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OhHello - Zack Holland
23 Plays2 months ago
🚀 The OhHello Pod is back! And we’re kicking things off with an episode you don’t want to miss…
🎙️ Our guest? Zack Holland, founder of Select Few & Avery. Zack built his first software at 15 and learned (the hard way) that mentorship is the ultimate cheat code for success.
We talked about:
✅ The power of mentorship—and why it’s the shortcut to avoiding costly mistakes
✅ His top mentors, including Sam Parr (The Hustle, Hampton) & Tom Logan (Coley)
✅ The biggest marketing mistakes founders make (and how to avoid them)
✅ Mental health, stoicism, and why taking care of yourself is a competitive advantage
💡 “One great mentor can change everything.”
💬 Who’s been a game-changing mentor in your career? Drop their name in the comments👇
🎧 Listen now & let us know your favorite takeaway!
#OhHello #Mentorship #Marketing #Founders #AI #Startups #Growth
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Transcript
Intro
Introduction and Setting the Tone
00:00:08
ohhello
Got some head bobbing. There we go.
00:00:10
ohhello
Ooh, shoulder shimmy. There we go, Zach. Nice, nice, nice. Oh, hello, Zach. How are you?
00:00:17
Zack Holland
Oh, hello, Jeremy. Doing great.
00:00:19
ohhello
Awesome, awesome. So good to have you here. We've known each other for a few years. We've never met in person, just many Zooms over the years.
00:00:26
Zack Holland
Not yet.
00:00:26
ohhello
And not yet.
00:00:26
Zack Holland
Not yet.
00:00:27
ohhello
I love that. Not yet.
Zach Holland's Background
00:00:29
ohhello
So, Zach, I have the pleasure of knowing who you are. don't you tell the audience, though? Hello, viewers. Who are you? Who am I speaking with?
00:00:36
Zack Holland
Who am I? Who am That's a deep question. No, my name is Zach
00:00:39
ohhello
It's real deep.
Mission of Select Few
00:00:40
Zack Holland
Holland.
00:00:53
ohhello
Tell us for a second about Avery and about SelectView.
00:00:58
Zack Holland
Definitely. So we've been running Select Few for about four years. Through my last experience a founder, was continually frustrated with how especially on the marketing side of things, you have this infinite amount of information of people to work with, of agencies to work with, and very little to actually help you find the right ones. And so at SelectView, we pair customers ranging from early stage venture-backed startups up to Fortune with what we call strategist, which is an experienced kind marketing director level individual who has
00:01:27
Zack Holland
insights into what the tech that we've built to see across hundreds of similar accounts. What are people doing? How are they spending their marketing budgets? And then an expert ecosystem underneath that to use machine learning to connect people to the right freelance experts or agencies or tools to use to help decrease the amount of time that people waste on bad agency relationships or Bad freelancer experiences to help me.
00:01:50
ohhello
Yeah.
00:01:51
Zack Holland
I mean, running business hard enough when you've got the right strategy, the right people in the room. And so try
Avery: The AI Marketing Manager
00:01:55
Zack Holland
to take care of that. And then after running that for about four years, but, you know, studying hundreds of thousands of conversations between strategists and customers, you know, with all the innovations and large language models going on, we were able to launch Avery.
00:02:08
Zack Holland
which is an AI marketing manager that's trained on hundreds of thousands of custom conversations between strategists and companies built on frameworks designed by some of the best marketers in the world.
00:02:21
Zack Holland
So you can work with an AI that trains on your data, helps you strategize around how to build your business and create content, and then still is plugged into our marketplace. So the AI can introduce you to designer to work with, the right agency, the right tool.
00:02:34
Zack Holland
Again, hopefully a little bit more at scale than select few just helping people decrease the risk in these decisions so that more people can go launch great products and successfully run companies without the obnoxious parts of marketing.
00:02:45
ohhello
I love it. And it makes so much sense to have this conversation and because of your vast network and what you've been building. One of the reasons why we thought it would mutually be beneficial to do this pod.
The Role of Mentorship
00:02:55
ohhello
When you think about what we are trying to do as a community, what we're trying to do as a tribe for Oh Hello, what excites you about the vision of Oh Hello? What excites you about mentorship?
00:03:05
Zack Holland
Oh, I mean, just in my own personal founder experience, so I built my first software platform at 15. You know, I launched another one that was venture backed at 23.
00:03:15
ohhello
Amazing.
00:03:15
Zack Holland
And in each one, and then again at 25, and then select few later.
00:03:18
Zack Holland
And through each of those experiences, I relied more and more on mentorship throughout each of those chapters. And it significantly changed my experience as a founder kind of throughout all of those runs.
00:03:30
Zack Holland
I think when I was young, I think a lot of founders probably have this trait of I can test, I can figure out myself. I don't need anybody's help.
00:03:38
Zack Holland
And then you just kind of, you start to realize I'm just making mistakes that are avoidable. I'm making mistakes that I don't need to make because there's people who have done it before and people who enjoy sharing what they've learned. And now kind of on a little bit, I'm definitely kind of sage, but on the flip side of, think of my career there,
00:03:56
Zack Holland
being an advisor at early stage startups, helping people, whether they're customers or just relationships of young founders that I try to help out, I find that to be one the most rewarding parts of my day. So...
00:04:05
ohhello
Amazing. So when you look back and you think about what you've been doing for the past 15 years, it essentially is just realizing the experiences that you've gone through. You're able to give back and help other founders, other people just, hey, wait, I see that. I've seen that wrinkle before and be able to iron it out.
00:04:22
ohhello
I love it. I love it.
00:04:23
Zack Holland
Yeah, exactly.
Influential Professional Mentors
00:04:24
Zack Holland
And just one great connection between mentor and mentee, one introduction, just the power that can come through one piece of advice or one introduction is everything when you're running a small company or whether you're trying to operate a program or a department or anything like that. Yeah.
00:04:40
ohhello
So well said. Who are some of the top professional mentors that have made an impact on you, Zach?
00:04:49
Zack Holland
I've got a few. We were just talking about them right before we hopped on, but Sam Parr, founder of The Hustle, somebody who was really an innovator in content marketing early on and now runs Hampton that I'm a part of and really enjoy.
00:05:01
ohhello
Yeah.
00:05:01
Zack Holland
So Sam Parr and a person consider friend. So Sam Parr has always been great mentor to me and Joe sponsor his partner.
00:05:09
ohhello
Yep.
00:05:10
ohhello
Nice.
00:05:10
Zack Holland
Tom Logan would be another one, the founder and CEO of Coley, a company that was kind of doing interesting things in marketing early on.
00:05:32
Zack Holland
So those would be two on the professional side that have been solid mentors for me.
00:05:36
ohhello
Nice. I've been a fan of my first million for years, so I love hearing that. And it's fun watching the journey and hearing about it, just peripherally, obviously. But with that said, just how would you, I guess, name some of your personal mentors, anyone that's made personal impact outside of our professional world? Because as a founder, you founded a handful of different companies at this point.
00:05:59
ohhello
So there's got to be a couple of go-tos in your life that you go to.
Personal Mentors and Family Influence
00:06:03
Zack Holland
Yeah, of course. I mean, I'm blessed on that side. My grandfather was, you know, really an innovator before his time, a self-made millionaire, an entrepreneur that had his hands every single part of business in the area where he lived.
00:06:16
Zack Holland
And he was my role model growing up. And so, you know, he didn't go into an office when somebody told him to. He, you know, he was the boss.
00:06:23
Zack Holland
And so...
00:06:23
ohhello
What kind of business?
00:06:25
Zack Holland
He started the first ambulance and taxi company in the area where he lived. We're from parks in Utah. He eventually started developing condos up at Powder Mountain, which is ski resort that recently was bought by the Summit.
00:06:37
Zack Holland
He really just was involved in everything. And he owned a drive-thru movie theater. He was just a real... When he was young, he was the first person to think about putting telephones in hotel rooms and This was during World War II so that people could get news about what was going on the war and they would be quarter operated.
00:06:51
ohhello
Love this.
00:06:52
Zack Holland
And so that's how he made his first amount of money when he was like 17 was these quarter operated coins, put him in hotel rooms near where the train stations were. So just, I mean, he was one of the first people to own a cell phone.
00:07:03
Zack Holland
He just like loves technology.
00:07:06
Zack Holland
And so growing up, I just thought he was the coolest guy in the world because he, you know, could go out with the family for three weeks on the boat, Lake Powell, and not be like, oh, not the office. And so he's definitely one.
00:07:17
Zack Holland
I think on the opposite side of that, my father is, he's a doctor who worked for free for seven years in the Amazon rainforest.
00:07:25
ohhello
Yep.
00:07:25
Zack Holland
mean, I think now at 60, 62 still works 80 hour weeks. I mean, he's just the hardest working person that I know. And And so on the one side, I wanted to be a founder because I wanted to own my life and own my time.
00:07:37
Zack Holland
But on the other side, anytime I'm like, oh, it's 7 p.m. and I'm still working, can call my dad and he's still working too. that's one. And then just the final one, like I said, I'm blessed in just the family side.
00:07:47
Zack Holland
My mom, she took time off work to be a mom when we were young. And so she was always mom to me. But five years ago, she started her own startup and now is the badass CEO of a 250-employee company.
00:08:00
Zack Holland
And I never got to see that side of her growing up.
00:08:02
ohhello
Right.
00:08:04
Zack Holland
And so recently in life, her and I have a lot of really deep kind of founder issue and problem and how to get over something what's the solution to this, which I never had that relationship with her before.
00:08:15
Zack Holland
And so that's been really rewarding part life over last years.
00:08:15
ohhello
That's amazing.
00:08:17
Zack Holland
So.
00:08:18
ohhello
I love, thank you for sharing that about your parent, about both your parents and your grandfather. Really badass.
00:08:23
Zack Holland
Yeah. I realize I'm like blessed on that side to have that kind of like, my personal mentors are my family pretty much.
00:08:26
ohhello
For sure.
00:08:29
Zack Holland
So.
00:08:29
ohhello
Yeah, but there's a sense of humbleness and humility that comes with that, and I think you're embodying it. So I appreciate you sharing it.
Supporting Cycle for Survival
00:08:36
ohhello
Additionally, as you know, we have dozens and dozens of different charities integrated within our platform.
00:08:41
ohhello
What are some causes that near and dear to you? You'd mentioned your dad's experience of being a doctor overseas, call it. What about in your world?
00:08:50
ohhello
What are some charitable or philanthropic endeavors that are meaningful?
00:08:53
Zack Holland
Yeah, absolutely. I love seeing Cycle for Survival on there, raising funding for rare cancers. We ride in the cycle right here in New York City every year and raise money for it every year.
00:09:02
ohhello
Awesome. Yeah.
00:09:04
Zack Holland
My family has been hit by cancer like so many couple times over the last couple of years. And so that's that, you know, I mean, just I know we can swear on this. So fuck cancer that, you know, that that Cycle for Survival does amazing things in funding, funding rare cancers and riding it every year.
00:09:19
Zack Holland
So love Cycle for Survival.
00:09:21
ohhello
That's awesome. That's awesome.
Effective Marketing Strategies for Startups
00:09:22
ohhello
Zach, how would you characterize your skill set that you're going to be sharing with the Oh Hello community? When you think about why people are going to be choosing you because of your experiences, who are you as a person fundamentally that just will create a sense of why a mentee is going to pick you?
00:09:27
Zack Holland
Yeah.
00:09:37
Zack Holland
Yeah, absolutely. When I think about my circle of competence, where I really feel that I can bring real value, in starting SelectView, I had been the marketing operator always.
00:09:40
ohhello
Yeah.
00:09:46
Zack Holland
I'd been running departments. Why I love SelectView is it's given me the opportunity to study hundreds of programs all at the same time on a very intimate level. across early stage B2B FinTech, across Fortune 500 consumer. And so I think that I have, you know, of really any person alive, been able to over the last few years, had a more in-depth view at a large scale of programs going on in startup.
00:10:12
Zack Holland
And so I feel like I have a pretty unique perspective on things that are waste of time, how to cut the BS and the nonsense of what blog you read and what thing you think you want to spend money on into like what matters,
00:10:25
Zack Holland
The companies that grow well, what are they doing? Where they focusing their time? And that's what I, you know, I'm an advisor at a few early stage startups that are growing quick and doing that now. And that's what I find really rewarding is helping people just cut out the noise because the world is so noisy right now.
00:10:39
ohhello
No bluff.
00:10:40
Zack Holland
And to be able to just get down to brass tacks if you have limited time to make sure that your marketing and your growth and your branding is taken care of. What the things spend time and money on? What are those relative amounts that a company like yours should be spending?
00:10:52
Zack Holland
And then, you know, even to the extent of who should work with and should spend it with?
00:10:56
ohhello
Amazing, Zach. Any other parting words of wisdom that you have for the Hello community?
Mental Health and Mindfulness Advice
00:11:01
Zack Holland
You know, take care of yourself. Take care of your mental health and your mental wellness. It's so easy to get caught up in the ups and downs and, you know, and I think starting, you studying mental models, studying stoicism, meditating.
00:11:15
Zack Holland
These things aren't just like flashy ideas and going to soul cycle and stuff like that. These are the things that are the engine of how you see the entire world.
00:11:22
ohhello
Real.
00:11:24
Zack Holland
And so take care yourself, be good to people. And that's really all I got.
00:11:29
ohhello
Be good and take care of yourself. Well, Zach, thank you. Thank you for being a part of this. excited to have you as part of the Oh Hello community. Thank you for doing the shoulder shimmy and the dance.
00:11:37
Zack Holland
I appreciate it, Jeremy. Thank you.
00:11:38
ohhello
All right. Take care, everybody.
00:11:40
Zack Holland
I appreciate it.
00:11:40
ohhello
you, Zach. Thanks.