Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Welcome back to Rogue Startups. I'm your host, Craig Hewitt. This is a solo episode and after, I don't know, a dozen interviews in a row, I'm sorry that it's just me this time. You don't have amazing insights from other guests, primarily in the last kind of handful of episodes talking about AI, the impact that it's having on us as founders and our business and where we think economy and SaaS and startups and the world is growing as a result of AI. And no doubt that this was a big theme at microconf last week and largely. I'm just gonna talk about microconf this week and the things that I took away from it. I have a couple of notes over here. So if you're watching on YouTube and I'm looking down in the corner, it's not. Cause the dog is snoring, which he probably is as well, but it's because I'm looking at my notes because I have five things I wanna talk about from microconf last week. My takeaways, things I noticed, and things that I think would be helpful for you if you weren't able to make it.
[00:00:55] So a bit of a pause on the AI theme, by the way. Hit me up on Twitter or LinkedIn. Let me know what you think of kind of the AI theme if you want to keep that going. If you like interviews or you like solo episodes like this, as, you know, kind of searching for where this thing is going, trying a few different things and want to do what you want to do, right? So please just let me know what you like, what you don't like, what you want to see more and less of. Okay? So the first of the five things I want to talk about was what I thought and was kind of the consensus as the best talk of the event was by Anthony Pieri, all about positioning and copy. Anthony runs a kind of an agency where they do positioning and copy mostly for SaaS businesses. I'll include a link in the description below if you want to check it out. But I mean, the talk was amazing, right? Literally, like spot on. Everything that. That I would have thought and a ton more, right? So a lot of times, like I'm kind of opinionated or somebody says something on a talk and I'm like, yeah, I don't know about that. Spot on, right? 100%. And the thing I liked about this was there were a lot of kind of frameworks and methodologies that you could use in, you know, coming up with better positioning for your product, taking into Account things like jobs to be done and the voice of the customer and things like that. Color coding your copy, which I heard afterwards, was kind of like a big aha moment for a lot of folks. But the reason that I like this and I picked this as like, the best single talk of the event was everyone was talking about it afterwards. Everyone was talking about how they're going to take what Anthony talked about and implement it into their business.
[00:02:31] And so the. The takeaway for this is twofold for me. One, it was a great talk, and we all should think about positioning and copy and how we're talking to customers a lot. Something I'm taking away to implement into Kastos.
[00:02:47] That's good, but that's, like, relatively obvious, right? Like, we should all be better copywriters and marketers. But the thing for me that this really took away was, I'll guarantee you that Anthony is slam full of people trying to hire him this week after coming to microconf, delivering an enormous amount of value, telling us all, hey, this is just how you go do this thing. Go do it.
[00:03:09] But folks might be like, gosh, that's great, but, like, I want you to hold my hand, or I want you to show me the secret sauce. I want you to. To share the secret of how to actually do this thing and get this implemented in my business. And so the lesson for me is maybe the best part of this talk wasn't that it was a great talk, but it was an example of how to generate leads from a conference. Right. A hundred percent. Anthony is going to grow his business from coming to this conference. And so the takeaway for me maybe is what conferences can I go to where I can talk about podcasting and content and this kind of media brand that we talk a lot, a lot about within Castos as a way to grow your business. So I'm not sure yet. Right. But you would imagine, hey, I'm going to go to this kind of adjacent or tangential conference, or I'm going to go to a conference on financial planners. It's a big kind of customer of ours within our Castos Productions business. I'm going to go to that conference and talk about how podcasting has helped kind of move a lot of brands forward for our customers and give a really actionable, practical talk on just, hey, if you're thinking about doing this, but it seemed too complicated, go. This is step one, this is step two. This is our framework. Here it is. Here's all the downloads, the PDF or guides or whatever. So Anthony's talk was really good, but for me, it was kind of the meta level of, like, conferences are awesome for one to many lead gen and selling and awareness. And we all should probably take that away and say, how can we do this with our business? Okay. Second thing I want to talk about was, for me, like, the personal best part, hands down. And I think Rob talks about this a lot in, you know, publicly in his kind of talks around microconf on the podcast. And, you know, personally, I chat with him some. And the best part of microconf is the connections and the people. Right? And so hands down, the best part of microconf for me was seeing my friends. I don't have a huge startup and bootstrappy kind of ecosystem here in Rhode Island. There's not a lot of people in Rhode island in general, but there's not a lot of us. Right? So the best part for me was seeing my people and for the first time in a long time, meeting a lot of people who listen to this show that I didn't know before. So I met a handful of people who were like, hey, I listen to the podcast. It's great to meet you.
[00:05:24] That's awesome. Right? And so if you're on the fence about, like, oh, gosh, should I have this podcast? There's a bajillion podcasts out there. There are, but for good reason. And it is that it's a fantastic way to kind of grow your brand and grow yourself and get to know people or let people get to know you so that when you go to a conference, they already kind of know, like, and trust you. Right. Which, you know, if I had my sales hat on during the conference, I could have said, hey, cool, like, you know, what, what can we do together? So, so, so the best part was like, you know, seeing, seeing my people, but. But, you know, also, like, the reason that I'm back on the mic here when I normally might have taken a week off, it's like, I want to keep this going. This is really important to me. This podcast is the single kind of biggest part of my digital identity and brand and want to put as much into this as I can. So seeing you all and my friends and people that listen to this podcast at the conference was really important to me. So much so that I want to do more things in person going forward. Kind of related to the first one, but kind of just around founders and entrepreneurs. So probably more on that to come soon. But, like, I'm trying to engineer. Hey, how can I get in front of more of my people throughout the year because it's really important to me, and I'm a single founder, and it's tough sometimes, and I want to just be around y'all more. Right? So let's find a way where we can get together. Okay, so the next thing I want to talk about is, like, the biggest takeaway for me, the big, biggest kind of single thing I learned was if something is working for you, drop everything else and go all in as much as you can. And this is really kind of a compilation of several really kind of important conversations I had. And it was like, hey, what are you working on? That I would ask people and they would ask me, and, you know, we talked about it, and every time it was really obvious, either to the person talking to me or when I was talking to someone else, like, wow, that, like, that's the thing. I don't know why you're wasting all your time over here. If you're watching on YouTube, I'm using my hands to point in different directions. But why are you focusing any effort over here on this thing that really isn't going to make a difference when it's obvious to me and was obvious to a lot of very smart people I was talking to about my business, like, we need to go full hog on this thing over here. And for me, that was like, paid acquisition. I was sharing some numbers around how we're acquiring customers, and people were like, whoa, like, just do as much of that as you can. And so that was my big takeaway, is it's a tough chicken and the egg thing, right? Because we all say, like, oh, the founder has to figure out growth, but the founder may not be, like, the best marketer ever. But it's unfortunate, like, we just got to figure this stuff out. Once you do stop trying to figure out and just optimize the hell out of that channel, I think it's pretty rare, right, that across, you know, the companies and the founders that I Coach across the 200 something tiny seed companies that I advise for as my role as advisor in residence, there's for a company, especially at our size, to have a single channel that's working really well a lot of times. Oh, this is working okay. This is working okay. This is working okay. Maybe that's a result of us being scattered in ADD and can't focus on one thing.
[00:08:37] But. But I think that if you look at the fastest growing, most successful SaaS companies, it is because a single thing worked really well. The rest of us, and me included, you know, we get A little bit from here, a little bit from here and a little bit from here. And so we're not able to double and triple and quadruple down on one thing. This was the real for me, which is like, if something is starting to work, go all in on it. If you don't know, try to get data.
[00:09:04] And if you can't get that data, do something else to get data. Right? And it's very simplistic, but if you're listening, you probably are self identifying with, oh, you know, I'm, you know, posting a bunch of on LinkedIn and it's not really doing anything. Maybe just stop that and go try some biz dev or try some integrations or I don't know. Right, but, but like find that leading indicator of success. And if it is looking promising, go all in as much as you can. I'm saying this as much for myself as I am for you, but I hope this is helpful. Okay. The next big thing is a fun thing, right? So this conference I knew going in for me was much more about kind of the social aspect than anything.
[00:09:46] And, you know, because like I've said, going and seeing my friends is kind of the best part for me. And I kind of took that to the next level, which was I went a half a day early and I stayed a whole day late to play golf. So I've been playing golf a little more lately and I, you know, whatever, played with a few people at the conference and it was really great. So if you're listening to this and you were playing golf, that was amazing. Thank you very much. It was a really fun two rounds. And the takeaway for me is like, you know, I'm married, I have kids, I have a lot of responsibilities at home. It's easier actually for me to do this and tack a day on to a conference to indulge. Right. Think about, oh, I'm gonna go to the spa, or I'm gonna go on a tour, or I'm gonna go on a big hike, or I'm gonna play a round of golf or I'm gonna, whatever. For me, it's easier to tack an extra day on like this because like, I'm already gone. For my wife and my kids and everything here, it's like, hey, cool. It's just an extra day of the conference. And I was very transparent with them about it. But this is a pretty big unlock for me, honestly, to be able to say, hey, cool, the conference is through Wednesday. I'm going to play golf Wednesday. You know, is that okay. To my wife, and she's like, cool, I got the kids. No worries. That's easier than just like some random Thursday. I'm just gone for like a day.
[00:10:59] So take this or what? You know, whatever, I guess take this for what it is. It's just my perspective. But going forward, I will very much try to go a day early or stay a day late and do something fun as a little bit of a treat for myself, as like a little mini founder retreat, I guess, is what I would call it. So going to the conference in general was. Was all about connection and reconnection for me. And then, you know, staying an extra day, essentially to play golf was. Was a bit extra of that, and I'm really glad I did, and I want to do that again in the future. Okay. And the last thing for me was a realization. And this is kind of like the composite endpoint of the conference for me, which is leads are everything. And this is kind of like it's been building up to this for a while, but it's not often you talk to somebody. I think they had a stat that 28% of attendees at Microconf were over 100k. ARR. So successful businesses default alive. You know, they're doing well from there and even to get there, right? Like, leads are so important. And I hear Hormozi talk about this a lot, which is like, hey, you can optimize your funnel and every step of the funnel, like, you know, the visitor to trial and trial to paid and, you know, booking to demo and demo to close and all this kind of stuff, you can optimize all those, and you can optimize some of them a lot.
[00:12:21] But the thing that has infinite scaling capacity is the front end, which is leads. And so if you think about, like, oh, we have, you know, 3% churn and we have 50% trial to paid conversion, like, you might get each of those 50% better. And that's great. That's doubling the size of the company. Probably more complex math than that, but that's. That's really great. Right? But you could a hundred x your leads and obviously everything would be better. And so from. From my perspective, you know, I realize. And this is kind of going back to the. If it's. Something's working, go all in on it. Like the third point, I realized that I am not as efficient and effective as I could be as a founder. And I think that's just hard because, like, we all got a bunch of shit we have to do, right? I have the paperwork from the state here. And I have taxes and I have team and I have product decisions. I don't get to just put my marketing hat on all day, every day. I get a few hours a day right to, to do marketing.
[00:13:24] But, but the realization for me, and probably for you, is like, if you just get a shit ton more traffic to your site, everything would be better. A ton more leads, a shit ton more followers on YouTube or LinkedIn or whatever. Like, it's just, it's just a bigger lever to pull.
[00:13:43] And so how, how am I doing this?
[00:13:47] You know, we, we are trying extremely hard to make paid traffic work as good as it can. There are some very good signs. Some things are working really well. There's. That is, that's just money, right? At the end of the day, like we have an agency that's like managing that. I need to provide some creative every once in a while, but then it's just money. So my kind of proactive effort here is mostly around biz dev. So partnerships, affiliates, these kind of nodes of folks who go out and sell shit for us. And that's really hard, right? It's really hard because you don't just hit up some big LinkedIn influencer, say, hey, rep my podcasting stuff. You gotta build a relationship and you gotta have a win win and all this kind of stuff. But as a founder, it is something that I am uniquely qualified to do. So I really like it. My buddy Justin McGill, like, this is kind of their big growth effort and I have seen this work really well for a lot of people in our industry and not.
[00:14:50] And so like, if you look at the, you know, SAS playbook by, by Rob and like the, the handful of marketing channels like biz dev and partnerships is one that's consistent across every type of SaaS. Like if you're, if you're a low ARPU, SaaS like us still still works here. If you're a big old one, then channels and distribution partners still works. And so, you know, I kind of look at this and say, like, what am I good at? I'm not like a tiktoker, right? I don't have a big old social media presence. I am enjoying posting on social more these days, but I don't expect that to pay dividends today, tomorrow, or even this year, right? It's the end of March. I don't expect that to pay any dividends anytime soon. But what I think I can do to affect the business is something much more direct and confrontational isn't the right word, but to where I'll get a yes or a no and something will happen, which is, I got my Dream 100 list. I'm reaching out to handfuls of folks a day. I'm starting to build relationships. And it's a sales process, right? These folks are going in the CRM, we're tracking them all this kind of stuff.
[00:15:57] And so I'll report back on this and how it's going. But you sure think, like, hey, if I can get a new friend to help me, you know, grow the business and kind of pitch our stuff to their audience, and we do a JV dealer, we do an affiliate thing or I get on their podcast or whatever, like, that's all gotta be good. Like, I think it's very unlikely that I put six months into this and I really give it a good go and it's not successful. I think there's a lot of things I could put six months into and it wouldn't mean shit. Right? You think about SEO as like a classic example. They're like, hey, we get a whole bunch of traffic and none of them turn into customers.
[00:16:39] I don't see that potential as much with biz dev and partnerships, which is why I'm pretty bullish on it. So that's it for me. Those are the takeaways from Microconf 2025. Rob, if you're listening, thank you so much for putting on an amazing conference like this. I think you probably don't appreciate how much it means to all of us in the community to have a thing and a place to come back to every year or every couple years to know that we're going to have a great time, we're going to see our friends, we're going to get a lot of value or eat a bunch of good food in New Orleans and really have a place that is ours. Because I think this is really unique and really important. So I think for all of us, like, we're all thankful for the microconf community and to be able to support it by coming. So that is it for me. I hope you enjoyed this solo bit, rambling episode, but wanted to share kind of my takeaways and thoughts from microcurrent of 2025. As always, if you're enjoying the show, please share it with someone who you think would enjoy it as well. Helps get the word out and just makes me feel good about showing up every week. So that's it for me. Thanks.
