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Lately: The Software That Blew Me Away
52 Plays4 years ago
I have been working with B2B SaaS companies since 2008. I can honestly say that few of them have struck as truly innovative. Many of them were cool but they didn't blow me away.
Lately is an exception to the rule. When I learned what it can do, it resonated as a game-changer.
The company turns content (blog posts, eBooks, video) into social media posts. It takes the painful, time-consuming work out of creating updates for multiple social media networks.
Imagine the ROI from being able to create social media content at scale effortlessly.
In this episode of Marketing Spark, I spoke with Lately co-founder and CEO Kate Chernis about her journey from popular DJ to marketing to SaaS entrepreneur.
We explored the personal struggles that Kate endured in the music industry, why she backed away from raising money because she believed the VCs weren't treating her in the same way as male entrepreneurs, and how to operate a business remotely.
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Transcript
Introduction to Marketing Spark and Lately
00:00:01
Speaker
It's Mark Evans, and you're listening to Marketing Spark, the podcast that delivers insight from marketers and entrepreneurs in the trenches in 25 minutes or less. When I started my consulting business in 2008, one of my first clients was Sysimos. When I went to see its software, I was blown away by how it could monitor social media activity on Facebook and Twitter. It was, at the time, mind-blowing.
00:00:27
Speaker
When I heard about Lately, it was Deja Vu all over again. Its technology, which turns content into social media updates, is impressive and its customer growth has been astounding.
Kate's Enthusiasm for Lately's Impact
00:00:38
Speaker
I'm excited to have Kate Chernis, Lately's co-founder and CEO on the podcast. Welcome to Marketing Spark.
00:00:45
Speaker
Thank you so much, Mark. I actually got some goosebumps there for a second. Because I know what it feels like to see something and be like, oh my gosh. And it's a fun feeling because you want a piece of it. You want to be in the club.
00:01:01
Speaker
And all the time that I've been doing marketing for B2B SaaS companies, I can't say I've been blown away that often. Once in a while, you come across a service and you go, man, this is super impressive. In fact, so impressive. I wish I was working for this company. And that's the thing that I got when I saw lately. It really is.
00:01:20
Speaker
a pretty astounding piece of software. And that's why I was so excited to have you on the podcast to really get into the platform and your story, which is very interesting. Talk about your view of social media and content marketing and all the things that are impacting marketing these days. Why don't we start by talking about what lately does and why a growing number of companies are enthusiastically embracing
Lately's AI and Content Atomization
00:01:42
Speaker
it? I mean, this is a, this is a product that when a lot of companies see it and agencies for that matter, it's a must have.
00:01:49
Speaker
Yeah, well, thank you, first of all. Thank you so much, all of those super nice compliments. I'm absorbing them. They're washing all over me. So what Lately does is, essentially, you can upload a file, a video file or podcast or any kind of long-form content, whether it's writing or audio or video. And you push a button inside Lately, and Lately instantly atomizes that content into sometimes hundreds of different social posts.
00:02:18
Speaker
Now, the sexier part that's happening in the background that you don't see is it's also studying all of your analytics across any social channel that you connect to its brain. And it's looking for the highest engaging posts that you have. And then it builds a writing model based on literally the DNA, the words that make up those posts. And it's applying that same writing model to the long-form content you feed it. So before it atomizes,
00:02:44
Speaker
it's choosing which things to pull out. That's how it gets customers like Gary Vaynerchuk, you guys know him, 12,000 percent increase in engagement because it's really smart and the more you put in, the better you get out. Gary has a lot of content to feed us.
00:03:06
Speaker
One of the interesting things about Lately is there, well, there's many interesting things about Lately, but there's no lack of social media tools out there. And lots of companies are applying AI to their technology. And this is a tough question for you to answer because you're obviously biased being the CEO, but why has it made such an impact and such a splash? There's no lack of choices out there. And I'm sure there's other tools that may do something similar. Can you explain the phenomena?
00:03:33
Speaker
Boy, I love being called a phenomenon. I think it's two things. Number one, we've been at this for a long time, Mark. It didn't happen overnight and we've been banging our heads against the wall even to make sure we were describing what we're selling. You guys just heard me describe it and it's not easy and I'm not really that good at it. But believe me, I'm so much better than I was last year or the year before. Part of that is because we watched our customers to see which part of the platform
00:03:59
Speaker
you guys were all using to give us information. And it's a very robust platform. And the thing that people kept gravitating into was this atomizing component.
Community and Growth through Advocacy
00:04:10
Speaker
And so that was interesting to us. And people liked it. And we were only doing it with text. So you could pop in a link to a blog, push a button, and you get 40 social posts instantly. But when we added the video clip component,
00:04:25
Speaker
that really changed everything. And I think it's because it's for a couple reasons. I mean, and we had COVID at the same time here, right? So first thing that happened was Gary Vee saw lately in that form. He'd seen it before, but he saw it in that form and instantly built his, his Twitter channel to Team Gary Vee out of that. So now I didn't have to tell people what I did anymore. I could show them. That was big, right? Number two was, um,
00:04:56
Speaker
I mean, it's scale the unscalable. This is what Gary says, and he's right. We do everything the hard way, because the hard way is what works, Mark. So there's a reason when you met Ben, who was on our team, you got a 30-minute demo. We treat you just like we would treat an enterprise customer, because I know how to make evangelists. We were talking about this off-air a second ago, but I used to be a rock and roll DJ.
00:05:22
Speaker
And my last gig was broadcasting to 20 million listeners a day for XM. And I was really amazing at making listeners into fans, right? Because fans, evangelists, they do the hard work for you, right? So we figured early on as a small company, I don't have a big budget to spend on marketing. How am I going to make the noise I need to make one by one, right? And that's what we've done. So the community around us is really driving the ship.
00:05:53
Speaker
Well, it also helps to have Gary Vee as an evangelist. If you have a small community and a Gary Vee, then you're well off.
00:06:05
Speaker
And I've got background information, so I'm looking to tell the story about the way that he's using the platform and the results that he's seeing. Now, the guy's everywhere. I mean, he produces a ton of content. He's got a lot of ammunition that he can, or a lot of fuel that he can feed into the lately, you know, machine. But maybe give a little bit of a few details about how he is using it and what the difference that it's made on his marketing machine.
00:06:30
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, you know, what's interesting is Gary doesn't need lately, to be honest, right? He has his own army, but he's clearly a poster boy for lately because
Lately's Appeal to Diverse Market Segments
00:06:39
Speaker
his advice to you and me and everyone else is to repurpose and take your long-form content and atomize it, right? And so he knows that. And though it's interesting, I was just talking to their team now because we're trying to figure out like, actually, what is the use case for Team GaryVee when he's not
00:06:57
Speaker
really my target, you know. They do see a 12,000% increase in engagement. And that's so much because the more you teach the AI, the more you give it, the faster it can learn. But also because there's that pain of unlock mark, right? And you have this pain. I certainly had it. Just imagine the time it takes for you to create a blog, right? It's about 3 or 4 hours of writing time. And then you have to promote it. Most people
00:07:26
Speaker
kind of mail it in right there. They do one or two social posts, and that's it. And to me and to Gary, that's a huge waste of time. So that unlock idea, how do we not just toss into the wind? The time is taking me and you to record this podcast right now. And so I learned that it's the after-the-fact marketing.
00:07:46
Speaker
is infinitely more valuable than butts and seats. And Gary knows that also. That's why he atomizes his content like crazy. And he's trying to milk it for everything it's worth. I think of it as like garlic. I was just chopping garlic last night. And every little bit that is on my knife has to make it into the pan. I'm kind of
00:08:10
Speaker
because it took me a long time to do that. I don't want to lose those morsels. So that's partially why as well.
00:08:19
Speaker
as we've been growing the company, we have to go up before we can go down, like Salesforce, right? So my job now is to sell to larger companies so that there can be a time where I can create a long tail and sell to all of Gary's fans, right, for like some normal price, like $20 or $40, right? That's, that's what I want. And we will get there. And the best part about working with him, by the way, is like knowing, knowing that that,
00:08:48
Speaker
that there's both a long tail of that smaller customer, and then there's the larger customer, like all of the VaynerMedia clients, right? And we have both of these clients, which I'm just tangenting a little bit, but it's all connected. This has been part of our struggle, is like, who is Lately's customer?
00:09:05
Speaker
You know, it does vary from small, medium, and large customers. It's not micro customers, micro marketers, right? But yeah, so it's the learning experience, as you can tell, it's ever-present and slightly overwhelming.
00:09:21
Speaker
Well, that's the thing about being an entrepreneur is it's a classic line. Be careful what you wish for because it might happen, right? It does remind me of Sysimo. So when Sysimo's came out of the University of Toronto, there was a tenured professor and her super smart PhD student and they developed this technology. And now it was, we got this better mousetrap, like who do we sell it to?
00:09:44
Speaker
And in their case they went to PR agencies who had clients and the clients wanted to buy social media monitoring tool and they saw doesn't make an opportunity agencies would buy once and sell it again and again and again and then the brands came around and said you know we like this tool.
Entrepreneurial Journeys and Challenges
00:10:00
Speaker
as well so what this most did is they created a light version like you couldn't it wasn't everything but the sink kitchen sink it was just a restricted version also made two products and that's the that's the curious thing about lately right now is who is your customer I mean other than Gary V is it agencies is it enterprise customers is it guys like Gary V who are one-man bands I mean do you have a an ideal customer right now or is it basically anybody who can pay the bills
00:10:28
Speaker
Yeah. So we just went through this and we did what's called a right-size pricing with one of our advisors, right-size pricing, that's it, and really started to spell out who is the personality of the customer. So we lately, again, it's a very robust platform. It's not just a one-trick pony. And the reason we did that is so that we can appeal to all these customers. So we have what I call social animals. So that is that one man or one woman band who
00:10:54
Speaker
not only creates content and has ad nauseam, but the pain and the pain of unlocking, but also as someone who's publishing on Twitter or LinkedIn like several times a day, every day, right? So those are one kind of customer. We work with agencies as well, because we give them a lot of ability to publish across all the places and marketing and planning and all those kinds of things and analytics, but really easy for them to have a single login so they can access if they have 200,
00:11:23
Speaker
customers or five customers who had 20 channels each, it's really easy for them to bounce in and out. But our larger customers, Mark, are people that really want to do marketing for other employees in the company who don't know a thing about marketing. So Lately has what we call, it's like a hub and spoke feature or parent child. So one parent, like a CMO, can use the AI to create content for
00:11:51
Speaker
Any employee, it could be salespeople, it could be employee advocates, could be executives, you know, anyone who wants to talk about the company on social but doesn't want to make a mistake. And then the auto generation can literally publish that content on their behalf without them ever having to deal with it.
00:12:11
Speaker
or it can give them the ability to edit and customize it as they like. So that's how we are able to sell tens, hundreds, thousands of licenses into a single company. And we market them all the same way, by the way. So that's the lucky trick.
00:12:33
Speaker
Before we sort of dive into the platform itself, maybe just get you to elaborate a little more on the backstory. Now, there's two angles here. One is the backstory of you, the big time DJ. Like, how did that happen? Where did you start? That kind of thing. And the other thing is that from what I've heard, lately isn't a company that was created by a couple of geeky engineers working in a basement fueled by Red Bull.
00:12:58
Speaker
This is a different type of founder story, which I find to be fascinating, particularly on today. We were recording this, this episode in international women's day. So this is, this is the timing is pretty good. Talk about both stories. I mean, you've got two careers, both super successful. How did that happen?
00:13:15
Speaker
Thank you so much. It doesn't it doesn't feel like that when you're in it, you know because you're just always always in the slog or I am I have that special gift of seeing the glass, you know half empty But yeah, you know in radio I was really lucky mark because I was in a format it's called adult album alternative or triple-a and it's designed to play
00:13:37
Speaker
the albums that you have at home. I'm 47, so, you know, I'm old enough to have albums. And meaning, you know, everything from rock to folk to blues, reggae, you know, that kind of mix. But then also the album cuts, not just like the radio singles, which is also what we often like. And that radio really focused on theater of the mind,
00:13:59
Speaker
and meaning the listener's obligation to fill in the blanks, to participate in that conversation. Then my job as the DJ or as the host, the programmer, to make you feel like you have a voice, even though I'm the one with the mic. This is what we talked about making listeners into fans. As I was learning how to do that, I learned something about the neuroscience of music.
00:14:28
Speaker
that tells you when you listen to a new song, Mark, your brain must instantly access every other song you've ever heard before in order to place that new song in your memory banks, into your library in your brain.
00:14:44
Speaker
And when it does that, it immediately taps into nostalgia, right? So this rush of emotion comes forward when you hear music because your brain is looking for the familiar touch points to know where to put that song. And your voice is a frequency. So when you hear me,
00:15:04
Speaker
or when you read the text I wrote or the text someone else wrote, you hear their voice in their head, your head, right? Same idea. And your brain is looking to put in some context to make it familiar. And this is all sales and marketing. I'm trying to sell you something new, put it into a context that you're going to feel comfortable, right? Trust me, and then buy it. And so this all ties into our AI, right? As you can see.
00:15:32
Speaker
So from, from radio, so here I was at XM in this wacky format. We were not live, actually, we were recorded, but we left in a lot of mistakes and did other things to be perceived as live, to again, create that trust factor, that human element, you know. And
00:15:53
Speaker
It wasn't the right move. I wasn't in the right place and the universe was trying to tell me. So I was a boys club. I was sexually harassed every day. One of the things my boss would always say to me was, hey, Bradley, are your hands clean? Meaning, can
Resilience in Entrepreneurship
00:16:10
Speaker
you hold my dick while I pee?
00:16:12
Speaker
Yeah, real talk here, right? And even I participated in the sexual harassment because it was part of the culture. It was normal. You know, we didn't know. This is, you know, 2004, 5, 6. So the language Me Too wasn't around. And there was a hostile work environment, which I didn't even know what that was. And I just remember telling, like, family and friends, like,
00:16:32
Speaker
You know, this is so stressful You know, my my boss would like be yelling at me in the little sound booth and like I would just absorb it You know and not yelling at me but yelling about whatever going on. It was just so tense and my Body was starting to shout at me and have I had all these ailments. I was incapacitated eventually I couldn't type at all without any pain without extreme pain like debilitating pain and this is a long story, but
00:17:02
Speaker
So I was scared, Mark, because suddenly I couldn't work. Everything was on computer. Everything was email and mixing songs, like the sound files we're seeing right now go by us. I had to touch those every day and I couldn't anymore. So I learned about Dragon, naturally speaking, which is the voice activated software I use today. I don't type today.
00:17:27
Speaker
I use my voice. Isn't that ironic? I'm still talking. Interesting. So I learned how to use it. And XM didn't believe me because my hands looked fine. It didn't look like there was something wrong and people didn't know about epicondylitis and tendonitis really. And so I moved to another music company and it was the same thing. Another boys club and nobody believed me that something was wrong with me. And I cried a lot. I was really angry and scared and frustrated and I didn't know what to do. And my dad,
00:17:57
Speaker
had enough. And one day he, I was just crying uncontrollably. I used to smoke a lot of cigarettes too. So I was, you know, I was like pig pen, but full of anger. You know what I mean? And, um, my dad just lovingly shook me by the shoulders and said, you can't work for other people. And there's no shame in that. And so, uh, a light went on obviously. And I thought, Oh,
00:18:24
Speaker
Oh, there's another way. Did not know that. And my husband was so thoughtful of my boyfriend at the time he went out to the bookstore and bought me Guy Kawasaki's Art of the Start. Do you know that book? Yeah, yeah.
00:18:38
Speaker
It is really interesting to see how people fall into entrepreneurship. Some people are natural entrepreneurs right from the get go. They've got lemonade stands. They're buying 10 packs of gum for a dollar and sending them for 25 cents each. I mean, and people like you and I do it by accident. It's different. It's not by design. I never thought I'd be an entrepreneur. I was a journalist. I love being a journalist and something. And then I wasn't a journalist anymore. I was an entrepreneur.
00:19:08
Speaker
Do you find that I need this catalyst all the time? So my dad was one, there's been a number of people who see something I don't see and I need them to point it out to me. And that's what changes the channel is that awareness that I didn't have.
00:19:28
Speaker
for some reason, you know? Yeah. Well, I was a long time employee. I liked being an employee. I liked getting a paycheck. It was all good. And then I got laid off. And I got a severance package. And I said to my wife, you know, if I had gotten six months rather than three months, I'd do my own thing. I would hang up my own shingle and I would become a consultant. And the word she said to me, I always remember that she said, well, why don't you make three months severance last for six months? And do your own thing.
00:19:57
Speaker
And that's what I did. That idea is like working for people. I'm not sure if the people you're working for were assholes or not, but like that was a light bulb to me is like the, the literally the pain of working for.
00:20:13
Speaker
for in an environment where that was happening versus the quote pain of not knowing where your next paycheck was coming from. Um, the first one was, was way worse. Right. Whereas for some people, that's not the case. It's terrifying to not know where your paycheck's going to, if you're going to get one or not. Right.
00:20:33
Speaker
Well, that's why not everybody's an entrepreneur because it's a 24 seven, always on great highs and great lows. And if you can't handle it, then do something else. Get a paycheck. You went from, from that and your boyfriend, soon to be husband said, do something else. What happened? Cause I eventually you ended up doing marketing. How did you go from DJ to marketing? Was it by design or did you just kind of fall into it?
00:21:02
Speaker
More falling. Yeah. So that week, so my dad said, work for someone else, work for yourself. And David got me the book. And the next day I met a couple of angel investors by accident. I didn't know that they were angel investors. And they essentially said, we love you. Let's start a company. Here's 50,000 bucks. We were off. And we started a music taste making company. It was like a miniature radio online.
00:21:32
Speaker
And as I was marketing that, my aunt said, you know, you're really good at marketing that. Would you come and consult this project I'm working on? We'll pay you a lot of money, more money than you're making, and you know, you can say goodbye to the music industry. And that sounded really good to me, Mark. So she put me on the Walmart account. Nice, nice way to start.
00:21:57
Speaker
Yeah, that was pretty lucky. And I came at that. This is, again, 2007 now. So marketers, we're going to nerd out for a second here. This was Walmart and all of their franchises.
00:22:14
Speaker
and IRS and United Way worldwide and all of their franchises, plus Bank of America and theirs and AT&T and theirs.
Scaling Strategies and Customer Engagement
00:22:23
Speaker
So there was almost 20,000 people involved by the end of the project who all wanted to help promote. There was a good cause. It was to help lift the poor out of poverty through financial education.
00:22:37
Speaker
and Walmart owns some software that was helping with this. So I came in and thought, okay, I worked at IBM before and just when Lotus Notes had come through and I had worked at XM and there was no cloud, there were servers, and then there was a mirror of the servers over in another state, right? But I saw how hard and important it was to have all these naming conventions of all the songs tagged in the metadata and how people
00:23:05
Speaker
all over, not just in the building, but all over the country, we're collaborating in our cloud and what that needed to look like. I built a spreadsheet that became the cloud for the Walmart project. My spreadsheet system ended up getting us 130 percent ROI year over year for three years. Amazing. Thanks. You stumbled into Walmart.
00:23:32
Speaker
figured out this system became massively successful. And then where did lately come from? Because it was your idea. I mean, you had this thing going. You had you kind of had this germination of an idea. Tell me the story of that, because it's you work for IBM, but I take it you're not a techie. You know, then I mean, how do you go from that then to this AI driven machine?
00:24:01
Speaker
I mean, my big mouth, again, the reason that those angel investors invested in me is because I was yammering on about, I was taking to task a pretty famous music industry critic loudly with all the cursing that I do. And they were, I think they thought I had some balls basically. And the same thing when I walked into the Walmart project, I basically
00:24:27
Speaker
not even basically, but I don't, polish is not my gift, Mark. And so I was like, this is a freaking mess, you know, is what I kind of said. And then I was at a dinner one night and I, you know, I was doing the same thing, just having my big mouth and somebody said, you know, you should really meet my friend, Steve. And so, okay, who's this Steve? And I didn't have time for Steve, but he was harassing me. There's always a Steve, you know? There's always a Steve, right?
00:24:56
Speaker
My Steve doesn't wear turtlenecks. So in fact, he's in Puerto Rico right now probably wearing a t-shirt.
00:25:04
Speaker
So he was in this world. He was a serial entrepreneur. He was a former CTO, chief technical officer, and then also an angel investor. I didn't know any of this world at all. And he kept asking to see my spreadsheets because now I had an agency and I was using this system for all my clients. And I found him very annoying.
00:25:30
Speaker
But he was nice though, and he was driving by my house. He would drive from New York to Vermont, and he would just say, hey, can I come buy for a beer? And we would have him for dinner. So he was making himself around. And he started to say, we just need $25,000. We can automate your spreadsheets and build some wireframes. And I was like, OK, first of all, don't touch my spreadsheets. Are you crazy?
00:25:56
Speaker
Bananas cuz I I like it it took me so long to imagine the world I was in you know I was a consulting I was a consultant now and and the timing was so good by the way mark because I was really I had I I had to fire a client and I didn't have the balls to because they owed me so much money and I needed to get out of this situation. So here I have Steve giving me this nudge, right? and he also
00:26:25
Speaker
Was like week i didn't know what automation meant and i didn't know what wire frames were when the twenty five thousand dollars like you know i was a line cook for a bunch of years before radio like making money wasn't you know my gift.
00:26:42
Speaker
And I just thought he was crazy, totally crazy. We'd saved both me and my husband, both music industry people had saved like crazy to buy our first house, which is what we were doing. And Steve ended up taking the $25,000 out of his own pocket.
00:26:58
Speaker
and bringing in Jason, my other co-founder, to my house one night. You'll relate to this. I was a consultant and so I got vacation when my clients got vacation. So it was Christmas and I was on vacation and it was Sunday at eight o'clock at night and they wanted to come by and I had two glasses of wine in me already and I was pissed. That's the best time to negotiate the launch of a new company. I know, right? And then I saw what they built and I was like, oh,
00:27:28
Speaker
Steve says I was much nicer to him after that. I guess we talked about becoming an accidental entrepreneur and then becoming an accidental B2B SaaS entrepreneur. It's a great story, and it's been amazing to see how lately has evolved. From your perspective as somebody who's had a very varied background, what are some of the biggest challenges of running a fast-growing company, personally and professionally?
00:27:58
Speaker
Um, that's the best question really. I mean the so the the biggest job Is i've got 50 houses on fire at any time and my job is to figure out which ones gets the water, right? And oftentimes I don't get to put out the whole fire. I just get to like dribble a little bit, right? And so that's the that's the most difficult day day-to-day task, which i'm sure you can relate to um And those those fires get to be more um
00:28:29
Speaker
What's the word? The weight of the decision is harder with the more investors you have and team and all the thing that's weighing down on you. I think professionally, the failure, we were talking about this in the beginning, there's a manic addiction to being an entrepreneur, which is the highs are high and the lows are low.
00:28:55
Speaker
And I clearly love it. I mean, I love all the lawlessness of being a line cook and being in radio and being in this world, right? That's the thing I like. I thought I found the end of my rope two or three times and it keeps getting farther, you know, and I'm always sort of amazed. I'll tell you a story, if you don't mind. So a couple years ago, I had to, we'd raised $2.7 million, all from angels.
00:29:22
Speaker
And I was going for my first venture round, right? It's a little bit different of a round. And I was trying to learn how to walk this talk and do all the pitching and everything. And that's when all that data came out that said that female founders only get 2% of all the venture capital funding.
00:29:41
Speaker
and all of the shenanigans and how the goalposts move and gaslighting. And one of my investors said, this is what's happening to you right now. This is why it's not working. And I was stunned. And then it all became clear that that's what was happening and it was sucked. And so I had no choice but to pull the burn of the company back from $100,000 a month to $10,000 a month. Wow.
00:30:09
Speaker
It's a lot of people who didn't take a paycheck, right?
00:30:14
Speaker
And I spent the year doubling sales, and I landed SAP in Anheuser-Busch in Bev. And I got us into, we got Gary V, and then we got into a very well-known, respected accelerator in San Francisco with Jason Calacanis. So now I'm flying out to San Francisco once a week, every week, to do a live demo day for four months I do this. This is crazy breakneck shenanigans, right?
00:30:40
Speaker
I come out of that mark. I win the final demo day. That's the one to win because you brag about your growth, right? I'm in the top three of the class and I have that term sheet I've been chasing for two years. I got one and the world exploded. And boy did I cry. I cried. I'm simplifying it really, but like I cried for a while because the feeling to me was, oh good, I failed twice.
00:31:10
Speaker
And it feels bad right now, it feels really bad. But then I grew the company 256% over 11 months, so.
Growth Amid Market Changes
00:31:20
Speaker
That's the boom-dum, right, you know?
00:31:23
Speaker
Well, you know, it's been an interesting year for a lot of companies. I mean, maybe I'll tell you a story back, please make you feel better. So I have a friend of mine who's been a lifelong friend of mine and he's a SAS entrepreneur and he's been trying for 20 years to be successful. And he's tried all kinds of things and some of them have been successful and some not so much last year. He's about to sell his company and he's at the finish line. It's the final papers and he, his wife are not going to be super rich, but they'll be rich enough. COVID hits and.
00:31:50
Speaker
Deal falls apart and he is crushed emotionally, physically, you know, he's like you. He's a hardworking entrepreneur. He's built a company up. So he says, I gotta go back to the table. So he goes back to the table and he built sales this year and he does really well. And he's just sold the company for double.
00:32:06
Speaker
what the private equity person offered him last year. So that's great. Thank you. That's, that's what I need to hear. Thank you. Well, you've had a tremendous year, obviously. And I think in some respects, the rising tide lifts all digital ships and some companies have done better than others. And some are going to growth won't be as spectacular, but it'll be good. And for other companies, maybe like lately it will be good.
00:32:28
Speaker
What i'm curious about this is probably not a fair question when you look at the landscape the marketing landscape right now it doesn't look like there's gonna be. In person conferences for most of twenty twenty one if not early twenty twenty two i mean things are a bit different up near canada cuz we're locked down a little more a lot of companies gonna spend a lot of money on. Content marketing and social media how do you see that evolving this year those two pillars and what does that mean for lately.
00:33:00
Speaker
Yeah. So, I mean, the thing I've been pushing for a long time is after the fact marketing, right? Getting butts in seats is really hard and it's, I mean, not because of COVID even, it was harder before, right? Even at, you know, any marketing conference that I've been to, it's the same conference every year. I mean, that gets pretty boring in itself. And, but, but if you want to get the eyeballs exponentially, you take apart all of those workshops and panels, find the,
00:33:29
Speaker
10, 20, 30, 60-second mini movie trailers and use them to drive traffic either back to the long form or back to the next event. What's interesting to me, Mark, is what COVID did for us is created a mind shift. It was already there, but people were forced to figure out how to try new things. That's been part of it.
00:33:54
Speaker
And the after-the-fact marketing has been big. I mean, so think about how you digest radio now. You don't do it live, probably. You hear it on Spotify and you digest it at will whenever you want. Same with TV, right? Not live. And so
00:34:11
Speaker
We as a company for the last six years we stop promoting our own live events except for the 24 hours beforehand we do one the day before and one the hour before because anything else we found fell on flat ears because people are just too busy but if I take it apart afterwards and then use that all these little atomized bits right to try to drive traffic I end up getting
00:34:36
Speaker
six, seven times more leads than I would get than the butts in seats. This
Human Connection in Remote Work
00:34:42
Speaker
is the effect we're already seeing them having as far as the conference landscape goes. I think the other thing that's changing is the control. At big companies, marketers and CMOs especially, the control that they've been wanting to have and maybe having to have,
00:35:06
Speaker
you can see it, you can literally see it slipping through their fingers. It's not working anymore because people respond to people. And believe me, I get, my friend Brian Kramer is the one who said H2H, there's no more B2C and B2B, it's all human to human. And that's true. Although of course, when you're talking to a larger company, they don't care how nice you are. Yes. But the talking heads at the company, what did they say outwardly? The sanitized stuff isn't working anymore. And they're quickly,
00:35:35
Speaker
Not even, not quickly, but they're more, what's the word I'm looking for? It's more accepted that that style is not only antiquated,
00:35:45
Speaker
But actively killing you. It's actively killing you and the brand. Because of the controls that lately does allow the collaboration to let more voices be part of that conversation in the microphone, that's the other thing we're seeing acceptance on as well.
00:36:06
Speaker
I don't need to be the only one on the magazine, the cover of the magazine. You can be, and Lauren can be, and Chris can be. And that's what I'm seeing other companies do as well, is give more voices that microphone. If I understand it correctly, lately has always been a remote company, is that true?
00:36:22
Speaker
Yeah, always. Don't tell anybody. I had a conversation with an entrepreneur last week. The first question he asked me was, what are you hearing from your clients about returning to the office? Because he's been working remotely for a year and my answer was nothing. My clients aren't talking about it.
00:36:44
Speaker
They're not thinking about it. I mean, they can see the light at the end of the tunnel, but it's not terribly tangible right now. So I'm wondering, if you're an entrepreneur and you're not quite sure, and your employees are happy and productive working from home, but you've got this office space that may expire in a little bit, what's your advice to them in terms of how you manage your people effectively when you can't see them other than on a Zoom call?
00:37:14
Speaker
Yeah, so it's a good question. Because people do have different needs, and we've hired people that don't have that need on purpose, right? So people who very much are wild horses can run autonomously. I mean, this is a huge part of our culture fit, you might say. But also, Mark, like, we've trained people to be able to give you that hug over Zoom, right? You know, from the beginning.
00:37:40
Speaker
because we know that that's part of the evangelism kind of thing, right? I personally am the kind of person that eats lunch standing up at the fridge if I eat lunch, you know? It's a waste of my time. I save my, that's how I am. So I hate the water cooler and
00:37:58
Speaker
I feel like it is a waste of time i'm always trying to think about how i can get something done if i'm sitting somewhere or you know. Focus and so i think like first understanding who on your there are always broadcasters and fans in the world right and there's sometimes you're both.
00:38:17
Speaker
There's nothing wrong with being either one, but you have to understand who your employees are and where they fall there. I think equipping them with, there's things to equip people with. For example, if you're going to be doing Zoom calls all day long, it's not enough to look for women, let's just say. Everybody wants to look pretty and people are buying more cover-up and self-tanner. I mean, this is a known fact, right?
00:38:42
Speaker
How can you look at the camera differently this is what we do like lauren is actually always flocking me she's like you have bitch face on smile. Right this is about sales and you know all that kind of stuff.
00:38:59
Speaker
If you're doing the loom videos for your customers, are you looking at the camera here? Is it over here? This is the kind of stuff that we've learned to translate from before and to force people, by the way, on the other side to have their camera on. This is from the beginning. We don't take a meeting if you're going to be on your phone driving.
00:39:18
Speaker
That's just the deal. It doesn't matter if there's a demo or not, but if you can't take the time to look me in the eyeballs, then you're not going to be our customer. For those companies, I think there's some cost stuff involved. You have to think about what that value is, but some people really need the change of scenery.
00:39:38
Speaker
and the change of pace to get something done. They can't be distracted by all the things at home, and there's nothing wrong with that. I'm really curious to see who's going to make it and who's not. What people are saying, they have Zoom fatigue. That's because they're having cocktails with their family on Zoom and friends. Stop that.
00:40:01
Speaker
I'm curious i guess you have to really start to listen to people and find out you know what their. What their social needs are two people we are i'm kind of i'm not an introvert by any means but like i don't like i'm not in retail for a reason i hate. I hate people don't tell anybody.
00:40:22
Speaker
So I'm glad, you know, when I shut this thing off at the end of the day, I mean, my husband, we watch TV at night and eat dinner like that because I already talked all day, you know, I don't want to talk anymore.
00:40:33
Speaker
You know, it's going to be interesting because there are some people who like me, probably like you, who like working at home, doing what you want. And there's some people who need that social interaction. And I think, I think particularly younger people who that social networking is really important to them and that interconnectivity and, you know, the opportunities to rise in the ranks, they feel that they've got to be close to the boss. That may be more important to them than older people, but I think it's going to be a really fascinating year. I think it's going to obviously be very exciting year for lately.
00:41:02
Speaker
Sorry, really to interrupt you. So, so we do have an offsite every year. That's our one like gathering time and it's here at my house and everybody comes and they spend the night on the floor downstairs with their sleeping bags. And we're like between 17 and 62. So we're not all young. Right. And we do a crazy thing together. Like we went skeet shooting or zip lining and we cook a meal and there's, there's no work talk, but it's, it's the most fun of time of the year.
00:41:30
Speaker
Enjoy it. Well, you can, because at some point in time you may have to buy either buy a bigger house. Oh, and you just reminded me of one more thing I wanted to say, which is, so I connect with all my team on social, which might be weird if your CEO is your friend on Facebook, but I am an Instagram and everywhere else. And the reason I do that is because, cause I'm not there in that water cooler. I can't see people what they're dealing with.
00:41:56
Speaker
now online I can. So I know when, you know, it's the history, it's the anniversary of somebody's father's death, you know, and I know not to bust that guy's balls this week.
00:42:07
Speaker
We're all going to use different tools and different ways to connect with people. But yeah, the future is whatever you want to make it to be.
Podcast Conclusion and Contact Details
00:42:13
Speaker
And we'll see what happens in 2021. Listen, this has been a great conversation at the top of the show. I told people that this would be a podcast that happens in 25 minutes or less, but you have broken my rule. I know you now have the distinct honor of being the longest talking person on my podcast in the last year, but I'll let you off this time.
00:42:34
Speaker
job hazard. Yeah, exactly. Well, yeah, you've got a, Hey, this has been great. We had a few bumps along the road trying to get this interview arranged. There's another Mark Evans, apparently out there who's stalking your email. I don't know what's going on. One final question. Uh, where can people learn about lately and yourself? You're, you're a doll Mark. Um, they can learn about us at dub, dub, dub, dub lately.
00:42:56
Speaker
And me and Lately were in all the places at Lately AI. And we're very friendly, as you know. We're also a little wacky.
00:43:05
Speaker
Thanks for listening to another episode of Marketing Spark. If you enjoyed the conversation, leave a review and subscribe via iTunes or your favorite podcast app. For show notes of today's conversation and information about Kate, visit marketingspark.co slash blog. If you'd like to suggest a guest or learn more about how I help B2B companies as a fractional CMO, strategic advisor and coach, send an email to mark at marketingspark.co. I'll talk to you next time.