(21) How Semrush’s ex-VP of Brand Builds a Founder Brand From Scratch w/ Olga Andrienko (CMO at Foxtery) - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CqDrLa9qCVc

Transcript: (00:00) Every company has something that's broken. Carrier is at stake if uh they don't experiment their on their own. If you start implementing AI, I think it's impossible that you will end up with the same team uh that you started this with. They're not starting from zero. They're starting from a lot of company knowledge. (00:19) They're starting like from knowing internal systems. Like now it's an interesting time where everyone's like hugging their job because the market is so so scary. What would your advice be to marketers on what they should do, learn? All right, before we dive in, you're listening to the executive brand podcast with me, your host, Finn Thommeer. (00:40) Each week, I sit down with top B2B CEOs, executive, and founders to break down their playbooks. If you've not yet, it would really help if you subscribe or follow the show because it helps us get on better guests and create better content for you guys. All right, let's dive in. All right, I'm here with Olga Andreenko, the CMO at Foxtter. (01:00) Foxtter is a preede startup building AIdriven corporate training that quickly converts employee expertise into tailored courses. Before joining as a CMO there, she was almost for 12 years at Seamur. She joined when they were doing 5 million in revenue all the way through IPO and beyond. uh and went from head of social media, head of global marketing, VP brand, and then the last role was VP of marketing operations, which I think is a very stark contrast. (01:28) So, I definitely want to dive into that. The reason why I wanted to have you on the show is because obviously you helped build one of the most well-known brands in SAS with Seamrush, helped build out the employee advocacy program there, which is really relevant. you're doing an amazing job with your own executive brand and now with your new role at Foxtory. (01:48) You're kind of building in public as the CMO and you're sharing all your campaigns and lessons and mistakes publicly on LinkedIn. And so I think that's really awesome. So, thank you for joining and let me know if anything should be kind of amended or added there in the intro. >> Yeah, that's like that's super accurate. like I I was I expected to give like a 30 secondond pitch but uh you nailed it amazingly well. Thank you very much. (02:12) Yeah, excited to be here. >> So I remember we met a couple of months ago for coffee in Berlin and that was when you kind of had just wrapped up at Samrush and you were it felt like you were really excited to just go solo and do some advising and vibe code your own SAS tool. I'm just curious why you ended up taking the the the full-time role like what thought process went behind joining a company again and obviously at a very different stage to where you left Samrush. (02:43) >> Yeah. So, I like to reflect on my career every now and again. And then I did this a lot in the summer. And I realized um that that's the only gap I have is that like I never really built anything from ground up. Uh and also I realized that I don't want to go solo. uh because solo is lonely and I really love being a part of the team and being building something larger than myself. (03:15) uh and uh yes I I vi vibe coded the employee advocacies but then well MVP was great but realizing how much effort I need to put in alone um to build like a secure website with payout and then just uh publish this and push it further that's something that I decided that I will park and uh then I met the founder uh because I was a speaker at one of the webinars and uh he joined and then later we connected and uh yeah I felt uh I was always passionate about employee uh learning because I was passionate for employee (03:55) advocacy so I always really really love like investing in the team and uh that just felt like a great match >> when you posted about your decision to join Fox and I think you actually wrote a little bit about work life balance and It's kind of interesting because I feel like there's somewhat of a trend of maybe marketing leaders being burned out and either going into this fractional advising or and I've seen you do this, I've seen Tom Wentworth do this where he was CMO at Recorded Future, a big company and then joined Incident.io (04:35) which you know is series B startup and I think part of his reason was similar to yours where he just wanted to have more ownership and actually get his hands dirty and build stuff including with AI. >> Do you think that's can you expand on that a little bit? >> Sure. So in my my in my last uh role at Samrush uh so I I ch I switched from brand to operations because I thought that okay like well marketing um marketing is the same marketing as it used to be but now with different systems different back end different (05:10) operations and I understand all marketing channels I work most of them being like well uh the owner of them or the key stakeholder and um now I need to rebuild all the systems and uh being a part of the large public company means that you're very restricted in terms of AI that you use in terms of approvals of different software like if the terms and conditions like terms of service say that they will be learning on your data there's no way uh this like this software would be chosen >> only like very secure software so it (05:50) just I cannot not just look at the startup and and then if I want to test the product then I would not be able to give that access to our systems and here I just ask founder like what's the restrictions and then he's basically like he said none obviously GDPR and that's just like common sense uh but apart from that then I can just test anything and uh I now I talk to uh marketers and well corporations and they feel that they're like lagging behind. (06:22) Like now it's an interesting time where everyone's like hugging their job because the market is so um uh so scary. >> Yeah. >> At the same time, they sometimes feel stuck because they know and they realize that they're not learning fast enough and there's a lot of formal. So I was like happy to trade the even like Sirius B like it's just like it's it's a scaleup and there also like this is already the like brand where you have a lot of like reputation to break uh if something goes wrong and if it's your if you're in a pre like if you succeed (06:59) that's great like if you don't like if your experiment >> doesn't that's just you don't you don't lose much. So this is a really really great sandbox to play in. >> Yeah. I I had a question about this, you know, going from VP brand to VP marketing office. But before that, just based on what you said, I'm just curious. (07:20) Do you have any advice that you tend to give marketers who are maybe in that position? They are holding on to their role. It's a scary market. Lots of layoffs obviously happening. What would your advice be to marketers on what they should do, learn, etc. >> Well, depends on how much free time they want to invest. But this is like now I would say that their like career is at stake. (07:49) If uh they don't experiment on their own, they can VIP code some solution, they can at least launch the MMP uh API would be such a low cost like within like hundred bucks a month they could be able to sustain like lowable super base and uh well APIs. >> Yeah. Uh so even just gathering the market intel and just playing out with the tools without selling them uh would be great. (08:20) Uh and another thing is depending on what API and what AI tools are already available within the organization. But if that's Google then they're actually lucky because Google suite has a lot of stuff like well Gemini has well image and video generation baked in. Google has Vert.ex X AI Google has OPPO uh and they can really try and even build something within their workspace uh that could help their daily work and really succeed. (08:50) So it really depends on what infrastructure they have already. >> Yeah. And and you you mentioned lovable first. Is that is this kind of learning how to vibe code something as a marketer? Is that almost like your number one? I just I just use it. Um and I also have access to bold. Well, I would not recommend Corser since it's more of like development ground, but yeah, either level bold base 44, but yeah, lovable I think is just uh the easiest and they're now like really adding functions. (09:24) Um but yeah, whatever works like ripplet parasell. So yeah, just um just whatever tool you have access to there is uh yeah there are plenty of options >> just do you have any resources that you use I don't know a course or a YouTuber or something that you found particularly useful or just getting in there and >> yeah just getting getting in there and I well I I learned so well so first of all also I joined the loable accelerator on and so they they're they've launched one they also occasionally launch like some (09:56) gigs like she codes. >> Yeah. Hackathons like she builds. Yeah. >> Yeah. Yeah. So that's something I would recommend. Um and uh they all teach how to use their platforms. >> Mhm. uh or also when I was vibe coding the uh the my MVP I was just asking Claude and Chad GPT and just like this is where like I don't understand this like just explain this and also YouTube um just a step step by-step guide on how to set up everything in loable there bunch of courses in there. (10:32) >> Yeah. Now, we're going to uh span a little bit from like lessons from Seamrush, which is big company, public company, to then your new role at Foxtory. But I'm just curious at Samrush when you made that transition from VP brand to VP marketing ops. Obviously, I guess you spend a lot of time trying to figure out what what workflows should be built, what could be built, what can be automated, where could we leverage AI that would have a big impact. (10:59) Where do you right now see let's say for the larger company some of the lowest hanging fruit or highest leverage places to leverage AI NADN vibe coding some of the use cases that you feel like would apply to a good number of companies >> the most effective uh departments outside of product uh would be sales and customer success uh that's what was outside of my realm. (11:30) >> Yeah. uh but because uh these functions are so large and also the cost of software uh is incredibly high there like it's nothing compared to marketing department that's like well even the smallest automation uh or improvement in uh well in qualification of leads or some uh some automation would really save uh costs and uh also well just even prepping how sales team talks to to the customers or um optimizing how customer success uh and well just answers and handles queries um or where this information goes afterwards (12:16) because I believe that uh the like not all companies really learn based on their conversations um with customers from sales and customer success and this could be well a gold mine of ideas for marketing for product for also uh preparation for the sales enablement >> and there's not like a full cycle of learning >> uh for example >> what I tried to do like we were not able to get full access and AI connected to chorus AI and zoom info but what I was able to do is uh export the conversations and transcripts and then (12:54) we process them uh with proprietary AI and uh then uh use this for uh content creation. So that's uh that's where also you can plug in marketing u and uh yeah I was very very focused on optimizing how we write content also content guidelines and well verifying content that comes from all sorts of teams but those are um still like all marketing um optimizations and automations are still um less impactful that you would what you would launch in sales and customer success. (13:34) But for for you in the marketing department, what's maybe what's maybe one AI workflow that you were able to implement that you maybe the proudest of and then what's one that you weren't able to implement that you were just really I don't know sad because you had I don't know high hopes or expectations. the well the one that uh we really implemented quite quickly and I was very happy because uh that's where I kind of managed to show the teams how AI could really help them work and lowered down this uh >> fear or unsettling unsettling attitude (14:14) towards AI is where we removed uh the time for reporting and all the teams were reporting they were like spending from 5 to 10 I was uh a month on a management report and uh so we standardized four slides that they had to submit and uh we asked them for that in the presentation. We collected everything and well Samrush well is using Google suite so we had Gemini uh approved. (14:47) Um so then uh Gemini analyzed all of the content from all of the teams and processed the consolidated management report and teams went from like spending up to 10 uh hours like to two hours. >> Um and then also we as a team spent as a team of three people spent at first five hours collectively and then two hours. So I cut down the time and also this was something that was annoying for teams >> soul draining. Yeah. (15:17) >> So another another automation was also very easy when we calculated share of voice from influencers and there was a spreadsheet where um there was analysis of compet competitors and then share of voice within 40 influences per each competitor. Mhm. >> So that is manual work analyzing how much mentions of Samrush, how much mentions of other brands uh were on X were on LinkedIn and that saved like that was fully automated within two weeks and that saved um influencer manager like six, seven hours of manual work that she didn't like. So um that's (15:59) where I really believe most companies should start with is like routine tasks and repetitive tasks because they have not hired their workforce for those tasks. They they need to get creative. >> What's one you weren't able to implement that you felt like would have been great? >> Yeah. (16:20) Uh that was a complex one and that's content creation. And uh I believe like well that's like custom GPS don't work that well and uh you can train AI uh no matter like if you're even well five pages instructions. Uh so um I wanted to have the um Slack bot uh where people drop their brief then Slackbot sends this to NAN uh form and then uh NAN has access to rag like just a huge database of all uh knowledge base of all like product descriptions of all guides uh that Samrush had like all everything basically like best practices, worst practices (17:12) and then also um uh like a well 9 10 page separate prompt uh that would actually have the analysis of best practices and worst practices and um instructions on how to write content for every channel whether it's email whether it's article whether it's like press release. So um when this brief comes in then AI well selects the content from rag that would be relevant. (17:43) Then there's this prompt with instructions and then there's the first draft. Once there is a first draft, then there is another uh step with AI editor that also has the instructions. >> And after that, there is a specific uh Slack channel where I would I already started poaching people I really like respected in the copyrightiting space. (18:09) So I planned to hire three of them and uh then the content would be dropped in that channel. and whoever is available from like outside copyriters who are like well overpriced but they like they they were supposed to be editors they would be reviewing the content and manually uh editing this and then when they click uh done within the Slack channel only then this content will be sent to the person who requested this >> and this was for any kind of content like a press release a blog post a LinkedIn post >> yeah which was supposed to be that. (18:48) Well, at first what I managed to launch was the content checker that had the guidelines that like was trained on best practices and worst practices in content and was aimed at emails uh or landing pages. Mhm. >> Uh and uh the problem I was solving was that email team was bombarded with a lot of requests and then sometimes content was really really not what they would >> like to get. (19:19) So I was kind of gatekeeping them and also ensuring that whoever works in the content uh anywhere in company like they know um the guidelines and they're able to edit the content based on the assessment of AI. And what was the bottleneck to getting this implemented? Was it just time or was there >> It's just a complex thing to get gather all of the knowledge base really label this uh and then also set up the whole flow and test it out. (19:53) And we tried the third party solution that didn't really work. And yeah, this was just a complex build also with a lot of experiments needed to be done before this would be a working uh solution because still like AI content is like well it's like it's the first use case everybody started implementing but at the same time like it's just nowhere near the quality uh that >> how do you think about managing the the the the people things that come up with this because obviously That would make probably at least some people obsolete. (20:29) >> Yes. Uh for sure. And then now well it's impossible to um if you start implementing AI, I think it's impossible that you will end up with the same team uh that you started this with. And some people they would just uh yeah they they they would need to either to switch jobs or they would um yeah become obsolete. (20:50) at the same time like it's uh you can do a lot more if your systems are automated. Uh so it just if you're well the larger organizations really struggle right now because uh especially well like I would say in Europe and where the um the layoff laws >> are stricter than in US. Uh so they are implementing AI at the same time they they cannot really um shrink their teams. Yes. (21:22) >> Uh but they have uh well if that's where I really believe that this reskilling or educating existing uh teams is like so powerful because if people have this like growth mindset if they're ready to learn they they're not starting from zero. They're starting from a lot of company knowledge. (21:42) they're starting like from knowing internal systems. Every company has something that's broken. Uh so ultimately they can um just reroute their workforce and solve new problems. So I do believe that it just while the systems are automated, people who are really like eager to stick with you and who are eager to learn, those are the people who will take you forward. (22:07) I'm going kind of off my agenda here, but I'm I'm I'm pursuing my curiosity. Who do you think within the marketing department in that new world, let's say, with AI and automations and NAN and VIP coding, who who will be the people on the marketing team with high leverage? Like I've seen some people for example see that there will only be you need the kind of AI native the people who are amazing at prompting and vibe coding and building AI stuff and then there's the the brand people who have amazing taste and you only need those two people. Do (22:44) you agree with this disagree with this? Where do you land on? I just always thought okay there well people who are great with uh machines uh and algorithms and there are people who are great with humans and psychology. So those are like technically performance and brand like we're digital and brand and and uh there definitely need to be like both sides and I would I always actually thought and well I come from like a social media background but I felt that social media because people spend so much time on social and uh people long for the (23:20) community right now they need support they and we follow people we don't follow brands it's it just it's now an hard to create an account for a brand that's worth following. At the same time, those people are closer to the audience and not to the product. And uh that's why my input was always very powerful and I was actually one well always like one of the loudest voices in the marketing room because I was speaking on behalf of our audience because I know what they're saying and uh so and if people spend five hours on (23:56) social then it's like the largest chunk of time they have in a day and uh now we get people who are uh social media native and uh that they're an AI native. So there's a lot of power the social media manager actually has like um often it's a junior marketer and they're don't leverage their authority that much. (24:20) Uh but this is one of the most powerful positions I believe in marketing team with >> how has this changed? I mean you were you were running Samrush's social media I guess almost 10 years ago. Yeah. >> Um, and how how has that and and you just said something like it's now an art >> to create a a brand social media presence or something like that you just said. (24:51) So like I'm just curious what you meant by that and then how it how it's changed to 10 years ago. I was I when I joined uh Twitter was big and even Google+ was big and uh so I just used um those platforms to really have start conversations. So I was commenting and engaging more than we were posting. My posting was >> through the brand page or >> Yeah, (25:20) through the brand page. Yeah. And then I realized that we could start a Twitter chat. So that actually what brought our community together and Twitter was really really interesting space in the sense that you could create community together and it was public and everybody could see that your community were getting together and uh how I actually started like pushing my own brand I I started posting a selfie after every Twitter chat. (25:45) Uh so when I was saying like thank you for joining like everybody started like realizing who was behind the brand. So I really also encourage anybody who's like working behind the profile really show um and like make it more relatable and just yeah like showcase your own uh work in sense of art of creating the uh profile. uh this is well it's very difficult to create something that that is worth following right now on the brand page and I think well Tik Tok accounts are fun in that sense but if you go outside of Tik Tok to other social media then (26:25) it's mostly never fun and uh it's just more of like product announcements and no one wants to follow that so just really be having the green light even to test and talk more not about the company and the product but like things and problems that your audience um cares about and also in a fun way this is not what every brand is allowed to do and not and uh right now if you're not funny like if you're not also just >> do you have any favorite examples of B2B brands doing a good job with a company page on LinkedIn (27:08) Well, I would say well I'm very proud of what we've did we did with Seamrush accounts. We were very funny uh and uh now it's changing a bit uh because uh enterprise poll is is quite heavy and that changes uh the and I can see this like right now I well HubSpot was also funny and uh but HubSpot well they didn't even push their product they were just funny like it was uh interesting to see that this is purely brand play this is like they're not there for the product and yeah those I really love uh but this yeah this is not the brand page (27:50) um >> who came to mind just now >> um the Henry from Passion Fruit >> oh yes yeah yeah yeah >> so uh it's h but this is such a unique content also um a bait from the from Clay like he's also one of my favorite creators uh so the most of the uh Well, most of the uh companies they try to leverage the the the brand uh of someone who's like unique in their uh creative mindset. (28:26) But in terms of companies, well, there are some fun libraries accounts uh on Tik Tok. But the Tik Tok is where um I think uh the management lets companies run loose a bit. But when it comes to LinkedIn, this is like a graveyard. >> The serious. Yeah. Now, that leads us, I guess, based on what you said also with with uh Henry from Passion Fruit to employee advocacy and you helped build out the employee advocacy program at Seamrush. (28:54) Can you talk about that a little bit? Why you did it, how you did it, how it worked and how you how you activated people? I believe I strongly believe that companies should create content for their people if they really want to scale uh the uh program and one thing there there will always be some few passionate people that will post themselves like I always like my content is precious like it's mine uh this is my voice and then there were a couple of people like that but most of the time like people just say hey like give me uh what to promote and I'll I'll announce (29:30) announced it and um most of the companies they don't do that at scale and that's where the the program stalls. Uh so what we created at first this was uh with the freelancer so we had the channel we had a um um a board on Monday where anybody from the product uh marketing or from HR could post the news. (29:59) There was a project manager on my side who processed that. She hired the freelancer and uh we were producing from 10 to 15 posts um per news and uh then we had a slack channel where we tagged uh people uh and we we shared the Google uh doc with them and uh people would go in the dock and then just highlight the post and say taken taken taken. (30:28) So we knew who would be posting uh this and this was like an ongoing process of uh there's news we take it to freelancer freelancer creates uh the doc we post it and this was constant and because Samrush is a big company there was like a lot of a lot of news circling around and then well different people resonated with different news some were passionate about HR some were passionate about the product updates and uh that scaled plus to like 10 million uh impressions per year. (31:00) And yeah, there were a lot of people uh participating in the program. And then for the sales team, it was more structured with the specific software where they would come in, they had the posts and then this was >> what was the software? >> I cannot remember the this was the part that was managed more by HR brand like we created content. (31:23) there were a lot more impressions like overall from coming from employees. >> So you had news announcements per news announcement you would have your copyriter write like 10 15 different things and then people could claim it. So I guess per news announcements there was maximum 15 posts going out because >> well some for example it was like there was a post from me but I was not >> yeah mine was unique so there was more um announcements but uh also from when for example of course the executive team had their own um and it's it it was and we were not counting (32:02) the exact team in our reporting And then was there was was everyone in the Slack channel where they could pick a post or did you select people who would be part of the wh what what is the incentive? I mean I'm trying to think especially if it's like company announcement is like hey we launched this feature or we partnered with this company what why why were people posting it? Were they just kind of like was it proud? Was it usually something that they team worked on and they were able to sort of show look we accomplished (32:33) this or like what were people's reasons? >> I think it's also just depends on the culture of a company like um if people are happy and they want to share news they share news. uh if this is something about the things that they were working on like well you you're working on the product launch and then just or there was exciting product that we were launching and we knew that this was like very very timely. (33:04) So this is um yeah I will I was like I was sharing always just because I was like so passionate but people people are happy to also be more active on LinkedIn and then I believe there are all a lot of people who are cautious of posting because they're afraid that somebody's going to think that they're looking for a job. But if company if company provides you this content and if you're feel supported then it's great that you're more active um and then you don't have to really create content yourself. (33:34) >> Do you see any difference between employee advocacy and executive thought leadership or is it >> Yeah. Yeah. It's it's just very different. It's like well one is just um um it's a surround sound. Well uh in terms of uh employees well you can have someone from HR someone from IT someone from marketing someone from customer success their audience will not be your target audience this is a surround sound of like and I saw this as a real estate uh in the well just when person scrolls their feed they're well they might not (34:10) be looking to buy but they just like they're looking for like they're just brain consumes like what brands are mentioned And um in terms of executive leadership, this is where it's like the the audience really differs. Either that's investors or that's either CEOs or seuite board members like uh media like they're very very different uh audience who is like following um those accounts. (34:43) And I think you when we met we talked about at Seamrush you guys activated a couple of your execs but that was kind of separate from the brand that was managed by PR if I remember correctly. >> Yeah. So I never touched the uh executive accounts like in my almost 20 12 years. So that was uh something that I well I managed the PR team but that's like that's the PR team who's always like there's a combination of press release and the announcements from the CEO and the seuite and later like uh we activated accounts a lot more after the (35:21) IPO and then after we IPOed that like we had the PR separate from brand and that's where I leave um the it's the we tried to activate the accounts more but there was uh well the president of Samrush Eugene uh he's great like he is the one who always we had the Facebook group for clients he was always there when we had crisis situations it was him and me and Twitter replying to people so also you just need to pick uh the executive who's like naturally drawn uh to listening to the audience to engaging with them. Uh then (36:05) well you just you can't engage someone who is like who is not there like if it's just a post but there's no response a letter that's uh that's not the connection that you want to build. So I believe it's very very important to capitalize like on the existing passion uh for connecting with the audience and that's what like was done with the president's account. (36:30) Now to transition here. You wrote a post about a week ago that I found really interesting and I want to just share it here because you went from basically I'm not going to touch my executive's LinkedIn >> to now you are working with your with your founder at Foxtory at the >> Yes. >> company where you're CMO now and and I think you're helping him >> Yes. (36:55) um be active on LinkedIn and you broke down kind of I want to break this down a little bit in a moment but basically you said uh here's the five channels I picked for Foxy LinkedIn thought leadership and outbound email events SEO influencer marketing so just on the LinkedIn piece why why did you pick this and then how how are you activating him like how are you supporting your founder and and orchestrating this process Um so we are not uh starting the thought leadership ads just yet. (37:32) The goal is to start posting well activate the account more and since for example there there is um uh we connect with a lot of audience through hey reach. So let's say that there's a well database from people from the conference. We enrich it with clay. We have link LinkedIn accounts. So we put it in hey reach and hey reach starts like if it's not connection it starts connecting it starts engaging with the posts and then we send the message. (38:00) So if that happens but there is no content on the founders's page that looks super weird. Uh there's and if a person accept the connection request even if they're not replying to the message they still start seeing the content from the founder in their feed especially if we start connecting and commenting on their content which happens manually. (38:21) So I need to put um just my founders like face and profile on the radar of our target audience and uh what we do there is a combination of post there product posts uh where he talks about the problem we solve but then ties it into the features. Uh then uh there is his own thoughts on um like founders thoughts on building and then that's what he records in audio message and that's what we transform in terms of um content and what I also did uh so I picked the um profiles of founders that I like >> and well a ply like many of them and Uh many of (39:09) them were on your podcast as well. >> Mhm. >> Uh Peter Caputo for sure from Data Box. Uh so I scraped all of their content uh with the reactions. Uh and then what I did with AI agent, I also uh well put it in the spreadsheet with all the text of the posts with the reaction and I filtered out the top ones. (39:34) And of course they're from different niches. uh but uh that doesn't matter because I really wanted to see what content performs and then I also like asked AI uh that knew a lot about uh Fox 3 uh to suggest and rewrite the posts in the same format or the same kind of like framing as those uh founders >> uh but tailored to our topic. (40:04) So I kind of basically uh took the winning formats that I could experiment with uh and transform it into like into unique content tailored on our brand. >> And this is for example like this is a workflow that lives in N8N. No, that's actually I used well I used Fifi for scraping and I manually added all the accounts but in bulk and then I got like a huge JSON uh that's impossible to work with and uh I used Manus. (40:36) >> Manos. Okay. >> How do you spell that? >> M A N U S. >> Manus AI. And uh so it it can process large chunks of data. And then I didn't really want to have this. This is not a continuous workflow. >> So for anything that is not continuous and oneoff, you don't want to build in it and >> right. Sure. Yep. >> And uh yeah, manus transformed it into spreadsheet. (41:05) I have my well uh Google Drive connected to it. So it created the spreadsheet. I have this all in row data tab by tab by every in well by every founder. So I can look at it every time I want. >> And then what's your workflow from there? You pick three per week and send it over to your founder. >> I I asked it to create like um well 20 for me >> for example >> and then I saw what um well what it gave me like half of it of course is like garbage >> uh which is fine and then um I then we discuss how we can tweak and then there's manual editing uh coming (41:44) after after that step. by you or by the founder? >> By me. And also, well, there's a marketer that works with with me on this. >> Interesting. And then you just basically schedule it out on your founders's LinkedIn. >> And do you see this more like so the the voice notes that your founder records? That's only for certain posts. (42:06) This kind of the building and public founder stories type stuff. >> Yes. Yeah. Yes. And then for the rest like he approves what he sees. And then there's still like well but we we talk to him like every day. So it's not like it's not his content. It's like well it's his product. He's the main chief product officer as well. (42:26) So uh he's a subject matter expert like in in this in corporate learning. So uh yeah the well we constantly have insights from him. So based on this insights we build something and that's where he just uh then approves and the next step is for me like well for this week even to create the we'll start creating blog and then I'm combining digital PR with this and we're collecting different studies well we'll be transforming them into infographics and this is what I will also be using the founder brand for. (43:00) So he will be pushing this infographics which is like the type of format that really works on LinkedIn and hopefully that like would add a bit of virality and also just attention to his profile. So that was like that would be something that he would not be a part of in well because this would be different data from like public sources >> and that would be the this would be the post that would not be like based on his thoughts. (43:32) So you're finding research about I guess uh the learning and development space. >> Yes. Uh first like for ideiation I just asked well this was like a chadypty agent that went and also just deep research from Gemini uh that pulled all of the recent studies on uh on HR learning and development corporate learning >> some McKenzie stuff and uh just uh >> the recent yeah recent data and uh then we would group like and there were around 15 ideas so like well 10 is now I think the like backlog and uh we would collect and curate this data in one well in in one category in (44:19) one topic and then we would like mention the data sources and that's like yeah that's like legal curation uh if we mention and site them and uh yeah that would help the blog that would help the links and that would also help the LinkedIn >> and then you use like nano banana or something to generate the graphic from that no that would be a freelancer creating infographics. Yeah. (44:41) >> Interesting. Why no AI there? It's just not accurate enough. >> It's just not it's just ugly. Like all the infographics like even in Canva like well and if I asked it just it can only create simple stuff like if you want some circles if you want some like well even like remotely like I also really love clean infographics. (45:02) >> This is somehow like not something I I tried Gemspark. I tried um Canva um and yeah well Google Google suite would not create like Nano Banana would not create a good infographic as well. So like um this is just too complex in terms of like building blocks. >> Interesting. How would you rate your process if you had to rate it zero out of 10 in terms of how well it's working so far? I mean it's still early days right now. (45:34) Yeah, it's like it's three out of 10. I think in terms of my preparation, I'm really happy like also uh even this part where like I I want to be data driven. I want to understand what worked for different founders. I don't want and I always really believe that >> when even at seminars like I really learned um emotive marketing from like from FMCG brands like I really didn't like the SAS uh market in terms of what it can >> teach me about marketing. (46:03) Uh so I went to learn somewhere else and here also like I just need to see what works for other for other companies and other uh niches like it's not the HR tech that I'm looking at. >> Interesting. And then the voice notes you they just happen in Slack or something and then you just >> in Telegram. (46:24) Yeah, it's uh in Telegram like well it could be Slack or Telegram but yeah now now we're so small we're not using like any any chat software. >> Yeah. So if I had to recap you're you're leveraging your founder brand. So you you're you're using Hey Reach to connect to I think you said 200 people a week. So you're sending out >> connection requests to L &D leaders, HR leaders who are ICPs. (46:49) You don't just build a cold list. You actually grab like a list of a conference >> that you you attended or maybe even didn't attend. >> Yeah. Attended or didn't attend. Uh but still there's an app where we we like the well we sent them messages within the networking app as well like whether they replied or not replied but we still want to also connect. (47:10) Uh the same would have like the same happens with websummit. Uh there are a lot more people there's like but app is downloaded by everybody. So we connect both in the app and on LinkedIn. >> Um and yeah that's like where the connection is long lasting whether the app just dies once the is over. >> Yeah. (47:31) And then you're posting three posts a week through your founders profile using the process that you just described to create different types of content. Founder stories through a voice note, product updates, and then these kind of infographics that are generated from from the the the the external research that you're curating. >> And then how would you how how did the conversation go with your founder on like how to measure this? Like are you guys expecting inmount leads? Are you guys expecting? >> Yeah. Yeah. Leads. Uh and uh this is the (48:04) complex like well just I'm not I I'm not reporting like specifically on his brand and then specifically on the outreach like the goal is still like if you early then whatever you do that needs to bring in the leads. Right now the the product is not launched like it's going to go live this week >> hopefully. (48:26) So that's where I cannot really measure. um still like it's only the um it's only the demo requests and then just closed beta communication. Uh but that's not like that's not the high scale that I would measure. I would still measure the traffic on the website >> uh who stays um for how long and then tweak everything that I'm doing. (48:51) So it's just yeah now it's fully prep. So, um, in terms of the preparation and how it's going, I would rate this like probably seven out of 10. But like in terms of results, like it's just three out of 10 or two out of 10 because it's too early. >> Yeah. How when you say early, like is this something where you feel like okay, we just need to do this for 3 months or we need to do this for 12 months. (49:11) >> In terms of founder brand, I believe we need to do this continuously for years to come. >> Yes. Uh so and that's something where like the the startups uh really really like have high leverage uh and then they're super passionate they're focused and also I think what once founder really sees traction like he would be so much more involved himself because he would be connected like with a lot more people and there will be a lot of discussions >> right >> uh I've not well I've never seen like a person who just sees like the boo (49:44) engagement and they're like yeah whatever like So uh in terms of hey reach and uh mass outbound our first campaign was not great but that was expected. Now I'm doing a lot more personalized things but I also will be trying the manual outreach where we reach out and say hey like we will build a course for you like uh just or even uh I I'm want to build the tracking system where I would select like maybe hundred uh of ICPS and in SAS and then SAS is great because there's always like a new feature every month or every even (50:22) like every week now for some and uh we can track like we can basically scrape uh their information about their new feature and we can create the course for them without their input especially if there's like some overviews on YouTube like we would then take the information from that video we take the information from their website some overviews like well that or comments on like G2 and then we would be able to really have like super tailored super customized um things where we like we outreach but we already have like something so custom (51:00) that they would be inclined to see this without them like not even lifting a finger. Um so that's where I would say this is like next step but u yeah this is it cannot be scaled like properly >> and I assume you also be using thought leader ads and yeah >> you're using something maybe like triggery to scrape the people who are engaging with the organic founder post to run some warm outbound something like that >> hey reach does that so I can uh I can copy paste a link uh and it would well autoop populate the list of people who (51:37) engaged and then pushed them to a campaign. >> Yeah, I would I would personally say I'm not a really big fan of this. When I got outreach like, "Hey, Olga, you engaged with that content and this is not I immediately know this is automated outreach and that just makes me >> I think the right way to do it is well, you scrape your own post. (51:57) You don't scrape other people's post and then you don't need to mention how you found them. You don't say, "Oh, I saw you engage with my post. Therefore, here I am." You just reach out to them and then >> Yeah, >> the idea is just that they remember you or your face kind of >> Yeah, that's super cool. Now, the our hour passed very quickly. (52:17) I guess this is exciting. I mean, I'm guessing this is exactly why you took on this role and decided to join a small uh preede startup because you can actually build and do stuff and, you know, have an idea and get it live the next day or the next week and test and iterate and you're not waiting for approvals or >> Yeah. (52:36) >> stuff like that. So, >> exactly. >> That's exciting. I mean that's also I feel like that is the hopeful part maybe of AI that a lot more people can just actually do work that feel satisfying and and are not just I don't know creating reports and managing people and I guess there's some people who enjoy managing people but um yeah that was awesome. (53:02) Thank you so much for for coming on and obviously if people want to check you out or Foxy we'll link those in the show notes. Anything I uh I should have asked that I didn't ask or anything you want to add here that >> I don't think so. >> Okay, there we go. Cool. Thank you so much for taking the time. >> Thank you. It was a pleasure. (53:22) >> All right. This podcast is brought to you by Project 33. Project 33 is the leading executive thought leadership agency for LinkedIn. If you're looking to activate your founder, your CEO, your executives, or any of your internal subject matter experts and create thought leadership content for them to build trust and credibility for your brand, reach out at project33.io.