Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign.
[00:00:08] Speaker B: You know, it's going to be a banger of an episode when your guest says, I just want to be the best guest you've ever had. Because after 350 episodes of this podcast, we've had some amazing guests. But I think Brendan from Growth Sprints really delivered on that promise. We talk about content, we talk about marketing, we talk about SEO, we talk, we talk about authenticity and being a real unique brand and finding your voice, which I think is more important than ever in the AI era.
If you're kind of like lost with marketing, you say, like, how the heck do I do this stuff? I think this one's going to resonate with you more than anything because we talk about some specific tactics and strategies, but more so we talk about like overarching thought process of how to do marketing, which is the most important before you get into the weeds and at all. I hope you enjoy this conversation with Brendan Hufford from Growth Sprints.
So you have like a lot of experience and a lot of your background is kind of like with content and SEO.
How is that these days?
[00:01:10] Speaker A: I think it's, it's amazing. Like, channels are maturing.
You know, I could get really frustrated and be a baby throwing my food on the floor, or I can be an adult about it and be like, LinkedIn is maturing, Google is maturing. All the social platforms are maturing. Email is maturing.
They're just. It's not that like these things are catastrophically changing. It's just like, you know, when, when Facebook Reach went down to zero, basically, like I, I built a whole business off of 100 organic Facebook reach. If you got somebody to like your page, they would see all your posts.
Nope, not even close now. And it's a pay to play platform, but it's the best. Like Meta still has some of the best advertising options, especially when you combine it with Instagram. Right?
I think especially when it comes to organic content, wherever that lives. I work with clients on organic content and email in, you know, LinkedIn. SEO is still a big piece of it.
Now, I don't know what the acronym we're going to agree on is. Aeo, Geo, whatever. Like ranking.
[00:02:15] Speaker B: No, no, on this show, on the show we call it AI SEO is great. The geography guys are going to lose their minds.
[00:02:22] Speaker A: We can't do much, dude. Asking a bunch of dorks like us to pick a name.
My favorite is when we call it SEO Optimization, which is double the O, the the the. But even that's exciting. Like, I love it. I love figuring out the puzzle of people. I feel like when I came up in SEO, you kind of went one of two directions, right? You either went deep, you triple down on, like, technical SEO, and it's like, oh, we got to optimize our gzip files and all that. Like, I hope everybody listening, your eyes just glazed over a little bit and you're like, I don't know what you're talking about, but those are the type of recommendations we would make to people, like, just optimize these obscenely, like, barely related to your website and certainly infinitely unrelated to revenue types of things. Or you want the path that I took, which is I'm going to learn sales, I'm going to learn business, I'm going to learn buyer psychology, all of the. I'm gonna get really good at copywriting. And yes, all of that does lend itself to SEO. But the problem is now that the landscape is changing, some people have a very limited toolbox because they've really tripled down on being like, web developers, basically, which is fine. But now Here comes the LLMs and ChatGPT and stuff, and they're like, oh, it's schema and you gotta have a special robot. Like, they're still trying to use the same tool. You know, they're out there with the hand drill, trying to drill holes, and I'm over here with my power drill, like, clanking the battery into the bottom, and I'm like, why would you still use that old tool?
Like, there's better ways to do this. So I'm excited, I'm optimistic.
[00:03:52] Speaker B: Yeah. Why do you think that is? I mean, certainly, like, these folks who have, like, the little rotary hand tool aren't dumb, aren't lazy. Why. Why are they? And why am I? And why are some people listening kind of stuck.
Stuck in the past or stuck doing the old stuff there they used to do?
[00:04:10] Speaker A: I don't think it's stuck in the past. It's just a question of, like, skill set. Like, you're asking people. In my experience, a lot of people that got really good at optimizing websites to now optimize for humans, which is just. It's not good or bad. It's kind of the difference between going between, like an individual contributor and a manager in a company.
It's just two different skill sets. Even if you were an awesome ic, you might be a shit manager because you just are like, oh, I can do your job, but I don't. This new job is a different job.
It's just a different job.
So it's Requiring a lot of people to, like, learn a whole new skill set. And those of us that learned a separate skill set before are maybe a little bit more malleable to that.
But. And I don't think it's good or bad. I just, I get so bummed seeing people working their butts off and then like, they don't get results or they work their butts off and still get fired by clients or in house or whatever. Like, you know, or they're. They're trying. They're. They're a solo founder and they're trying. They're like, I don't know, I got a million ideas and I'm a product person, I'm a programmer, I'm whatever.
I don't even know where to start with marketing. And somebody's like, oh, you got to. It's all about the schema. And then they spend three months on schema.
[00:05:14] Speaker B: Right.
Txt.
[00:05:17] Speaker A: And yeah, they get no, they get no traction. And they're like, my MRI is down 12%.
I thought this was supposed to help. And I'm like, oh, dang. Yeah. I just feel for them. You know, it comes from a place of empathy versus. I say sarcastic stuff, but it always comes from empathy, not just judgment.
[00:05:32] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. So you obviously are kind of like a lifelong learner and someone who really embraces not just adapting the next, like stacking these really valuable skills like that. That, that's obviously amazing. How do you approach this continuous learning kind of mindset as well? You're not 30 years old anymore, right? Like, how do you.
[00:05:55] Speaker A: 40.
[00:05:55] Speaker B: Sorry.
[00:05:56] Speaker A: 41. So I'm 41.
[00:05:57] Speaker B: I'm 45. I'll just.
[00:05:58] Speaker A: Okay, cool.
[00:05:59] Speaker B: I think about this a lot. And I think about this. I'm. I talk to folks who are older than me and say, like, dude, how do you stay fresh?
[00:06:06] Speaker A: Good. Qu. I think it's a lot of who you surround yourself with. So. I used to be a high school teacher for the first 10 years of my professional career because we let 18 year olds decide what they want to do with their lives. I wanted to be in high school the rest of my life, I guess. But being a high school teacher, I was around kids. I dressed like them, I listened to the music they listened to, I talked like them. Other adults were remarking in my, like, mid to late 20s, like, you sound like you're in high school. And I took that as a compliment. Right. Because they sounded dusty and old.
And I think it's really just who your peer group is. Like, if you're Hanging out with people that are trying stuff. And I'm not hanging out with people on the cutting edge. Don't get me wrong. Like, I know people that are like, I built my 27th AI agent, and it does this and it scrapes that, and it does cool. That's still, like, sorcery to me a little bit. I'm not on the bleeding edge of this stuff, but I have. I hang around enough people that are still trying to, like, grow in their craft, get better, help people more, all of that sort of stuff. So I think that's kind of the. The crux of it. And I also.
I think we all have this. Some of us exercise it more than others. But I have, like, a really high bullshit meter, so my brain is immediately skeptical of stuff. My brain's immediately like, you know, it just. No matter what you say, it's like, I don't believe you, you know?
[00:07:19] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:07:19] Speaker A: And because of that, I'm also like, I may be slower to adopt things, but I'm also pretty sure when I go all in, I'm. I'm past the time I probably should have, so I can move with a lot of confidence.
[00:07:33] Speaker B: Okay, so I have to ask, like, where are you in the AI spectrum right now?
[00:07:39] Speaker A: You know, somebody asked me to come on their podcast about that, and I was like, dude, I'm afraid I don't have a lot to share. And he's like, you'd be. You'd be surprised where everybody else is, because you think everybody else is you, right? You're like, oh, well, surely everybody knows these things, because I don't think I'm anything special.
So they definitely know. And then other people are like, dude, that is wild. You're doing what? You know, I think. I still think I'm at, like, a beginner level with so many things, but I'm also like, because of my business model and the clients I work with, I'm, like, relentlessly pursuing only the things that work. Like, I don't have three days a week to build a bunch of AI agents to do a bunch of wacky stuff that may or may not pan out. I'm like, look, here's the things that actually matter to a business.
Let's do those things, and we can do, like, wacky, wild things later.
[00:08:32] Speaker B: So, yeah, I would give myself. If I had to give myself, like, a score, I guess, of, like, 10 is, you know this guy Nate Herc, who does, like, all these N8N workflows on YouTube? He's, like, building crazy shit. All that, like, Building Jarvis, like, he's a 10, I would say.
And like a zero is like, we have cut, like we're releasing an AI feature at Kastos next week. We're like doing show notes and all this kind of stuff automatically. It'll be live by the time this episode goes live. We have people who have emailed us back and saying we're going to cancel if you release this.
Even though it's like, opt in. Like it's not going to everybody you can choose to use this. They're going to cancel our entire service because we're. That. That they're a one. Right. So they're a one.
[00:09:13] Speaker A: And why are they canceling? They're just like, I don't want my stuff being trained on LLMs or no.
[00:09:18] Speaker B: And we're not like, we're not sending it like to LLMs. They, they just think it's the devil.
[00:09:23] Speaker A: Yeah, I, I haven't been. I'm just a very big rationalist. So all my clients were like, should we. Do we need to worry about getting found in Chat GPT? Do we need to worry? And I'm like, look, like I work primarily with B2B SaaS companies. And I was like, yeah, like your audience is probably more in than the average person. We can look in SparkToro, we can see that very clearly to be true. And also we kind of know this, right, because we care about our customers and know them, so they're probably more into it. But I was like, Google's still 350x the size of Chat GPT. Like it's. You're talking about tiny percentage compared to a big percentage. And so I was like, very rationalist about it. And then, you know, by the 15th client that asks me about it, I'm like, okay, this is probably an important thing to pay attention to and also just giving them other workflows, like I, I've found. So I don't know what I would rate myself. 0 to 10, maybe like a 5 or something.
But I'm looking at more of like less of the obvious use cases for what these platforms are being used for right now, which is a lot of just like shitty content creation and more of like, how does this help business structures that inform content creation? So how do we take, you know, a lot of these sales call platforms have this natively now, but it's bad. Like it's not very good where it'll take a summary of the sales call, put it into Slack for you. That's a superpower as a marketer. I Can see all my support calls, all my customer success calls, and all my sales calls. But the problem is these things, these platforms don't optimize for what you want out of it. So it's helpful to take the call, recording, zap it over to ChatGPT or Claude or something. Perplexity, probably. I've never used Perplexity. Maybe that makes me weird. Not for any reason. I just haven't tried it yet.
[00:11:00] Speaker B: I use it almost exclusively to read the news. That's where I get my news now.
[00:11:04] Speaker A: That's it.
[00:11:05] Speaker B: News is incredible.
[00:11:07] Speaker A: It feels better.
[00:11:09] Speaker B: It's way so. I used to use Google News just because it knows like what I do in Google and it gives me that news perplexity. Way better. Yeah, it's so good.
[00:11:16] Speaker A: Okay, noted. Yeah, but I like, I like use cases like that where it's like I'm using it to feed better inputs versus using it for crappy outputs. But like, you know, if I can feed it into one of those platforms and then filter out for like only the stuff that's really going to impact marketing, and then put that in a channel and then in one day, in 15 minutes, at the end of the day, you can cruise the channel and be like, whoa, I just noticed the same competitor brought up five times. I didn't even know we were competing against them. Yeah, that's crazy. Now it informs content, right? Like, I like use cases like that versus, like chat GPT. Like, right. I like old people typing with one finger. Like, write me a page about this. And it just gives you the, the slop. And you're like, cool, copy paste into WordPress or whatever. Um, I don't, I'm not there, but I am. I don't feel like I'm that much further past it in terms of like, technical proficiency. But I think I live at a, maybe a more strategic level than a lot of people who are like, you know, oh, I built this like N8N thing that's going to scrape Reddit and it's going to do this and it's going to port it here and then it's going to do this other thing and then it's going to.
And you're like, cool, what's that do? And they're like, I don't know, but isn't it really neat? And you're like, I don't have time for that right now. Like, I got help a business grow.
[00:12:31] Speaker B: This is. This is it. It's like, what are you actually using AI for? In production, for marketing especially, is a Question. Yeah, I would give myself maybe a six.
I am like using Claude code now and like agents a fair bit.
Not in like production, but like I'm starting to.
And really what I, what I want to do is like I have this kind of theory and like it supports Kastos as a business, but I also just kind of believe it is like from a content perspective, everything should start with YouTube.
[00:13:06] Speaker A: Yeah, we see that in Sparktoro with all of the like, we. I. I don't know, I'm royal weing you. I see that in all of the SparkToro. I look at where it's like, hey, if they go to the client's website, their number one platform is YouTube by default. And everybody's like, oh, nobody goes to YouTube to watch videos about X, Y or Z.
May be true, but the ones that do are so your people. Yeah, you know, it is absolutely the platform I think a lot of people should be looking at right now. Especially in a world that like zero click kind of world.
100%.
[00:13:40] Speaker B: But, but also from a work. Yeah, so. So like intent wise, but also from a richness of input. Like you're talking about like if I go create a YouTube video, I can create a podcast, I can create a newsletter, I can create a blog post, I can bunch of social.
But you can't start with a tweet and build up a YouTube video.
Yeah.
[00:13:56] Speaker A: You know, or you could like just put it in. You're just not prompting good enough.
I can take a tweet and turn it. I think we've also forgotten about like what I would call like there's different pieces of this. Right? There's like content atomization. How do we take a big thing, make it small? There's content distribution. How do we take this thing, find it, how to share it out to other places? There's one other piece I'm forgetting. But like we conflate those things and people get obsessed with like, I can turn one thing into 75 things. And you're like, cool, man. I like, it's just like, I don't even like, you could also turn a poop pizza into 75 pieces of pizza and it's still a poop pizza. Right. Like, people forget they repurpose things that had no purpose to begin with and that's where we run into trouble. At least in my world of content.
[00:14:42] Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah.
[00:14:46] Speaker A: That's a beautiful visual for everybody.
It's Friday.
[00:14:50] Speaker B: Friday's pizza day.
[00:14:51] Speaker A: I said I was over caffeinated.
[00:14:56] Speaker B: I want to ask.
[00:15:00] Speaker A: I want to.
[00:15:00] Speaker B: Ask the wrong question because it's very specific and strategic when we're talking high level. But I'm so curious because you mentioned Instagram.
[00:15:09] Speaker A: Mm.
[00:15:10] Speaker B: I think everybody's like, oh, like Twitter and LinkedIn, right? Like, that's. That from a social perspective, that's kind of all that matters anymore. You Facebook, whatever.
My kids use Snapchat. But that, like, whatever. I don't even know.
But to me, Instagram probably has some alpha, right? Like, not a lot of B2B guys there.
Sure enough, everyone in the world has Instagram.
They're in bed at night, flipping through, getting jealous of their friends on vacation.
Is that. Is that something that, like, I'm dumb to be thinking about or is that, like.
[00:15:43] Speaker A: No, it's super smart. I mean, I abandoned Twitter a long time. I abandoned Twitter. I had a couple. I hated the Twitter as a platform because it wasn't safe.
Meaning if somebody wants to destroy you, they can still see every mention of you and spam. Spin up 50 bot accounts, spam every single person that's ever mentioned you ever.
And just like, tell them lies. And then I'm getting, you know, emails from my friends being like, yo, this person said you stole money from their grandma. And I'm like, what? What is going on? Just like a psychopath, right?
So. And I was like, I can't be on Twitter. Like, I can't be on a platform. Whereas I continue to gain a following and do the work that I'm proud of, I'm more susceptible to this. And then just my personal opinion. Then a bonafide Nazi took over the platform and now I have no interest in being associated with that person. Personally, I don't judge anybody that does. I just think that it's a wonky, like, brand safety thing that my tweet is seen side by side with somebody with a swastika in their profile, in a feed. I don't want that.
So that's a risk for me. But I think Instagram and people argue like, well, the other platforms are no better fair. Totally fair. There are a lot of, like, there's really a lot of evil. Google even took it out of their, like, code right? Where they were like, do not. Like, it was like, do you know, don't be evil. And then they just were like, yeah, we're getting rid of that. And everybody's like, whoa, that's obvious for sure. We're going all now. Yeah, we don't care. So. But I think Instagram is still Instagram TikTok like, here's the problem. With some of these platforms, they're all moving into vertical video.
TikTok's a little more sophisticated.
Instagram is still like, you accidentally watch two videos about like, how to play baseball with your kids. It's your whole feed for the next two weeks. Like, that's really frustrating on Instagram where I'm like, dude, I want. Or you accidentally watch something that baits you into watching the whole thing. Like, you see a volleyball game and you're like, it's a huge rally. And you're like, oh my God, I want to see who actually gets the point. And now it's like all volleyball.
You're like, no, I just. Oh, God.
[00:17:43] Speaker B: It's just. Oh, man.
[00:17:44] Speaker A: Anyways, my point is it's not as sophisticated, but it is still a really viable platform. And to your point, like, the noise is less in a lot of ways. There are a lot of like, marketing bros digital, make a million dollars living in Bali. Like, there's a lot of that, but there's not a lot of like, him, a seasoned entrepreneur. Like, this is like, these are the lessons I'm learning. This is what's going on. You still have to build for those platforms. And the problem I've experienced with vertical video, I usually refer to it as swipe video. You're just going boom, boom, boom. Is you don't really build. You build like weird kind of parasocial relationships with creators on there, but you don't know who they are. There's probably 10 or 15 people. I can tell you about all their videos. I can tell you about all this funny stuff and how much I love them and how they're my favorite and how I watch every single one and I do not know their names.
I have. No, I don't. I wouldn't even know how to Google them to buy something from them.
[00:18:36] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:18:37] Speaker A: Which is a major issue because I don't care if I'm getting links or clicks or tra like the old school. I got to see it in my Google Analytics or it's not real. Yeah, I don't care about that. I believe in a zero click world, right. Where I might never hear of somebody, they might have never even been on my website. And all of a sudden they're like, I want to pay you 40 grand for consulting. That totally happens. But not if they don't actually know who I am to even find that. So there is a risk there and it is a blending. I like YouTube because it's still the best for long form video.
[00:19:08] Speaker B: Yeah. I like the short form and the long form play together.
[00:19:11] Speaker A: I can have a, I can mix shorts and long form on a channel. I can also have a shorts channel and a long form channel. Like if I'm doing a podcast. That's what I've noticed a lot of like very serious podcasts are starting to do now because it is in some ways two different audiences. One is like I want to go deep and the other one, the shorts are like I want to go broad.
So But I still think like that's really valuable and it is the way people like it is what we're all consuming.
Like, it's not that our attention span is down. Like I. Not even close. I think my attention span is higher than it's ever been.
But it's a little bit more democratized. Like the second this isn't good, I am out.
[00:19:49] Speaker B: Yep, yep. Can you define zero click?
[00:19:54] Speaker A: Yeah. So this is a phrase my friend Amanda Natividad kind of coined which is just we're experiencing all of this content and we don't want to click anywhere else. And the platforms themselves discourage clicking anywhere else. You click a link on LinkedIn and it's like a huge full screen pop up of like here's the link you clicked. Did you really want to click it? Click it again to be sure. Like they're trying to gate you leaving the platforms. LinkedIn notoriously decreases your reach tremendously. If you put a link in the post, TikTok Forever was like you get one link and we're not letting you put like the, the link aggregator, like a link tree. We will block those. Like they've done all sorts of nefarious stuff. They don't want you leaving. So you have to build the relationship in the email that you send. You can't send a newsletter that's actually like three blogs in a trench coat kind of thing. Yeah, it's just, it's all the values gotta be in the email. And if they wanna share it with a friend, like oh, this is also on my website, if you wanna, there's a link, you can click it and share it. But the function of going to the website isn't to consume it, the function is get em to consume it where they're at zero clicks. I'm gonna get all of this right here, all the value.
[00:20:59] Speaker B: And like, as we think about content, I, I've heard, I've heard zero click paired with this term of like a virtual audience or virtual retargeting. Right. Like you watch my YouTube short, it's going to show you another one of my YouTube shorts afterwards. Like, how. How do you think about those two.
Those two things together? And then like, how I should be thinking about creating content to optimize those, like that paradigm.
[00:21:30] Speaker A: So I think it just depends on if we're like. I talk a lot about checkbox marketing, how it's just about, like, checking, you know, I worked in house and I noticed that, you know, the playbook that we had been running for a long time, which was just volume, volume, volume coming out of like, hubspots, inbound movement of just, you know, you just out Vol. You kind of like. I call it a content cold war, right? Weapons of mass distraction, all this silly stuff. But it's to say, like, to paint a picture of like, oh, everybody's like, oh, my God, we were doing that. It was just a hundred blogs. A thousand blogs. What about 10,000 blogs? Like, let's just do all of it. All of those. We all did it. We all did it. And now it's like, that doesn't service anymore. We're producing more than ever, working harder than ever, and numbers still aren't going up at the same rate that they were previously.
So I feel like there's kind of a big risk in that checkbox approach where it's just like, let's just create more, more, more. And I'm noticing, even I, as somebody who built his whole career, Craig, like, outworking everybody. My career broke out because I did a thing called 100 Days of SEO where I did a YouTube video, a podcast episode, and a blog every day for 20 weeks, right? Five days a week, times 20 weeks, 100.
That was awful. Like, that was a horrendous amount of, like, it was bad.
But I don't. And I do still advocate, like, 100 day projects. If you want to grow your career, grow your company, give people something to follow. Those hundred day things are really interesting, but I don't think that that works at, like, a corporate level of still, like, creating that stuff anymore.
[00:23:01] Speaker B: Dude. I'm taking a pause to put in my calendar that I'm gonna start 100 day thing on Monday.
[00:23:11] Speaker A: You definitely.
[00:23:12] Speaker B: That's cool.
[00:23:13] Speaker A: People love to follow that sort of stuff. They're like, oh, my God, I want to see what he's doing. Oh, it's day five. Like, how's it going? You know, we love those things. And yeah, it's just you creating content and you can put the days even in it. It's like, hey, it's day 34. And people are like, where? What happened? I got to go back yeah. What's going on here? Like that stuff is super, super interesting.
[00:23:32] Speaker B: I just, I just found these fucking guys who are rowing across the Atlantic Ocean. These two, these four British guys are like rowing like whatever, transatlantic kayak across, across the ocean. And sure enough, it's like update from day 42. I'm like, where give me the first 40 days. So I go to the channel, I binge all of them.
[00:23:55] Speaker A: Yep.
[00:23:56] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. No, it's amazing. It's amazing.
Yeah. And I like, you know, I think that, I think when it comes to like personal brand, which I think is largely what we're talking about, like personal brand, company brand stuff is so whatever.
[00:24:13] Speaker A: I.
[00:24:14] Speaker B: Personal brand is kind of the only social marketing I think that, that folks should do.
[00:24:18] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:24:18] Speaker B: Video sure enough showing your journey, really important.
I find a lot of the you should do this just sucks.
Like when I post the you should do this stuff it's just like so obvious. And that's the stuff that's really easy to do with ChatGPT but I think that's why it falls so flat is like I can do it and the 16 year old kid in Venezuela can do it and whatever hacker guy or ever can do it. Like there's no differentiation. I think that we're all like desperately searching for attachment and like identity with folks online.
I heard this term or this term trust recession recently that, that I really vibe with and I think that that that generally should be kind of the destination that we're all or the thing we're fighting against with, with like our brand and our content is like overcoming this trust recession in our audience's eyes.
[00:25:16] Speaker A: So here's what's fun and interesting. This is cool that it's kind of an organic moment right now.
Trust recession is a really good example of what I call content ip which is instead of naming a category which a lot of tech companies are apt to do, instead of doing that, we name the problem that we exist to solve. It is our strategic narrative as Andy Raskin would explain it. And my content IP is checkbox marketing. It's something I can talk about viscerally and it resonates with a group of people when I talk about it. And I'm like, hey, I can help you escape that and actually see impact from your content. Again, people are like cool, I trust you to solve it because you named the problem, right? Somebody told you about the trust recession and it is a thing. Here's the other important thing. It can't be you. Like category creation. Sometimes people trying to make fetch Happen. They're just trying to make up a phrase and they're like, you need this. And you're like, I don't even know if I really need.
[00:26:03] Speaker B: Stop trying to make fetch happen. Yeah.
[00:26:05] Speaker A: Do I need like customer experience automation? Like, do I. I don't know even what that is. That's what ActiveCampaign tried to be when I was there. And I always joke about it, but the.
By naming the problem, they trust you to solve it better than anybody. All of a sudden they're like, oh. They do what I call the snapping point where they're like, oh, the trust recession. Cool that it's a thing I've been experiencing viscerally. I don't. I didn't have words for it, but now I do. How do I solve it? You have their undivided attention.
But I think that I. So I will validate you that the trust recession is real, but it's also a cool moment of like seeing content, like somebody's content IP in the wild. Like these problems is hugely important.
[00:26:48] Speaker B: Yeah, Yeah. I mean, I'll give a shout out. It's Ravi Abu Dhala. He's a kind of YouTube systems kind of guy.
And coincidentally, I think that folks like him are really good people for us as brands and marketers to look to. Like the info marketer guys and like your, your SEO experience. I'm sure you would say affiliate marketers are always the best people to look at for SEO because like, that's their whole business and product is like, how do I just get freaking traffic? Like, Laura Roeder talks about this. Like, she looks at like B2C marketing a lot.
[00:27:28] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:27:29] Speaker B: As inspiration for what we as B2B folks should be doing. Because it's like, okay, that's two, five years, maybe six months now in the future. But like, sure. As the playbook we're running as B2B companies is already dead and we should just move on.
What is, you know, AG1 doing? Or what is, you know, the next shoe brand? Like, what are, what are they doing? And how can we pick bits of that?
[00:27:50] Speaker A: I'm obsessed with those types of. Like, there's a good example. There's a ski resort, I think, I don't know if it's in Vermont.
They got like a bunch of negative reviews and they turned all their negative reviews into ads. Like, the first negative review is like, slopes are too challenging. So they wrote, they made a big ad with this, you know, cool visual and it says one star. Slopes are too challenging or like too advanced.
Because that's they're like, yes, that's who comes here is people that want an advanced challenge, not somebody that wants the bunny hills. Like, great. And that's it. I love that. So I took that and I had one of my clients, I'm like, you should go into all of your, your G2 reviews that said you're, you're expensive. And I just did command f on their G2 reviews and pulled all the ones that said expensive, pulled them into one graphic and I'm like, this ad is going to crush.
Lean into it. Yeah, we're the most expensive option. You know why?
Because all these other like, bop, bop.
[00:28:48] Speaker B: Bop, bop, bop, bop, bop.
[00:28:49] Speaker A: And all of a sudden it's like, oh, you actually are going to pay more for a cheaper option, just not in cash.
[00:28:55] Speaker B: Yeah, it did well, I assume.
[00:28:58] Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, well, I mean like it's still like anecdotal evidence, right? Like sales cycles and B2B are not. Yeah, yeah, super tight. But like, yeah, I think it did really well. And I mean at the very least, like it's putting a flag in the ground and doing something interesting. And I think more companies could do that of like, hey, what are the one star reviews that you can repurpose? CXL did that where they ran a whole ad campaign around a one star review that said these courses are too advanced.
Good.
[00:29:25] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, I think this is, this is something else that is interesting is like a lot of us are afraid to niche down and get really opinionated.
You know, I do, I do some advising with the Tiny Seed group of companies and a lot of them come in and they're just like, oh, we're, you know, vanilla, whatever.
And like, man, like pick, pick a fight, you know, pick a fight, get really specific.
It doesn't mean that's the only person who will ever sign up for your product. But, but if that person comes, it's like your click and point. You're a snap and point thing. They're going to know that it's for you.
I. That's tough. Like, I know that I can say that it's tough to actually do it. It's tough to say we're podcast hosting for WordPress. Even if you had to say like, what is cast us best for 100%? That's it.
But if we put that as the H1 on our site, I worry we, we turn a lot of people off.
[00:30:19] Speaker A: Well, I think it's, there's number one is there's marketing messaging and then there's like Positioning, right? So I like picking a fight against a problem versus what I would call, like, beef marketing. Like, I always felt like, oh, God, I forget what they're called now. Basecamp 37 signals, my God, it's exhausting the amount of beef marketing they do. They're fighting with Apple, then they're fighting.
[00:30:42] Speaker B: With Google, and then they're fighting aws.
[00:30:44] Speaker A: And yeah, oh, my God. They're always just in a fight with somebody and everybody's like, this is good marketing. And I'm like, these guys are insufferable. Just, you know, Jason Freed was going to sell his house and I was looking at it and I'm like, this guy's waking up in the day whining about things like, good Lord. Right? And it's. I don't know, like, it is what it is, but there's a difference between picking a fight with a problem and saying, hey, I'm gonna do. It's like an old school sales technique where you pull the person you're selling to's chair on the same side of the table as yours. Instead of me selling to you across the table, we're sitting on the same side of the table against the problem that I'm trying to help you solve.
You have to do that in digital marketing too, right? We're gonna fight this problem together.
So I think that's kind of the first piece of it. And I think being willing to take a stand in the positioning side of things. I'm a big believer in, like, very literal positioning. Right. We are the best at this one thing. We're the best in this category, or we're the best way to solve this problem.
And it has to, like, I like positioning because I hate when you get to, like, software company websites and they're like, unlock unlimited possibilities. And I'm like, are you selling me, like, an energy drink? What is, you know, like, expand your world with AI something? And you're like, oh, God. Like, and then you find out they do like, vacation tracking.
[00:32:03] Speaker B: Right, Right.
[00:32:04] Speaker A: Okay, cool. Like, just tell me. Just tell me what you are, who you're best for. So I think there's a difference between the messaging I love. Like, let's name the problem. Let's do all this stuff. But like, my website says I help SaaS companies scale from 10 to 100 million in revenue. Right. And then if you keep, you're like, oh, that's us. Great. Keep reading. I do it through short focus marketing sprints primarily through content. Got it. And here's if you want to keep Reading, here's my framework for doing that. And here's a bunch of people that co sign, right? Yeah, I'm taking them through that journey, but I'm not, I'm not going, you know, escape checkbox marketing. And they're like, how, what do you do here?
[00:32:43] Speaker B: So, so I know Growth Sprints is, is kind of the vehicle a lot of times that you use. How did you arrive at this kind of vehicle? And maybe like what as other. Because like folks listening to this, 95% of them are SaaS founders. So like, how can SaaS founder who could, you know, very likely be your client, think about like adopting the methodology of a growth sprint, like for. In their own internal team?
[00:33:10] Speaker A: Okay, so a couple things I came up in the SEO world where my goal is to get you to sign with me and then retain you forever. You're on a 6 to 12 month contract and conveniently SEO takes 6 to 12 months. Weird how we arrived at those exact same numbers as a really nice round. Why wasn't it? I always ask that, like, why is an SEO take five to seven months? Why doesn't it take three to eight? Why not four to 12, four to 15, right. All of a sudden it's six. Why? Because we like round numbers and because those are nice contract sizes, right? People are like, well, I can't run an effective agency if I don't have six or 12 month contracts. Ah, thank you for admitting the contract's for you. It's not for them. And I always hated it, right? Like we would do all this work at the beginning, all these audits, 20 million audits. And then we'd get a little bit of work done and we'd kind of coast for a couple of months. You know, optimize a keyword. Let's work on a page. And then, oh shit, renewals coming up. Let's be super busy and innovative and we renewed them back down and just coast again. Like, I hated that. I also hated the sales cycle of like, I'm going to whiz bang, sell you this amazing thing. I'm going to hand you over to Terry, who's 23 years old and has like six months of experience and he's your account manager now. So I built Growth Sprints A because I like literal names, right?
Two, because I wanted, I believe there was a better way to do it. Right? There's a better offer. This is a big thing that I notice in SaaS. We don't do. We're always like, the product is the offer. That's Our offer. Start a trial. Start a trial. Talk to sales. Talk to sales. That's the offer. Every page, you know, we got a. I called it like a demo deluge. For a while, when you go to those websites and it's like there's a button in the upper corner, but then it's also in the sidebar and it's at the footer of the blog and in the. Or at the end of the blog. And you could go to a scroll where there's four get a demo buttons on one screen. And it's like, y'. All.
You don't want. If somebody's too dumb to find it, you don't want them as a customer. Trust me. So we have to have other. Like, ClickFunnels is amazing at this. Like, their. Their product is dog shit. Right? But you know, there's way better lead magnet types of things. Or lead. I mean, leadpages is way better product and at least in my personal experience. But ClickFunnels has mastered offers. They make money off of the information they're selling you or a challenge they're selling you or whatever. So now all their marketing is free. That's why they're five times the size of lead pages.
So I arrived at this through I need a better offer. It is an offer I ethically align with. I have no problem going on LinkedIn and being like, you need to throw out your retainer. Those guys are ripping you off. And they all get so mad and call me disingenuous. And I'm like, prove it wrong. Prove it wrong that you couldn't deliver the same strategy to a smart team in three months and let them run with it.
And yeah, it's inefficient for me. I gotta do a crap ton more sales calls. But you know what I get to do, Craig? At the end of every engagement, I'm still friends with the people that I worked with. Yeah, that matters a lot to me because I hated that the only way we broke up in previous SEO engagements is where everybody fires you. That's the only way it ends. You get fired. That sucks, right?
So that's how I arrived at growth sprints. I think for SaaS founders, there's a couple lessons there. Like, number one, it's like, hey, is my offer better? Not just in the technology, but do I understand, like, what is the offer before the offer? What allows me to, like, build a relationship with them? Like, 100 Day Project is a really cool offer if you want a shortcut for that. I think people, whatever, Alex Hermosi is an absolute bro, but I kind of like him. I've been following since he was, like, launching gyms, and he wrote a book called Gym Launch, and I'm like, oh, it turns out this is also a playbook for launching an agency.
I think it'd also be a good book for everybody to read that's launching a SaaS company.
But under his book called $100 million offers. I think it's super cheap on Amazon just by that. Right.
The other piece is building what I would call founder Gravity, where you, instead of you having to push out into the world constantly, you create through content, normally building personal brand. All of the things we're talking about right now. You build gravity to you. Gravity that brings in customers, gravity that brings in investment if you want it. Gravity that brings in the top talent in the world. Like, oh, my God, I love Craig's stuff. I would love to work for him. If you reached out and you're like, hey, you know, I know you're probably super happy doing what you're doing. I've got this job open. Do you know anybody? Are you this person? You'll get 100% reply rate, right?
All of these things. We want that gravitational pull to ourselves as founders that makes everything else. Every sales call we hop on, they're like, I've been following you for years.
Perfect. I'm already bought in with your mission. I like your view of the world. All of these sorts of things.
That's. That's what I think the founders should take away.
[00:37:52] Speaker B: This is.
This is like, a lot of stuff though, right? I think this is one of the criticisms of all this is like, I do a decent amount of this, right? I have this podcast. I have a YouTube channel I post to most weeks. I post on social most of the time. Like, do. Do you do all this by yourself? Do you have folks that help you with it? Like, yeah.
[00:38:14] Speaker A: So I have an executive assistant. And that is only because I am at comms. I'm really. I'm very good at this.
[00:38:23] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:38:23] Speaker A: But me sending my Friday check in emails, I suck at that. I hate that. You know, I feel like I'm going out of the principal's office to, like, check in or something. Like, ugh. It's just the worst. I hate those sorts of things. I want to my. I treat my slack channels a little bit unhinged, kind of chaotic. What'd you think of this story? Did you all see this? Like, it's kind of crazy what's happening. And some of my clients Are really like buttoned up corporate and I get like no reactions and other ones are like, give me all the tea, let's talk trash.
So I'm good at that, but I'm not good at like scheduling things. My inbox gets too big, I get too many unread slack messages. I become very avoidant. I just am like, just let it keep piling. Check it later, check it later, check it later, check it later. And the work is still great, but comms are shit. So I brought in an executive assistant because of that. Her name's Rosie. She's fucking amazing.
And outside of that, I mean she helps post again like I was.
I have all this video content that I've had for years and years and I keep amassing more of it doing conversations like this. Right. I'm going to ask you at the end of this to get my side of the Riverside recording so I can like make clips of it and everything and then. But I the uploading Craig, like open up Instagram, TikTok and YouTube every single day. Upload a clip, schedule it something. I just, I don't want to do that. I'd way rather just like troll my friends on LinkedIn in the comments sections like I would or you know, respond, respond to people commenting on my stuff. So like I'm using, I have some help here and there on some sorts of tasks.
But otherwise it is, it is just me and it does feel like a lot. First of all, I have an unfair advantage that like every bit of content I create is directly bringing people into my business. I'm not creating content about something else. I'm creating content about content.
So I understand the privilege of being able to look through that lens. The second piece.
[00:40:11] Speaker B: So I just want to, I just want to pause there. I think that is, I think you're understating the importance of that. Yeah, I think that's why like the LinkedIn bros and the YouTube people on how to win on YouTube are also like that. That is like that verticality is so important and like we.
[00:40:29] Speaker A: I don't have that.
[00:40:30] Speaker B: Like I have a podcast, this is my podcast, but this is not a podcast about podcasting. And so like a lot of my brand is like assass or whatever but like not podcasting centric. So I just said like as folks are thinking about their brand and that alignment, don't discount the importance of like it being like self perpetuating.
[00:40:51] Speaker A: Totally. Like I know Jay Clouse saw as soon as he started making YouTube videos about YouTube and having YouTubers on his podcast, which he would then distribute on YouTube. Everything blew up. Like, that's not on accident. That's the way those sorts of, like, the best, like, most. Some other than, like, sensationalized, hyperbolic stuff on LinkedIn. The most popular LinkedIn content is about LinkedIn as a platform. Like, that's how that stuff kind of happens.
So. But there are other ways to do it. Like, if you are. If you have a technology for, you know, your pro shop, and you have technology that helps people manage and run their machine shops. Very niche. But they do, like, machine shop tours where their founder does these walkthroughs of people's machine shops. And, like, they love that. So, like, I just want to see inside everybody else's shop. What are they doing? Oh, they got one of those in the corner. They got one of those routers. I don't even know. Like some sort of, like, crazy tool that machines it to like 1 billionth accuracy or something. Like, they geek out over that stuff and like, that's perfect for them. And it doesn't need a million views, it just needs 70, because 60 of them are going to become customers, like, that sort of stuff. So you got to figure out your way. But I don't want it to be. You're not going to amass. For most founders, you're not going to amass a million followers or whatever else. Right. There's a reason Dan Martell talking about how he makes his kids sit in coach while he sits in first class on airplanes, go super viral for that cornball. But he's not talking about building a SaaS company. He's talking about, like, wealth and like some other random topic. Right. Like, it's different. It's different content. So we're not like, when you zoom out, you're not going to have a huge amount of followers. But I, I guess I'm just saying that to free people of, like, you don't need them.
[00:42:36] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think, you know, we. We get the question a lot. Like, hey, for my podcast, what. What's good? Like, I'm gonna launch podcast, my B2B kind of business. What's good? I go 100 listeners. Listeners.
[00:42:46] Speaker A: Yep.
[00:42:47] Speaker B: Like a hundred people. To hear you talk for 45 minutes every week is.
[00:42:51] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:42:52] Speaker B: Incredible. Like, so much leverage.
[00:42:54] Speaker A: Make it real. Like, be like, I'm gonna have a room. Like, first of all, a room full of 100 people's intimidating. People don't feel like I need a thousand or a million. I'm like, no, no, no. If you've Ever stood in a room with a thousand people, you. You're terrified you would shit your pants. That's a lot of people in one room. But a hundred people is also like, you forget. Yeah. And they're listening to you for an hour. You have their under. I mean, semi divided. Usually we're like driving, we're doing something else while we're listening to podcasts, but they're still consuming it, they're hearing your voice, it's building trust, all of this sorts of things. So, yeah, I completely agree with you. But I do think also that to back to your original point of like, this is a lot.
You don't have to do everything. That's where I see a lot of people, especially founders and even like marketers and SaaS companies make a huge mistake. They're trying to pursue every channel all at once. And I think making a strategic bet, right. I. I always talk about thinking in bets, right. Big bets, confident bets, strategic. Like there's different ways we can make bets, but we would always make a bet on like, I'm going to focus on this channel. I have X, Y and Z to prove this is where my audience is. This is where I can reach them and help them most. Great. This is the channel and we're going to work on this relentlessly. I'm gonna like if it's LinkedIn, great. You're trying video because they said it was video. Crap. They said it was. It's not. They don't know their own algorithm. Okay, cool. We're going to try this other thing. We'll try long form posts. I'm going to try just like shit posting sometimes. I'm going to try carousels on there. Carousels? Yeah, they're a ton of work. Okay, awesome. Like, maybe I'm going to try like infographics because I know when somebody clicks on the image and they dwell on it and they're actually reading the image because it's really entertaining. It's a visual way to organize and visualize the value of what I'm sharing.
That helps the algorithm. Like all of a sudden people are sending three minutes on the post. So that boosts it to everybody that ever, you know, could want to see it. All these sorts of things. But you're on one platform, you're not trying to learn Instagram and TikTok and YouTube and podcasting and like one, like, it's great that we have these distribution models, but if you want to distribute your podcast really effectively, have a really good podcast, right? Like all these podcasts in the business world that I see blowing up that I like listening to. Marketing against the grain. My first million. These types of podcasts were really popular podcasts before all the clips were even a thing.
Yeah, before anything before when they were just. It was just an audio RSS feed and like, that's what you got.
They were really good. And I think that's the. That's where I want people to, like, lock in.
[00:45:30] Speaker B: That's a perfect place to end. Man, I could go for like another hour. We'll just have to have you back on another time because I think we could do this.
[00:45:38] Speaker A: Thanks for giving me a chance to help some people.
[00:45:40] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. So folks who want to check out you LinkedIn, we'll have your LinkedIn in the show Notes Growthsprints.
[00:45:50] Speaker A: Co. I own the dot com. Why wouldn't I switch? I'm so dumb.
[00:45:54] Speaker B: No, it's all right. It's all right.
I want to end with like a short.
So. So we'll include your LinkedIn and then growth sprints. Co.
I want to end with one prediction maybe because, like, I view you as a very smart and practical kind of brand and marketing person.
And we are in a time right now where a lot of people are shitting the bed about what might happen.
And so I think I value, and I think everyone else would value a reasonable prediction on like, hey, end of next year, right? This is August 2025, end of next year.
What kinds of things do you think will be saying, like, oh, I'm glad I did this.
[00:46:47] Speaker A: I'm hesitant to give people, like, yet another rabbit hole to go down.
I think it's a couple things. If you're doing something like really high volume, like having a platform where you can see the messy buyer journey a little bit like something like a dream, data is really helpful. It makes. It makes a lot of sense out of marketing. Especially it's easy. Like if all you're doing is LinkedIn, you're like, that's. Or Twitter, whatever. That's where it's coming from. Or I just do a podcast. Great.
Most of the business is coming from the podcast. I don't need attribution. But what do you do when you have a more sophisticated marketing organization? You have four marketers and you have SEO and you have webinars and podcasts and you're doing three different types of videos and you're also on like all these things and you're like, well, what's. What should we double down on? Well, I don't know. Sure as not. First click or last click attribution. That is just an absolute disaster. Do we run ads on Google? Should we be doing this? Should we retarget, like to your point, like, it's a lot. There's so many options of how to grow a thing, having a platform. I think the winners are going to admit that it's messy and then start looking at like, what actually, what are the touch points we see most commonly? Oh, cool. When they become a newsletter subscriber, we know that they're four times more likely to become a customer. When they listen to the podcast, they're 12 times more likely.
[00:48:07] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:48:07] Speaker A: Well, we should be working on making our podcast better. Figure out some growth loops in there of like how do we get people to share the podcast with their friends, that sort of thing.
Second prediction to give people a fifth idea, I guess is I've had this thing sitting on my desk. This is. We all do like benchmark reports, right? I've had this thing sitting on my desk is from Dream Data, the company I was just talking about. They produced this beautiful report and they sent it out.
And I worked with a company called Sendoso. I still work with them. They do gifting and direct mail and their content IP is. We talk a lot about digital fatigue, Craig. Like sometimes digital marketing, all this shit I'm talking about, it does feel like an absolute scam.
It's just I. We're exhausted by it. You know, you go on Instagram and every third thing is an ad and you're like, oh, this is the same on LinkedIn. Just some download our white paper. Oh God. Like, who wants this? Nobody wants it, but it's just digital. Just being punched in the face by like a digital baby. Like it doesn't hurt but like it's just, you know, I mean it's like when my not baby but like my four year old hits me where it's enough that you're like, dude, stop.
Like, it doesn't, it's. I can't ignore it. But I'm also. It doesn't hurt enough for me to like really be pissed. That's what I feel like a lot of like digital marketing can become where it's just like we're gonna follow you everywhere, we're gonna cold email you and now we're call, we're calling you. Hey, saw you checking out our website. Oh God, don't call me because I went on your website like, yeah, what the hell's going on? All this.
What if we, what if we did something physical, right? Like, what if you said all right, you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to take all my customers that have been with me for a year. I'm just going to send them all cookies.
I can use a platform like, you know, Sendoso. If you have a advanced organization or if you're just starting maybe something like a loop and tie or something, I'm just going to send cookies. I don't even need their address. They just click the button, they put the address and I don't even need to see it. It's not weird. You probably have it though from billing and whatnot. But like just send them all cookies. That'd be real nice. What does that do? What does that do for you in terms of retent? Everybody's trying to figure out how to get more retention in their app. How do we digitally to my point earlier, like SEOs being like how do I use my SEO toolbox? And I'm like, I don't know anymore. I want to see people. Craig My. My 12 year old's at home ordering CDs right now because the 12 year olds are all realizing when I I'm a jerk hole to my parents and I get my phone taken away if the only music I have is Spotify, I don't have music in my life. And that's when you're 12. That's terrifying to some kids.
And he's like so shit. Back to physical media it is. He bought a CD player.
[00:50:47] Speaker B: That's crazy.
[00:50:48] Speaker A: And I'm like dude, we threw him out 10 years ago. We thought nobody would ever.
[00:50:53] Speaker B: Good for him. That's awesome.
[00:50:54] Speaker A: But a lot of his peers are. We're seeing and this is again like a generational thing. Whatever our parents were into, we're not just. It just happened. No matter how much better it is, they're pushing back into physical. I'm seeing a lot of marketers start to go back into the physical world in person events, sending people things, doing physical books and mailing them to people. User Evidence just did this too with their evidence gap report again more content ip of course. But like I love that sort of stuff. I'm going to be doing more of it. It's not a core part of my offer but like I think if you want a sneaky way to win, especially if you're like a tiny seed founder or something like that and you're competing against big incumbents sometimes that's a way to show you care more and it's not expensive.
Right?
[00:51:39] Speaker B: I saw a YC company do doormats yeah, they did. They did doormats and they sent them to like, their dream 100, you know, run. So, like, you know, it's like, what, they're 50 bucks a pop? Whatever. 100, you know, it's five grand.
[00:51:56] Speaker A: Yeah. That's one customer more of that into the sun every month in, like, Google Ads. Right. We're just blowing that on branded search.
[00:52:04] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:52:05] Speaker A: What if we actually sent somebody something they would like?
[00:52:07] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:52:08] Speaker A: Every time they use it. I. One of the reps at Sandoso, I was talking to him. His name is Junior. You know, he and I were just shooting the shit at a conference and, you know, we're just talking and I'm like, dude, I'm trying to find these books for my 12 year old. So many of the books are way too advanced and like, kind of like 12 year olds probably shouldn't be reading this. Like, we got to talk to Barnes and Noble about what they're putting on the end caps of the kids. Like, they have a court of thorns and roses or something on there. And I'm just like, oh, God, like, he shouldn't know.
[00:52:36] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:52:36] Speaker A: Game of Thrones. Absolutely not. Like, he's like, why? I'm like, just chill out. It's a lot for me to deal with, but, like, I'm trying to figure out these books. And I also want to get him baby books. Like, he's past Harry Potter. He's a. But he's, you know, he's good on that. We's read them, whatever. J.K. rowling sucks. The books are good, but, like, he is trying to figure this out. Two weeks later, I get a box, Thick, heavy box at my doorstep.
And it's just. It's. I open it up, it's just a box set of books. There's a little note in it. And sit in Junior set. He says, hey. Brendan thought about our conversation.
I read these books when I was your son's age. I totally couldn't think of the name at the time, but I think you would really like him. Junior. That's it.
[00:53:20] Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah.
[00:53:22] Speaker A: Nothing.
I will tell that story on podcasts for the rest of my life. Yeah, I will. I will personally love him and love that company for. Until they catastrophically screw it up, which they won't because they. It's like, it's. So the pendulum swung so far in their favor. I love that sort of stuff. So it's not the world I operate in, but, like, if you want a mix of things, thinking these other creative things, it really does work.
[00:53:49] Speaker B: That's really healthy. That's really healthy. I.
I know we gotta go. I, I said on a podcast a couple weeks ago, I, I can imagine the opposite. And so I don't think either of these are wrong. You know, Like, I, I think that brands can and maybe should have, like, virtual avatars, like, talking about creating all this content. It's hard. If you're a single technical founder, it may be better for you to go spin up this person over here that does all your. That is your social presence. I don't know that that's not wrong, but. And it's the whole, it's the whole spectrum, I think is, Is like, you can pick your flavor, lean into it. Whatever's authentic for you, whatever lines with your audience.
[00:54:28] Speaker A: Can I give them one last cheat code?
[00:54:30] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:54:31] Speaker A: Okay. The. Sorry to cut you off. I get excited. No, no, this is the last cheat code. If you're like, hey, like, this is what I would do if I were them. I would get a hold of. There's a guy named Justin Blackman. He's a copywriter. He does a thing called, like, a founder voice workshop, and he'll outline, like, content frameworks for you, what your brand voice is.
He calls mine parent at the bar. Like, I'm your, like, wise, sage parent. That's there. I've seen some. And I'm at the bar. I don't drink, but, like, it's that, like, I'm cool, chill, I'm relatable. And he gave me all these cool documents and I'm able to. This is what I would do. If you're struggling, if you're solo and you want to create content, I would take all of those or take all of your meetings. Record all your meetings. Use Fathom, use whatever. I don't care. There's 50 apps to do it. Record all your meetings, go in, take the transcripts, dump them all into whatever AI platform you want. Give it your content framework, give it your brand voice, Give it all these things. Give it examples of stuff that you like, things you've done in the past. It'll figure it out, right? And then say, give me. Give me 15 moments from the past week. Here's all my call transcripts, 15 things I talked about that are either going to get a lot of comments on LinkedIn, if this makes more sense, if you're going B2B, give me. That'll generate a lot of comments because that's how things grow on LinkedIn, or will get me more customers, preferably both.
And it's not all winners don't get me wrong, but all of a sudden you have 10 or 15 posts and you can go, no, no, no. Yes, yes, no, yes, yes, yes. And now you have five posts. Great. I don't have to think that, like, I can just schedule all those in the LinkedIn scheduler. I can post those and I'm doing something. I'm getting momentum, right? It's res. Like that sort of thing. And also I think, I just think we're all doing interesting stuff. We just forget about that cool story we told on Tuesday of last week. You know what I mean? Like, I don't know what I had for dinner last night. I definitely don't remember a story I told that.
So, like, pulling those things, that's like. I think it's an absolute will reward people for having listened to the entire episode. But like, if you're a founder and you're not doing that, you absolutely have to start. And if you have somebody on staff that's also helping you with marketing, or maybe they're like just part of their role is marketing. They're doing, you know, like mixed roles. Especially early on when you're small, have them do that. It's one of the high, like, lowest time, highest impact things you can do.
[00:56:58] Speaker B: Love it. Love it.
Cool, buddy. Thank you so much for coming on. I really, really enjoyed this. I've been following you for a long time, so it's great to finally chat. Thank you.
[00:57:07] Speaker A: Of course, man. Thanks for letting me monologue at you. No, that's what it's all about.
[00:57:12] Speaker B: Awesome. Thanks, Brendan.
