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The True Cost of Building an Audience Growth Engine w/Andie Ostrowski
34 Plays3 years ago
In this episode, Dan Sanchez talks to Andie Ostrowski who is the Director of Marketing at Team Genius.
In the episode we talk about:
Her first failed attempt at turning her marketing department into a media company
What it takes to gain true traction on a channel
The story behind their success at Team Genius
In the episode we talk about:
Her first failed attempt at turning her marketing department into a media company
What it takes to gain true traction on a channel
The story behind their success at Team Genius
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to the Podcast and Guests
00:00:03
Speaker
Welcome back to the Attention Podcast, where you can learn how to gain and retain the attention of your buyers to build an audience. I'm Dan Sanchez with Sweetfish, and today I'm here with Andy Ostrovsky, who is the Director of Marketing at Team Genius.
Building a Growth Engine: Costs and Strategies
00:00:17
Speaker
We talked about the true cost of building a growth engine. In the episode, we cover a few things. We cover her first failed attempt to turn her marketing department into a media company,
00:00:29
Speaker
We cover what it takes to gain true traction on a channel. And we also cover what they're seeing success with in Team Genius right now. I will say that Andy is killing it with her small team of marketers. And if she's doing it with her small team and probably small budgets, their whole company's only 14 people, so can you.
Owned Media vs. Immediate ROI in B2B SaaS
00:00:50
Speaker
So tune into this episode and don't forget to wait till the end. We're all tuned back in to give my two cents on the topic of what I'm taking away from our conversation.
00:01:21
Speaker
There's been a few times where I have attempted this and I feel like I have some good insights on this front and I'll try and get a specific example in here for sure, but I will say generally speaking, which I don't need to touch on this too much because I think it's super common for a lot of people is generally speaking, I think
00:01:27
Speaker
Welcome to the show.
00:01:39
Speaker
For most of my career and where I've worked, owned media has been an afterthought, just through and through, organic, social, all of it just an afterthought. I was kind of conditioned to think that way as well. When you're working in a traditional B2B SaaS company with a really big sales force,
00:01:57
Speaker
and you know, revenue targets and investors and all this stuff, it tends to be the the immediate ROI activities that you're focused on. And like, I totally get that, right? And so I think, you know, for my whole career, it's been okay, we have someone on organic social or trying to do on media, but it's like, Oh,
00:02:14
Speaker
if anything else, higher priority comes up, which I think everything, you know, everyone thinks everything else is higher priority. You kind
Commitment and Expertise in Content Creation
00:02:21
Speaker
of have to drop that. And so there's certainly been a bunch of different times where I've attempted to do stuff and it has failed because of that thinking. And so, yeah, let me get into a specific example for you guys. So this was actually at my previous job
00:02:34
Speaker
from where I'm at now, and I was really, really getting the urge to start some sort of media company, some sort of own media playbook, if you will. This was a few years ago, and really, podcasts obviously were taking off. A lot more people starting to focus on organic social, especially companies, especially B2B companies. There's a huge wave of people starting to do it.
00:02:54
Speaker
and i was like man i really want to do that and our company had gotten gotten pretty big and you know i had the playbooks in place and and all that stuff and i'm i just had this itch i'm like i gotta do something and for a little bit of context the product and the brand that i was working on was a software platform for
00:03:12
Speaker
Uh, small studio dance studio yoga studio owners. And so I was like, man, this is going to be perfect. Cause so many of them, like they're professional dancers or they love the sport or the activity that they teach, but they're not, you know, super business savvy. Of course there are some that are, but.
00:03:28
Speaker
I was like, man, this is going to be great. Like, let's start by trying to start a podcast for these owners. Like they need help with marketing, some financial stuff. And that's obviously what our software does. And so I'm like, let's bring in, you know, a bunch of experts in house and start this branch where we can be the trusted source of advice and business help for these small studio owners. And so try doing that. And there's certainly a couple of things I ran into that I know now and will try and avoid in the future because it didn't work out.
00:03:58
Speaker
And so a couple of things that I think were a little bit of an afterthought and going through this is I think one of the most important things is you need to be 100% committed to it. And I alluded to this a little bit before I got into the specific stories. There's always a higher priority. There's always something different to do.
00:04:17
Speaker
And the mistake there is committing even 50% of your time is going to get you 0% results. I mean, that's not fair. Some people probably get like 10%, 15% of what they're looking for. But it needs to be that 100% to get anything. Even if you're doing 75% effort and focusing on other channels and other things, it's not going to warrant the results that you're looking for and hoping
Standing Out with Media Expertise or Entertainment
00:04:41
Speaker
for.
00:04:41
Speaker
And so that's certainly something that I ran into and something that caused this podcast or this idea of building this owned media branch to fail. A couple other things in there too. The other thing is you can't really do it alone unless it is literally the only thing that you're doing and the only thing you're focusing on. So this kind of pairs with number one.
00:05:02
Speaker
it takes a ton of time and effort to do and i know a lot of people like you guys at sweet fish you guys make it look easy you guys are pros at this and so i think a lot of people see the end result and they're like oh man all they did was have a conversation recorded it and posted it on linkedin and it's like
00:05:17
Speaker
No, you guys came up with the angle for the podcast. You had to find the guests for the podcast. You had to come up with an angle for that specific guest. You had to do all of the post-production that is recording, taking out all of my ums or other things like that. You had to come up with all of the cut down posts and the angle and how you want to use those on all of the different distribution channels. And so, I mean, there's even more than that. And so I think
00:05:45
Speaker
A lot of people see that end result and are like, oh, this is easy. I can do this, you know, with my one hour I have left in each day and that'll be good. And it's like, no, you need to understand how the systems work and you really need to have a focused plan. So I think that's, that's the second thing that I ran into that was like a little bit of a rude awakening. I'm like, whatever, I'm crafty. I'm scrappy. I like, I like doing this stuff anyway. And I'm like, oh man, three hours into this. Oh shoot, I have to go to this meeting and this meeting and actually focus on, you know, what I should be doing right now.
00:06:15
Speaker
And so that was really the second thing. And then the third thing, and arguably this could be the most important, is you either need to be a true expert at what you're going to be talking about or trying to promote. I'm talking podcast specifically. Or you need to have guests who can really go deep on a topic. Or you need to be wildly entertaining. Or all three.
00:06:38
Speaker
If you are really, really good at this and I think a lot of times this happened to me and I think a lot of times this happens to other people is you try and go a really surface
Consistent Content Creation for Results
00:06:47
Speaker
level approach. General, anybody can listen to it. We're not going to get super specific because it might, you know, it might not resonate with certain people.
00:06:55
Speaker
but that stuff's everywhere. That stuff's in written content everywhere. That stuff's on everybody else's podcasts and everybody else's posts. I think one of the main things is you really, really have to go deep and be an expert and show an opinion, show a point of view that is like, oh, I've never heard that before. Maybe I'll come back and listen to the next thing they talk about because I don't need the top three tips for marketing. I need like, okay, in this specific situation,
00:07:23
Speaker
what did you do here? What industry are you in? What is the context? Why is that gonna work? Because if that resonates even with a couple people, you have something there. And so those are kind of three things I ran into and three things that I didn't do. The first time I was trying to do this where I was like, okay, maybe let's try this again sometime. So that's my first big failure story. Yeah, it's funny because like you're right, they do want results and VCs and even your boss usually is kind of like, yeah, but
00:07:53
Speaker
Like we're off target right now. You don't understand. I need results ASAP because we're already behind and you're wanting to do this long-term thing. And from their perspective, kind of makes sense. You're like, well, but I want to spend all my time doing this thing. You're like, they'll like, okay, well spend 20% of your time. So you do 20% of your time. It doesn't work. It's kind of like expecting six pack abs and doing like three sit-ups. And they're like,
00:08:16
Speaker
100%. I didn't get any results. I posted three times or I posted for three weeks. I'm like, dude, you could do set ups 10 minutes a day for three weeks and you're not going to get six pack. It's a lot harder, right? It takes a way more work. You got to think about nutrition. You got to think about sleep. To get to that level where you almost have to be all consuming for a season until it becomes routine, right?
00:08:39
Speaker
Oh, 100%. Now that you bring up fitness, I saw someone write this fairly recently and it said, if you had a nail, would you rather hit that nail 365 times with a piece of paper or just do it once really intensely, really focused with a hammer? It's like, hey, yeah. It kind of makes sense where it's like, yeah, do you want to go all in and do it right and not have to spend all these little incremental times getting it right with zero results? So I read that and I was like, huh, that actually applies to a lot of things in life.
00:09:08
Speaker
So it's a lot harder than it looks, even this podcast. And I actually think podcasting of a three big long form pieces of content, which is kind of like blogging YouTube and podcasting. I find podcasting to be the easier of the three because YouTube's like wicked hard, the amount of editing that goes into that compared to podcast editing and blogging. To do blogging well, to get ranked on Google, hard.
00:09:33
Speaker
It's hard rewriting 2000 words at least in order to do something good. And then hopefully it's not commodity content. We're just kind of regurgitating what you already found online, but it's something substantial. Um, it takes longer than I think doing the podcast. But even then the podcast takes quite a bit of time. I mean, we've already done a pre-interview had to reach out.
00:09:50
Speaker
do the pre-interview, follow up after the pre-interview, prep for this interview, and there's a lot of work I have to do after this interview. Obviously, I don't even do the editing. Somebody else does the editing. I still have a lot of work. It's going to be like 30 minutes of work just for this interview right after this interview. So it's a bit.
00:10:06
Speaker
And one thing I want to note on that too is like, I think we hear this a lot, especially in B2B SAS is like, Oh, just get started. Just take the first step, lean startup. Like you don't need to have all the systems in place, all of the equipment, all that stuff. And it's like, I get that to some degree, but for something like podcasting, for example, like you still have to do it well in order to get any results. And I think that feeds into like the,
00:10:31
Speaker
giving it a hundred percent and so again i think a lot of people hear that mindset on repeat all the time in our in our startup b2b culture and there you know there's some there's some uh you know credit to give to that like just get started just take the first step but i think it's taken a little bit too far in some situations where it's like
00:10:50
Speaker
No, you can't do C work and expect anything. Yeah, it could be a starting and building block if you're not expecting much out of the gate, but I think that's a good point to make too, because it's pretty popular. That's a hard balance, right? It is. Because you do need people to get started. Getting started is the hardest part. Procrastination from going for perfect is difficult. Yeah. I actually think getting started, but I always tell people like, hey, with LinkedIn, you need to post every day for 90 days before you even come up for air.
00:11:20
Speaker
which is so difficult to do. Like don't just post and then try to make every single one a little bit better, but that you have to really count the cost. This is what it's going to cost to even get to get an idea of what it takes to succeed. And you probably will get some success in the 90 days. If you're putting effort into it every day, an hour or more every day then yeah.
00:11:41
Speaker
So it's kind of a balance for things, it's hard.
LinkedIn Strategies and Employee Involvement
00:11:43
Speaker
Yeah, not to go too sidebar on this, but I'm curious, what have you guys seen with that strategy you just laid out of posting every single day on LinkedIn? Is that what you guys have established to be like, hey, this is the threshold to get to your baseline to understand what success looks like? Or I've heard so many people say, just start with posting once a week and then see where it goes. And it's like, well, how long till you get to that next step? How long till the next step? So I'm just curious your thoughts on that.
00:12:09
Speaker
Once a week isn't nearly enough, in my opinion. It depends on the platform, like podcasting once a week's good, YouTube once a week's good, blogging, depending on why you're doing it. If it's for SEO, you're good as fail. For blogging, you really need to be doing at least three, if not like five to 10 to really get on Google's radar if you're starting with a fresh site. Social, I think once a day. I was doing three a day for five months to kind of give you an idea of what I was doing to get to where I've gotten.
00:12:39
Speaker
or to get to 10,000 followers in about a five month period. It was three times a day, sometimes more, sometimes a little bit less, but I was probably putting in two to three hours a day.
00:12:49
Speaker
And that's the kind of level you take. I think once a day is a really good mentality though, because you have to think about it every day. And then you start noticing it gets easier. Kind of like when you're going back to fitness, if you're doing pushups, it's really hard at first, right? If you're not used to doing pushups, but as you kind of get through it, it kind of becomes more comfortable and you kind of develop a routine if you're trying to do 10 to 50 every day.
00:13:12
Speaker
The first couple of weeks hurts, but then after a while it just doesn't as much same with writing content for LinkedIn It's hard for a long time. It takes way too long to write one post But then it gets easier and it gets better and you get more comfortable with it and you start learning that Oh, it's not enough to post you have to engage with other people's posts to get the conversation going and kind of pump the algorithm, but I
00:13:34
Speaker
I don't know. Sangram Vajray told me to go at least every day for at least 90 days without missing a day and I took that seriously and then I did it and I noticed it was true and then I went for another couple months, right? So I found it's a good place to start in order to really understand the cost of what it takes.
00:13:50
Speaker
And if you get to the end of the 90 days, chances are you've probably developed the muscle to do it. And if you give up on it at that point, at least you know what it takes. If you get to that point, it's kind of like, okay, I've done it. That's cool. I see how that works now, but I just don't have enough time for it. Then cool. You understand what it takes and you can kind of assess what social is.
00:14:12
Speaker
Yeah, that's awesome. That's awesome. I'm going to emulate that a little bit. I'm not quite as active as every day on LinkedIn, so I'm going to steal that from you. Yeah, and you can take breaks later, but I think to really get the initial push you need to get traction, you kind of have to be every day, even on the weekends. It works really well on the weekends. Who knew?
00:14:33
Speaker
But then after a while, you could take breaks. I didn't post today so far. I probably won't post today. I've just been busy with other things and that's okay. And I took all Christmas break off and even touch LinkedIn. So once you have a certain amount of momentum, it's easy to keep the momentum going. But let's dive back into your early inroads,
00:14:54
Speaker
building a media company, right? Because that's the kind of mentality we had. It didn't go so well the first time. So when did it eventually come back up? And you're like, you know what, we didn't do well the first time. What led to the conditions again that you were like, okay, let's give this a second shot.
00:15:09
Speaker
Yeah, so it actually kind of came back up a little bit and I got a little bit reinvigorated with it is when I switched to my current position. So I will say one of the core tenets of getting my new position that I'm currently in was I really do believe in owned media. And just a little bit of context, the company I'm currently with, Crushes, when people are searching for us, we're the clear winner, it's a very niche youth sports
00:15:36
Speaker
a piece of software, and of course there's a couple of competitors out there, but we do really, really good when people are searching for us. And so, you know, and just looking at that, I'm like, hey, I really believe in owned media. And one of the key pieces of our funnel that would really move the needle for us is the very tippy top is we just need to expand who knows about us and really build our brand so that we can get more people searching for us. Because from there on out, we're doing pretty well if you're looking at our conversion rates. And so I was like, that's where I think we need to focus.
00:16:06
Speaker
So that paired with, as part of our company, we also just launched a new product. And without going into too much detail about it, it's essentially like Peloton, but for youth hockey players. And so the nature of that product by itself, the programming and the training in that app,
00:16:23
Speaker
Is the product and that is media and there's a ton of personality. So you think of peloton, right? They have coaches that are the personalities and are the face of the brand and they crushed with their content. You know, they're all over. They're a media company, essentially. And so it's, you know, it's that first thing I was talking about with that tippy tub of funnel for our core product and then this new product where is essentially a media B2C training app.
00:16:46
Speaker
And so I'm like, all right, we really need to dive in now and make this a thing and make it work. And by the way, of course, there's a couple of things along the way. We're like, oh, shoot, this isn't working. Oh, man, we haven't focused on this enough. But across the board, like a couple of things that we're doing where I think we're really starting to pick up steam. And to be clear, we're still very early on with this. I would not say we're a wild success by any stretch.
00:17:07
Speaker
We're a few months into really focusing on it. And so, you know, we're not even at that 90 day mark you were talking about where we're starting to really gain some momentum. But I really do feel like we're on to something. And so a couple of things going back to some of the reasons why I failed the first time is a lot of the effort that goes into it, right? We talked about how much you have to do to prepare.
00:17:28
Speaker
all of the content, all of the own media stuff you want to do, and then on the back half, that's almost where a ton of the work happens, is all of the editing, all of the production, understanding what distribution channels you want to be in, and really making sure that your audience, whoever you're trying to reach, consumes it. And so it's a lot more effort, and so one of the things that we did is we hired actually this really great agency called Willow Creek.
00:17:52
Speaker
And they're doing all of our production for us. So instead of us, you know, we're a two person marketing team where I work. And of course, we can't take on all of these things, right? There's so many things in marketing that you could be doing and we can't spend hours doing the production. It's like, OK, let's hire out some things that people are really, really good at that we're maybe not the best at. That is going to be really time consuming.
00:18:12
Speaker
and establish a machine. So right after we're done, let's use a podcast, for example, right after we're done with the podcast episode, we pass that raw file video and audio to the agency. They know exactly how to edit it, exactly how to cut it down, exactly what channels, what we're trying to do with this, and we can continually flow. And so without that,
00:18:32
Speaker
I think you're in trouble. There has to be some sort of consistency there like we were talking about to make any sort of impact. So now that we have that core production machine in place, I feel really, really good about it. A couple other things. So for our at-home training product I was mentioning, that's kind of like Peloton. We have two coaches in there right now who are experts in their space. And previously when I've attempted this in the past, like
00:18:55
Speaker
Nobody was a dance studio expert when I was trying a podcast in the past, so I brought on some guests who, you know, I won't say they weren't experts, but I certainly didn't have the context as to what was going on. And so now that we have two in-house hockey coaches, we have the expert in-house. They've been shooting a ton of content and are able to just do it on the fly without needing to research and be like, oh, what should I talk about? What's going to land with the audience? Like, they know the audience so deeply that I just know we're going to nail it on that front as well.
00:19:24
Speaker
And then the last piece of it too is we have started to dabble in LinkedIn. And I think like, I'll say this, I feel as though it's a lot easier for a lot of B2B traditional B2B SaaS companies, especially if they work in marketing or sales or their product is for marketing and sales.
00:19:43
Speaker
to to start an owned media company inside their company because you know what they're really good at is also what they're selling and so we've talked about this a bunch at length because we sell youth sports software to you know parent volunteers of course you know their business people too and and you can share about things outside of youth sports but
00:20:03
Speaker
I think one of the places that we're getting caught up a little bit at first with our LinkedIn strategy is like, oh man, we have to talk about what's the latest in player evaluations for youth sports and what's the newest thing in youth sports and why do we care about youth sports? And it's like, well,
00:20:18
Speaker
25-year-old sales rep who sure played youth sports but isn't on a board, isn't a parent, doesn't do anything with youth sports besides sell the software, that doesn't come off super authentic. You're not really that passionate about youth sports. That's not your thing. Of course, you sell it, but you either come off salesy or you come off inauthentic or both. We've put together this thing again with our agency where we're trying to figure out a plan for a lot of our employees to start posting more.
00:20:45
Speaker
So maybe we'll start a little bit less than every day just so people aren't super intimidated. But what we did is we put together a bunch of questions where some adjacent topics to youth sports. It's what are you interested in in tech? What are you really good at in your sales job? What's something on the cutting edge that you're really interested in? Because I think that you can get so much value out of posting stuff that you're actually passionate about, even if it doesn't fulfill your sales quota or even if it doesn't fall right in line with what I'm trying to market at our company.
Early Successes and Strategies at Team Genius
00:21:15
Speaker
And I think there's so many really, really good effects from that. And so we're just kind of at the beginning phases of that LinkedIn strategy and trying to build some sort of flywheel on that front. But the main thing for us that is starting to cruise a little bit is the content that we're doing with our new Peloton-like app and our player evaluation software. That's amazing. So you're getting the rest of your team involved in LinkedIn. How many people do you have actively posting?
00:21:43
Speaker
So we're just at the beginning phase, like I said, our company is very small. We have about 14 employees. And so there's about eight of us who are getting part of this. We're just starting with our revenue team. So sales, marketing, customer success, and starting to post. So there's about eight of us and... Eight out of 14 is a pretty high ratio. That's a lot of people.
00:22:01
Speaker
for sure. Yeah, so we're gonna try and I think you know, you're telling them to like, Hey, this again, I don't want to send you Hey, here's our latest marketing blog. Here's the copy, go post the copy or go reshare our stuff like that doesn't work. It's inauthentic and people love connecting with other people. And so it's like, we want you to post about what you're passionate about. And there will be
00:22:22
Speaker
there will be this domino effect. I just, I truly, truly believe that. And I've seen it happen. I posted, gosh, two weeks ago, but something that we recently did our company and like off of one post, someone's reaching out like, oh, we should do a partnership. And it's someone I've known for a while, but like, Hey, we got to connect on this. You know, we've had another customer come in because of it. There's, it's just, it creates this buzz even after one post. And so I just, I really strongly believe in it and I think it'll work for us. So beginning phases, but we're getting there.
00:22:50
Speaker
Well done. So you got the core content engine going on and now you're activating your employees. And of course, some of them will bump into the other content you have or be involved in that other content you have, and it'll kind of spell out organically. A hundred percent, yup. For others who are listening to this and thinking like, wow, how did they accomplish? How did she accomplish all that? Where would you tell them to start? How can they like kind of get out of like the doing a minimum every single week, checking the boxes to actually being fully focused on?
00:23:17
Speaker
building essentially this media engine.
00:23:21
Speaker
So something we haven't even talked about yet. I think the first thing that you really should do is, A, look at your goals. So I'm going to assume people listening to this are marketers. And from my perspective, I'm like, we have a revenue target from our marketing team. And then, of course, some associated KPIs just to show some benchmarks. And so really think about what your goal is as a marketer or a marketing team. And then I'm assuming you probably have a bunch of different marketing strategies in place that are probably hitting on
00:23:50
Speaker
a myriad of channels. You're probably doing like PR, email marketing, paid ads, like you're probably doing a lot right now. And so you really have to audit what's working and what's not. And that's something we certainly did on our side. Obviously, I skipped a lot of details into how we got here, but you can't do it all and do it all well. So I would say figure out your goals, look at the channels that you're using, what's really working for you and what's not.
00:24:17
Speaker
stick to ideally one to two maybe three and go super deep and so there's a lot of noise and it's gonna be really distracting I still get really distracted with stuff where it's like oh can you just do this really quick sponsorship and it's like ah shit it's so easy like
00:24:32
Speaker
Yeah, I can do it really quickly. And then it's like, no, Andy, you have to get back on track. You have to stay focused on the task at hand and what you're trying to achieve.
Focusing on Non-Urgent but Important Marketing Tasks
00:24:41
Speaker
And so I think it's difficult. But I really think there is something to be said about saying no a lot more often. And it's really hard as marketers, especially when you feel like you can do everything and like, oh, yeah, this will only take me an hour. But an hour turns into the next request, into the next request, into the next opportunity. And all of a sudden, you're left with,
00:25:02
Speaker
12 different strategies and it's like, okay, then you gotta clear it out again. And so just to reiterate one more time, figure out your goals, pick a couple of channels and then start small. If you're doing content marketing on media, start small, start with one person, start with yourself.
00:25:19
Speaker
show how it works a little bit and then say, hey, why don't you why don't you test this out? Let's let's try that and then move on from there. And, you know, you can start with maybe a podcast and then you can go into full on YouTube videos and then blogs and start adding beyond that. But yeah, I think those are the first couple of things is just audit what you have going on and cut out the noise.
00:25:38
Speaker
cut out the noise. It reminds me of time management. I can't remember what it's called, but the four quadrants, I think is what it's called, where you have the urgent, urgent, important, not urgent, not urgent, not important. You have those four quadrants in time management. The best marketing almost always happens in the important, not urgent.
00:25:58
Speaker
Right. So the more you can kind of cut out all the other stuff, like the things that are going to be long-term gains are always in that important, but never urgent, right? The sponsorships, the things your boss is asking you for, the responses you need to things, this PR initiative, the things that sales is asking you for. You'd have to do all those things, but it's kind of like
00:26:20
Speaker
trying to eliminate, automate or delegate them so that you can focus on the strategic, important, but hardly ever urgent work is what's going to get you to build an audience and ultimately advance your marketing. And it's probably why a lot of people avoid owned media and like paid media so much, it's just fast, it's efficient. And there's plenty of people with the skillset in it, you can hire and bam, you're in front of the right people.
Benefits of Owned Media
00:26:45
Speaker
And there's nothing wrong with that. Paid media's got its place, but we all know real branding. I don't know, I think with an owned media audience, you could just build so much more loyalty and at such a stronger affinity with people, if you can get out there.
00:26:59
Speaker
Yeah, definitely. You're not a victim to a bunch of algorithms and the news cycle and paying for a bunch of retargeting and getting placed in other people's emails. It's like you have so much control over the narrative when people are searching for you and you are the authority on something.
00:27:19
Speaker
And so that's, I mean, it's a really cool thing. And again, we're still on our way to get there, but I totally believe
Reflection and Key Takeaways from the Conversation
00:27:27
Speaker
in it. And there's so many more opportunities if you take that route. Well, Andy, it sounds like you were on a fantastic path there. I mean, if they're already winning an SEO, you got kind of like your organic content machine working, and now you're starting to activate your employees.
00:27:43
Speaker
team genius is going to be unstoppable. That's awesome. You're building systems that start to run themselves and the SEO was already taken care of, which is, in my opinion, still a thing. As much as people don't like it, I'm like, well, I still search a lot.
00:28:01
Speaker
I know my behavior is still to find things on Google all the time. So I don't know what you're talking about. So it sounds like you're slowly activating one channel at a time and really making it work and then moving on to the next thing. So I'm sure I'll be hearing more about Team Genius' success, even though I'm not in the target demographic of youth sports. I just have a feeling we're going to be hearing about that. Where can people go to learn more about Team Genius and yourself to take a look into it themselves?
00:28:27
Speaker
Cool, yeah. So we're TeamGenius.com. So just Google it, even though apparently a lot of people don't like SEO and don't Google anymore, I have to imagine some of you will. So TeamGenius.com. And then I'm on LinkedIn. It's Andy Ostrowski, and you can find me right on LinkedIn. Fantastic. Again, thanks for joining me today. Yeah, for sure. Thanks, Dan. Appreciate it. So after wrapping up this episode with Andy, I've had some time to think about what am I going to take away from this?
00:28:52
Speaker
And while I talked way more in that episode than I usually do, I still want to leave you with three things that I've been wrestling over now for a few minutes and now want to reemphasize again. For starters, she's had a lot of success, but it isn't without its costs, right? So if I want to leave you with three things, here's the three. You have to start somewhere. You have to have a dream of what could be, go after it, but you have to be prepared.
00:29:18
Speaker
for number two, failure. Failure is the path to success. So anytime you go into a new channel, just expect that you're going to fail. It's hard because your boss wants to see the success, but the failure is really the path. So I almost feel like you have to
00:29:34
Speaker
forecast the success but then at the end internally you have to be prepared to go through the failure that it's going to take and the more failures you get usually the faster you'll get there of course I have to emphasize this with you don't shoot you don't aim for failure you don't post something and just know it's gonna be crap right you have to actually try you have to ship you have to get it out there and then try to make it a little bit better next time
00:29:59
Speaker
It's what I'm doing with my podcast and even recording this right now. I didn't have this for the first many episodes and now I do because I want to make it better. And thirdly, you have to count the cost. Showing up to a new channel and activating it and building an audience is hard. Hard. It takes way more effort than you would think. Just like the working out example we gave. Growing muscle, becoming lean and trim, building that six pack abs.
00:30:26
Speaker
a lot of work. I know. I've tried to do some of those things and it failed. I've also succeeded in other ways. I've run my one marathon, right? So I've been consistent in some ways and consistent in others. But there's a cost. And you don't really know what it is until you try to aim for and actually achieve some measure of success. And once you get to a certain level of success, you kind of have a better idea of what it takes to go from 10,000 followers to 100,000 followers.
00:30:52
Speaker
or how to grow your podcast from a few hundred downloads to a thousand downloads because you've started to get a sense for what it actually takes to grow. So keep that in mind. You have to start somewhere and it's good to start. Failure is a good thing. The pathway to success is paved with failure. You just got to try more. And then third, really want to count the cost because it's going to cost a lot, but it's worth it. So start building an audience today.