Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Unique Content Strategies, Organic Growth Principles, and Audience Leverage | Neal O’Grady
57 Plays1 year ago
SUBSCRIBE TO LEARN FROM PAID MARKETING EXPERTS 🔔
The Efficient Spend Podcast helps start-ups turn media spend into revenue. Learn how the world's top marketers are managing their media mix to drive growth!
About the Host: Paul is a paid marketing leader with 7+ years of experience optimizing marketing spend at venture-backed startups. He's driven over $100 million in revenue through paid media and is passionate about helping startups deploy marketing dollars to drive growth.
About the Guest: Neal is the founder of Demand Curve, Bell Curve, and Un-ignorable. He has over a decade of experience as a serial entrepreneur and writes a weekly newsletter to nearly 96,000 founders and marketers.
VISIT OUR WEBSITE: https://www.efficientspend.com/
CONNECT WITH PAUL: https://www.linkedin.com/in/paulkovalski/
CONNECT WITH NEAL: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nealogrady/
Recommended
Transcript
The Creator Economy Boom
00:00:00
Speaker
Neil, welcome to the show. Thank you for being here. Thanks for having me, man. I want to start with a specific question to contextualize the importance of audience building. Goldman Sachs recently released a study and report that showed that the creator economy will grow to be half a trillion dollars by 2027. It's 250 billion this year, so pretty exponential growth, right? Yeah.
00:00:28
Speaker
What that means is that the marketplace for creators is getting more and more competitive. With that in mind, how can brands and creators become unignorable? Right. I mean, I love this one quote from Rory Sutherland. He wrote a great book called Alchemy.
00:00:49
Speaker
basically says that you'll never be fired for making the logical decision. It's kind of like that on, uh, it's like bad incentives built into a company where it's like, if you act logically and you make the logical suggestion, you won't be fired because at least you did the logical thing, right? But unfortunately, if every single company is doing the logical thing, then they all end up doing the exact same thing.
Quirky Marketing Tactics
00:01:11
Speaker
So, um, he has some great examples where it's like, uh,
00:01:17
Speaker
I think he had one where they were working with some charity organization in the UK and they were trying to get more donations. So they had like the letter they sent last year, they kept that the same and they like tested a variety of ones side by side.
00:01:33
Speaker
One was just added a mention, Hey, if you donate a thousand, the government will also give a thousand. So logically that's the best one because, Hey, I spend X amount of money and it it's actually, the government handles the rest, right? And gives you a bit more. So it's more efficient. Then he tested other ones, which were like, send an envelope that opened instead of on the top, like normal, it opened on the side.
00:01:57
Speaker
They had another one where it said, a human being came to your door and hand delivered this note. And then another one where it was just the piece of paper was of thicker weight. And then they ranked which ones led to the most amount of donations. And the one that did the most was the envelope that literally just opened on the side.
00:02:19
Speaker
And the worst, worst than control was the one where he said that the government would match. Um, so the logical thing was the exact opposite to doing thing to do. And the suggestion that somebody might throw out and everyone go like, why would we put, like, why would we use a different envelope? That's dumb was actually led to like 25% more donations. So I think to stand out ultimately, like.
00:02:48
Speaker
Even with my content on LinkedIn, I just do dumb things. I put my head at weird angles or I have a quote from Justin Welsh and I just have his head coming out from the side rather than from the bottom. And it's just quirky little things that make people stop or think and notice you and randomly include a bunny in your ad.
00:03:10
Speaker
We had one client, they sold deep learning computers and server racks. This was like six years ago before AI was cool. Our best performing ad for them was an Instagram ad where my co-founder lazily just attached some dog ears and a tongue.
00:03:35
Speaker
on front of this machine, and that got way more engagement and purchases than any other ad we ever ran from them, because it was just so weird and stupid. And yeah, my co-founder spent 20 seconds making that ad. So it's like you just don't expect for a $20,000 computer to have that. And the kind of people buying that are probably nerdy computer engineers, and they wouldn't
00:04:03
Speaker
really pocket that anyway, they just kind of find it
Building a Personal Audience
00:04:05
Speaker
funny. So yeah, I think ultimately it's just like you have to just break yourself out from just doing the safe, normal thing.
00:04:16
Speaker
Do you think that that is more of a one-off or do you think once you identify those things you kind of build that into your content strategy and things like that? You mentioned your point around having your face to the side and that's something now you do consistently, right? But was that kind of like you identified it and now you've systematized it in a way?
00:04:37
Speaker
I think if I was doing a better job, I'd probably be constantly finding weird stuff like that to do, rather than just doing the same thing all the time. I mean, there's companies like Red Bull, which they're constantly like they just have a team of people just doing weird stuff for liquid death. Like you see all of their advertisements are just like wacky and hilarious.
00:05:00
Speaker
Um, so some companies have done it really well. I think even, I think one of the most interesting companies is dual lingo in that like they've gamified the hell out of an extremely unfun thing to do. Like learning a language is brutal and somehow they've made it so that like millions of people are excitedly opening an app every day and using it. And then they're like, we'll do it for 30 minutes to an hour.
00:05:29
Speaker
Um, whereas you ask people, they probably same people thought French class or Spanish class was the worst class in school. Right. So, and their advertisements too,
Organic vs. Paid Content
00:05:39
Speaker
they're, they're like really quirky and fond of their Tik TOK accounts. Great. So, um, I think it is something you just have to like build into your team and, and like process to just like throw out ideas and, um,
00:05:54
Speaker
And just constantly experiment. And if you do find something that works, you can kind of keep doing it. And then you might be known for that weird quirky thing. Sure. I think that there's obviously a lot of reasons why the creator economy is scaling and growing as it is.
00:06:16
Speaker
You mentioned audience building being the highest leverage activity that you could possibly do. Why do you think that? How do you contextualize the time spent or resources spent on organic audience building versus the million other things that you could be doing as a startup marketer?
00:06:39
Speaker
It's a generalized statement. Obviously I'd also, like one of my friends, she saw some of my posts promoting our course and she's like, oh God, should I be posting on LinkedIn? I feel bad that I'm not. I'm like, your business is going to do like $4 million this year at like a 40% profit margin. And your problem is that you're working until 3 AM every day.
00:07:01
Speaker
So it's like, you don't need to add writing content for your LinkedIn. When you don't need more leads, you like literally couldn't handle any more leads. You need to spend all of your time just like getting yourself out of the front, like hiring people.
00:07:16
Speaker
improving the process so you're not staying up until three in the morning. So it's different for different people but overall I'd say it's one of the highest leverage activities in that the more people know my name the more likely that when I send an email on behalf of the company that people are going to open it.
00:07:35
Speaker
So that's one. If we want to do cold outreach, it's the best cold email is warm email. If they already know my name or they've liked one of my content or we've DM'd before, then they're way more likely to respond. Like I like to say if Joe Rogan emailed you, he could literally ask for anything and you would still respond because you're like, holy shit, this is Joe Rogan. So, and
00:08:02
Speaker
Most people probably aren't building a startup to do it until they're 65 and to retire. People generally have multiple businesses.
00:08:13
Speaker
So when you build it under your own personal audience, it's like, great, I've sold, you know, I've moved on from demand curve. I now I'm starting this other business. I still have this audience. People still know me. If I, when I announce it, when I, when I try to raise money, it's just so much easier. So, um,
00:08:34
Speaker
And like so much of a startup is just like relationships, meeting the right people. And it's like when you have that audience and you're attracting people to you, it's just so much easier to do that. So, um, I think it's extremely high leverage. Obviously it depends on whether you have the time or if that's like what you should be doing right now. But I think ultimately, uh, it's something that people should be doing at some point of their, uh, entrepreneurship career.
00:08:59
Speaker
For sure. There's obviously different types of leverage for a brand to be doing it versus a creator. I was mentioning earlier the way that I kind of view this podcast efficient spend is that we have marketing spent on one and being an input into a machine that we deploy to output compounding revenue, right?
00:09:23
Speaker
I spend most of my day thinking about how to do that with media spend and a media mix, paid social, paid search, et cetera. But a similar perspective can be made for organic content. It's time spent that a brand needs to do to create the content, but it's also spend on influencers and resources and things like that. How do you think about that
00:09:48
Speaker
dynamic. Yeah, I mean, it's it's definitely it's a very like long term thing. It's like you could argue the amount of time or resources or whatever that's going to my LinkedIn. It's like maybe we just run ads and we'd actually make more money today. The beauty is that it's it's kind of like SEO content, like it's a thing that builds over time.
00:10:14
Speaker
Whereas ads, like you turn the ads off, it's like, sure, there's more people that have purchased in the past and they might be repeat purchases, but as soon as the ads are off, it's gone, right? And I would argue that if you spend more time building your organic presence, then your ads were going to be
00:10:41
Speaker
more effective, right? Um, like if I got an ad for Airbnb, I'd be more likely to act on that than if I got an ad from one of Airbnb's competitors that I haven't heard of before, right? So, um, or if the ad had Brian Chesky in it, I know who Brian Chesky is and I don't know the founder of VRBO, VRBO's founder could be in there and I had no idea and it wouldn't do anything to me. So, um,
00:11:10
Speaker
I think in terms of like efficient spend, it's like you're, I think the more attention, everything you can drive to either yourself or your business organically, the more efficient all of your other marketing activities are going to be. And like, I think that's kind of the benefit of brand in general is that if you have a better brand, it's just easier to close things. And it's like your, your CAC might just be lower just because people are more likely to trust you. Right.
00:11:38
Speaker
Sure. Yeah. I mean, um, I think what you realize when you have a really good organic presence in your more scaled startup is that, uh, the CPAs that you're getting on Facebook and other platforms, the attributed CPAs are not actually completely incremental and a large portion of that is should be attributed to the organic audience that you're building.
00:12:04
Speaker
Yeah. Oh yeah. It's kind of funny. So I live in Victoria in Canada. And coincidentally, there's somebody else here that runs very similar business and that they have essentially like a media business in a way and a marketing agency. So the newsletter is called D2C, direct to consumer. And the agency is called Pilot House. And it's interesting because they've taken the complete opposite approach that we have. We've been
00:12:33
Speaker
we've barely ever run ads. Like we've gotten 86,000 newsletter subscribers, basically all organic, just from us putting content out, throwing events, having a Slack community, things like that. Whereas they did the, they're, they're a paid media agency. When they started the newsletter, they took 300 grand of their marketing budget and just like ran ads to grow, start bootstrapped the newsletter.
00:13:00
Speaker
And that's all of their growth. It's just like the arbitrage of them running ads, putting in sponsors, and then extracting some more value through their agency. And it's funny because if you ask the average marketer, I think they're more likely to have heard of us and to think that we're probably bigger than them, even though they, I think they have like 200,000 subscribers and like their agency is 150 plus people.
00:13:28
Speaker
But it's like an ad is sort of like a private experience. You open up Facebook and you see it and you click on it, you sub. Whereas organic, the only way it happens is if people are talking about it. So it makes it seem like it's larger. But my argument, I think, if we were to run ads, I would hopefully assume that we could get a lower CPA than they could just because of that organic growth.
00:13:56
Speaker
Yeah.
Persistence in Content Creation
00:13:57
Speaker
I also mean, as someone with a lot more experience in paid media that is starting to play around with the content game a little bit, it's a lot harder and a lot more frustrating too. With a paid ad, I can pretty much guarantee a result with a specific methodology to a certain extent, but with organic content,
00:14:19
Speaker
And you could spend two hours trying to craft the perfect LinkedIn message, and then you get crickets. And that can be demoralizing for sure. And that could happen for literally months. One of our students that went through our course, Alex Smith, he's a strategist for consumer brands. And he's, I don't know, in his 40s maybe,
00:14:47
Speaker
He's a great writer. And when he started, his LinkedIn literally had like 500 followers. And he was posting for, I don't know, god, months. And we celebrated when he finally hit 1,000. And they created a post that got over 8,000 likes, and he went to 22,000 followers. And then he hit 30,000 followers by the end of the week. So it was, I don't know if you've seen Jack Butcher's
00:15:16
Speaker
graph where it's just like flat, flat, flat. And then there's like an arrow saying, this is pointless. And then right after it, it goes, that is like basically Alex Smith story to a T and that it's like literally nothing. And then everything all at once. So it's, yeah, it can be quite demoralizing to spend because to be writing content as a founder, like you're already busy.
00:15:41
Speaker
You're probably doing this in your evenings or weekends a lot of the time, like I was. I'd spend a Saturday making two carousels or something. And then if you do it and nobody likes it, then you're just like, it's really hard to convince yourself to keep doing it. So it is hard, yeah, for sure. Yeah, for sure. It just kind of reminds me of the importance of compounding
00:16:10
Speaker
and investing the time and even, you know, I'm really into the financial independence retire early movement, read a lot about investing and like the S&P 500, for example, if you're investing into your 401k, you're actually not going to get the compounding returns for, you know, it's going to, it's like the last 10 years are where you see all of that growth. So you just kind of wait it out basically. Oh, it's, if you look at Warren Buffett's like net worth,
00:16:40
Speaker
over his, I don't know, 60 year investing career. It's all in the last 10, 15, 20 years. For sure. That's where he got 99.9% of his $80 billion for the hell it is. Crazy. Yeah, I actually have a note on my
00:17:00
Speaker
Deslica nota, brick by boring, brick by paramour, which is just like that consistent little small actions that compound. And not only for marketing and investing, but habits, exercise, literally everything. I think it's, especially for audience building, like content creation, like it's so much easier for me now, just in the fact that I already have like a bank of 200 plus,
00:17:30
Speaker
posts that I've created, that I can either reuse entirely, that I can rework, or I have like a whole bunch of templates in Figma that I can just like, okay, just copy paste some words in, I don't have to come up with a design anymore.
00:17:49
Speaker
And now that I'm at this point too, I can just like have somebody on my team where it's like, Hey, I wrote something in the newsletter. We have something on our website where I created this on Twitter. Can you just like convert this into something for LinkedIn using the templates and everything that I had created? So then I just go in there and I edit it at the end. So I'm not doing like the four hours of Figma work. I'm just going in and like.
00:18:14
Speaker
30 minutes of editing before I post it. So like it's so much easier today than it was. Um, and yeah, it's like the compounding of now people just like tag me, like yesterday, somebody tagged me and I probably got several hundred followers just from them, like suggesting me as somebody to follow. And you know, somebody just starting out, like it might take you two months to get several hundred followers. Right. So sure.
00:18:43
Speaker
You did one viral one recently. So was it, uh, was it in response to Sam Altman? It was a funny one. It's yeah. I basically just claimed I changed my, cause like nothing's stopping you from saying that you are the CEO of open AI, right?
00:19:00
Speaker
Um, so I just changed my, my bio to open AI. And, uh, I now said I was now did the CEO and it's like my first, my most viral post on LinkedIn ever was me. Uh, I spent 20 seconds writing it. I had seen one too many, you know, this was three, four years ago. I saw one too many fundraising announcements on LinkedIn. And I was just like proud to announce my, we just raised a zero million dollar series a.
00:19:30
Speaker
from Nobody Ventures. And it was that and the Sam Altman one were basically like a certain percentage of people who see it don't know that I'm joking, especially since most people on LinkedIn aren't joking. So some of the comments are like, oh, like legitimately saying, curtain rats. I started getting DMS of people wanting to partner with open AI.
00:19:56
Speaker
And, but if you do know that it's a joke and you see those comments, you feel smart and it kind of gives you that little, I don't know, boost in ego too. So it's funny, that post didn't really, you know, like there's a difference between a post that gets a lot of engagement and one that actually gets a lot of followers. And then there's also a different thing from increasing buyer intent.
Balancing Engagement and Value
00:20:23
Speaker
So it's like me sharing funny memes. I don't like sure that might get a lot of engagement. Most people probably won't decide to follow me from that. And I don't think anyone's going to decide to actually like give me money from that. So it's it's I think a lot of creators unfortunately get addicted to
00:20:46
Speaker
kind of like top of funnel dopamine hits. Like, you know, you post your 10 free AI tools or 12 Ted talks in 12 days to change your life for here's those don't demonstrate any sort of expertise on your end. It's literally just a list of things that gives people it's like,
00:21:09
Speaker
There's people like feeling like they've learned something or they've gained some sort of valuable resource. So sometimes the thing that they like is like, cool, this Ted Talk list, like, I'm definitely gonna go through these, I'm gonna save it. And then they don't. Or maybe, but they feel good for feeling like they might, right? So I think people, it gets a lot of engagement and people, some creators get addicted to that, because like, I got 10,000 likes.
00:21:37
Speaker
And that ends up being all that they do, but that alienates anybody who's been following you for a while and all your posting is this, like they're not gaining anything truly valuable from them. So you're prioritizing new people coming in and you're like pissing off everybody who's been following you before. Um, so it's, I think it's hard not to get addicted to that
00:22:02
Speaker
dopamine as a creator and you have to like every so often like reel yourself in like, wait, why am I caring about this? Um, I need to focus on the thing that actually matters, which is like, you know, building trust with people over a long period of time so that they're want to purchase from you or work with you.
Content Creation Frameworks
00:22:22
Speaker
Yeah. And
00:22:24
Speaker
That also is in regards to the importance of being really, really, really focused, focusing on the audience that you're targeting and what you're saying to them. I definitely want to talk a little bit about your personal content creation journey and how that's evolved. You have a course that helps personal brands build an audience, but in terms of systemizing this, right?
00:22:54
Speaker
What are your, what are your frameworks today on creating that content generation system from zero, right? Um, I think that's a helpful way to contextualize some of the next questions I want to dig into from zero. So you mean like, if you were just starting out today, like how you'd go about, yep. Yeah. So, um, one that I really like and.
00:23:20
Speaker
So Ali Abdaal is a YouTuber. I think he's got like five million subscribers or something. So he teaches a course on how to become a YouTuber. And he hammers in the three stage, just three stages of basically anything. It's like one is get going. The next is get good. Third is get smart. If you're not currently doing it, just just do it. Doesn't matter. Like he said, for YouTube, like
00:23:46
Speaker
A lot of people get in the stage where it's like, Oh, I need to get the right microphone. Oh, I need to buy the camera. Oh shit. I need the light. Um, so he's like, record the first 10 videos. Just grab your phone and record it. You don't even, like, don't even think about it. Just like, just pick something and do it. And he says like the first 50 videos are for you. The next 50 are for the audience. So it's just.
00:24:12
Speaker
It's kind of cliche, but if you're not currently do it, just sit down and write about something and press post. Once you've developed the habit of just doing it, then you can start worrying about, okay, I need to actually pick a topic that's related to something that I currently sell or I could sell and I'd want to sell. I need to learn how to copyright because that's the main thing. If you're not a really good copywriter,
00:24:42
Speaker
you know you're not gonna see the results and that's just a skill that you have to get better at and that just is a combination of doing it a lot and sitting down and just studying the work of really good writers and you could read copywriting books you could just read really good really well written books or you can go through like read wise as a resource where it just shows all of the
00:25:07
Speaker
Basically top creators based on the number of times people have saved tweets to read wise, you can just go through those identify and just like try to figure like reverse engineer like how they're writing in a way that you're not like.
00:25:24
Speaker
And yeah, so I think a lot of it early on is just like getting going. Most people don't. And if they do, they post three times. You know, even people go through ship 30 for 30, the cohort for just getting people to write every day. A lot of them will write for every day for the 30 days and then basically never write again.
00:25:44
Speaker
So it's like, you just need to start doing it. And then once you can convince yourself to keep doing it, then you can worry about like getting better. And what the system is for doing it really depends on each person. Like I'm not.
00:25:59
Speaker
I'm not an extremely regimented person. Justin Welsh is like his days scheduled out and he probably hits this time and he writes until that time and he's scheduling three weeks in advance and he's got his probably content calendar figured out for the next six months. That's not me. That's not my partner, Caitlin Burgoyne either. We're a lot more like
00:26:30
Speaker
It's Tuesday, I'm going to finish for the rest of the week, but it's going to be more based on inspire to what I want to write about or to think about. Dan, I like to use the example of Dan Go, grew on Twitter. He was tweeting, I think, 350 times a day, and that includes comments. It's like, hey, if you do that eight hours a day, what is that?
00:26:55
Speaker
still 45 tweets an hour. So it's like basically one a minute. Whereas my co-founder grew to basically the same size, 250,000 followers by tweeting literally once a week, but he would spend 10 to 20 hours doing it. So it's like completely different process. And he, it's just based on like, what do you prefer? What's your personality and what's something that you can like,
00:27:22
Speaker
If I were to try to make myself very regimented to do this, I probably wouldn't have fun and I wouldn't be doing it for the next five years. But if I can find a system where that I enjoy and I'm able to do it, then do that. But it can take you a while to... You have to know yourself and your personality and your working style to be able to do that.
00:27:42
Speaker
For sure. Um, I personally, I practice, uh, meditation and mindfulness a lot. And, um, I realize that sometimes when I schedule something in my calendar, like create, and then create comes up, I'm like, Oh shit, I'm not ready to create right now. And then I'll be, it'll be 11 o'clock at night. I'm ready to go to bed and like, all these things start coming into my mind. I'm like, Oh, I gotta write that down.
00:28:05
Speaker
Yeah, it's like, you know, if you were to go, no, now's not the time. This is not the writing time in my calendar. I have to wait until 10 a.m. tomorrow. And so, yeah, it really just I think it needs to depend on the preferred style of the person. But it's like if you do schedule something in your calendar, I think like it's a good habit to develop that if it's in there and the reminders come up, they should do it.
00:28:32
Speaker
Because I think as soon as you say no once, you're just going to say no increasingly more. Let me ask though, I know sometimes that you can post quickly on these platforms and it comes out to be more of like a brain fart if it's just like a simple quick thing that you thought of and you want to put down. How long do you typically spend on posts and I guess maybe LinkedIn, Twitter?
00:29:00
Speaker
purely text post, I'd say at least 30 minutes, hour, two hours. For carousel, I mean, that can, you know, if you have to design it, that could take like eight hours, right? So, but yeah, it's, I think depending on the style of post, like I think those satirical ones and everything do better if they're just like,
00:29:31
Speaker
You just do it really quickly because I think if you heavily edit it, it doesn't have the same sort of organic human feel to it. Like it doesn't sound like somebody's saying it. And I think for those sort of like funnier off the cuff sort of things, you lose something. But if you're trying to like methodically teach something or whatever, then it's best to like sit there and edit it and get it.
00:30:01
Speaker
It's even still, it's like, as, as I said, my co-founder, he'd spend probably 20 hours working on a Twitter thread just cause he's, you know, that that's his personality. Like he's just fairly OCD in a way where it's just like, he just wants this to be perfect. And he is completely fine editing the same thing 50 times me. I, you know, after I edit it once or twice, I just like cannot bring myself to do it anymore. Right. So, um, yeah. Are you talking about a Julian Shapiro? Yes.
00:30:30
Speaker
Okay. Awesome. Yeah. Uh, and I've learned a lot from him as well. Um, uh, he has a long tweet about mental models, um, which is really strong. So. Yeah. I mean, his, his, uh, the guides that he puts on his website, like, like one of the things that really.
00:30:51
Speaker
Like our, our business was bootstrap. We started an agency and he had a small audience. Like I'm talking, he probably has like 6,000 Twitter followers and you know, a little bit of a newsletter list. And he had created like a muscle building guide on his website that was well received and getting hundreds of thousands of views a year. And so it's like not necessarily the perfect audience, you know, for a Mark growth marketing agency.
00:31:16
Speaker
And we had leveraged just like some of the people I knew we were, had them as clients. And then he, he took the first several months of our, uh, of working together, like part half of his time or whatever to write this guide. And it was like, he was doing it half the day, evenings, weekends, writing it for months before he posted it. And it was like, you know, maybe eight pages or something on a website. Um,
00:31:44
Speaker
So it's like he very methodically goes through and does it and writes and rewrites and rewrites and rewrites. So and as I said, like I wouldn't be able to do that. Like I was that I have a test in university and it's like by the second time I read my notes, I'm just like, oh, I cannot do this anymore. Right. I think so for for startups, though, you know, less individuals for for startups that
00:32:13
Speaker
have a marketing budget line item for organic content. How do you think about optimizing that against revenue growth and different things? Well, I mean, one of the beauties is that you don't necessarily need to spend anything to do it. It's just like the founder just needs to carve out some time and do it.
00:32:42
Speaker
It could be yes and scenario, right? But like I would not advise anybody using a Ghost Rider. I don't think that's a good investment. Like it's fairly expensive. They're not necessarily going to work unless you find like a really good one. And you're kind of building an asset that you're then not able to take advantage of.
00:33:10
Speaker
So for example, say you have an amazing ghost writer, you pay them six grand a month for a year, you drop 70 grand. They get you to 50,000 followers and then you start working with them. The algorithm is very brutal in that even if you have 50,000 followers, you still need to write something really good for them to be able to see it. It's like every post
00:33:33
Speaker
has to like have merit. It's a complete meritocracy in that sense. So it's like, then you have this asset that you're not actually even able to take advantage of because you do not have the skills yourself to actually take advantage.
Authenticity in Content Creation
00:33:46
Speaker
So you're completely beholden on having somebody else continue to write it, which is kind of strange, but, um, so I don't necessarily think ghostwriters is a good thing to do, but yeah, in terms of,
00:34:02
Speaker
Ultimately it depends on the stage of the business and what their biggest problem is and, uh, how much problems they have, whether the founder should actually stop working on other things and start posting things online. Um, I think ultimately it's better to be doing that through a, the personal account rather than the company account.
00:34:27
Speaker
Um, just because people prefer to follow people than they do follow companies. Um, you know, that's not necessarily a trend I would have agreed with 10, 20 years ago. Um, I think previously people were like, why would I listen to this weird guy, Paul? Like he's just some random dude. What does he know?
00:34:51
Speaker
Uh, whereas I think that it's shifted where it's like, I'd much rather listen to what Paul says than this company. This company is just doing it because they want to get money from me. Right. Um, so I think doing it from the personal and then like you can, as I said, you can reach out, you can DM people as Paul, and then they're more likely to respond to Paul than they are to respond to the efficient spend podcasts company page. Right. So, um, yeah, it's.
00:35:22
Speaker
It's, I think it's worth the investment if there's not like fires that the founder needs to put out desperately and they're really willing to put in the effort for a long period of time. Um, yeah, it's, it is a, it's a hard thing and it's, uh, I find it very curious that some of these large companies are like trying to make all of their employees do it.
00:35:47
Speaker
because I think trying to make somebody else do it, as much as I'd love for my other co-founder Justin to be posting consistently, I just can't make him do it. I can shame him. Maybe me saying this on the podcast will shame him a little bit into doing it, but I cannot make somebody do it because it's so hard, it's so much work, and they have to just enjoy the process of writing and sharing it online to do it.
00:36:16
Speaker
How do you think about measuring it towards business outcomes? Obviously you've grown a lot of your brands completely organically. Are you, you know, measuring the ROI of an individual post? I mean, I'd say that's been difficult for us for whole existence is when you're a completely organic company and you grow, people just come to your website and sometimes you don't, it's a lot of the traffic's direct.
00:36:43
Speaker
You don't know why they're there, right? So it does make it tricky. Like you can do things like when we have an agency, so like during the sales call, you can kind of ask like, oh, how did you hear about us? And if somebody says like, oh, I follow Neil on LinkedIn, or if I know that I've seen them engage with my content on LinkedIn, but even still, like I'd say,
00:37:11
Speaker
of the people who follow you and read your stuff, only a small percentage of them actually engaged. There's a lot of people who just like read it. And so.
00:37:20
Speaker
It is hard to measure, like I put UTMs on things or it's like we track the refer whether it came from LinkedIn. That's easy to do if you have sort of like a direct conversion funnel from a post, but me posting every single day and somebody reads my stuff for a year or they started reading the demand curve newsletter three years ago and have gone to an event or whatever, and then they finally purchase.
00:37:47
Speaker
three, four years later, it's like, what can I attribute that to, right? So it's hard. And with the latest cohort of Unignorable, there's literally like, I just noticed purchase names in the purchases where it's like, I've been seeing this name in our newsletter database for like four years, and this is the first time they've ever purchased. So yeah, it's hard, it's kind of,
00:38:15
Speaker
They have to really think of it as like a long-term investment and you'll never know exactly what led to it.
Testing Business Ideas with Organic Channels
00:38:23
Speaker
That's like, I think the appeal of ads is that you can track that. Sure. Yeah, exactly what it was. And that's really hard to do organically. But it sounds like, I mean, you've grown these brands, you've been able to create revenue, sell products and services.
00:38:45
Speaker
You know, you're, you have conviction in what you're doing is working. You may not necessarily be able to attribute, but you're like, okay, this month we got X amount of course purchases, whatever. We should continue to do this content. Yeah. Yeah. I'm high conviction that providing people free value and establishing yourself as an expert at a thing that will eventually lead to them wanting to either
00:39:13
Speaker
purchase something that you make that has, you know, like in terms of a course, it's like they've taught me other things. Their content's really good. I can assume that this course is going to be really good too. Or what happened with Julian's growth guide is that a lot of people would read it and you know, maybe they started to think like, I can learn this myself. I'll be able to grow my own startup. And then halfway through, they're like, oh shit, this is actually like really hard.
00:39:43
Speaker
but this guy Julian seems to know what he's talking about. Let's see if he can do it for us. Um, so, and then there's probably 99% of other people who read it. It's like now they, maybe it wasn't the right time then, but they now know Julian is a good growth person and they can either recommend that to somebody. So yeah, I have conviction and I have my theories that it's a great idea and great investment, but, um,
00:40:12
Speaker
I can't necessarily prove that in everything that I say, otherwise it's just kind of like a, what's the term? Anecdotal. Cool. I know we are coming up on time. I do have one final question, which I'm particularly really, really fascinated about.
00:40:35
Speaker
You have, like I said, grown a number of brands. You have a new course on Ignorable with all very different business models.
00:40:47
Speaker
And I wonder when you're thinking about, you know, is this thing, is this thing something I should pursue this next business? How do you kind of think about that? And what's your process for that? That's a good question. I'd say that we're kind of, um, I think one of our failings in the past is trying a lot of stuff and not focusing. Uh, I think 2024 is going to be a big year of us just kind of like focusing.
00:41:14
Speaker
You know, focusing demand curve is just predict more like media, you know, just producing more content. Um, and then our agency will be very, a lot more focused on like, we were doing just like full service growth. Like we'll come in and we'll diagnose your problem. We'll do it. And now it's like, we'll have productized services of like.
00:41:35
Speaker
you pay X per month, you get this. You can come and go as you want. And we're focusing first on like paid ads. And then we're going to add things tangential to that. So I would say that we do like to experiment. And then if something works, like for example, our ads, uh, productized ad service, you know, it launched two months ago and it's at basically 1 million.
00:42:01
Speaker
run rate for revenue based on the amount of things we've closed. And it's like, okay, that's obviously good. We should probably keep investing in that. For Unignorable, it was like we previously had run an audience building course with Sawhill, Sawhill Bloom. And each time that we did that, it was 200 grand in revenue. And it was purely just from us putting in our newsletter and blasting on social. We never ran ads to it.
00:42:27
Speaker
Um, so we had wanted to try it again, uh, but do it in a much better way. And we went with, uh, sort of working with Caitlin and it was just like a test to see. And we sold the course out in six minutes.
00:42:42
Speaker
So we're like, okay, obviously there's demand here. There's something we should probably tap into. So a lot of time it's just been like us theorizing whether something would be good. And then we, the benefit, benefit of us having built these organic channels is that we can build something through it out there.
00:43:01
Speaker
If nobody cares, okay, whatever, two months later, we'll just close it. If we have like six minutes and we sell 200 course seats, then it's like, okay, that's probably something we should invest in. So that's sort of in our processes.
00:43:21
Speaker
Uh, just have a lot of ideas, test them out, see what the response is. And, you know, like we've, like we launched kind of shorter video based courses and the response for that was not particularly great. So we stopped making this. Um, and we'll probably just shut those products down. So, um, yeah, it's just coming up with ideas, testing them. Awesome stuff. Um, cool. Well, Neil, thank you so much for being on the show today.
00:43:50
Speaker
Yeah, it's a pleasure to finally see you on a call.