Good Stress

[00:00:00] Speaker A: The most important thing on YouTube is the packaging. So title and thumbnail the most important because otherwise you don't get the click. After that you have to have a good hook to keep people watching for 30 seconds. Because if you do those two things then it really takes off. And that's the power of YouTube is like the algorithm. Like this video I have with 25,000, like for some reason it got clicks and people stayed. So YouTube's like cool. Like everybody should see this. [00:00:20] Speaker B: Welcome to the off site podcast. I am your host, Jordan Gahl. This is where I team up with friends to catch up on our work and just as importantly, what's going on beyond the work. As always, this podcast. This podcast is brought to you by Rosie, the AI powered phone answering service for small businesses. Welcome back everybody. Another episode of the off site podcast. I have my friend Craig Hewitt. You're back. [00:00:46] Speaker A: What's happening, Jordan? Hey, buddy, how's it going? [00:00:48] Speaker B: I'm stressed. How are you? [00:00:50] Speaker A: Yeah, better than yesterday. Like in some ways I wish we would have recorded yesterday cause it would have been really dark. But today, like, I'm good. I recorded some stuff this morning. I had a good coaching call. I've done some content. So like, yeah, firing on all cylinders today. [00:01:04] Speaker B: Okay, okay. I am better since yesterday as well. But because I had lunch with an entrepreneur friend and his situation is so much more stressful that I feel better about everything. [00:01:15] Speaker A: Yeah, it is relative, right? It is like, oh, you could be running a content marketing agency right now. That would suck. You know, you and I are in pretty enviable positions, I think of having relatively stable scaled businesses with good teams and a lot of opportunity. So I think it always is just relative, like the Chicherin versus kind of where it could be. [00:01:36] Speaker B: You know, that's interesting when, when you say it's, it's relative because I think the problem with it all being relative is the people who are either doing really well or have a nature about them to boast are the ones we see online. And our relative is to them formulating a funny tweet. In my head this morning my tweet was going to be, I don't like the insufferable bragging online, but I, I give latitude to the people who brag about the real estate that they build because that's genuinely cool and people like use it, you know, I don't know, I follow a bunch of people on real estate and they're like, look at our beautiful new building. And I'm like, that's good bragging. [00:02:18] Speaker A: That's. [00:02:18] Speaker B: That is not. Our team just did the most amazing thing and we just raised $85 million three months after we raised $20 million and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. [00:02:28] Speaker A: Do you think you're in the wrong business? Like, that could be, like, really fundamental. Like, do you think that you just assign value to a thing that is not the thing you do? [00:02:36] Speaker B: Yes, partly. I think that's like a happy ignorance filter. You don't know what that's like. Anyone that I've ever spoken to in real estate has become so comfortable with risk and debt and things. You can't control that. When I actually look at the details, I'm not envious at all. [00:02:52] Speaker C: At all. [00:02:53] Speaker B: My younger brother just exited his crunch gym business, so he ran multiple crunch gyms. And if you just looked from the outside at the revenue figures, the growth, the employee count, blah, blah, blah, it looks cool. You talk to him and you're like, do you know what it was like going through Covid with Cuomo as governor? Do you know what that was like? That is not envious in any way. [00:03:20] Speaker A: So what is it about stress? Because I think, like you mentioned, like, there's good, bad stress, like, what is it about the current kind of stress that is productive or, or is bad for you? [00:03:31] Speaker B: So I find myself thinking of, like, this week as good, healthy stress, productive stress. And there's something about, like, the time of the year, right? There's like a funny meme going around Twitter where it's like the great lock in of September to December 2025. The first time I saw that meme, before I knew it was a meme, I. I like, retweeted it because that is exactly how I felt. Because summer's over. In summer, there's a much healthier balance. No, let's say it differently. There is a more balanced approach to personal and family and kids and vacation and work. And now the kids are back at school and summer's over, and then you look at, you know, you look at the calendar and you're like, it's September. You. You blink, it's October. You blink, it's November and the holidays, and then it's December. And that flies by. And I'm like, I gotta go right now if I want to make things happen this year. So I think the stress is urgency. [00:04:31] Speaker A: It's interesting. I have less stress since the summer because the kids are back in school. So my wife works a conventional job. She goes and she works and she comes home. So I am, you know, dad cab, as we call it. [00:04:44] Speaker B: Right. [00:04:44] Speaker A: I'm the Uber driver of the family. I'm like all summer, every Wednesday I would spend from 11 to 3:30 at a Starbucks because my daughter was at skating practice. Like a lot of that, a lot of going to, doing stuff with the kids, balancing this. So now like to me stress is much lower because they're in school and I have from 8:30 to 3 at least 100% every day I have this, like, this is my time. Nobody can fuck this up. So in some respects I have less stress. It's been an adjustment. It's only been a week and a half here that kids have been back in school. But I think that this lockdown, lock in time, this lock in time is very real. It's always the best time of year for us at Castos. 100% from the 1st of November through New Year's is always our busiest time of year. And we're in the run up to it right now. [00:05:29] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:05:29] Speaker A: And so I think the question is if you're acknowledging that that's the fact, hey, this is the busy time. Things need to happen now or things are about to happen. Coming from your e commerce world into like Black Friday in the, in the shopping season, what do I need to do now to be successful in that busy time? [00:05:45] Speaker B: I have not gone through more than a year of Rosie, right. So I'm unfamiliar with the seasonality of it. So I, I feel like it's good for, for you. Just like e commerce brands, they know we gotta get geared. Everyone in E commerce right now is thinking, well, let's get all the emails ready, all the offers, the inventory. Right. The pricing, the ads. So it, it really does help focus the mind. Sounds like you've gone through a few cycles where you are familiar that this time of year is important to you. I think for me it's a bit unknown but, but there's a lot of hope around it because the summer was slow. It was just slow. The run up to the summer was so fast that of course I just think it's going to continue. And when it slowed down, I got real stressed. And so we, we focused inward for the summer. Once we realized like May started to slow down, then June, that's when we saw, when we saw an opportunity to say, let's go fix our funnel, let's go redo the onboarding, let's go improve the homepage, what we called Rosie 2.0. This like set of projects that we improve the agent quality and the onboarding and we just did so much internal and now we just did All Hands on Wednesday and the theme of All Hands was the shift from the product and internal outward to marketing, sales, distribution. Basically let's take all the work that we just did and let's go get credit in the market for it. [00:07:12] Speaker A: I wonder. So we, we just had some work done on our house and I was talking to the guy, the contractor, I was like hey, like how, you know, how's business? I was actually thinking about you because like he would be a perfect person. He's like a guy that has a couple crews that does home improvement stuff. And he was like, yeah, for Labor Day it starts to slow down and then after Halloween it's dead through, you know, St. Patrick's Day or something. And you and I live in similar climates. You know, I wonder if like your customers will be less busy, some of them maybe. So will they be looking for your solution? More or less. [00:07:46] Speaker B: So I've been thinking about this recently in terms of timing on when our customers prospects, when they come across our product and offer in their like psychological up and down. [00:08:01] Speaker A: Because you knew this in e commerce, right? Like summer was the time to prep the shit for Black Friday. And so like what's that offset now? [00:08:08] Speaker B: Yes. And then as a marketer in E commerce selling, you know, products, you also understand there's back to school and then there's Black Friday and then there's holiday. So you kind of under, you're in sync with, with what your customers are thinking and you're looking to match that. So I just started an email project with Mark Thomas actually, who we both know back at Rally. We hired Powered by Search as our marketing firm for a long time and Mark was there. So that's how I got to know him. He's fantastic. So, so we hired Mark to work with us on an email project. We don't send enough email. We have a lot of emails on our list and we just don't send email very often. It's not, it's not smart. And as we were talking with Mark and thinking through. Does this sound familiar to you? [00:08:57] Speaker C: Uh huh. Yeah. [00:08:58] Speaker A: We worked with Mark as well. [00:08:59] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah. Great. [00:09:01] Speaker B: So what we realized is that the value of the frequency of the emails that we send and we haven't started like the project just got kicked off this week actually. So we're going to start sending emails next week. What I realized that maybe I didn't before this was that our audience, we always catch them almost like as a positive interest. What I mean by that is when they see our ad, they become Interested in it. Right. We give the pitch. I used to miss calls all the time and it was frustrating and it interrupted my work and. Or I would miss the calls and go to the voicemail. And then I found Rosie and now I can focus and I get all the. So. Right. So we're like giving the pitch of the value and people see that in a positive light and they say, I want that. Okay, so this is like, this is like, I don't know, I guess vitamin talking. So they see that and they sign up. What we forgot or didn't internalize properly until this email project kind of brought it up is that we then don't ever interact with them in the pain. So what is the likelihood that someone who saw our ad that morning felt pain around the phone? Oh, this. I got interrupted again. And my in store employees keep getting interrupted. And this is. But like, the chances of that pain coming up among all the other pains in their business right before they saw the ad is unlikely. [00:10:24] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:10:25] Speaker B: So the ability to send three emails a week for weeks and weeks and weeks, basically forever increases the odds that we are on their mind and on their radar from the negative aspect from the pain and then. And then to kind of bring it up. So I, I didn't see things that way at all. And I'm very, very happy that we're about to send a lot more email because we have an enormous number of people, enormous, like, very large, that signed up but didn't launch. So they have an account, they went through the process. They're familiar with our product, they're familiar with the offer, they're familiar with everything and the quality of the agent, all that. But we didn't keep reminding them that this exists. And so we weren't present in their mind when they experienced the pain. [00:11:08] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:11:09] Speaker B: Does that sound familiar at all? Does that ring true? [00:11:11] Speaker A: No, totally. I mean, we have, we have had for a long time a lot of email set up, and then we kind of follow like the Laura Roeder kind of style. Like, she just, she, she's really smart about this. She just emails all the time, forever, which is like, this sounds like where you're getting. And yeah, we have, we worked with Mark for like a long time and we've had all this before. He's kind of revamped all of it. We have like global nurture sequence. Like, everybody comes into this eventually. It's a year long. We have special campaigns like, you come in for, like our podcast name generator. We collect your email, we nurture you in that kind of Bucket. And then you go to our global sequence and that's, that's exclusive of like trials, failed conversions churn. Like we have all that shit. [00:11:52] Speaker B: Right. More triggered, event based, timing based when they sign up and so on. What's the frequency on the global Weekly. Weekly. Okay. [00:12:01] Speaker A: For a year. [00:12:02] Speaker B: Okay, that's pretty good. That, that's staying top of mind in a relatively soft and subtle way. We're going to try to YOLO this three, three emails a week for, for, you know, 10 weeks in a row kind of thing. [00:12:13] Speaker A: What about text? Do you guys. Because like your customer is just different than ours. Did you guys collect the phone number? [00:12:19] Speaker B: We have phone numbers because it's part of our onboarding. [00:12:23] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:12:24] Speaker B: So we have a lot of phone numbers. I have to tell you, I am so fearful of the legal side of texting. It's. I talk to my lawyers. We. Because our app sends texts, no one knows anything. No one knows what they're talking about. Every conversation with a lawyer is like you should basically double opt in every single time you send a text. [00:12:45] Speaker A: Oh, come on. [00:12:46] Speaker B: Right. If you're trying to avoid legal issues, you have to be so careful that it's not marketing, it's not gonna work. It's improbable that it works if you have to do what the lawyers say you're gonna do. So we keep our texting transactional. Like our customer says, I want texts when a call comes in as a reminder or notification that I have a new call. And like those the only text we sent? [00:13:14] Speaker A: Yeah, I just wonder about it. Cause like I, I think email works well for us because like our customers, when they're going to be in the mindset to do something with us, are at their computer. Maybe not the case with you because like these guys are in the truck and doing stuff. And so like maybe, maybe like it's, if email is still the medium, it's something fast and quick that they can get back on the site and do a thing or book a call or you know, like you got to bridge that like mobile to product, like productive gap. I think, I think you make a. [00:13:44] Speaker B: Good point and it's worth me reconsidering and thinking about, okay, if someone is on our marketing and they have opted in or can we add that and if we can do it in a very compliant way. You know, the truth is our legal risk is much more centered on people that are not in our universe. So if our customer, a Rosie user, wants to send a text message with promotion directions to their location, that's where we are extremely careful, and we opt in, and we double opt in, and we confirm over the phone, we have a recording of that, then we send a text message, then they click yes. So that. That's kind of where the real danger is, when people are outside of your immediate marketing orbit. [00:14:23] Speaker C: Yep. Yep. [00:14:24] Speaker A: Cool. [00:14:25] Speaker B: I have a question to ask you. I have seen you do more and more video, and you keep. You keep doing it, you keep getting better at it, and I'm trying to figure out how to get better at this. I see it as one of the very few leverage points that not. Not everyone's doing this. You kind of can't really do it with AI. I mean, you can, but it's not. It's not good. It gets you in front of people anytime one of our customers is, like, found. The people that come in through podcasts and videos that they've seen of me doing an interview are the most motivated. They have the most trust coming in. They have, like, the lowest friction to getting started. They're just like, I saw Jordan. That's what I want. Like, what do I need to do? Yeah, how's that go? How long you've been doing it? How often do you do it? [00:15:13] Speaker A: Yeah, so it started with I interviewed Brendan Hufford, you know, growth Sprint. Sprint Effort smart, kind of marketing guy on my podcast episode. Hasn't come out yet, but he was telling me, like, hey, you know, I got into SEO and really kind of came into the marketing scene when I did this thing called 100 Days of SEO. He did a podcast episode and a YouTube video every day for 100 days. And I was like, that's crazy. I can't imagine that. And then we finished up the interview, and I thought I was like, I'm such a fucking idiot, because it's so clear to me right now that AI is everything. And I think we'll talk about distribution of product and AI and stuff, but it's where the world is going. And so how can I. As massively as possible, FOMO or yolo, right? As you said, how can I just YOLO myself into the AI world? It is to do a YouTube video every day for 100 days. And so that's what I did. That's what I call it. 100 days of AI. I'm publishing a video every day. I think today is day 35. And yeah, dude, it's a lot of fucking work. Like, a lot of the reason I. [00:16:16] Speaker B: Felt so bad yesterday, you have, like, video. You do, like, 10 of them at a time or you do you waking up that day and saying, I'm doing a video today. At some point before I go to bed tonight, I'm doing a video. [00:16:26] Speaker A: A bit of both. Like, it's really hard to stay significantly ahead. Like, at this point, I'm a day ahead. Yeah, we're going to Michigan actually next week. I'll be gone for four days. So, like, over the next five days, I have to get four days ahead, which means two a day. And that gets hard because it's like, oh, I'm going to do this thing and I have to build a thing, or I have to walk through a new tool and really understand it. So sometimes, like, they're just not amazing, you know, sometimes I put a lot of work into them, and they're really amazing. I've had one that really took off, like, 25,000 views, as opposed to like, hundreds or a thousand. [00:17:00] Speaker B: Yep. All right, so another testament to frequency, dedication, consistency. [00:17:05] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:17:06] Speaker A: And there's really nothing about it. Like, the video is like, 12 Google AI tools. You need to know. Like, I just opened 12 tabs. I walked through them. It took 20 minutes. I edited it myself. There was nothing. Like, I've had several that I thought, like, this is fucking amazing. Like, I did one on the impact of. On climate change. [00:17:23] Speaker B: Okay. [00:17:23] Speaker A: I was like, this is super interesting. I scripted it. It was really good. Dud. So, like, you just don't know. But, yeah, dude, it's. I agree. Like, it's where the alpha is in marketing right now is YouTube, not AI. [00:17:34] Speaker B: You'Re saying YouTube in general. [00:17:36] Speaker C: Yep. [00:17:37] Speaker A: As a channel. [00:17:38] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:17:38] Speaker B: As a channel. [00:17:39] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:17:39] Speaker B: I mean, this is what Brian, you know, Castle's doing also, and it's an enormous amount of work he would tell you. And it works. [00:17:47] Speaker C: Yeah. And. [00:17:48] Speaker B: And you know, from. From his feedback on it, it's been the most promising thing he's done in years in terms of audience building, because he was a newsletter guy back in the day, and he built an audience that way. And nowadays, man, when I tweet something, I just assume literally nobody I know is seeing it. [00:18:07] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah. [00:18:08] Speaker B: It's. It's a trip. It is not. It's. It's. It's not a distribution channel anymore. It's an entertainment channel. It's a news channel. But you can't get your word out there. [00:18:17] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:18:18] Speaker B: Can I. Can we geek out for just a second? [00:18:20] Speaker A: Totally. [00:18:20] Speaker B: How do you do it? What tool do you use? How much editing do you do? Do you do the editing yourself? How worried are you about making it perfectly polished? Or is it Just throw it up there. Like, because if you look at Brian's stuff, it's ridiculously well done. [00:18:33] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:18:33] Speaker B: But it takes him. It takes him a week to get a video out, and that's that. His strategy is, I'm creating content for serious developers, and the content is going to be serious and the production value is going to be serious. And that's, like, his angle on it. [00:18:46] Speaker A: So I think, like, where I am now for the next 65 days is different than I will be after that. Like, after my a hundred days, like, I'll go back to. I think I could do two good videos a week. But. But just generally, like, for. For, you know, whatever. I think a video a week is all you can reasonably expect. I do script the hook all the time. So the first 30 seconds or a minute, because there's. So it's everything, right? Like, the most important thing on YouTube is the packaging. So title and thumbnail. The most important because otherwise you don't get the click. After that, you have to have a good hook to keep people watching for 30 seconds. Because if you do those two things, then it really takes off. And that's the power of YouTube is like the algorithm. Like, this video I have with 25,000. Like, for some reason, it got clicks and people stayed. So YouTube's like, cool. Like, everybody should see this. So in terms of process, like, I just have a notion board of just a bunch of ideas. Like, I steal from other people in the space. Like, oh, they did a video on this and it did well. I'll plop that in the board. I'll have an idea. Like, I was walking the dog today and had an idea. Like, plop it in there. And then when it's time to record, I'll look through it. Sometimes I'll, like, prep. Like, I'll build a thing, or I'll sign up for an account on Lindy or whatever. I'm in my setup right now, but I don't really have, like, all the stuff on. I have, like, lights behind me. I have lights up here. I use this mic. I use just my webcam most of the time. I have a really good webcam. Sometimes I'll use a teleprompter and, like, my DSLR camera. That is really different. Like, just getting on and spieling for 15 minutes. In some ways, easier but less good. Like, Brian, I think scripts his whole thing. And sometimes I do too. I use AI for that a lot. Reading from a teleprompter, emotionally draining. Like, super hard. [00:20:28] Speaker B: So riffing is Easier and less taxing. But you are, you're going to miss points. [00:20:34] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:20:34] Speaker B: That you want to make. [00:20:35] Speaker C: Yep. [00:20:36] Speaker B: That's. [00:20:36] Speaker A: I think if it's a screen share kind of video more acceptable because you have kind of this thing to lean on, which is like the thing you're doing. [00:20:44] Speaker B: Yeah. Staring into a camera. I haven't really done for more than like, I don't know, you know, a minute, like some quick message. But my default is using Screen Studio and sharing my screen. And then, yeah, it's a little bit of a hook. It's. Hey, I'm Jordan, I'm the founder, Rosie. I'm gonna walk you through this amazing feature that Rosie does for you. Here's what it does. And then it's talking through a screen share, which is the crutch. It's so easy. Then I'm gonna do this and then this happens and check this thing out. And as you're doing things on screen, that brings up the point that you want to make anyway. So it's easier. Much easier. [00:21:16] Speaker A: I think like a couple of specifics. One, I use Screen Studio. Some I don't care for it in some ways because I can't shoot like just talking head stuff and then like splice it in like it's just the screen recording from what I found. So I typically start with like me full screen and then go into the screen share. I use what's it called, Screen Flow, which is another like buy it, download it kind of thing. And then I could just export. If I'm going to have somebody edit it, which to editing. I have one of the guys from our team edit about half of them, like if I'm organized enough. And the rest I just do myself. [00:21:49] Speaker B: No substitute for practice getting better at it. Doing it over and over. [00:21:53] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah. [00:21:54] Speaker A: Because you see, like, oh my gosh, that was really bad. Like I got to do a better job recording next time because I'm seeing like all my mistakes. [00:22:01] Speaker B: Yeah, it's tough to get over. We were talking before we started recording this week. Our ad agency came to me and said, Jordan, we are finding that ads perform really well when it's the founder that's on the screen. You know, up until now we've used creators, you know, actors basically that create these, these ads. So they asked me, jordan, would you be willing to, you know, basically take these scripts and do them yourself and then we'll edit them after and add all the screen share and the, all the graphics. And I was like, no problem. These are like 30 second ads. How hard can that be. And it's a struggle to do it, and then look back on it and not just cringe to the point of, I don't want this on Instagram, I don't want this in our ads, and going to have to just get over that. Basically, the only thing I found that worked is making the same video 15 times, because the first one's terrible, the second one's terrible, and you kind of loosen up a little bit, then you're just more fluid, and then all of a sudden, it gets better. I'm like, oh, okay. So every single hook, I'll just have to 10 or 20 times, and every single, you know, body of the ad, I'll also do 10 or 20 times. And that's the only way to do it. [00:23:09] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:23:09] Speaker A: Are they giving you the whole, like, the whole script to. To. [00:23:14] Speaker C: Okay, yeah. [00:23:15] Speaker A: You got to get a teleprompter. [00:23:16] Speaker B: Okay. So I. I've done a teleprompter in the past. What I have right now is I just have a Google Doc with very large fonts, and I hold my phone up, and I have that right behind me. But it's. I'm not good at it yet, you know? [00:23:28] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah, yeah. [00:23:30] Speaker A: The teleprompter is good because you say the exact right words. You can't. Like, you're looking at the camera, and the words are kind of, like, in front of it. So, like, you can be pretty dynamic. [00:23:40] Speaker B: And it moves also, so your eyes aren't very obviously going left to right and down and left to right and down and left to right and down. Yeah, that's right. And when you say teleprompter, I'm assuming it's like, an app on your computer screen. You don't have, like, a real teleprompter. [00:23:54] Speaker A: I have a real teleprompter. [00:23:55] Speaker B: Oh, okay. It is the next level. [00:23:57] Speaker A: Got it. [00:23:58] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah, yeah. [00:24:00] Speaker A: Cool. [00:24:01] Speaker B: I want to ask you or maybe say something and then have you react to it. One of the things that has come up for me over the last few weeks is this confronting reality of the amount of competition in our space. I generally don't pay that much attention to competition. I look over at their sites every once in a while, but I don't obsess about it. I don't follow them on Twitter and see what they're launching or this or. I just don't find it very healthy for me psychologically. And I don't. It doesn't. It's not very helpful in the business, so I try to use it only for actual business value. Let's go see their pricing real quick. How are they phrasing this individual feature? Okay. Now, because I go to competitor sites, I then end up getting a lot of ads. And that has had a psychological impact on me where if I'm scrolling, what I like to do is I like to block Twitter during the day. I had this little. This thing here. Brick. [00:24:58] Speaker C: Okay. Yeah, okay. [00:24:59] Speaker B: Little piece of hardware that I touch my phone against it and I can quit having access to Twitter until I physically touch this thing again. So during the day, I do that. I leave it in my bedroom, and then I just don't go back. I don't click on it so that I'm not. I don't have Twitter on my phone during the day. That's helpful for me. [00:25:16] Speaker C: Good. Okay. [00:25:17] Speaker B: You'll be shocked to hear that it's a bit unproductive on work to find out exactly, like, what's going on in Israel right now. It's not good. [00:25:23] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. [00:25:25] Speaker B: Yes. Okay. So what that does. Because I'm human, is it? I never go to Instagram, but when Twitter is blocked and I'm bored, I'm like, oh, let me just go like. And Instagram feels a little more frivolous. I don't really care about Instagram. I like Twitter and the ideas and the news there. Instagram just feels like, I don't know, like a magazine, whatever. But Instagram's got a million ads, man. And when I'm scrolling, I. The number of competitors in AI Voice right now feels like dozens and dozens and new ones I've never seen before. Just so what it has done. It has driven me toward this mindset of we're not special. It doesn't matter what our pricing is. It doesn't matter what our feature set is. It barely matters what our value proposition. Like, effectively, nothing matters when compared with just distribution and getting in front of people. So, like ad budget, SEO, LLM, SEO and other forms of distribution. And it has shifted my mindset toward the only way we win, the only way we get what we want, is figuring out ways to just get in front of a lot more people. And it's not going to be ads. Ads are important, but we're not going to raise an enormous amount of money and just get in front of as many people as possible by just spending money on ads. So that's where my head has been over the last few weeks. How do you think about this marketing landscape, this competitive landscape? [00:26:53] Speaker A: I was having this conversation on Twitter yesterday And Arvid Call chimed in. I think transformationally, AI has shifted SaaS and just like customers expectations of everything, because for fucking 20 bucks a month, you can get a thing that can do almost everything you need it to do. [00:27:13] Speaker B: True, true. [00:27:14] Speaker A: So when we're $19 a month or whatever, the expectation of customers of our tool has changed a lot. So I think to your point of like feature set and positioning and all this, it's just like, I don't fully understand the impact that it's had. I don't think any of us do, but. But the relative importance of the thing we actually do is different than it was 18 months ago. And like, I think that's part of kind of what you're saying and whether. [00:27:38] Speaker B: Like, whether in like hierarchy of people's minds on what tools do, how much they cost, how important they are to me. [00:27:43] Speaker C: Okay, yeah, yeah. [00:27:45] Speaker A: Like, I think, I think if you had asked me two years ago, our customers would have been more passionate about what we do than they are today. [00:27:52] Speaker B: Because it was more unique and it was more advanced. It was more challenging for them to accomplish on their own. Like that mixture of things, I think. [00:28:01] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:28:02] Speaker B: Relative value, I guess. Perceived value. [00:28:04] Speaker A: Yeah. Now perceived value of another tool is so much higher that it's commoditized. And I think that's the word I would use is like a lot of SaaS and a lot of everything is just commoditized. Right. It's just not that hard in our customers eyes anymore. And so yes to your question. I think distribution and just being in front of people is way more important because like, for two reasons. One, it's just how you grow. [00:28:30] Speaker C: Right. [00:28:30] Speaker A: Like it is just more eyeballs and more butts and seeds. I think the other point though, that, that like, as we think about the shit to do to grow is like, we oftentimes focus on things that have like, limited upside. Like, what if I reduce churn? You could reduce churn from, I don't know, like 8% to 6%. That could be an enormous amount of effort for only this much difference. Or you could put all that effort into tripling your, you know, brand exposure. Probably, probably a bigger upside also. Probably a lot freaking harder to actually do that. [00:29:03] Speaker B: Yes. But I'm not sure if it's that much harder. If you focused on it and made it the most important thing, that's what you would work on and that's what, what would improve. [00:29:12] Speaker A: I will say kind of, I don't know how to do that. [00:29:15] Speaker B: Which part the focus in the right. [00:29:17] Speaker A: Place or no, like actually just getting a ton more eyeballs on your stuff. Like I think that that's part of it is like the playbook that we've used at least, which is like content marketing and SEO. That's a different playbook now. Like, I'm not going to say it's dead, but that's a really different playbook. And so like how do you as a brand go get in front of five times more people? It's not a thing that it's not a well trodden path for SaaS, companies like ADS or partnerships or SEO or you know, all these conventional things. And I know like you and I talked about like Cluli last time we did an episode like, hey, is it some kind of viral like Internet meme thing that you do just to get a bunch of attention? [00:29:57] Speaker B: Yeah. You see a lot of the B2C apps and their hack that they talk about is this putting an enormous amount of leverage into social posting. Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of TikTok accounts, testing every little iteration, hiring hundreds of influencers to talk about you at the same time, using AI to create dozens and dozens of ads or videos every single day. And that feels crazy. And I don't know if that really works for B2B in quite the same way. I do think B2B has a lot to learn from B2C marketing for sure. I hear you on the, you know, we've invested a decent amount of effort and money into SEO and we get one part of the results, we get listing, we get ranking, we get LLM mentions. The other part of the results, the traffic and trials, much harder. [00:30:53] Speaker A: Mm, interesting. [00:30:54] Speaker B: Yep, yep. We get traffic, we get listings, the rankings, the keywords LLM mentions, all better and better and better and better. And the traffic just kind of the same. [00:31:05] Speaker A: Are they kind of like high buyer intent, low in the funnel kind of stuff? Like best voice to text tool for home service businesses? [00:31:13] Speaker B: It's both. It's the top of funnel middle. It's all over the place. Not so much top of funnel because that's kind of, you know, going to take longer. But if you go into ChatGPT and you're like, what is the best AI voice answering service for small businesses? Like, we're there, we're number one or number two. [00:31:30] Speaker C: Wow. [00:31:30] Speaker B: But it's still slow going on the actual results. I'll tell you where, where I'm at is I'm looking for. I don't know how else to say this, speaking of Cooley, but ways to cheat things that are unfair yeah. So for example, affiliate deals, partnership and integration deals that are. So we have one brewing right now. That's an interesting situation. I have a lot, I have a lot of high hope for. So we have a pretty well known CRM page builder, CRM, and their main competitor is like an all in one that has an AI voice feature. And this competitor that we're talking to does not and doesn't want to build it themselves. And so I'm seeing that as like a model on. Okay, if we can find a partner that sees direct advantage for themselves in launching this feature for their audience, what do we need to do to create an unfair advantage? Right. Like give them a great affiliate commission and then go to market together. So what we've talked about internally is how can we leverage AI tools to make it in such a way that we can build an integration in a day, ideally in an hour. Because when we used to do integrations in E commerce, it was weeks and weeks and weeks to build an integration because of the complexity and everything else. But now our product is relatively simpler. How do we do an integration every single day? And it's almost like we maybe don't even need to ask permission from the partner. [00:33:03] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:33:04] Speaker B: Do you want to do this deal? Used to be the only way it made sense to go out and spend three weeks on the integration. But what if we could build it in an hour and we remove that cost entirely and we just keep building integrations and whoever answers us and does a partnership with us does, and whoever doesn't, fine. Didn't cost as much. [00:33:19] Speaker A: I mean, obviously not a developer. I would guess there's some technical stuff that could set you up to be able to do that. Like, you know, whatever, how the bits work. [00:33:28] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:33:28] Speaker B: Claude Agents is really where our, our team has found the ability to build things that are unique and have a specific end goal in mind. And here's our API, here's the, here's an example of an API. This is what we're trying to do. And then our goal is to be able to just hit, you know, go on a cloud agent and have build 90% of it. [00:33:49] Speaker A: That's awesome. You know, as you were talking through that, I would challenge or think about one thing, which is like you mentioned affiliate commission to the CRM. In this case, I don't know that that's the incentive that they would want. Like, if I'm going to go build an integration with Kastos, I don't want money. I want more customers or my customers to be more successful and Stay long. [00:34:09] Speaker B: I think it depends on the model of the partner. [00:34:12] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:34:13] Speaker B: The best partners I've ever worked with on integrations did not want rev share. [00:34:16] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:34:16] Speaker B: But some in the. It's. It's like the very transactional partner that only sees you as an affiliate commission never works out. But some companies have it in their business model that they do co marketing with integrations and then they take an affiliate commission. But they have a playbook up and running on how to introduce these affiliate features effectively to their audience. And that I see, is a very different thing that, like, is fitting into their existing business model and going with it. And they're much, much better at marketing your product to their audience than someone who's just completely transactional and doesn't care about you at all and just wants the affiliate commission. [00:35:00] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:35:00] Speaker A: And probably just as much as you can be that person to all of your potential integration partners. Like, the easier it is like, hey, we have a playbook here. It is this. We're going to give you the assets. This is what we're going to ask for you. This is we're going to do in turn. [00:35:13] Speaker B: Okay. We're all familiar with people talking about AI in the larger economy as a way to accomplish jobs or tasks that haven't been done because they were unrealistic to do. You just can't do everything. And so the things that are so tedious and time consuming that you is in practical impractical to do just don't get done. And I kind of is. Is perfect for those. Because if it's not a person that you're paying, you know, a W2 or an hourly wage or something, then you can actually ask that AI employee to do the most ridiculous, repetitive things, and it's fine. Who cares? Everyone's happy. I keep thinking about that in the context of sales and marketing for. For B2B SaaS and like, playing around with this idea like, what would I love to do? But seems so unscalable that I ignore. Right. So an example would be we get a lot of attention from local SEO companies. So SEO companies that do SEO for local businesses, perfect. Those local businesses, those are our people. And so the SEO companies end up looking at this like, hey, this. If this helps my client. And a lot of those SEO companies, as their primary goal for their customers is to drive phone calls, and if they don't answer the phone, everyone's unhappy, including the SEO company. And so I see this and I'm like, all right, that's a very natural partnership. And now what is completely impractical is for me to reach out to 5,000 SEO companies throughout the country. [00:36:43] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:36:44] Speaker B: But maybe it's not practical. Maybe that's actually a perfect use case for automation. And Russ, you see like what I'm thinking in terms of this distribution, like how do I hack? How do I get better ideas? How do I not compete where everyone else is competing? Because it feels like a fool's game. [00:37:03] Speaker A: Yeah, no, I think that last part is definitely like the theme is like a lot of the conventional stuff has diminishing returns. At least like if it's not kind of toast already, like top of funnel SEO, it's just going to have diminishing returns as the people's access to it gets easier and easier. With AI, I think that's the theme, dude. Totally. I mean, so like one like tip tool tip wise. Have you used Manus? [00:37:27] Speaker B: No. [00:37:27] Speaker A: Oh my God. Okay. [00:37:28] Speaker B: M A N I S. I think. [00:37:30] Speaker A: I've heard of it. M I n u s.im I think Manas is like an agent AI platform. [00:37:37] Speaker B: Okay. [00:37:37] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah. [00:37:38] Speaker A: So it's like ChatGPT agent. If it didn't suck. [00:37:42] Speaker B: Okay. [00:37:44] Speaker A: It would be amazing at this. You could go into Manus and say, find me all the local SEO companies and the biggest 50, like metropolitan areas in the U.S. give me name, email and title and it would just go do it. [00:37:56] Speaker B: So it's like a fantasy upwork. [00:37:59] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:37:59] Speaker B: Like if I wanted to do something that was impractical for us to do internally and you're saying that it is smart enough that you could use natural language in that way. This is what I want. Can you help me do this? [00:38:11] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah, yeah. [00:38:12] Speaker A: I mean you would need to be like a little more than I just was and adjust. [00:38:16] Speaker B: But that's the gist. [00:38:16] Speaker A: If you gave it that, it would give you 80% of what you wanted. [00:38:20] Speaker B: What I'd like to do is then say, okay, great, send them an email today that says with this template and. Right. So I guess that that's the string of tools that, that I'd like to use. [00:38:30] Speaker A: Yeah, I mean it would, it would definitely draft the email for you. You say like, hey, this is who I am. This is my website. Analyze my website, Define the icp. Now go write, you know, three email sequence. Then you just load it into instantly or whatever and do it. But yeah, dude, like, I agree, I agree. I think, I think that kind of question, like, what is so tedious and at scale that humans would have to do is not worth it anymore. And how does AI change like the Opportunity. [00:38:55] Speaker B: Yes. Because some things that really bother me are the things that I know would work. I know it would work. [00:39:03] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:39:03] Speaker B: But you, you know, I can't get myself to, you know, one of the things I have a sticky note I just wrote. Maybe I literally wrote to myself. Maybe just call every sign up. [00:39:17] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:39:18] Speaker B: Because we have so many, we have a, of signups. Right. So I look at our funnel a lot and, and this is the other side of focusing inward on things that probably don't have as big of an impact but. But they would have an immediate impact. Right. So when I look at our funnel and I see our onboarding and I see where these two drop off points are, I want to address those drop off points and a lot of that is UI and UX and it is dangerous to go stare at that for weeks and weeks. Yes. Instead of going out and getting more people into the top of the funnel. But we have, we have a great know design team and a great product person. And so me looking at that and saying let's have a few conversations about these drop off points and then they go off and kind of try to address them and come back and experiment. So that's good. But sometimes those drop off points, I mean they're real people and I just, I just want to call them. So I had a conversation yesterday with a few of the guys from Portland, Ruben Gomez and John Ewalt and that group that I'm still very close with and Reuben was like, just email them. Yeah, like, okay, fine, you can't call of them. But these people that drop off specifically, just email them, ask them why they dropped off. I was like, damn man, that's so annoying. [00:40:27] Speaker A: How many people a week are we talking? [00:40:29] Speaker B: Hundreds. [00:40:30] Speaker A: Not you, but someone could call that many people. You get a multi dialer and all this kind of stuff. Yeah, you could do it. [00:40:36] Speaker B: Yeah. And even if you just trimmed it down to I know that signup looks great. That that's exactly our icp. Call them because then it goes down. [00:40:43] Speaker A: They got to this critical point. [00:40:45] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:40:45] Speaker B: Yes, yes, exactly right. [00:40:48] Speaker A: Specifically for you, I think email could convert worse than phone calls or text just because of the type of customer you have. [00:40:56] Speaker B: Yeah, fair, fair. So the things we just talked about, the basically how interested and excited I got over Manus and what I could do with that. That's kind of what you are addressing and that's what you're finding in your videos. Do you have a sense of where it leads? Is it just to build an audience and then figure out what happens next? Is it let those ideas brew while knowing, let me just get through these a hundred days. I know it's good for me no matter what. It's good for me. It's good for my business. It's just good. And we'll worry about exactly what to do with it later. Is that how you're thinking? [00:41:31] Speaker A: Yeah, mostly like I am collecting emails and actually it's converting pretty well. Like YouTube views to email is converting at like 10%. [00:41:39] Speaker B: That's amazing. People are on YouTube. Click on a link and sign up for your email newsletter. Yeah, I think that's a real accomplishment right there. [00:41:48] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:41:48] Speaker A: So that's the goal for now, right? Is like I have this and then I have like a 30 day sequence, which is like a tip or a process or a tool or whatever for 30 days. That's kind of the opt in. After that, I don't know. After that, I don't know. I have a few ideas. The few ideas are they change every day. I think the most likely one, like the one thing I for sure learned with Kastos is selling to people for $19 a month is really silly. And I for sure will not do. [00:42:13] Speaker B: That again just because of the sheer number of people you need to convince. [00:42:16] Speaker C: Yep, yep. [00:42:18] Speaker A: So whatever it is, it's got to be real. B2B. [00:42:21] Speaker B: Do you have like a. A level of pricing that you think is healthy, appropriate? Is it like the $100 range or $500 a month range? [00:42:31] Speaker A: Like 10 grand? [00:42:33] Speaker B: Monthly or annually? [00:42:34] Speaker A: Annually or one time? [00:42:35] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:42:35] Speaker B: Okay. [00:42:36] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah. [00:42:38] Speaker A: An idea is like, I go in and train your 50 person CPA company on how to use AI. [00:42:43] Speaker B: I think there is a preposterously large opportunity around that. Just monstrously large. I don't know if you listened to the episode I did with Brian a few weeks ago. There's a lot of themes here. He's doing something similar in just building up an audience and then the opportunities that are coming out of that are related to what you're talking about. There are opportunities for products, for training, for mentoring, for coming into companies. I just, I cannot wrap my head around how big of an opportunity that is. And I think all of us underestimate how much money larger companies are willing to pay to get up to speed. [00:43:23] Speaker A: So my mom still works. She's 73, still works. Amazing. And I was down visiting her a couple weeks ago, and my sister, who's an attorney, we were talking about AI. They're like, yeah, I use ChatGPT. I use my own personal ChatGPT account. My free account at work. I'm like, well, first of all, you're putting a bunch of like company shit into a chatgpt. Like not cool, right? Because just for everybody, models are trained on stuff we do on free accounts, not on paid accounts. Second of all, they had no idea what Claude was. They'd never heard of Perplexity. They sure as shit had never heard of something like Manus or Gemini or whatever. And like they had never built a GPT. They don't have all their prompts saved somewhere. So like the things that you and I do as like, you know, a scale of 1 to 10, like 5 or 6, you know, level, like sophisticated is way above everyone else, even in the corporate world. [00:44:12] Speaker B: My question is, is management aware? Are the, are the buyers aware that they could introduce these things into their company, into their employees hands to make them better? Like, I assume a lot of CEOs are talking about this, right? And they're seeing it. It's impossible to ignore if you're at that level. But are people who make purchasing decisions, are they like, at what stage, are they of buyer readiness? Are they like the next person that comes in and makes this offer? For me, I'm saying yes. Or is it just kind of out there a little bit? I mean, that's really what the audience building does. If you're seen in authority, people want you to do it. [00:44:51] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:44:52] Speaker A: So you know my barometer for this is my wife, she's a hairstylist. Okay. And so this is like I get to see everybody, right? And so I ask her about this a lot because. [00:45:01] Speaker B: Okay. Because she has conversations with, with everyone. [00:45:03] Speaker A: Oh, dude, she, she's like, she's a hairstylist. She's really a therapist, right? Because like people are there for an hour or two or whatever and just get to. And so I ask her, I ask her like every week, like, hey, what's the vibe? And she goes, a lot of uncertainty, a lot of uncertainty. People are just scared. They don't know what's. We live in a very like, liberal area. So a lot of it is about trumpets, whatever, but a lot of uncertainty about jobs, okay. Especially for people who are in leadership roles. I don't know what's going to happen. [00:45:32] Speaker B: If you're 55 in management, you. I can understand that concern. [00:45:37] Speaker C: Yep. [00:45:38] Speaker A: So, so to, to your question, no, people are not like, we have to tackle this right now. This is a giant burning problem. But the, the step before it is, this is real. This is. I mean, the jobs report just came out today. It's the worst jobs report in five years. [00:45:56] Speaker C: Yep. [00:45:56] Speaker B: Not good. [00:45:57] Speaker A: I feel you and I are similar age. I feel so grateful that I see what's about to happen. It's so clear. Right. [00:46:03] Speaker B: We are. [00:46:04] Speaker A: It's that we're fucked. [00:46:05] Speaker B: We're so lucky. Yes. The ability to see something bad happening and filter that through. Well, there's an opportunity in helping people, therefore, I know how to maybe take advantage of. Isn't a nice way to say capitalize. [00:46:19] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, capitalize, sure. [00:46:20] Speaker C: Yep. [00:46:20] Speaker A: It's so obvious. It's so obvious. So we're going to have massive unemployment or just call it shifting job markets. [00:46:27] Speaker B: Yes. [00:46:28] Speaker A: That will transform pain. I used to be super scared about it. [00:46:34] Speaker B: Okay, can you, can you go into that a little bit? What made you worried about it? You filtered it through your own personal lens of. I'm worried about what's going to happen to me, my family, and what this means. Okay. [00:46:43] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:46:43] Speaker A: And I run a podcasting company. You know, is that even relevant? Like, what's, you know, how can I do this? Everything's so much more competitive. We're kind of stalled and growth, blah, blah. All that is still true. But now I take not the, like, victim approach, but the, like, I'm like, on this wave, you know, I'm on this wave. I'm going to go help these people. We're going to help drive adoption and education and like, best practices on this stuff. Like, I'm not the victim. [00:47:10] Speaker B: Yep. I mean, you know, I used to run an e commerce company, now run an AI company and feel infinitely more optimistic because of that. You look at tariffs, you look at all these consumer trends, you look at discretionary spending ability. I'm very happy to not be in the E commerce universe. AI is very competitive. But the trend going in your direction makes everything so much easier, better, and more optimistic. [00:47:37] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:47:37] Speaker B: Yeah. But by coincidence, we have gone. I think I. It's safe to say small law firms have been like a major theme for us over the last few weeks. [00:47:47] Speaker A: Shocking. [00:47:48] Speaker B: Yep. Just makes. Yeah, it makes sense. You're. You're, you're solo and, and every phone call matters. Every ever. And everyone really wants and needs new customers. And I guess something for 50, 100 bucks a month that helps you do that is. Is where you spend money. [00:48:04] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:48:05] Speaker A: And they're surely starting to feel the squeeze. [00:48:08] Speaker B: I often look back and kick myself for not acting on trends that I was early to. And even in terms of, like, investment, like, I remember when Tesla first came out, I was like, that's obviously, obviously going to Be unbelievably successful, didn't act on it. I mean, trends happen constantly and we are always first because we're so online and so on Twitter. And it is worth taking a minute and taking the time to say, okay, if I assume that I'm right in feeling this trend coming on, what should I do? What, what, where should I put my attention and my money and my focus and my company and whatever else. [00:48:50] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:48:51] Speaker A: And I agree. And like, I kick myself. Like, I'm kind of on the AI train like fully now. I should have been in hindsight two and a half years ago. But I don't think it's wrong to be a little like, hey, let's wait and see. Okay, this definitely stuck. Let's go. Like, you're not going to buy Bitcoin at 3 cents. [00:49:08] Speaker B: Right. [00:49:09] Speaker A: But that part, 600, that's good. [00:49:12] Speaker C: Yes. [00:49:12] Speaker B: Buying Bitcoin at 20,000 would still have been an acknowledgment, a correct acknowledgment of a trend. [00:49:18] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:49:19] Speaker B: Okay. Well, I'm very interested to see where the 100 days of AI leads you. And I will absolutely update on some of the hacks, maybe the hacks that work the best on my side. I will hold off on talking about for a little while, but know that this, I think this is the right mindset and tinkering and experimentation toward these things that feel unscalable but are no longer impossible to accomplish. [00:49:48] Speaker A: I'll give you another one. Is you mentioned like a hundred TikTok accounts. I would try that you could set up the automations to do all of that. You know, hey, Gen 11 labs, automatic scripting, you know, innate in like it would be a day of work to set that up and a few thousand dollars a month of credits and run through. [00:50:08] Speaker B: I've seen, I've watched some videos of people kind of talk through how they do it and it is, it is amazing the just the leverage, like everything from the script. You don't have to come up with a script. You just give your website to tools and say come up with a bunch of different scripts, different angles. And here are five ads that work well for us and come up with variations. [00:50:29] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:50:29] Speaker B: Now here's, here's this gap I want to identify. I want that and I don't know how to do it. And I want. Not willing to pay. I want to pay someone to help me accomplish it. And I think that exists all over the place because what you see on YouTube and on Twitter, you see the explanation of how to do it. And it drives the desire to accomplish it, but it does not. It does not close the gap on being able to do it yourself. And that gap, just put a dollar amount on how much it costs to get across that gap. And people want. People want to pay it. [00:51:07] Speaker A: Yeah, I know a few people we can talk, but. [00:51:10] Speaker C: Yeah, but. [00:51:11] Speaker A: But it's like any finding any of these, like, specialist freelancers or consultants, it's like, gosh, you're going to interview them. You don't know how. You don't know how to interview for this. You don't know how to find these people. [00:51:20] Speaker B: It's all. That's why it's a lot of. It is kind of word of mouth that leads directly into, like, I heard you're good. Let's go. Tell me how much. When can we start? [00:51:27] Speaker C: Yep. Yep. [00:51:28] Speaker A: All right. [00:51:29] Speaker B: Well, I'm going to go have lunch right now with another entrepreneur. Maybe their situation is more stressful. I'll come out of it feeling even better. And then I'm going to put my. My dad cabin hat on and take, I don't even know, six girls to the local high school football game. And then they're going to come back here and they're going to have 10 people sleep over, and I'll be exhausted by Sunday night, But it's the best. [00:51:51] Speaker C: Epic. [00:51:51] Speaker B: How about you? You have any plans for the weekend? [00:51:53] Speaker A: Yeah, let's see. We have volleyball, we have basketball. Oh, and I'm going down to New Haven to meet a work friend who's in New York for the weekend. So that's what I'm doing tomorrow. [00:52:01] Speaker B: Okay. Very nice. If you're on. If you're on Yale's campus and you see Taft Cosmetics, that's my uncle's shop. At least it used to be. I think he sold it. [00:52:10] Speaker A: All right, cool. [00:52:11] Speaker B: All right, brother. Thanks for coming on. [00:52:13] Speaker A: Thanks, Jordan. [00:52:13] Speaker B: Appreciate it. [00:52:14] Speaker C: Yep.