media is difficult, like possible over a long period of time in a certain kind of instances, but we're not up $500 a month tool to where that makes sense.
Interesting. Yeah, I mean, definitely see very large high churn SaaS companies out there, but the ones who make it that far. Right. That the top of funnel and the world that they live in is so massive that they can support high churn. So, yeah, that's interesting. I think it makes sense.
A lot of founders who are listening to this might say, oh, great, I don't have to worry about churn anymore. Well, you don't have to worry about churn as much. If you're generating millions of eyeballs on your stuff, then it overcomes high churn.
[00:16:21] Speaker B: There's a really great book which is, I think people should read. It's not going to be applicable to everyone at the moment at the size of business that they're at because we're talking larger businesses. But it's a book called how brands grow, Byron Sharp. And it's a classic marketing book now.
But in SAS, I barely ever meet anyone who's read it.
[00:16:49] Speaker A: Never heard of it.
[00:16:50] Speaker B: Yeah, right. But it's a huge, imagine everything you know about marketing and then flip it on its head. And that's the contents of the book.
It's not just like, oh, this is lovely, kind of like life affirming literature. This is like academic literature now. It's based on mostly non SaaS products, but there are so many applicable things. And in that book there is an amazing chart which shows an example of what you're just talking about there, Craig. It shows one company with a lot of customers and one company with not as many customers.
And it shows that their churn rates might be roughly similar. Right? So in reality, company a, the large company is churning way more customers in absolute terms than the small company.
But what they're also doing is because they are visible, because they are always there, because they are always in these kind of weak, these kind of loose buyers mindsets, right?
Who might buy once or they might pay for one month, or they might literally do one task and then never come back.
Because of that, they are also going to acquire more customers. So they can afford to not care about that churn because it'll snowball. And if you look at a company like ClickUp, I think they're a great example. I have no insight into ClickUp's actual data, but I bet this is the case. But if you look at ClickUp, they're company a, right? They've got a huge number of users because they're getting users from to do list tools, from team productivity tools, from document creation tools, from AI task management tools, huge numbers of categories where somebody might only want one thing, but other people might want like heaps of it. And they'll use that tool forever. They'll never change from ClickUp and they'll be an enterprise buyer, lots of revenue. But then the tail is like, oh, it's really long of these people who might pay $9 once in their life to click up, and they're going to churn out huge numbers, but they're also going to replace them with additional people because they're able to spend and get attention in a way that just small little to do list company, which has maybe a far superior product for a specific set of people, and they're thinking this product is going to crush it in the market because it's better.
Unfortunately, that's not true. Better products often don't crush.
[00:19:37] Speaker A: So I put a thing out on Twitter for listener questions, and I have a couple, but I want to jump into something that's related to this. That was a discussion at a conference I was at last week, which was kind of horizontal versus vertical. SaaS, podia, castos. Both are what I would call horizontal. Right. We are podcast hosting for anyone. We have churches, we have sports teams, we have gamers, we have people like you and me.
Startups, whatever, everyone. Podia. I'm sure it blows your mind, the types of people.
[00:20:07] Speaker B: I love it.
[00:20:09] Speaker A: Yeah, no, I love it, too. I mean, some of the insights that we see are just amazing.
Versus vertical. Right. Like, we are a virtual architecture platform for urban planning. Right. Like super specific.
I don't want to say which is easy. Well, yeah, which is easier from a conceptual marketing perspective, which is like, what you were just talking about is like, okay, we want to reach as many different types of. Or we don't care how many different types of people about a topic. Or we want to reach this one specific vertical for one use case. And arguably it's more targeted. It's easier to figure out who those people are. I don't know if I have a good question, but those are the two camps, and I think everybody pretty much falls into one. There's not a lot of gray space in between, I don't think. How do you think about the difference? Or which do you like better?
[00:21:07] Speaker B: Well, I'm having a great time doing horizontal. Okay.
But there are definite pros and cons. But here's the thing about it. Regardless of what you choose, there are different playbooks and different channels. All of this must be based on deep customer understanding. So let's say I am that. I think he said architecture for.
[00:21:32] Speaker A: Urban planning. Roads and parks and sidewalks and stuff.
[00:21:35] Speaker B: Swimming pool people. Yeah, I did work on one of those products once, amazingly.
Yeah. So let's say those people. How many of those people are there in the world? There's probably hundreds rather than thousands or tens of thousands.
Now if I just need to sell to hundreds of people and the deals take, let's say, 36 months to go from start to close, I think that's realistic. 36 months at a large deal size. I don't want to do anything other than literally get in front of those people in person all the time. And I'll do basically anything to do that. But the things that will work are building relationships with them on LinkedIn.
That's interesting.
I think I can do this one as well. See if it does.
[00:22:33] Speaker A: Yeah, I know it's iOS macOS stuff. It's amazing.
[00:22:39] Speaker B: I'm just going to get in front of them on LinkedIn.
When I was at the agency that I was at, we realized there's probably about five K people in the world, five K companies who could probably buy our services.
And so we literally made a list of those people.
I literally vetted each one.
I visited their website, I found the people, we combed through them, and then we just spent advertising money on those people.
[00:23:09] Speaker A: Oh, wow, interesting.
[00:23:11] Speaker B: That's the approach that will work for those kind of businesses increasingly. I don't think it's massively worth your time investing in SEO if you're doing that, frankly, because those people, they're not like Googling. Where do I get a piece of software for my industry? Because it's so niche. They know everybody in the industry. They're just asking. So all you got to do is start making inroads into that small contact book.
[00:23:39] Speaker A: Now, let's say you've got dream 100 kind of concept, right? Or dream 5000.
[00:23:44] Speaker B: Yeah, exactly. I mean, it's ABM based marketing and it works, frankly, you can grow fast like that.
Let's say, though, I've got 100 times the volume of potential users in that vertical, while my deal size is almost certainly smaller, first of all. So in that case, maybe it does make sense to be doing things like SEO, but does it make sense to be doing how to content? Well, maybe not. Maybe you could go a bit upfunnel. Maybe you could be saying like kind of like middle of funnel sort of thing and doing topical guides. So if there are specific events coming up in the next 18 months, maybe you're building up to that event. Legislation changes things like that if you're in b to b.
Once worked on a client which had a trucking client and the canadian legislation for logbooks, I think, I can't remember the details was changing and suddenly all logbooks had to be digital. And so team created a huge seminar on how to do this and also a downloadable logbook that you could use just to do a spreadsheet. And then said, look, here's the offer for this. You can use this product to just manage it for you.
And that whole thing, it drove business because there's 10,000 of these companies or whatever. I can't remember the numbers.
[00:25:32] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:25:34] Speaker B: So really it's not which one is better, it's that the classic thing, which is follow all the marketing best practices in order to score these customers.
It doesn't work because it's one size fits all and it isn't based on customer insight. Right. Whereas what I just described is based very much on broad customer insight. You can go deeper than I can. Sure. If you're one of these companies, you know your customer, hopefully.
[00:26:06] Speaker A: Okay. Switching, switching gears. A.
Yeah. So I had a question out on Twitter about questions to ask you and got one from Don Velker. He asked about tactics for dealing with competitors in regards to growth.
So we don't have any competitors. So we've never seen somebody steal our marketing tactics. So I don't know what Don is talking mean. I think. I think podia is in a similarly competitive spot as castos with a bunch of. I'll say we have some very good competitors then companies that do a lot of the same stuff that we do.
Yeah, I think Don's question is really good from a marketing perspective. How do you look at positioning against your competitors and then dealing with the shit that they do?
That seems not great.
[00:27:00] Speaker B: I think everyone worries too much about that negative stuff that competitors do.
Think about how hard you work as a marketer, as a founder, to just even get anyone to think about your company. Right.
You work really hard and you think that somebody placing an ad on your company name is going to actually do anything for your ideal fit customer who's going to a competitor.
You don't have to consider it. It's not going to work even if you're someone at base camp size, when Slack suddenly, I don't know if they do this, but if slack suddenly goes, hey, we're going to bid on base camp's name, we're going to say there's a better camp and it's over here at Slack.
Great.
More power to them.
If I'm the founders of Basecamp, I'm thinking like who cares? Frankly, it's hard work getting these customers. They don't buy based on one ad. So that's one thing. On the other hand, there is a customer journey.
Every company has a customer journey. Now it is different for everyone, but one of the key stages of that is consideration of the market as a whole. So your solution at web, right? And you're looking for a specific solution in that phase. You need to understand what it is that your customer is actually considering. Now the classic thing to do is create a competitor landing page and that is great. Those are really effective. I have seen those, I've seen those over and over again. Be incredibly effective at driving leads again at the agency that I was at previously. It is a key part of their playbook and they work just tips on that because I think this is like really tactical advice is don't lie and don't be ungenerous and do be way deeper than you think is good practice.
A lot of clients when they saw a landing page draft that we had created for them, a competitor landing page were like, there's way too much text on here. Where's all the pictures? People don't read and tell you when someone gets to that stage and they're going to make a product purchase that maybe is like say 100k or even ten k a year, they are reading because they don't want to lose their job when it goes wrong, right? Competitor landing pages and competitor content in general is an insurance policy for your buyer. It says, look, this is an honest comparison. We're not trying to deceive you into buying. And in fact if you're a bad fit, we will tell you. We will tell you to go and buy from the other person. That's how much we care about this process.
So tactically that's what works. Now if you want to get creative, you can do all sorts of things, right?
You can do stuff that kind of like you could create some industry beef. Why not?
If you've got a bigger competitor, create like a light hearted east coast, west coast style feud with them and just make your social content about this feud.
Use their brand colors and stuff to signify the evil guy in your thing. Why not? It's funny, people know it's a jest, but it gets you into the same consideration set when somebody goes, hey, who was that little company who took the mech out of Salesforce?
Did you see that thing where they had Mark Benioff as an opera singer, it's memorable.
[00:30:49] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:30:50] Speaker B: So there's all sorts you can do, but the base thing is create the content.
Don't worry about what your competitors are doing, mostly because frankly, you're not that memorable right now. And I mean that nicely.
[00:31:05] Speaker A: You hit on something that I think about all the time, which is like, we think about, okay, how can I sell something to a customer? Right? But I think the maybe more important thing is how can I help the customer make a confident buying decision? Because, yeah, you're going to go spend ten, 2100 grand out of your company's budget. And if the solution you pick sucks, it's on you. Right. It's your next review. They're like, yo, this decision you made is terrible.
Now we have switching costs and all this kind of stuff. The cost is way. It's probably ten times what they actually pay for your solution to go to another one. So I find that I don't know when I'm thinking about selling, in particular more sales and marketing, but helping customers feel good about the decision they're about to make is way more important than the features and the benefits and stuff. But just like, hey, you're in good hands. This is a smart decision.
Is really effective.
[00:32:03] Speaker B: Yeah, definitely.
[00:32:04] Speaker A: You got it.
[00:32:06] Speaker B: It's almost like you've done this for a living for a long time.
[00:32:12] Speaker A: So this is interesting. We were talking before we started recording about just time in the market. And so castus is six and a half years old right now. And I think one thing that I'm always kind of conscious of, and you obviously do a really good job of this, is continuing to learn and refine my craft.
I think it's a slippery slope. And I see some people doing it where they're in the business so long and they become like the old stodgy guy of like, well, fucking. This is just how it is, and this is who we are, and this is how we sell and all this kind of stuff. And on the other side, I think there's the people that are a little too flippant and are like, it's 2024. We're going all in on AI and TikTok or something crazy that's not really aligned with them and their ideals and stuff.
I guess it's a little bit of a statement, which is like, I think there's a fine line between continuing to reinvent yourself and invest in your own personal development. At the same time, staying true to what got you here, what got us to thousands of customers.
Can that same thing get us to another few thousand, or do we need a whole new thing? I don't know. It's just something I think about.
How do you balance that with, like, well, you've changed roles in the last year and a half and at a product company instead of an agency. And I'm sure that was a big learning curve for you, of mindset shift and everything, but how do you balance growth, like personal growth and opportunity with those playbooks that you talked about?
They don't really work, but. Shit, probably, like, 70% of them really work pretty well.
[00:33:49] Speaker B: I don't know. Well, they're all context dependent. It's not that they don't work.
[00:33:53] Speaker A: Yeah, okay.
[00:33:55] Speaker B: The real insight is they work when they work for your customers.
Okay, right.
But how do I balance that stuff? Well, for me, I think you shouldn't lie.
And the worst person you can lie to is yourself.
And when I was a founder, because I was a founder before I worked in an agency, I was terrified all the time. Like, honestly, so scared. Maybe I didn't recognize it at the time, but I was operating at, like, peak fear.
[00:34:35] Speaker A: Interesting. Fear of failure or running out of money.
[00:34:39] Speaker B: Everything, man. But crucially, what I've now worked out over time is the biggest fear was that I would fail and I would lose optionality in my life right now. What I mean by that is, when I started the company, my startup, we were able to raise money when we had zero customers and really an untested product. It was amazing at the time. It felt great, like you suddenly, overnight, we had this million pound valuation that's like million and a half dollars. And it was just on paper, but it gave us this sort of sense of, oh, now we're like a real business.
Let's go exit in a couple of years for a huge amount of money, and then we will be able to do whatever we want.
The position of fu.
Now, what I now know to be true is that that wouldn't have happened.
[00:35:56] Speaker A: Sorry, which part? Like the exit part, or then we would be able to.
[00:36:01] Speaker B: Then we would be able to. Okay, right. But at the time, I was terrified about, if I fail here, I'm going to have to go and work out what the heck I'm going to do next, and it's going to be on the basis that I have no money, and so I will have to do whatever it takes. Whereas if I absolutely nail this, I will be able to go, well, I've paid my mortgage, I have the money in the bank. I'm living on the interest. I could do whatever I want.
And so I made fear based choices for years.
And I told myself, these are not fear based choices. These are just suboptimal choices in service of a bigger goal. I know that this company is not growing at the rate that it should, but I am not going to change everything. I'm not going to scrap everything and pivot to a specific product or a specific vertical, which is what I actually should have done in that company.
I'm going to just carry on being this horizontal product.
I knew I should have done the vertical thing, and I knew I should have made that target list and gone after the x number of companies on it.
But I couldn't bring myself to do that in case we failed even faster. And so we failed slowly. I mean, look, failure is relative as well, right?
Anyone who's run a business for a long time knows this. You start the business with one idea of the outcome, and yet we burned through the cash that we raised in about a year, and yet we still managed to make that business pay people for five years, including us. And I'm like that I'm actually proud of. But the real thing was that I was just terrified of failing.
And I lied to myself for years, and it cost me probably four years of my life, which I won't get back in time, but I do have in bags of experience now.
[00:38:02] Speaker A: And you won't make that mistake again, right? I won't make that decision again.
I've never talked about this on the podcast, but I'm actually kind of in the middle of a similar thing right now. Right. Like, castos is in a lot of respects, a really successful company, but I've always thought it would be ten times the size that it is. And I'm kind of getting to the point where I'm like, probably not going to be ten times. Like, we're almost seven years into this. Probably not going to be ten times the size it is.
I am starting to see that we can keep going like this and growing, and we're very fortunate to have grown every year and all this kind of stuff, but probably not going to be the unicorn that I thought it would be. And that's really taken a lot to really grok and kind of accept that in every respect, this is a great business, right? We're profitable. I'm paying myself, like, market salary. We have options with employees. We have amazing investors. But I'm not going to sell this for $100 million.
Not going to happen.
And to say this is like, a triple in baseball, but it's not a home run, is probably the hardest thing that I've had to deal with, which is like, man, my baby is pretty cool, but not homecoming king or whatever.
[00:39:32] Speaker B: That was a lot of american mental force for a british guy.
[00:39:35] Speaker A: Okay, sorry, I got it.
Whatever. Not the fastest car in the race. Yeah, that's a fair hit on your ego.
But coming to terms with like, oh, this is great. I'm 43, I have a lot of options. It's still really great. I'm going to keep doing this, but it's just not like the amazing thing that some founders talk about. And I think there's like, an enormous amount of bullshit. And I saw that you recently quit Twitter, which I commend. And honestly, every time I'm on there, my life is in some ways better and in some ways worse. I get that, wow, I'm super motivated and intrigued, and then I get that, like, I just can't deal with one more person saying that they're making 50 grand a month with a faceless YouTube video where they spend 2 hours.
I just can't deal with it sometimes. And I think that, that comparing ourselves to other people is ultra unhealthy, and I'm just super guilty of it.
[00:40:39] Speaker B: Everyone is. Everyone suffers from. Right? Like, we do it all the time.
[00:40:43] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:40:45] Speaker B: So you lived in France for a long time, and France is the spiritual home of existentialism.
And existentialists like Sartre, what they believed, and I think they were very right about, is that.
Sorry to all the philosophers out there who have a deeper understanding of this, you can theoretically know something to be true, but it is action that makes you that come into existence for you.
You have to take action in order to have some truth in your life.
And what I have found to be true of many positions in work, in life stuff, is that you can know for a long time, and you can lie to yourself for a long time that things will get better.
But it's only once you have cut the cord, you've gone, this is it. I'm jumping out of the plane. I can't climb back in.
That you realize just how severe that condition was.
When I left my startup, I remember handing in my notice effectively, and I told the board, I'm leaving. I'm passing over to my founder, my co founder. You know what was sort of amazing and terrifying and terrible at the same time is that as soon as I left that room and I closed my laptop, I was like, there were no fireworks, there were no explosions, nobody was crying. Nobody was crying. It was just like, oh, okay, well, so we advance.
And for me, I was like, this is great.
Neither the success nor failure of that situation really depended on me.
It was out of my control. I was just sort of stewarding it through a period.
And for founders, and I'm sure there are lots who listen to this, it's terrifying to admit that what you've worked hard on might not work.
But on the other side of admitting that and taking some definitive action on it, there is an absolute world of opportunity.
And talk about optionality.
That optionality goes through the roof. Once you've exited successfully or unsuccessfully, a company, companies will pay you so much more to come and work for them because you've got incredible experience. You're, like, effectively an entrepreneur within their company.
People will pay you to work as a consultant. You can go and start different jobs. You open up a whole new world of kind of advisory. You can create content from a different place. As a founder, exiting a company is like a stepping stone to amazing things. Regardless of how you feel the company has ended.
[00:44:08] Speaker A: Yeah. And I'll just add that I think that a lot of us view it as binary, right? Like, we fucking ran out of money and closed. Or we sold for 100 million, and that's one to ten, right? And there's every step in between, all of which I think are successful. So we ran it for a while, then we shut it down. We sold it for a million bucks. We sold it for $20 million.
We got pe growth and we're still working on it. Or we just are base camp or convertkit and run it forever and have a really great life. And that's the one that I want to talk to more people about. It's like, hey, what if I run castos for the next 25 years? I'm 43, and what a great outcome.
I think there's a chance that that's what happens. And it's an amazing business for me and my family and our employees and our investors, even somehow, I think there's an investor path to a long term, sustainable, cash flowing business.
[00:45:07] Speaker B: And do you enjoy your life right now? In terms of life?
[00:45:11] Speaker A: It's pretty awesome. Yeah, great.
It's pretty awesome.
[00:45:16] Speaker B: I mean this nicely. You're going to die someday.
Why do you want more when you're already happy with what you've got? Right?
[00:45:23] Speaker A: Yeah, no, that's the trap for a lot of us. Right? It's like a b plus thing right here. Do I want to just shut the whole thing down? Searching for an a or just take the b plus and tweak it a little bit.
[00:45:36] Speaker B: Right.
Just one more thing here for founders that I know I suffered from.
I basically told myself I only started working for other people four years ago, three years ago now, I'd never had a conventional job before that in my career.
And I effectively told myself that I was unemployable because I couldn't take instructions from other people or I couldn't work in a team in the same way that other people can.
These are all lies because people are immensely adaptable and you can maintain your personality, your authority, and your influence as an employee or as outside of the company.
You don't have to lie to yourself about what will happen to you once you leave.
[00:46:37] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:46:37] Speaker B: And I'm not trying to get people to leave their companies, by the way.
[00:46:40] Speaker A: No, it's interesting.
I kind of soft pitched someone on being an employee, being like a regular advisor in their business recently, and I did it kind of on a whim. And afterwards I was like, that would be the best job ever.
I would totally do that. So, yeah, maybe that's the path, too, I think, as a founder.
[00:47:05] Speaker B: Hire you now?
[00:47:07] Speaker A: Yeah.
I mean, the skill set we have is second to none. Right? Like, you know, the whole stack. Right?
[00:47:14] Speaker B: The whole.
[00:47:14] Speaker A: All seven kind of parts of the business, fundraising operations, the mental part of it, much less like you being an amazing marketer. You have all the business skills.
[00:47:24] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:47:25] Speaker A: Cool. Mark, this is amazing. We could go for like a whole nother hour, I'm sure, but we'll have you back on another time. In the meantime, best place for folks to connect is on LinkedIn, I think.
[00:47:37] Speaker B: On LinkedIn, yeah. Just remember my name's spelled with a c if you go and look me up.
[00:47:42] Speaker A: Awesome. So we'll put a link in the show notes for sure.
[00:47:45] Speaker B: An emoji in the middle of it.
[00:47:47] Speaker A: No, I love it. I love it. Yeah. Mark, thanks so much for being on the show. I appreciate it.
[00:47:52] Speaker B: Love it. Thanks, Craig. Great.
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