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Building business and spotting growth opportunities with Paris Vega
45 Plays1 year ago
How do you spot opportunities for growth, roll in some personal development and repeat the process again and again?
Paris Vega is the Chief Growth officer at The Nine Digital, as well as being the host of the popular 'First Customers' podcast. Throughout his long career, Paris has found himself on the bleeding-edge of several technological advancements and has enjoyed many adventures in business bootstrapping and investing.
In this fascinating episode, Paris is in conversation with Yeseo founder Andrew Laws, and explains where it all began, where it is now, and hints at where it might be heading next. This was a fun episode to record!
Find out more about Paris and the First Customers Podcast at https://parisvega.com/Fancasting - https://www.mycast.io/
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to Podcast and Guest
00:00:01
Speaker
Hello, welcome back to the second series of the Untitled SEO Podcast. My name's Andrew Laws and I am honoured to have a guest here today. Guest, would you like to introduce yourself?
00:00:11
Speaker
Yeah, I'm Parise Vega. I'm the Chief Growth Officer at the Nine Digital Marketing Agency and kind of an investor and co-founder and a couple other little projects. Nice to meet you, Parise.
Concept of Live Action Networking (LAM)
00:00:23
Speaker
Right. I'm going to explain what we're doing in season two of this podcast. We're going to call it LAM, so Live Action Networking. I've been an SEO for well over 20 years, and I know that a lot of people in SEO and digital marketing hang out and network with each other really well.
00:00:39
Speaker
And I've identified that over the years, some of the most interesting conversations about digital marketing happen during networking, during initially meeting people. Now, I
Parise Vega's Journey to Austin and Digital Marketing
00:00:49
Speaker
live in a little town called Ipswich, which is about 100 miles east of London in the UK. And I kind of know everyone nearby now. I've been going for long enough that they all know me. I know them. So I wanted to reach out and find people in other places who I haven't met before. So each episode is a conversation
00:01:07
Speaker
straight networking thing. So I'm going to guess with your accent that you're not in the UK. Nope. Nope. Whereabouts in the world are you? Um, in the United States, in the Austin, Texas area. Excellent. Well, you're the first person we've spoken to from Austin. Um, I know a little bit about the music scene there, but not much else. I'll be honest. Are you part of the keep Austin weird scene or? Uh, probably not enough. Um,
Transition from Design to Digital Marketing
00:01:36
Speaker
I've recently moved here. Um, I lived in, grew up in Alabama, um, for 20, 30, what is it? 30 something years. Uh, I was originally from Portland to Oregon. Wow. Um, so kind of been around a little bit, but, but yeah, we're, we're relatively new to, to the Austin area. Excellent. Right. So obviously you're in digital marketing and one of the things that I always like to know is did you fall into digital marketing or was it a choice?
00:02:09
Speaker
Um,
Evolution of Digital Media Tools
00:02:11
Speaker
I think that it was a little combination of both because I started out as a design major. I was kind of an art student at first. And, um, at the time when I was in college, the digital media side of art was kind of just becoming mainstream or just kind of the early phase of that. Like.
00:02:34
Speaker
I took some photography classes and we were in the dark room developing our film. You know, it was still like that was still happening. I guess that kind of dates your age a little bit, nothing else. I'll get you an idea of how old you are. And the, there were some people who would like turn in some digital digital cameras were just out like coming out, but they weren't like super high quality. You could still tell it was super obvious that it was digital, especially the early digital cameras had a lot of kind of,
00:03:03
Speaker
weirdly over sharp pictures, you know, it'd be almost pixelated. It'd be so sharp. It just didn't look naturally sharp. And so it still had that look to it. And so it was kind of looked at as an abomination that when people would bring in their digital photography, it was like, it's not true art. Um, and so it was kind of in that time period in the early, uh, 2000s that I was in college and, uh,
00:03:28
Speaker
And so I was studying studio art, graphic design, and digital media was kind of my focus. And so I got to play around with the tools of digital media that would become kind of standard stuff for today's world, where everybody can just jump into Canva and start editing and making stuff. You know, where back
Web Development Transition to CSS
00:03:51
Speaker
in the day, you had to pay Adobe three, $400 for the latest version of Photoshop.
00:03:58
Speaker
Um, so are you, are you the right age to remember using things like Letra set before digital came along? Uh, I'm not that old, I guess. I don't know. I don't know what that is. They're like little sheets, but I'm, I'm guessing, right. I now know I'm a little older than you because there were little sheets that you had that were like transfers, you know, like temporary transfers that kids have almost like that.
00:04:21
Speaker
Yeah, the lecture sets are brand like Hoover or Electrolux or whatever, but you had to rub every single, it was awful. Yeah, when digital came along, I think what sounds like you were part of the Wild West, you're on the frontier of digital if you're using some of the kind of the first tools that came about because this would have been sort of web 2.0 as they used to call it that sort of era.
00:04:42
Speaker
Yeah, it was right when that was like CSS was just becoming like mainstream when I was getting into learning about web development stuff. And my first job on the kind of web development programming side of things after I had, you know, studied art and been a freelance graphic designer for a little while, I got a job at this interactive or this internet marketing agency and they had more need for web development type work than just pure design. And so I started to learn.
00:05:12
Speaker
That side of it in my first task was just transitioning websites from table layouts to CSS layouts. Because back in the day tables were used for the whole layout. It's like a table within a table within a table, nested tables, right? Tables all the way down. And so that was kind of how I cut my teeth in web development was just going in, removing all tables and replacing everything with CSS. That's a nasty job.
00:05:39
Speaker
Well, at the time I was just so new to all of it. Like I had taken a class in college that was horrible. It was like HTML for the information superhighway or something. And it was horrible. Like as their curriculum, it was just them saying, all right, create a cell and put, they were just instructing you on the details of how to make a table. Those guys were only ever like one step ahead of where we were.
00:06:05
Speaker
Or maybe like they were one, it was pre-YouTube,
Early SEO Challenges and Freelancing
00:06:08
Speaker
but they were one tutorial, one page in a textbook ahead of where we were trying to learn those things. Yeah, I guess so. Everything was so new. So the teachers, yeah, hadn't had time to really get deep into it. I mean, it was, it's so crazy looking at the world today because you can learn anything. Just, it's a pure matter of will to learn something. But back then it was like, maybe you'll stumble across the right book or person who knows
00:06:33
Speaker
actually what's going on or how to do something and you really had to dig. We didn't have the vocabulary to know how to look or where to look. I remember things would come along like SEO for me and I just kind of go, what is this? It would take a while to actually figure out what the business tool aspect of it would be. You worked fixing nested tables and then
00:07:01
Speaker
I've read a bit of your bio. I don't want to read too much. I didn't want to spoil the surprises, but you started working for yourself fairly soon after that. Is that right? Yeah, I actually started working for myself in college. I started to do freelance design and.
00:07:20
Speaker
how I really wanted to own a business or run a business since I was a kid for some reason, just from whatever movies I'd seen. And growing up kind of, well, not kind of poor, really poor financially. So it
Agency Work and Learning SEO
00:07:35
Speaker
was always, you know, looking up to move upward and, you know, watching lifestyles of the rich and famous. I don't know if you guys had that show. No, I was trying to think what, what films it may have been.
00:07:48
Speaker
that you watched. And I can't, I can't think but a lot of it a lot of American TV, because in the UK, American TV was and still is very, very dominant. So we were living in, you know, I grew up in called Thatcher's Britain. So I grew up where not that long after there was so the country was so poor that we only had electricity for days of the week. And that seems wild now. But even in the early 80s, we had
00:08:15
Speaker
We didn't really have any sort of exotic food. All the food was beige. All the cliches you hear about Britain in the 80s are completely true. We weren't quite queuing up for bread, but it was not a dazzling time. So American television, watching things like The Cosby Show, Cheers, Night Riders, Street, anything American would just seem like so aspirational to us. I never really thought about whether it'd be the same if you were in America, but I guess we just thought everybody had a Trans Am.
00:08:46
Speaker
Nope. Nah. Yeah. There's, there's definitely, uh, the haves and have nots, I think across the world. So anytime you see somebody with something, you don't have, it makes you like, whoa, wait a minute. So young trees saw that and thought, I want some of that. And yeah. At what point when you first started working for yourself, was it as a freelancer or did you just pitch right into running an agency? Yeah, I was just a freelancer, but it soon became like, um,
00:09:16
Speaker
hiring friends to help on projects and that kind of thing, because it seems like whenever, you know, if you, you get a slightly good reputation doing something, you know, the work comes in faster, you know, more work than you can handle. And so it's like, Hey,
Social Media Marketing and SEO Growth
00:09:32
Speaker
I can get a P at least a piece of this money if I hire somebody else. And, and, and so there was a little bit of that, it was up and down, but I got really annoyed with trying to collect money.
00:09:42
Speaker
Because at the time, I was just a college student, you know, and I was using some of my paid work, my client work as my school work. And I worked out a deal with the teachers and they're my professors and they're like, yeah, that's fine. You know, that sounds very wise. Yeah. And so I was getting paid for the work I was turning in for my graphic design class. That's really baby smile. I like that a lot.
00:10:07
Speaker
I mean, it might as well. It's kind of like how some majors would like, let the students do an internship or something like an engineering. You might work at a company as part of your, you know, course curriculum. Um, and so it just kind of evolved into that.
Software Design for Military
00:10:23
Speaker
And so I didn't start an agency intentionally at that time, but I guess that was kind of an aspiration. So the deliberate getting into digital marketing and the accident accidental building the agency.
00:10:38
Speaker
Well, um, it was really that first company that I went to work for after I got tired of trying to collect money all the time. I wasn't aware of how much of that admin work was involved with running a business. Uh, there's that E-Myth book. I don't know if you've ever read it. It's revisited. Um, and that whole concept of that, the folks who are doing the technical work, the actual execution, there's like this syndrome that happens. You're like, well, I'm the one doing the work. So.
00:11:04
Speaker
I could have my own business. I'm the one doing everything and you don't realize there's layers and layers of administration and all this horrible work that you are not interested in at all, but still has to be done by somebody. Well, that book in particular is one of those things that I was about to ask you, at what point did you realize you were doing things the difficult way? Because everyone I've spoken to in digital marketing has this breakwater moment where they go, do you know what?
00:11:33
Speaker
I'm making my life more difficult than I need to. And for me, it was reading that book. It was reading that book and the whole thing about you don't own a business, you own a job. I was like, yeah, that's quite shocking that the scales fell from my eyes and I realized that things had to change. Yeah. Sadly, I didn't run into that book until years later and it wasn't until looking back that I realized, oh, that's why certain things didn't work out. I mean, I'd been going about 15 years by the time I read that book.
00:12:03
Speaker
Yeah, and so I kind of stopped freelancing for a little while or just did it on the side and just decided I'm just gonna go get a job at a company because I don't wanna have to do sales and billing collection.
Co-founding The Web Craftsman
00:12:19
Speaker
And so that's when I got a job at that internet marketing company I mentioned earlier and built some good relationships with some folks there that I ended up doing business with for decades after.
00:12:31
Speaker
And that was just my first job out of college. And I actually worked at that company a little bit during college part-time. But they did SEO. They were running ads, you know, SEM stuff. Social media wasn't out yet.
00:12:52
Speaker
you could just post organically. I think there weren't like ads on Facebook when I first started working there. So that wasn't really a thing. And like the business world hadn't taken over social media yet. Um, and so it was still early days there. So they were just focused on SEO, SEM, and, uh, building their little websites and custom PHP. Like they hadn't gotten into WordPress yet. WordPress hadn't totally dominated yet.
00:13:21
Speaker
I actually helped introduce WordPress to that company. Um, just because I was still doing a little bit of freelance work. I think that's why it's important to maybe allow employees or for employees to try and seek out freelance work. Cause it just expands your skillset. This is, this is one of the precepts of my business that anyone who works for me, um, mostly got a team of freelancers and a couple of employees, but I'm keen that they explore freelancing because the amount that you learn working for a company with a set number of, um,
00:13:51
Speaker
of clients is finite. The opportunities that come along, however many
Unexpected Startup Success
00:13:56
Speaker
clients you've got, there is a bookend to that. Whereas if a freelance or even a member of staff has their own clients as well, the opportunities to learn is so much bigger. And they can learn the things by solving problems outside of your business, they bring to your business. It's kind of like free training and they're making money from it. I think it's a win-win situation. For sure. And that's what happened with me.
00:14:20
Speaker
got this project, building a, designing a logo and a website for a solar company. And it was actually from my first Facebook ad. Um, because once Facebook started running at allowing ads, I ran one for like 50 bucks and had this little ad that had a guy punching through his laptop screen and it said, do you hate your website?
00:14:43
Speaker
Hire me a professional designer to help you out. It was just a simple little ad pulling people's emotions. But I got that lead turned into like a $500 logo project. And I think I charged them like a thousand bucks to rebuild their website totally, which is kind of crazy looking back. But anyway, 50 bucks turned into, you know, $1,500 of work. And I just, at that time,
00:15:10
Speaker
was not like digital marketing focused, didn't have a marketing, uh, sense really at all. And I was like, Oh, cool. I got that work, but I can't be spending $50 all the time. So I didn't run any more ads to get more freelance work. Cause I thought it was too expensive and just wasn't doing the most basic return on investment math of, Hey, you got 1500 for $50 ad. Like that's amazing.
Deep Dive into Digital Marketing
00:15:38
Speaker
And, uh, and so I just, and part of that maybe was because I was, you know, working outside of the main job, starting a family, just had a kid. So there's a lot going on, but I just did not have that marketing sense at the time. Um, and so I probably missed out on a ton of leads that I could have gotten early days of Facebook where it was so cheap. Yeah. Even with Google ads, I remember running campaigns and we were paying for,
00:16:06
Speaker
two, three pence, pence, pence, a click. It was absurdly cheap. It was almost like, well, why wouldn't you do that? Because it was so easy. So what happened? When did you get switched on to the marketing aspect of, of, of what? Right. So for years, I worked at that agency. Um, and for about three years, and then it got bought by a bigger local company and
00:16:37
Speaker
worked at the new company for about a year. And then I was like, you know what? I don't really like this bigger corporate vibe here. This is not what I want. And and so I started looking around and got a job at a smaller local agency. Just being there like website guy helping design and build websites and.
00:17:00
Speaker
Um, that was, they were trying to do social media marketing. And so we got a little more exposure there. And, uh, that was before, again, social media marketing was really mainstream. So you try to sell it to people and they're like, what, what is that business content on Facebook? What are you talking about? Cause it was just not as common yet. And so work their year and, uh,
00:17:26
Speaker
Then because I had been like putting my work on my website, my personal website, did a little bit of blogging here and there. Uh, somebody saw my work and, um, reached out and hired me to come, uh, or offered me a job to come work on a government contract, working with the military to design some software interfaces for. It's like the software they use to manage their finances, uh, the certain part of our military.
00:17:57
Speaker
And so I left that agency and took that opportunity and just went into design mode for about a year.
Becoming Chief Growth Officer
00:18:05
Speaker
And that was a really interesting experience because it was just a totally different world where I was used to more web development.
00:18:11
Speaker
and being around website designers and developers and marketing folks. And then this was like high level software engineer folks. And I just used to think software website development, it's kind of the same, but it is not the same. No, it very much would have been to ask for people in your situation at the time. I've never worked on pure dev or kind of what would now be offline dev, I guess.
00:18:38
Speaker
But yeah, no, I can see why you would have thought that. So was it a rude awakening or was it a pleasurable learning opportunity? Um, it was a little bit of both there because they were wanting me to learn some of the like, what was it. Dotnet, the Microsoft programming language stuff. And I was more on the design side of things. I had just done a little bit of like PHP and HTML and CSS. And I was just, I got in there trying to learn the dotnet stuff and I was just like, Oh, my brain just melted. And, uh,
00:19:08
Speaker
And so I just focused on the design side while I was there, but it was crazy getting exposed to that. And it was really eyeopening because there was like one guy on the team, one of the software engineers, and the whole time I was there for like maybe eight months on that project, something like that, the whole time he was just working on this, like one formula to make this one aspect of the software a little faster. And I was just like, what?
00:19:33
Speaker
what does that even mean? Like, what do you mean? You're working on this for like every meeting, like, yep, I'm just optimizing for a little more performance between SMEs and the people who've worked before and then the military. That must mean, yeah, very different. It's like I knew someone who worked at clients. He was an engineer, I can say a proper engineer. No, not not that they have some proper engineers, but he was, you know, machines and stuff. And he got a job working for BMW. And they were spending
00:20:01
Speaker
something like 15 million pounds a year, trying to cut down two seconds off one of their production lines. Two seconds. That was his entire job. It's just save us two seconds. Remarkable. Yeah. Because it adds up over time. Yeah. It saves him millions probably.
00:20:20
Speaker
Yeah. So, you know, worked at different freelance jobs for a little while and then decided to start my own company. It was called The Web Craftsman. And so I partnered up with a buddy that I'd worked with the previous company. He was deeper into development and I was more on the design side. And
00:20:36
Speaker
We partnered up and this was when responsive web design was becoming big. And so that was kind of our pitch, like, Hey, we can help your website work on all devices, you know, wherever it is. People can access your website. It should work. Short period of panic. We've seen something similar with GA4 coming in recently, but suddenly everyone was like, Oh my God, our website doesn't work on mobile devices. When we built it, there was WAP. There was no mobile internet. So you found a good seam of opportunity there.
00:21:08
Speaker
Yeah, we got a little bit of work. We did that for a few years and then our old boss was starting a project and we heard he needed some web development help and so we reached out and started working on that project and then ended up taking over our lives for the next five or six years because it grew and did well and so we kind of
00:21:31
Speaker
accidentally became part of a startup when we thought we were just, Hey, we'll, we'll do this for like two months and then move on. And it just, and it just grew. And that was like a truck driver recruiting a business. And so throughout that business is when I really went deep into marketing and more into SEO and, and all that kind of stuff, because I started off on
00:21:57
Speaker
being more of a project manager, product manager side and helping manage the designers and developers. And then moved in over the course of that project after about maybe a year or two into managing the marketing side of things. And we tested out Facebook ads and became one of the first in that industry to really use Facebook to recruit truck drivers and saw a lot of success there. And
00:22:27
Speaker
you know, experimented with other formats or with other platforms. We experimented with little content marketing and, um, and yeah, so I'd got a lot of experience just managing one client that worked with, you know, a few hundred clients itself. And so we were managing a few hundred campaigns, um, to get leads and then also our main, um, kind of brand and accounts.
00:22:54
Speaker
And, uh, and so that's, that was really the deep dive and kind of a transition where I went from being more on a mix of design and dev and product manager guy into more digital marketing focus. Uh, and then that carried me into eventually getting the job I have now at the nine where I started out
00:23:17
Speaker
as their marketing director, building the marketing department, defining the services and processes and helping recruit the team and then transition in over time as we put.
00:23:28
Speaker
better people than me in place at each of the positions, you know, more specialized folks. Um,
First Customers Podcast
00:23:33
Speaker
now I'm the chief growth officer role, whatever that means, just helping the company grow in whatever way I can. And so that's kind of the summer, the brief history that brings us to today. It's really interesting. And I think everyone I speak to has a slightly different path, but there's none of us are the same. And I find that fascinating. And part of the reason I was so keen to talk to you about your origin story,
00:23:59
Speaker
is that you run a podcast. So your podcast is called First Customers. We're the first customer, sorry. First customers. First customers podcast. And you've done nearly 50 episodes of that. So, wow. Explain the concept because I think. So when in 2019, that truck driver recruiting project was sold. And so I had a little gap
00:24:29
Speaker
Well, uh, it was kind of by choice. So I talked to the boss man and I was like, Hey, this is awesome. We did it. We built something for five, six years. It's sold. Awesome. What are we doing next? You know, what's the next big project that, you know, the next big hunt, uh, the next big problem to tackle. And he was like, man, I'm on a non-compete for whatever, however many years, you know, this is part of the deal.
00:24:56
Speaker
And I was like, okay. He was like, so he was kind of in cruise mode for a little while. And I was like, well, I can't hang around and keep doing what we've been doing. I gotta, I gotta do something else. You know, I was just itching to try something else and experiment and try some of my own ideas. And so, so I left that project and took about, uh, maybe six months or so of experimenting and trying different things. And one of the things was starting this podcast, first customers, um,
00:25:26
Speaker
Um, I went and worked with, uh, dropified. I don't know if you've heard of that software before, but it helps drop shippers, like sell stuff from all other websites on and sell it on the Shopify store. But, uh, a buddy of ours who actually worked with us on that truck driving project at first, he was the first marketing guy on that project, but his startup just exploded. His little side project dropified just took off. And so he left and that's why I actually took over the marketing because he wasn't available. Um, and so.
00:25:56
Speaker
After our project sold, reconnected with that guy and he hired me to be a product manager temporarily. And I worked there for like three months and then I was like, man, I've got to scratch this itch and go try to do some of my own ideas. And so, spent that six months in 2019 trying different things, failing horribly at all of them for the most part. But what a joy to have that opportunity rather than
00:26:25
Speaker
Yeah. I wish I could, I wish I could say I was joyful during that time, but it was pretty stressful. It was a big learning experience and a lot, I learned a lot of hard lessons, but it was one of those things where I don't think I could have avoided it because of the state of mind I was in at the time. Like I had to try these things that
Involvement in Mycast.io
00:26:48
Speaker
I've been thinking about for years. Um,
00:26:51
Speaker
And a lot of it wasn't even clearly defined projects. It was just, I've got to try my own thing. And, you know, and so I did that. Tried a couple different, start a couple different websites projects. Um, and just didn't give myself enough runway with any of them. Um, cause it was more of a desperate, this has to work in one month. Yeah. There's the kind of the hustle side of that being useful, but there's also the distress of that.
00:27:18
Speaker
especially within any new project, actually kind of blinding you to some quite obvious facts or quite obvious truth. But you know, they say fail harder, fail quicker. I've done plenty of failing, plenty quick. Yeah. And so I did not have the appetite, I guess, enough for any of the projects or belief enough, strong enough conviction.
00:27:38
Speaker
to go as deep as maybe they would have required. Like, you know, I could have taken out a whole bunch of debt and just went all in and that's what it takes sometimes. And that's actually what it took for that truck driver recruiting project that had sold because at the start of that project, I didn't get paid for like six months. It was pure investment mode while we were running our other company. And we had also done a bad deal with this agency where they had a
00:28:09
Speaker
retainer with us, but if they didn't have any projects one month, they would just pay us regular. But then anytime they wanted to cash in that money they paid us and give us work, they could say, Hey, we've paid you. So you owe us this much work, man, actually resource that kind of painful. And so during that period, they called in all the chips, basically all the money they paid us and had all these projects for us to do while we were investing in this other project. And we on top of that,
00:28:39
Speaker
That's two whole jobs that don't even pay for that current moment. So we had to also do new work to pay our bills. So you were getting like one, two hours sleep a night at this time. Exactly. A lot of caffeine. And with a young family as well. Yeah, yeah. So that was the dark times, the darkest, I think, in my career. Stress-wise, you know, everything, family, everything.
00:29:03
Speaker
Um, and just pushing it too far because of being stupid and making bad deals and just being not reading enough books beforehand because in the years following those hard times started getting into like audible listening to books and, uh, just opened my mind to how stupid I was in the past. So if you're listening, get knowledge, get wisdom.
00:29:28
Speaker
Learn from other people because man, it'll save you so much, so much pain because I try to look back and reanalyze like, man, how could I avoided these problems or made more out of these different situations? And it becomes so clear looking back as I, as I learn better ways of doing things or learning how other people have done things, done things better. Um, but yeah, so.
00:29:55
Speaker
Made it through those dark times, obviously, and, and that company sold. And so I was in that period of experimentation. And, uh, greet the guy that I work for now work with at the nine. Um, they had this project called my cast. One of their developers had built a side project and I
Connecting with Target Audiences
00:30:15
Speaker
joined up with them, um, as an investor and partnered with them eventually became a co-owner and, um, They,
00:30:25
Speaker
Well now we're like the number one fan casting website. So if you search fan casting or fan casting any movie role, I didn't even know this was a hobby that existed, but people will search or they'll recommend who they want to see in a movie role. Like whether it's Oppenheimer or Barbie. Yeah. They'll say, Hey, I want so-and-so to be Barbie or so somebody else to be Oppenheimer or whatever. And they can make a list of all the,
00:30:52
Speaker
roles in a movie and all the actors they would want to see. Mycast.io, is that it? Yep, that's us. Yeah, you're number one. They're just, you probably already know, but yeah, you're SEO, you're number one in the UK as well as states. Yeah, it's pretty dominant SEO wise, all over the place for all, you know, millions of keywords related to that topic. And yeah, that was one of those things just
00:31:21
Speaker
happened to meet the right people at the right time and heard about this project. And when they started to show me, even back then, it was like 2019. So the traffic wasn't as nearly as big as it is now, but even back then I was like, man, this has got some traction. And ever since they had launched the site, it was kind of a steady just growth chart. And I was like, I don't know what this is, but this is something like, this is interesting. Like people care about this.
00:31:47
Speaker
And so that's why I got involved and helped make some changes that helped, you know, increase that growth rate a little bit. At first, we were experimenting with stuff I'd done before, like, Hey, let's try some Facebook ads and different things, but it's a user generated content site. And so that's really tough to stay on a public platform, any of these ad platforms, because people are crazy and post the worst of everything. You get, you get some of that.
00:32:15
Speaker
Yeah. It's so hard managing the humans on that platform, on our website. We're always getting like, uh, contacted by lawyers constantly saying you got to take down this or that content. Like they have automated things that I didn't even know existed, but it's like, you can register your, your photos or like models do this, I guess. Cause we've gotten contacted by their lawyers all the time.
00:32:40
Speaker
they'll register their photos with this digital rights, you know, I guess the DMR stuff did a digital right or DRM. Uh, so those would be like this library of all their content and they got it, you know, tagged. And I guess they have bots that crawl the internet looking for people who are illegally posting or sharing their content. And so it's automatic. Yeah. It automatically sends us these emails saying we got to take whatever content down on whatever URL,
00:33:09
Speaker
And so that's a constant thing with that project, but I guess that's kind of the pain of being a website that size where anybody can post anything unless our internal controls filter it out or our human moderators filter stuff out. That's a lot to take on. We're slightly running short on time now, Paris, so I'd really like to ask you, out of all the people that you've spoken to on the First Customers podcast,
00:33:38
Speaker
Are there kind of common threads? Are there common regrets or common, just any commonality? Is there something that when it pops up, you're like, okay, yeah, this, this, this comes up a lot. Yeah. So the kind of overall pattern with first customers, um, that comes up. Well, first the context of the show is talking to entrepreneurs about how they got their first customers. So we talked to all types of businesses, um, from SAS to manual labor type businesses and
00:34:09
Speaker
Because of this period where I took all this experimentation time and everything, I experienced the pain of going from no customers to trying to figure out how to get that first customer. And that was a very visceral, real experience for me during that time. And so that was kind of the reason I started the podcast. It was like, I want to learn how other people are doing this, how they're starting something and getting that first customer because there's got to be, like you're saying, some patterns.
00:34:37
Speaker
that I'll learn, and also there's the networking and things like that that you're talking about for this podcast. And so the common things kind of get reduced down to basic principles of marketing, like define your target audience, connect with that audience, physically, if possible, like in person, and then learn from their conversations, their feedback,
00:35:03
Speaker
you know, listen well to that target audience and adjust what you offer to kind of line up more with what their needs are, their desires, or whatever it is, your product or service. Take that client feedback or that potential customer feedback and use it
00:35:23
Speaker
um, in your targeting, your messaging, whatever it is. Um, and that seems to be that even though that's kind of three simple things, define your target audience, connect with them and to use their feedback in your product or service. But, but that seems to be kind of the little niche little secret that keeps showing up the people who know their target audience the best and connect with them the most.
00:35:47
Speaker
Like this one guy sold his business
Importance of Offline Interactions
00:35:49
Speaker
for like $200 million. And the only marketing he ever did was like an annual event or like event every, maybe a couple of times a year where just his customers were invited and they would end up upselling each other on the additional services or different aspects of the product that their company offered. And it became like this.
00:36:12
Speaker
you know, which one everybody looks forward to. I want to specifically go back and listen to that one. That was, that was the episode with John Darby Shire. And he, I don't remember the number at the moment, but his current company is smart suite. And I don't remember the name of his original company, but
00:36:35
Speaker
It was a perfect example of he was using his personal network to meet people and came up with the whole business idea because of a need that he discovered in the market and designed a solution for it in the early web days.
00:36:52
Speaker
dominated without running a single ad. It was crazy. That's brilliant. We're going to have to draw it to a close, unfortunately. But I was at a meeting, like a community group that we're setting up here in Ipswich, just to celebrate the town and creativity. And one of the colleagues, somebody I work with regularly, he's done several startups and exited. He's someone I consider as quite successful. He was saying that the thing that he's learned the most in the last six months is go offline.
00:37:23
Speaker
you know, meet with people, be be an actual human being, because that will now with this now so much online noise, that's now what's going to connect and I'm a firm believer with it with especially with regards to promoting my own SEO agency, that that I think that little nugget you gave us there about the three, the three things is
00:37:44
Speaker
so powerful. And it's such a lovely note to end on because I want people to remember those bits. So there's several things that I wanted to speak to you about like AI and your music because we're both musicians. Oh, yeah, just quickly. What do you play? Bass mainly bass guitar and then hey, hey, there we go. Podcast pointing at a bass that I've got. Actually, there's a strat here as well. Yeah. But like me and my family,
00:38:12
Speaker
We just had our first little jam session with the kids last night, actually. And so I'm on guitar, acoustic, and my son's learning bass, and my daughter's learning drums, and my wife is on the keys. That is so cute. We just had a good little jam session. Do you know the band Crowded House? Nope. There's a band, they're huge. They were big in America in the 90s.
00:38:33
Speaker
But the main guy, Tim, he's started touring with his family. His two boys are in the drum and in the band. And so his wife, they are now a crowded house, pretty much. But we could go rapping on. And unfortunately, we are. We were actually run over, but I was thoroughly enjoying talking to you, Bruce. So I've got to put some notes in the show notes so people can find out more about you. And do you want to leave us with a final thought? Hey, this life is short.
00:39:01
Speaker
You know, it's crazy times in the world if you zoom out. So as you're hustling or working, whatever you're doing, whatever you're listening to this show, remember the people that you care about the most, take time to talk to them, engage, try to be present, because like we're saying, the digital world is overwhelming these days. You can get flooded.
00:39:24
Speaker
from with notifications and there's, there's never ending tasks. Now, you know, the work day never ends anymore because you can always access everything online from your devices. So, uh, yeah, to leave people with something, say, Hey, make sure you disconnect, be present, look into your kid's eyes every once in a while. And, uh, and yeah, don't forget what life's about. That's absolutely wonderful. Thank you very much for your time. I'm going to say goodbye now. Would you like to say goodbye? See ya.