Episode Transcript
[00:00:06] Speaker A: Welcome back. This is rogue startups and I'm your host, Craig Hewitt. If this is your first time here, welcome. This show is all about SaaS sales, marketing and growth. On the show of a mix of solo episodes where it's just me or interviews with friends, colleagues, inspiration leaders in the SaaS marketing and sales space. And today is no exception, I'm joined by Adam Shaw. Adam is really amazing. I got introduced to him as a lead. He put something out on LinkedIn and I was like, wow, this is fucking great. I gotta check this guy out. Maybe I'll become a client of his. Didn't work out. We're just not a great fit for what they do. But he has a great service. Marketing for entrepreneurs is what it's called. And it's really kind of a strategy and accountability service for Bootstrap SaaS.
And in this episode, Adam and I talk through utilizing platforms like Reddit and LinkedIn to actively go out and engage with your ideal customer Persona and get business directly. So, you know, kind of as opposed to passive marketing like YouTube content or podcasts or, you know, SEO and content marketing. Like, how can you go out and find that perfect person and engage with them directly on a platform like LinkedIn or Twitter or Reddit or whatever? And while we know that this is borrowed land and we don't own this, and we could lose all of our followers tomorrow, I think Adam has a really good kind of ethos and idea around this to say like, yeah, it might just be borrowed and you might not be able to stay here forever, but by golly, you can get customers, like, tomorrow. And they're driving really amazing results for their clients and marketing for entrepreneurs. And so I'm excited as we dive into the episode here, I think you're going to love the first part especially. So let's dive in.
So I want to start by asking where you got your sweatshirt, because it's amazing.
[00:01:59] Speaker B: Yeah. So I got this in the theater.
We were watching, the movie ended, and I said, I want that sweatshirt. And we just went online, googled I am knuff sweatshirt. And actually it is Mattel. Like, Mattel makes them.
[00:02:14] Speaker A: Oh, nice. Okay.
[00:02:15] Speaker B: Yeah, they're actually really, really comfy. I don't know if you can tell. Like, they're. It's really comfortable.
[00:02:18] Speaker A: Yeah, it looks like it's the same.
[00:02:19] Speaker B: Material on the Inside. It's just like, oh, it's so comfortable.
[00:02:23] Speaker A: Epic. Epic. So if you're not watching this on YouTube, go on YouTube and watch it. Adam has an amazing. I am kenuff whatever tie dyed sweatshirt that looks just amazing.
[00:02:35] Speaker B: So exact same one for the movie.
[00:02:37] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. So cool. Okay, we got the important stuff out of the way. Now we can go into the boring stuff about like, SaaS sales and marketing. So I, I ran across you because of a really great piece of marketing, talking about Reddit marketing.
I think I saw you post on LinkedIn.
We've cracked the code on how to use Reddit to acquire customers.
I know from talking to you since then, that piece is still generating leads for you and you're running some ads and stuff like that. But tell me how you're viewing platform marketing like that. So put LinkedIn and Reddit maybe in the same bucket for b, two B SaaS companies.
[00:03:22] Speaker B: Yep. So Reddit, Reddit, LinkedIn have very different uses to me from a content standpoint and how I'm using the platform. Reddit is very reactive platform for me. It's way ahead of LinkedIn and what people are talking about. But I very rarely post on Reddit. I very, I almost always just comment because that's where a lot of people go anonymously to ask for help on stuff.
I just created this app and I'm having a hard time figuring out how to reach my audience. Lot of questions like that. You can go on there, go on the subreddit r sas r microsass. There's tons of questions about how do I get users how to do that thing.
I just go in there and answer questions. And oftentimes, actually, the content that I create that most people see on LinkedIn comes from an answer on Reddit. Like, oh, that's interesting. Let's go see how I can, I've never seen anybody talk about this on LinkedIn because LinkedIn's, I've noticed LinkedIn is probably like, I don't know, maybe several weeks behind Reddit on the tactics. I think that's fine. I wrote about this in that Reddit post. In that LinkedIn post about Reddit was, LinkedIn is a lot more for bragging and telling people how good you are doing something. So people don't brag for stuff about stuff that they're not doing yet. Right. So if somebody goes on Reddit or something similar, that's a little bit more like ahead of it and then says, oh, okay, I'm gonna go try that thing. It takes them three or four weeks to try it, see if it worked, and then they, then they brag about on LinkedIn.
[00:04:50] Speaker A: Got it. Okay, so Reddit ReactiOnAry, answering people's questions. I think Quora was a popular thing back in the day. Kind of similar MindSet There. LinkedIn. I agree.
I go and boast on LinkedIn about how great I am at sales and marketing and helping other founders with sales and marketing, and I tell you, man, it works like a champ.
But it makes me feel really bad every time I'm there.
I don't know. Do you like on a person, I know your business is run partly on these platforms, but do you have a similar kind of feeling about LinkedIn as a platform?
[00:05:31] Speaker B: It's easy to fall into it, but I think the way that I've kind of defeated that personally is that I am using my results as a hook, not the story themselves. So you can go on there. I had a great post. I had a post I think was great. It got really good engagement two days ago, and it was kind of a story about, actually, let me take a look because I can't remember.
Yeah. So I had a post on here that I did two days ago, which is wasting 30. If you're wasting 30 minutes per day on LinkedIn, it's hurting your b two B startup. If it's not, I'm helping people, telling things. And then I use my experience on Reddit or on LinkedIn and on these platforms and telling people a slight brag as more of a, a reason, like, hey, you should listen to me about this because. And then I go back into, here's how to do it, and it's more help oriented. So I have a line here that says, I made $30,000 for my startup on LinkedIn this month, and I only had about 30 minutes per day.
And after that, there's not really any bragging. Right? And I go and I say, like, here's the challenges I faced. If it sounds familiar to you, continue reading? Check this out kind of thing. And then I tag other people in it who are also very helpful in this space, like Nick Brackama, Indrik Poldie, Sam Brown. I tagged them and said, like, you know, go and use their stuff, too. So, yeah, I use that, but I jam pack my content with so much more helpful stuff. I don't feel like I'm bragging. I feel like I'm just using it as an example of what could potentially happen if you do follow whatever it is I'm telling you to do.
[00:07:07] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. Gotcha. Gotcha. Okay, interesting. Do you, as you're, like, working with your clients and stuff, do you think about, like, different types of businesses are better suited for one platform or another? The approach is obviously different but like certain industries, types of businesses, Arpus, stuff like that.
[00:07:24] Speaker B: Yeah. So our customers vary very significantly. I have folks who are HR tech SaaS startups. I have folks who are consultants and I have folks who are very technical, like SEC, Dev and DevOps and Secops stuff.
And it varies pretty significantly. Like, Reddit is very good for those devices. Twitter is really good for those devs. LinkedIn is awesome for the HR tech communities is really, really good for the HR folks. So we really, part of what I do when I bring on new customers, we spend an hour talking about who their customers are, where they're spending time, and we really find them. We delay. We're going to go and like, I use sales Navigator, I use something called Gummy search to help me search through Reddit. And then I use the Hive index, which is like a list of communities.
That's pretty cool. Check those out. Definitely. And maybe we can include the link to them in the description. But I use those to quick once over, like, what are people doing? Where are they? And then from there we go and we say, all right, we're going to make content. That's for that specifically.
[00:08:35] Speaker A: Sparktoro as well, or, no, I haven't used Sparktoro.
[00:08:38] Speaker B: I've heard of it. What does it do?
[00:08:41] Speaker A: I think it kind of connects the social graph or overlay of people with certain interests across social and search and communities and platforms like that. Like Reddit. Yeah.
[00:08:53] Speaker B: I'll have to take a look. I've heard of it before, but I was never really familiar with what it actually did.
[00:08:58] Speaker A: Yeah, I've dabbled a little bit to see if people are searching for b two b SaaS sales. They're on these subreddits or they're following these people on Twitter. A lot of it's pretty obvious, but I think it gets pretty fine grained.
[00:09:11] Speaker B: Yeah, very cool.
[00:09:13] Speaker A: Neat. Neat.
And so let's talk about the, so I think I get the strategy for Reddit. It's like find a topic that people are talking about that relates to what you do, give a super awesome answer and somehow link to your shit. Right.
That's the bit of the edgy part. Like, there's a lot of rules and etiquette in Reddit and you'll get banned if you're using it as promotion. Like, how do you approach that?
[00:09:38] Speaker B: So I make my profile like a landing page. My profile is optimized. You can go on there, just search marketing for founders on Reddit. It's my profile and you can see it's full of call to actions full of content, full of like click here for my newsletter, click here to schedule a call. That kind of stuff. So I don't have to be overly pushy on the posts because people who are very interested don't have to say they're going to click my profile, my username and they go learn more about me.
So I don't feel like I have to push it. I only push it when it's very organic, when somebody asks a question and then I can say, hey, here's the answer. Also, I wrote this guide I talk about in my newsletter, and as far as I usually go with that is I have links to them in my profile. Go check it out.
Because this is way more organic, it's way more conversational, and it's less threatening, too. Makes people not feel like you're trying to sell them on something. And yeah, you won't get banned if you do it that way.
[00:10:35] Speaker A: So, yeah, gotcha. Gotcha. Do you use any kind of like keyword alerts or anything like that in Reddit or you just pop in every morning and search the subreddits that you're a part of?
[00:10:46] Speaker B: No. So I do, I use a platform called Gummy Search and I'll send you guys the link. I have an affiliate link that I think gives like 1015 percent off. But it's pretty inexpensive. It's very, very easy to use. Cause what was happening for me was I was spending 2 hours a day on Reddit at one point because I was making money off it and it made sense. And I was like, I need to figure out a way to spend less time on this but still get the same outcome. And so just like any other tactic I do, it's like, all right, what part of this is taking the most time out of my day? And it was the finding stuff to post.
[00:11:19] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. I mean, I've played around a bit on Reddit and just LinkedIn with like, finding people, talking about interesting stuff and commenting, increasing social reach. Yeah, that's the hardest part, is like, it's just finding the content to engage with. I was reading a tweet thread by Tebow, I don't know, Tebow's last Tebow maker, the tweet Hunter guy and Taplio guy, and he was like, yeah, you know, make a list of this and then go engage with these people every day. I'm like, yeah, that's cool, man, but like, that's hard. Like, that's a lot of time. But I guess that's the point. It's like, oh, this is important and so you gotta make the time to do it.
[00:11:54] Speaker B: Part of it too is after you're in there, you start to know what kind of conversations you want to be in and you can create almost like bait for those conversations. The few posts that I actually do on Reddit are bait. They're questions, hey, you know, what's the biggest challenge people are facing right now for generating leads? Hey, a post I'm probably gonna do here sometime this week was for people who launched a new product in the new year. How's it going? Three months in and the goal there is to get people to say, hey, I launched, I'm having these currently. These are my difficulties, whatever, then I can go back to them and say, oh, okay, here's how I help do that.
[00:12:33] Speaker A: Let's talk about marketing for founders a little bit. So you all have an interesting model where there's the strategic accountability partner side of things and there's a done for you service. You want to give a overview of landscape there.
[00:12:48] Speaker B: Yeah, I built marketing for founders off of my consulting and I had a lot of early stage startups like sub ten k a month startups coming to me and saying, hey, I want more help, but I can't afford, I can't afford basically my rate, which is anywhere between five to month.
What we found out from talking to them was they actually did prefer somebody just told them what to do. And they were unhappy with consultants and coaches that they had gotten in the past because it wasn't hands on enough. There was too boilerplate. They'd meet once a week or a half hour an hour, and they'd be like, oh, go do this thing or fill in this template. That wasn't really enough. So what we did is we said, okay, I'm going to really just hold people's hands. They're going to create a bunch of content that helps people and then I'm going to tell them what to do step by step. So the way that that works is we build them a 90 day roadmap. We do a daily action plan for them. So every single day they just look to see what they have to do that day to accomplish this thing. And then we have office hours every single day for an hour and a half for people to come in, get help with the tasks that are due. And what we really want to do here was just completely remove the question of what do I do and how do I do it, and just turn yourself into a task driven marketing person. And just to trust if you do the steps, it's going to work. And it works. It really does. We have a bunch of customers now who are at a situation where their first post they ever did on LinkedIn is going viral and they're getting customers the first time. They're having more than one or two conversations with customers a week. Now they're getting one or two a day.
And part of this is that we also calibrate this to the needs of that customer and the abilities. So part of our onboarding process is to dig into what kind of content do you like to make and are good at? And then how much time do you have every week to dedicate to this? Because if somebody says, I love making video content, but I hate writing, I'm not going to tell them to write four newsletters a month. I'm not going to tell them to write a guide a week. I'm going to tell them, go record video. And then the next question is, how much time do you have every month or every week to spend on this? And we have founders who are like, yeah, I can spend 20 hours a week marketing, and I have founders who spend, say, I can spend 1 hour a day, so 5 hours a week marketing. And we make sure that our daily action plan is tailored to that. Those are significantly different outcomes that are going to happen. So we want to make sure that we're accounting for all of that.
[00:15:19] Speaker A: You probably have some data on this. At what point does the results really start to grow exponentially based relative to the input? It was like 5 hours a week. You're going to get a small thing, but ten, it's three times as much results. Is there a thing like that?
[00:15:37] Speaker B: I haven't seen it based on how many hours work they're putting in. I see it based off of consistency of putting hours in. So I would say three months in is when you start to really see the consistent, very obvious growth happening. You start to see the impact and start getting more phone calls, demos, engagement within two weeks from us, most of our customers pay back their investment within three to four weeks. Working with us, because in that first month we focus on fast stuff very quickly, what we call active marketing, where messaging people one on one, we're tagging them in posts, we're just forcing conversations to happen on various platforms.
So yeah, I guess to summarize that answer, it's less about how much time you're spending per day, and it's more about the consistency of getting stuff out the door and enforcing conversations with customers.
[00:16:26] Speaker A: Gotcha. Gotcha.
And just if folks are interested marketingforfounders.com. And is there a price point at which this really makes sense? We're $19 a month. I don't know if it would make sense for us $100 a month, like minimum price plan. Is that kind of where you like to start?
[00:16:43] Speaker B: Yeah, I think we're seeing, most of our customers are seeing success if they're like $500 to $1,000 a month and up.
We don't have anybody who's under 499 a month. I know one of our customers is that, and then I have a customer whose average contract value is one hundred fifty k. And so they're really happy when they get one demo a week, whereas the 499 guys are really happy when they get one demo a day. And they're both seeing that and they're both happy with it.
[00:17:10] Speaker A: Yeah. Gotcha. Gotcha. You touched on active versus passive marketing. I wrote about this in my newsletter. I credited you and linked back to your LinkedIn post. But I really, so I was on a sales call with you. We were talking about this whole thing. And before then on LinkedIn, I think you were telling, you were asking me like, hey, what kind of growth stuff are you doing for Kastos? And I said, like, you know, I'm a hammer. And my, like, the nail or whatever is content marketing and SEO. Like, yeah, that's passive marketing. But like, what's the mix of active and passive marketing and what are you doing for active marketing for folks who haven't, like, heard of this concept aren't on my newsletter.
Give me the skinny on like, how you define those two and how you think about the breakdown between them.
[00:17:55] Speaker B: Yeah, good question. And I want to preface this by saying that the terms active and passive aren't associated with positive and negative. I want to make that clear. Like, they both have.
[00:18:05] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah.
[00:18:05] Speaker B: Equal part in the marketing. Depending upon where you are, when you're really early stage or you're trying to make a big impact fast, the active marketing part is what you want to do. Active marketing is more of going and forcing those conversations to happen, putting things and content directly in the hands of the people that you want to have, look at it and turn into a demo or buyer or whatever the passive part is. You're thinking of paid media SEO, things where there's not anything you can do at that second to get a demo from that activity.
When you post on LinkedIn, if you just post and leave it, that's very passive. You're hoping that somebody who you want to have come into a demo, sees it, engages, you can create a conversation with them to make that more active. You create a post on LinkedIn and you dm the post to ten of your prospects and saying, hey, just wrote a post, thought you get a ton of value out of it. Let me know what you think and leave a comment. Then out of those ten, three of them come back and say, that was really helpful. I've been having a problem with this and you go, great. I help people do this and would love to show you. And maybe you get one person that says great and you get a demo out of it. So very actively putting that in people's hands and when you're talking about being a founder and very low MRR, basically anything under a million dollars a year that is going to have huge, huge impact in your business.
Versus paid ads and SEO. Paid ads is more passive, more risky, because you can waste a ton of money. You have to spend good money before you know if it's going to work. SEO is risky. Well, a, it's really hard and super time consuming, so you can't do other stuff, and b, it's more of a long tail thing. And your active marketing stuff can contribute to that SEO piece, obviously. Right? Because you are writing content.
If your focus is set first on just creating great content that's going to engage your customers, then you can just upload it into a blog or something in the future and maybe add some more keywords and just hit some SEO best practices.
[00:20:04] Speaker A: Yeah, no, I totally can relate. As I was thinking about active versus passive marketing, frankly, most of what we've done is passive marketing.
And I think one is because we're all just scared. We're scared to dm this thing to somebody and them tell us to fuck off or not get the sales call or not get a response or something like that. Whereas it's easy for me to say, I'm going to publish, I have a goal to publish 200 YouTube videos this year and this will be one of them, which is great. You're helping me meet my goal. But it is because at some level I'm scared instead of doing this, to go have a whole bunch of conversations with people who I think could be great prospects for us.
[00:20:46] Speaker B: A way to take the stress off of that is you have now really great content hosted on a site that everybody knows, non threatening. It's not hosted on your, I mean, I'm sure it will be on your website somewhere, but you don't have to drive them to a site that's going to have a demo request thing, you know, it's this and that's branded and everybody, it just feels like a sales pitch. You've got a YouTube channel with really great content and you can now go using LinkedIn automation or doing it manually to a really, really specific audience and say, hey, I created a YouTube channel to help people build, you know, their marketing whatever, funnel, whatever, however you want to position it to help, you know, mid stage marketing teams build better funnels.
Here, check it out. Know what you think. And you're going to get one of two responses back. There is one, hey, great. This is awesome. Not super helpful for me right now, but maybe I'll take it up later. And you very rarely get somebody angry with you because you're not just hard pitching them, you're just giving them some content.
The other responses, the one that I'm always trying to get is somebody going, yeah, thanks. I need this because we've been struggling with some of these things and there's stuff that's going to be in the middle where somebody says, thanks, this is interesting. And your goal in that conversation with them is to get them to come back and say that they're having a problem with something that you fix. For me, I send people my newsletter and just this morning I had three people reply back, say, this newsletter is really helpful and super timely because we're launching this month or in April.
So I just respond back, well, that's awesome. I help founders do their own marketing. Would love to show you how it works. If you find the news that are useful, I think this would be useful for you as well. And out of those three replies, I got one demo off of it. So it's because I know how to dig into those folks and get them to tell me, hey, I'm having a problem with marketing. One of those three people is a stealth company. He said, oh, this is timely for me. You know, we're going to be launching and built and driving revenue in two months.
But he didn't really tell me they had a problem with it, so I said, what are you guys working on right now? And he replied back with, well, we've been trying to figure out how we're going to launch this for like three weeks and I'm just not sure if.
[00:22:53] Speaker A: This is the right way to go.
[00:22:54] Speaker B: And I was like, oh, great, come have a demo. This was like an hour ago. He hasn't responded yet, but we'll see. That's the kind of thing I just have to dig and try to. Cause I know if they tell me I have a problem with something, so I just try to get them to.
[00:23:05] Speaker A: Say that, yeah, yeah, got it, got it. I like how you're approaching kind of like using a platform to get people off platform because that feels really good to me because part of a kind of LinkedIn community or like LinkedIn to grow your business community. And they have been talking all week about how fucking reach is down and all this kind of stuff, and the algorithm's changing. And you saw it with Twitter a while back. I'm sure you see it with Reddit all the time and the API changes with Reddit a couple of years ago and stuff like that. I think it goes without saying it's super risky to put all of your eggs in the platform basket. But to me, like, the way I'm approaching it right now is exactly like what you're talking about. It's like I want to create content off platform and then use the platforms to amplify it. So like, to me, like me personally, all of my marketing effort, all of my passive marketing effort is going into YouTube because I think as a platform and an algorithm, it's the best. But then fucking Twitter and LinkedIn, and if I get active on Reddit, it will be just to drive awareness and traffic back to that thing. Because that feels like even if Reddit and LinkedIn and Twitter all blow up tomorrow, I still have this thing that relatively is mine.
[00:24:24] Speaker B: Yeah, I actually haven't heard anything about the LinkedIn algorithm going away. I mean, I had a post yesterday. They got 3000 impressions and got me a demo. So I guess I'm not really. Maybe I missed that one.
[00:24:32] Speaker A: Nice.
[00:24:33] Speaker B: Maybe I missed that train.
LinkedIn throttled all their stuff, whatever. A year and a half ago or something, I had half the amount of followers I do now. And I used to consistently get 20 to 30,000 impressions on stuff and now I get whatever, $3,000 to 5000, but it's fine. I get a lot more engagement now from an actual likes and comments standpoint than I used to and obviously sales calls from it.
I think if you're practicing those active methods and really pushing it in front of people and using the platform in an active way, I think you get affected a bit less by it because you're not relying on an algorithm or a piece of code to hopefully put it in front of the people you want. You're going to go do that. My LinkedIn posts that I put effort into, the ones I'm really like, this LinkedIn post I'm writing to engage and to turn into customers. I'll go share it on Reddit, on Twitter, in the communities, in other areas, messaging it to my friends or emailing it to people, things like that. Because to me, that's the best way to get in front of people is to just physically hand it to them and not have to rely on the algorithm. And then the algorithm goes and says, oh, a lot of people are engaging with this, so let's push it in front of more.
[00:25:40] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, no, makes sense. Makes sense.
What do you think most founders, like, miss or get wrong when it comes to approaching growth? So a lot of folks come to you because they're just like, I don't know, I have a problem.
Where does that problem start from, do you think?
[00:25:57] Speaker B: Yeah, I pinpoint that in a single response I get when we're trying to figure out who the audience is to buy the product and create a message is, oh, but those people could buy it, too. And that destroys startups. I think people are starting to get, they're starting to understand more because a lot of people talk about niching down. The thing is, niching down, people say it, but I don't think they really actually get into what that means. Like, oh, go find a smaller audience.
They equate niching down to a smaller audience versus niching down to talking directly to your audience in a way that they care about.
And that's the source of it. And when I do these onboarding calls with my customers, we really dig into their audience.
We pick one really specific subsection.
I'll just use my business as an example for this.
I help companies do marketing. That's the 10,000 foot view. Could I do this for companies that are doing 500 million a year, 100 million a year, 50? Yeah, sure. But I don't want to, and I don't think it's the audience that's going to buy my product at a high rate.
So I dug in. I said, all right, I help b two B SaaS founders. Well, some b two B SaaS founders are worth $4 billion. Some don't have a pen in their pocket. So what does that really mean? All right, well, I help b two b bootstrap founders. Okay, cool. There you go. But however, if they were marketers before, they don't need my help. So I help b two b bootstrap technical founders do their own marketing.
And then from there, everything that I do can kind of go back, flow back into that. You know, my content is focused on that. My content is about how to do stuff inexpensively. It's how to avoid making big mistakes. It's focused on people who don't know how to do marketing. So it's very easy to read and there's not a bunch of technical marketing jargon into my stuff.
So that's how, like, taking a niche, it doesn't mean that you're just like making your audience smaller. It means you're just learning how to talk to the people who are most likely to buy your product.
[00:27:54] Speaker A: Have you found any risks or downside to niching down like that?
[00:27:59] Speaker B: Not in the early or being more.
[00:28:00] Speaker A: Specific, I should say. Okay.
[00:28:02] Speaker B: Okay, yeah, not early in the time, because, you know, I say this a lot of times. First of all, if somebody comes to me and says, I want to create an empire and I want this company to be worth $10 billion, they're not my, I should tell them, like, I'm not gonna be able to help you guys. Well, I know that they're gonna, like, they're gonna try to, they're gonna not listen, they're gonna do stuff that is like way too out there as opposed just doing decent marketing. They're gonna try to do something revolutionary every time. They're gonna expect everything has to go viral, because to get to $10 billion, you do have to have like that ridiculous level of luck to some degree. Like, every post you do is viral. You have an amazing thing. But what I would say is, like, at the level that they're at under 10,000 mrr, under a million ARR, you know, they're looking at just being good at marketing. And you don't need a thousand customers if you're charging, you know, whatever, $2,000 a month for something to get to that ten k mrr, you only have to reach five people. And imagine if, like, I was in my situation, imagine if I am the marketing company for every HR tech, bootstrap SaaS startup, under a million dollars a year, I would be not working anymore. First of all, not living in St. Louis, Missouri. I'd be on the beach, I'd be riding my bikes, right? Like, yeah, and, you know, how much money could I make if I was where all these HR tech company I use HR tech, that's kind of my background that got me started in this. But like, if, you know, there's hundreds of those startups, and if I get most of them to pay me my two k a quarter, I'm going to make a boatload of money. And I tell my folks that it's like, dude, imagine, like, there's how many, how many devs, for instance, can, like, buy this product of yours, you know, in this extreme niche? Oh, there's like 10,000 of them. I'm like, okay, so if you have, like, 5% of that market, which isn't that outside the realm of possibility with your extreme niche, like, how much money you gonna make? Like, oh, 10 million a year. You good with that? Like, you all right? Can you live off of that?
[00:29:55] Speaker A: Right?
[00:29:56] Speaker B: They say, no, I want to be worth $10 billion. I just tell them that, I don't know. My, my tactics are not for you.
[00:30:01] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. What scares you about kind of marketing today?
[00:30:10] Speaker B: I don't say it's fear. It's more like an anxiety around how many things you could be doing, but it's always been that way. I just think it gets worse and worse.
But it's easy to fix that. When I just go and look, the things I'm doing are already doing great. And going back to the idea of, do I really need to do more on more places, or can I just keep doing better where I am? I always use the term and actually kind of goes back to what I was just saying is, like, how many yachts can you water ski behind? And the anxiety behind being on more platforms is, I'm not going to make more money because I'm not as many platforms. It's like, well, are we doing all right where we are now? Yes, let's maximize this. And if I can hire somebody to help me with these other platforms or something, then I'll do that maybe in the future, but right now it's totally fine.
[00:30:50] Speaker A: Yeah, no, I love that. I love that. And that kind of answers. The second part of that question is like, what are you really excited about? And I would guess the answer is kind of like, nothing, because you're trying to stay focused.
[00:30:59] Speaker B: Well, yeah, what I'm excited about is I just hired a bunch of people, and now I can actually do marketing for my business, which is something that.
[00:31:05] Speaker A: Instead of fulfillment and client work.
[00:31:07] Speaker B: Exactly. Yeah. So we know that when I spend time on Reddit or Link, well, Reddit, too, but when I spend 2 hours on LinkedIn, we get four demos. It's literally, it's clockwork. I just spend the time talking to people, posting, engaging, whatever. We always get demos. And so now it's all right. How can I take 6 hours a day off of my plate so I can actually go do that and really build the business? We had a huge, huge month in March because in February we didn't have a ton of new business. So I was spending a ton of time on LinkedIn, Reddit, writing newsletters. And so it's like, okay, we went, you know, we closed 40K MRR in March because I spent almost a full time job marketing. So how do we go do that again and again and again and again? How can I get it so that I'm spending 40 hours a week on marketing? Because we know that that's going to be the best way for this business to succeed.
[00:32:00] Speaker A: So to just play Devil's Advocate a little bit here, is it fair to say that this type of marketing is not something you could put on autopilot, but it is active. You have to be there and you have to be doing the work. And if you turn it off, it's like paid ads. In that respect. If you stop putting in the work, the leads stop coming and business slows down.
[00:32:21] Speaker B: This method is depending upon the size of your company, what your product is. 99% of the time. This method is not going to get you 10 million error. It's not. I tell you that right off the bat is if you're at five, you need to get to ten. Well, actually I would probably say the done for you side of my business, the more service oriented side of my business would probably be better. But even that our main audience or our main buyer for that done for you side of the business is two or 3 million ARR trying to get to five.
Because when you get to five to ten, then you can have, you really should be hiring a CMO, you really should have somebody internally owning marketing for you. At that level. You should probably be able to afford paying somebody three hundred k a year on that versus having a company doing it all for you.
So, yeah, I'm pretty transparent on who we're for. We're not for companies who are series C, series B. Thinking about going public soon. 10 million errors doesn't track with our methods.
[00:33:19] Speaker A: Gotcha. Neat.
Yeah, I mean, I think just last, like what would you like to leave SaaS founders with in terms of like places to go, things to do, things to think about? Like what's like the parting nugget?
[00:33:33] Speaker B: Yeah, I think it's think about first, go find where your customers are.
That's the main thing. So go and dig and like to spend some time on Twitter, Reddit, LinkedIn, wherever they are, and have conversations with them. This is especially helpful if you are very much non marketing and very much not able to write good content or make good content yet, because it's just not a strength of yours is just have conversations. And when you see conversations happening over and over again, whatever your responses are to these questions and conversations, turn that into content. You'll get better at it eventually. That's a really, really good spot to start because you're just going to be able to talk with your buyers and with your customers who have these problems you're trying to fix. So there's no guessing. You don't have to guess if they're going to like what you're going to say because it's just repurposing something that somebody else already liked and then where to go.
Come to me, ask for help.
Follow me on LinkedIn. Shoot me a message on there. Craig knows if you message me asking for help on something, I'm going to give you a pretty lengthy response on anything. Basically, hey, how do you recommend doing this? I'll either give you one of the assets that we have, guides, templates, whatever, to help you, or I'll write a totally custom response on step by step. Here's how I do it. Also, my newsletter is really popular lately and has a lot of great step by step stuff, and that's marketingmemos dot behive.com dot.
[00:34:51] Speaker A: I just want to kind of echo one thing you said.
Just regarding having conversations with people and ideas about content is I've started doing some kind of one on one sales coaching for SaaS founders. And yeah, a lot of my social content comes from discussions I've had where people say, I was in the situation, I did this.
And interestingly, there's only like two or three threads. It's always focus or hiring or compensation or something like that.
But it's interesting to have those conversations, hear the same stuff over and over and then think, oh, I should probably write a thing about that. And they always do the best when I hear stuff from clients.
And then generally I don't want to disclose what a client's doing, but just say, like, I've been hearing a lot of this and this is how we tackle it. Always does the best. So, yeah, definitely, definitely agree.
[00:35:42] Speaker B: Yeah, I get that. It's a, makes your life a lot easier. Yeah.
[00:35:45] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:35:45] Speaker B: I try to remove all the thought process from marketing, which is, you know, reacting to other people. It makes it way easier. So you don't have to be the first person to answer a question. You just have to answer it better than the other guys and 95% of them. Right. Um.
[00:35:58] Speaker A: There you go.
[00:35:59] Speaker B: Which is why Reddit works really well for me.
[00:36:01] Speaker A: Yeah. Neat, neat. All right. Man, awesome. So marketingforfounders.com, folks who want to check it out and we'll have a link to your profile and LinkedIn for folks who want to connect there.
[00:36:10] Speaker B: Awesome. Thank you so much.
[00:36:12] Speaker A: All right, thanks, Adam. Have a good one.
[00:36:15] Speaker B: So in my mind, I always think that there's two ways to scale the active marKeting.
There's two areas that are stopping you from scaling it's time or expertise. And the best way to, you know, make something do better is by, you know, the expertise side. In my situation with these carous odds was I want to make them look better, just design nicer, to grab attention more and communicate better. So, and I don't have the expertise to do that. I'm a very bad designer. So I took my design, sent it to my guys who do all my designs for me. I said, hey, make this better, put it in our new, we're launching a new website with new branding and stuff, like put it in the new, you know, format and here's this. And, you know, and then on the other side, I talked about this already. I hired a bunch of people so I can spend more time on LinkedIn. So not only am I going to be able to do more of these carousel posts that have made, that made me good money, I probably make five k a month off of just a carousel post every month from new customers who said, I saw your thing.
I was only doing two. I only had two last month. I wanted to 5678 because it makes me money. So make it look better and figure out how to do more of them. And that's also how you can figure out when it's time to bring in consultants and things.
Is it volume or expertise? Which one do you want to pick to do better? And then that's how you pick who to bring in as a consultant. You don't make that mistake of bringing a consultant to try something totally new. You bring them in to amplify something that you know is already working and there's no risk there.
[00:37:41] Speaker A: Yeah. And just for context, we were talking about this as it relates to how I'll repurpose content from this show is like, we use opus opus pro to create the short segments. And Adam was saying, well, yeah, but just take, you know, a segment from this and create a LinkedIn carousel from it. So that's, that's kind of where, where this came from. So, yeah, love, love the idea, man. I like, yeah, carousels, I hear, do really well. I've done a couple of them, you know, simple canva, template or something like this. The Evan figma is great. Yeah, cool, man.
