(7) Peep Laja: What It Takes to Do Founder-Led Marketing & Differentiate Your SaaS Startup - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_c2Y2-NBLr4

Transcript: (00:00) pep thank you for joining thank you um for for taking the time so uh founder CEO of winter um uh you guys are how many people are you guys right now winter we're 16 I think very nice very cool and all bootstrapped and profitable I assume that's exactly right you you don't get to uh any size with your bootstrapping if you're not profitable right totally cool all right guys we got more people joining now that some people are in here if you guys are open to turning on your camera that is always appreciated and makes uh us feel like we're not just talking against the (00:46) wall of names um I want to make this interactive obviously I have a lot of questions for Pep but you guys probably joined here for a reason um and I don't want to make this just a one one conversation so feel free to drop your questions into the chat feel free to unmute yourself at any point and drop in your own question or topic or challenge that you want to troubleshoot with pep um and then we can take it from there so um all right but we get rolling um now pep this is called the founder let marketing show I'm curious if you consider what you do founder let (01:28) marketing uh definitely when you're a startup that hasn't raised a bunch of money where you can hire you know Top Guns and lots of people and all that stuff and you can't you know spend a ton on ads then like what what is it that you have and uh a visible founder is a great asset to have and also I'm a marketing first type of um founder that's my background around and so definitely um also when we when you sign up for winter we ask you you know how' you hear about us and I want to say 70 to 80% is saying um LinkedIn or my name and (02:18) uh there's not much else on LinkedIn by us rather than you know other than my content so it is absolutely founder Le marketing how would you explain to another founder who is maybe not doing this or who doesn't where this doesn't come naturally to them um why you're doing it I'm doing it because it's uh driving uh it's having an effect if it you know if it wouldn't work I wouldn't be doing it um so the main thing is pipeline customers demand yeah yeah yeah you know for us we are probably half the revenue is self signups and the other half is like uh through demos um so go through (03:02) sales yeah then um yeah so that's how we measure it and you know I've been a content creator for a long time winter is not my first company you know I have three other two other companies and I've started some other ones in the past that are now dead um and and I've been I've been the main guy to get it going in every single case so it's not like a new playbook for me yep but the if the the problem I I often see is that that people obviously now you have an audience you have 70,000 followers you're posting multiple times a week (03:43) you're getting great engagement people know you they've heard about you you're a little bit of a thought leader definitely in your Niche and in your space for someone starting out this can take time for them to get anywhere close to 70,000 followers um how how would you tell a Founder to approach getting started with this like how much time should they give themselves how long do you think it takes to have any meaningful impact on their revenue pipeline demand Etc well I want to say you could get to a quite meaningful place within one year (04:21) um this is based on an assumption that what you post is actually good and interesting and different because if you're you know talking about platitudes oh my next webinar like nobody cares about that if you have a strong point of view and you can write you can get somewhere very very fast so I think my main example to bring is if you look at the uh this uh Fletch pmm guys so LinkedIn Anthony coming on come on soon yeah yeah so I mean I think an Anthony has way more followers than I do um actually I'm not sure how many he has but if you post consistently high (05:04) quality content and you work on that content as if it's marketing it's not like oh it's an extra work it's a distraction no no this is the work if you treat it as the work this is marketing uh and you make sure your content is good you can get there very very fast as in the case of Anthony or if you go back to everybody's uh or the poster boy LinkedIn success Chris Walker starting refine Labs it happened very very fast for him as well yeah and again he had a controversial point of view talking about a topic that a lot of people care (05:42) about uh challenging conventions um doesn't hurt to be handsome all those things you know so yeah it uh you can get there fast now of course there have been Founders posting for 10 years and they have like 3,000 followers right yeah so then it's like well how consistent has have you been and that's that's that everybody can be consistent then you you absolutely can post you know at least you know three to five times a week you know it's it's not hard of course if you can't put a sentence together uh it's an uphill (06:17) battle like maybe not everybody is a born content creator yep and and you can't Outsource it you know you can't have a ghost riter you can some you can have somebody to write books and for you so if you take Adam Robinson uh retention. comom he has on retainer people who take his content and rewrite it to have like Hooks and and they use formulas and templates and all that stuff absolutely you can Outsource that and you know Adam is a great example of how it absolutely works is every post is written like a you know like a hook yeah I know he has a coach and and they (06:56) basically spend an hour every week to just decide on the hooks I did I say coach coach you know and same with like in a lot of companies like Clary like Deon Reed was telling me how they did for their CEO there where it's like every week There's a retro meeting and they analyze post by post and then they oh this topic this is our content pillar and we should do more of this and less of that now you can be all crazy like that and but it's it's not necessary like there are other ways I mean I if you can swing it if that's the way you (07:28) like to run a ship go for it I'm more of um Wing It kind of guy so like I'm consistent but the way I do content is like I'm like waking up in the morning what should we post about today and I write it so there's very little planning and preparation I don't do no content analysis I don't look back at my I mean obviously I see how much engagement I get but like I'm not overly analytical um I I I I do think like I I mentioned Anthony and Chris Walker here Founders Who start an agency have a massive Advantage because you talk to customers (08:07) and see their problems every single day you know what questions come up you know what they don't get and so on so and I I was a consultant for more than 10 years I have my own agency all that stuff uh and I I built that Agency on top of content as well it's agen is called speo y now so very easy to talk about subject matter expertise way harder when you're a SAS founder yeah because you are not in the business of expertise yourself anymore you're not a consultant anymore right uh and you're managing your sales team and you want to manage the pipeline and your product team and you do customer support you (08:43) know like it it's significantly harder totally respect that where do your ideas now come from um yeah I'm a I'm a believer that most people are not original thinkers meaning that you just sit you know and do your morning routine and sip your coffee and then brilliant ideas will come to you I've met people like my wife is is one of like that like she just sits and has Amazing Ideas I'm not one of those people uh I'm a synthesizer meaning that I need to feed my brain with content and that Sparks something (09:23) like oh yeah I remember thinking about that and then add my own experiences and whatever and then that cre creates an idea for Content so the way I feed my brain is listening to podcasts listening to audiobooks uh consuming you know social cont I'm not a huge lurker on social myself but you know sometimes uh so when I do when I plug out I don't consume any business content I do feel that my own content generation ideas twindle down so I need to constantly stimulate my own brain with other people's content to spark an (10:01) idea and most of my ideas actually also come from talking to customers so I'm in a sales call I do support still every day I mean not that's that that's not my full-time job we have support people but I'm in there in the live chat I'm I'm monitoring what they're talking I chime in I hop into conversations if you go to winter you know live chat like I'm in there every day and like you probably talk to me uh so those are all sources of uh yeah ideas I have a follow-up question on that but two things one Karen and Margot thank you guys for turning on your camera even Stephanie Travis Margie (10:39) uh all the fin impersonators in here Rick uh if you guys want to join the crowd and turn on your camera that's always very appreciated and again for people who join later if you guys have any question for Pep or in the random case that you have one for me feel free to drop them in the chat or unmute yourself and we can jump into those things um and if you're on the live stream um I just dropped the link to the zoom in there if you want to join us on here um what do you take pay attention to with ideas because obviously you said you talk to customers you're in that support you consume lots of content (11:17) podcasts and maybe this is a little bit hard of a question because these things come naturally to you at this point but what are you looking for to say oh this is worth making a post about mhm now obviously since it's for business reasons you have guard rails in terms of topics and if you haven't figured that out for yourself it's it's a you know that's if you could start there like I want to I'm I'm posting about messaging ICP research qualitative research things like that and like maybe bigger umbrellas it all feeds into product marketing or strategy so you (11:55) need to have these pillars in place and then I'm looking for ideas within those confined spaces if you will and I do uh I'm aware of the fact that you need repetition you need to repeat the same idea that you want to come across like this is messaging what are the five key ideas I want people to take home like my point of view is also aligned with actually you know what I'm selling I'm doing this for business reasons I'm not doing it for my personal entertainment um um and so I'm looking for ways to get a certain point across in a different way because I you (12:42) know otherwise I could just copy paste the same post every day and post it but I go back and post something I posted a year ago or three years ago and maybe tweak it sometimes even not and post it verbatim and it does well again because people forget what you posted hey I don't remember what I posted nobody else will remember what I posted right and you have new followers new followers and and um and you know I repetition is don't be afraid of repetition um and sometimes it's uh somebody asks me a question and I'm like oh yeah oh you don't know about (13:19) this or like I for me it's obvious or you know and oh I should make a post about that or sometimes it's that's a controversial or interesting idea uh and sometimes it's also uh news related whereas like uh not exactly news jacking but for instance um you know yesterday Jaguar the car company relaunched a brand I saw an opportunity to to make a post about something that's timely winter also does AD creative testing you know like it's relevant yeah uh there was literally no strategic thinking behind like I just okay this is relevant this is timely going to make a post about it (14:10) because besides you know branding myself or you know if that's the right word here what I'm also thinking about is just mental availability a mental availability meaning that I want I want to be top of mind for my target audience so when they need message setting when they need ICP research they remember me winter um and so I want to be always talking about certain topics that are you know relevant to what I'm doing yep um yep yeah now k k ask how have you thought about your content pillars and how have they changed over time you're at 70k followers now how has that changed from (14:50) the early days of followers to finding growth through now yeah so when I started posting actively LinkedIn I want to say that was maybe 2019 is I winter didn't even exist I was actively running my other company cxl e-learning business yeah uh and I was talking about totally different topics my main stuff was conversion optimization running online experiments AB tests so all my early audience was people who knew me for that and I had built up an email list of like some 100,000 people over 10 years of talking about conversion optimization world's most popular blog on conversion (15:33) optimization and when I started winter I left all of that world behind basically I completely dropped what I had been talking about for 10 years and switched to message testing which is really relevant to product marketer so I I changed my ICP and um that was a turbulent time and at first winter was a mon monofunctional tool just doing message testing I just talked about that and as winter has evolved you know other things like ICP research and you know creative testing I also talk about more things uh and that's not to say that I (16:11) only talk about things that my company does sometimes uh have like business things to say like hiring is top of mind that talk about hiring or business strategy or you know things like that sometimes it's not really it's it's what I'm interested in as a as a business person y but I try to keep the pillars relevant to what I do because again I'm doing this for business reasons not for my personal entertainment and and between me and you hopefully nobody else sees this if I wouldn't need to do this for business I would never logg into LinkedIn ever I'd be like I'd be riding (16:50) into the sunset this is a game I'm playing this as a means to an end right and everybody else does it too how much time do you allocate to this whole founder that marketing creating content Etc thing I want to say depending on the topic um if if we're talking about just uh posting on link and takes me anywhere from five minutes to Max 30 minutes a day and it's it's closer to the five minutes Mark but that's just writing it that's just writing it yeah uh what about everything engaging replying hopping on things like this (17:34) which is also found alert marketing you know uh I used to do a lot more webinars and stuff in fact this is the first one I've done in like many many months uh because you can spend your whole life in other people's webinars and and not get done you know so I do it in Cycles um yeah and when you reached out it was like oh yeah I guess I haven't been on one for a long time maybe I'll do one um but this you be like never again uh well this this takes an hour but it's not typical I I don't do like seven a week you know uh the newsletter is really (18:18) repurposing my LinkedIn content so how we do my newsletter is that you know I post Monday to Friday we see which post that is relevant to what winter is doing doing which one did the best on social in terms of engagements likes comments Etc we take that and put it in the newsletter and maybe I elaborate I like make it longer add some thoughts again not very time consum I'm not writing totally different content for the newsletter also the audience is uh overlap to an extent but it's not the same people you know yeah a lot of (18:49) people just read my newsletter um so Adam Robinson said publicly he spends 20 hours a week on all of his content and newsletter webinar and all the things 20 hours a week where do you land what's your best guesstimate close to that way less than that way less than that way less than that um you know because at a company of my size I am also the chief product officer so I spend a lot of time in product management um and uh I worry about you know the finances of the business the the future of the business uh how's the customer success going and like like all (19:30) aspects I'm the you know the classic cook cleaner Chef bouncer type of person um at a small business you know and as lean team as we have like everybody has seven jobs including myself and I write copy for the website I I probably personally ship changes to our websites you know at least five times a week um we don't launch new products every week so uh but I do a lot of ICP research and I spend a lot of time in thinking time where I think about the big problems like as a business you should all as a business owner you should always think about like what are (20:11) my top three bottlenecks and so on like if I would solve this that would really help me accelerate to the next level so I really and this are all hard problems right if the answer was obvious you'd already be doing it so I spend a lot of time thinking about problems uh and carving out meeting free days so typically I only do meetings on Mondays and Wednesdays like today and so Tuesday Thursday Friday I do zero meetings and I try to spend as much time thinking you know I do Post uh every day but like 20 hours a week now like do you write your post on the day like you don't have (20:50) typically the the night before and a schedule uhuh because timing when the post gets published on LinkedIn makes huge difference if I post 6 a.m. my time us Central Time versus 9 a.m. it's like half half difference 6 AM is half or or double uh 6 a. (21:15) is the most it's like the peak interesting if I if I want to post at like 11:00 a.m. 12: p.m. might as well not make a post because it's not going to go anywhere it's it's huge I don't know why that is I can hypothesize why that is like the European audiences are you know their day is ending and ma (21:34) ybe maybe that but like 6: a.m. so I schedule always all my posts for I read it the day before schedule it for 6: a.m. interesting because some people say you need to kind of be around and answer comments right away when you post and you're just not optimizing to that extent or most comments are like the AI chat boy dudes you know like that have extensions like oh nice insights great or they summarize what I said and then phrase it as a question sometimes I get so annoyed with them I just block them like yeah I like it's perverse incentives I I'm incentivized to keep those AI comment dudes around because they're boosting my posts yeah but I'm like I hate you guys I'm (22:13) just blocking you all right I'm G to go to some questions that we have here in the audience but I'm going to ask one more question because I realized I can actually ask you this question which I was curious before which is when you are the founder of multiple companies and you do this kind of found that marketing thing where you create a lot of awareness you have a lot of followers you get a lot of Impressions how much the impact that changes once something is not your main company anymore and the person I was particularly thinking about was Chris Walker because when he was CEO (22:43) of refin apps I'm sure all of his content drove a ton of demand and inbound for refin lab now that he's only chairman and his main thing is petto I wonder what the drop off is oh it's massive it's catastrophic uh and uh my head of Revenue worked at refin labs and he said like they they would measure it to the T where Chris makes a post leads come in Chris takes three days off demos like you know yeah fall off the cliff it's it's that uh uh so now refine Labs you know like I think he's been AET on two years now I mean it's yeah it's not yeah okay (23:29) interesting that's what I thought no it's yeah it's it's not good for refined Labs that's for sure so drives for cxl and and for um no no not at all I mean okay yeah I don't post for those companies at all I mean or at all is maybe too harsh but like rarely yeah uh and it's just that you you can't have diluted attention you know and as a Founder I guess the audience here is mainly found Founders I'm assuming you know as as a Founder uh as a Founder you need to think like you're building a business that would have some sort of um Financial impact on you down the line (24:12) like maybe there's an exit or something right or or you're making hella cash flow but like that's what you're doing of course it's nice to be your own boss and all that as well the lifestyle matters a great deal but it's also money money is important and so if you see that one business is never going to fulfill your dreams especially if you run an agency it's a shitty business model your multiples on an iida your your your uh profit margin is low eventually you want to move out of there because unless you're one of the super (24:44) exceptions that gets to 10 million ibida uh you know it won't get you it won't build your dreams so you want something else and businesses have extremely high chance of failure right we all know this like 5% is like optimistic um and so what you want to do is have a lot of reps you want to have a lot of Tri is this the one that's going to go somewhere and you need to give it enough time to see and so that's why how I ended up with three businesses it's not that I wanted to have three businesses it was just um I don't think so no not (25:20) quite next one right okay and so and then you can't run all at once you have other people running other companies um and so you wanna hence you need to abandon the previous ships and of course not abandon fully but like you need put your attention to the new one and have the team run the other companies now I'm going to go to audience question and then I'm going to ask a selfish question for myself so this is the question on the LinkedIn live stream it's a little bit of a text so I'll need to see if it actually becomes a question it's by ilas founder (25:52) at eie move he said I'm a startup founder it's a SAS that helps transportation management or organizers such as sport events uh the objective is to reduce CO2 emissions of Transport based on an blah blah blah blah I'm facing challenges now on validating the idea and more more exactly on the segmentation I guess he's asking how he how he should figure out his ICP he has this idea he has some estimates or guesses on who this is for and what it's going to be but he now needs to validate who actually is the ICP well I guess that's a little off (26:29) topic but this is the classic books of Lean Startup you know like you have to go out there and talk to these people that you think that might want to buy you have probably already have some hypothesis who these people are and you're probably wrong about some of them you just don't know which ones and the answers are not in you or or or LinkedIn especially if it's like Transportation those people are somewhere else you need to be picking up the phone meeting people for lunch and coffee and and all that stuff like get out of the office type of thing and then try to get them (27:06) to pay because that's the real the real validator for sure would you buy this is not the way it's like you sell something right yeah now Ian asked do you use or know somebody that that does use a repurposing system for multiple channels and formats formats do you have any thoughts on that yeah I mean I I think most people would want to try to reuse some something so my me as I already said my best performing LinkedIn post becomes the newsletter next week also well my LinkedIn post and I post once a day you know uh and that's because the LinkedIn algorithm really likes you to post once a day uh but I I'm on Twitter (27:47) and on Twitter I post 10 times a day and if if if uh my tweet gets more than 10 likes this is a massive Banger on on LinkedIn I know this is going I get 300 likes on LinkedIn and I uh I I either post it verbatim or uh based on the but if I get any replies because Twitter reach is like minimal uh even though I have like more than 50,000 followers there too it's just algo it's different uh but I yeah basically I take content from Twitter and put it put it put it on LinkedIn depending on how it does um and (28:24) I think if you do video same thing if you uh my podcast I have't published the episode in a in a couple of months right now but that's also the the typical thing you record a podcast podcast becomes a newsletter a LinkedIn both etc etc it makes sense you know it just makes sense y so the flow is post 10 times on on Twitter the best tweet becomes the one LinkedIn post per day and then the best LinkedIn post out of the week becomes the Weekly Newsletter absolutely and 10 years ago we did the in Reverse we took like three days to write a blog post and then see how it (29:00) would do that do people like it and they're like and if they don't like it like you spend three days on this whereas like how how expensive is a tweet you know it costs nothing right yep love it um Punit has two questions I guess it's a little broader he asked what are some trades and skills that that Define a great B2B marketer and that will help them stay relevant in the age of AI and then how he could develop those skills H well what does AI have and what does it not have ai does not have personal (29:37) experience AI does not have stories AI is not a human so lean into that because what ai ai is like Wikipedia right it's like like is knowledge that is from a textbook essentially right and so you don't want to you don't want to be talking about uh definitions oh what is product marketing like that type of content is dead so you talk about your personal take view why people are doing it wrong um so you want to lean into more personal experiences and of course if you if you like those get those first because before you can say you need to (30:23) be Margie said what I love about Pep's content is it it is clearly his voice straightforward human language that sound like he's in your head and then she ask as you grow how will you make the transition to having more subject matter experts or marketing people also posting so that's it's not all dependent on you or will you yeah uh I've had different uh approaches to this where I've had the uh approach of like let's make everybody an inhouse celebrity and in in our recruitment is like we're going to make your internet famous and we're going to (31:00) lend you our support and all that stuff and so first my lessons learned that this is many years in and in different companies cxl and spe and so on some people are posters and some people not like everybody is like I'd like to be internet famous sure man but like okay and I'll consistently post every day and like this is like you know January 1st everybody's in the gym and February 1st you know you you haven't gone all month so it's the same same thing with people like people who are going to post on LinkedIn they are already posting a (31:33) LinkedIn so if you want to hire smmes or marketers uh that that you want them to post and they haven't posted ever or like last time through three years ago they're never gonna post just because you asked them to the people who are posting on LinkedIn are already posting on LinkedIn so that's the thing so if you want other people in your company to post hire people that already post they already content creators maybe and it doesn't have to be LinkedIn like any medium you publish a personal blog you're on Tik Tok doesn't matter like you're creating cont because creating content is hard work and it comes naturally to some and it's unnatural to (32:13) others so um so that's my Approach so the more you can have absolutely the better and if if you value that hire for that you know hire the product person who sharing knowledge hire the um you U or or or or whatever I mean there there's also slippery slope in some cases where definitely uh if there uh they might be posting a lot of content that is about them as opposed to relevance to your business and so then it's like they're you're paying for their time to build their personal brand right and they will uh they will leave (32:53) and there is the I think maybe I don't know if the peak now or where Maybe be coming off the peak where everybody and their mother became a consultant a fractional this and this and soon now um very soon they will learn how hard it is to find customers as soon as the the first 10 in the network you know are used up uh and they go back in-house you see know LinkedIn oh finally after many years I'm joining in-house companies again and the story might be one thing but it's just hard to find customers you know um so that's that is a slipper very slow uh in a way or like (33:30) a tradeoff you need to take into account now I'm going to ask the the selfish question and then then we're going to go back to some so you mentioned uh agency is a business model and it took you kind of multiple iteration to go from speo to see EXL the info business to now winter to find something I run an agency what what's your advice like what what's the road map what's what's well I mean uh I think BAS should be judged by founder outcomes not you know um and it might be different for you know B2B s if you raise $100 (34:07) million then then you're judged on like VC returns but a typical business should be measured by founder outcomes is that and then somebody might be happy with a million bucks right and then if that's all you want do an agency it's the fastest way to a million bucks absolutely but is a million bucks of lifechanging money you build a nice house most of it is gone you know uh and uh you know trip around the world and then and that's you can't stop working right uh I mean and again it depends on your ambition and so on so forth there's also there's something that I think about all the (34:49) time this is what I read a few years ago from I think there was an article in the Atlantic magazine which is your cognitive decline comes much sooner than you think and what that means is and it's like B the composer was a piano teacher for the rich in in his 50s and Beyond right think about the top musicians painters writers novelists most of them overwhelming majority did their best work in the 30s 40s 20s right and like Paul McCartney is still doing music famous song he wrote in the last 15 years right like you know we and we want to sing the Yellow Submarine and so so we're going to get (35:36) old our brain won't work as uh and it's like the Tyson boxing match right in your 20s you were a heavy hitter and now you're just an old man and it's it's going to happen to our brains as well and younger people are going to be more they're going to be faster savier they know all the new current cuz you're going to get more conservative like you need to think about these things if you're not made by the age 50 then what like your chances of making it after are going to be slim chances of course there are exceptions we like to talk about oh Ray Croc all that stuff you know you're you know look at like (36:17) Jeff basis is is not he's the chairman right like he's retired like he's he's the old guy now he's not coming up with a new new so so an agent see is that unless you get to certain level where the free cash flow you can take out a million bucks in profits every year it runs without you it grows great that's fine you're never going to sell it probably uh and and that that way it can keep going but nothing is guaranteed market dynamics change technology gets disrupt AI evolves all of a sudden the agency might crumble (36:52) right so there there's there's a risk with the cash flow business especially if it's a small business small business gets disrupted very easily like if you have a less than 20% company and a uh you know uh that might collapse like in two years it might be gone zero right um so that's what I would think about so and it's not a it's very hard to sell an agency first of all businesses are bought not sold right so who would buy as a tiny ass agency especially one that's dependent on the founder step one (37:24) get out as a Founder agency runs you're not part of it right so otherwise buyers won't touch it you know uh I would I would venture that Chris Walker has a hard time selling refine Labs if the business doesn't come with him right God damn I have like 20 more questions but we have some audience stuff here so uh Margie said love the idea of a Content coach who can help a Founder who isn't a natural one like you are what would you look for in a coach if you will to look for one any recommendation um I want I would look (38:00) for uh show me somebody who's who is this person coaching and is that person slaying it like and do you personally like it so uh and I think like for instance like Adam Robinson he's been name dropping the guy he's using and I met him in person he's a nice chill dude here in Austin uh like you know not cheap from what I hear but like look at these these guys and find out who who using a a a Content coach you know these are not Ghost Riders remember like they take your point of view and they just help you present it better that's what (38:37) they do yeah Kar ask what's your next business idea you're toying with well you know right now winter is going well and um my virtual Mentor Jason lkin um if you haven't uh if you're not following with him like it's my my number one recommendation of like the best try to get him the but you need to sponsor saster first by a booth for $100,000 and then but like basically it's like every founder his point of view every founder has a limited number of companies in him her right winter is my I want to say fifth company I'm not not even sure I have (39:21) another one in me anymore because creating something from scratch and making it something it's just a lot of sheer muscle and willpower you just will something into existence and it just I don't know it's not like making birth making giving birth to a child is like of course a million times more magical but it's it's something like it take something from you permanently I feel and some some you know your mileage may vary but uh I think I'm going to see winter through I think winter is um checks many of my boxes uh right now what does see it (39:58) through mean like selling it uh yeah seeing it through until I'm done with it meaning I sell some of it most of it all of it uh at some point got it um not anytime soon I'm having a blast building it right now love it um you you mentioned you know getting a company from nothing into something um that that's kind of a a long and hard process what part does founder that marketing play in this process in your opinion I think first million bucks of Revenue is on the founder um and you know my gauge on what's a good pace of like is this resonating and am I am I (40:42) reaching the right people and is the idea like is the market buying my messaging and my my the big big idea is like how fast do you get to a million in Revenue you know like I think the ultimate Benchmark is like a year like if you get there in a year I think with cxl it was year actually with winter it was a little longer I think with winter it took me two years to get to a million in Revenue like total revenue or like yearly recurring Revenue annual annual revenue total like money cash in yeah yeah yeah um uh I have a failed startup in my (41:21) past where uh I think three years I was like building it and we never got past like 10K monthly Revenue so then I was younger and uh you know naive if today I had a business that it's second year running and I'm struggling with 10K a month I would instant abandon it it's never going to go anywhere you know you mentioned a couple things that you kind of uh like ingredients let's say for someone doing this type of thing found theet marketing you mentioned good looks you mentioned uh consistency um what do you think are the ingredients if you were to talk to founder they said I like what you do I (42:05) want to do this too like what do they need to have going for them for this to be a good idea for them and a good fit well I mean to do founded marketing you got to be willing to put yourself out there content creation should come easy for you you know that I think because it costs nothing Well it costs your time so you either you get stuff with Sweat Equity time and effort or with money and if you have a lot of money you don't need you know Sweat Equity as much still need it uh so so B so I would invest uh you know uh in that uh a lot and have have something to say (42:47) have a unique point of view about a space and how do you develop a unique point of view I mean you need real world experience I think it's very hard to have a unique point of view when you're 20 years old you don't know you know about life even though as a 20-year-old I thought I'm the and I know everything now like anybody who's like 40 plus looks back at themselves when they were 20 and they're like oh gez boy you know um how do you know that you have a unique or strong point of view because as you said if you're 20- year-old and you believe you have one that doesn't (43:25) mean you actually have one how it's it's it's it is possible to have one in like specific like there are the technology nerds out there like they're building new uh whatever you know the the the exceptions are out there for sure I'm not saying all 20- year olds uh but in in general it's hard to have a new idea of like let's say let's take market research like you cannot reimagine what market research looks like if you don't know even how it works in detail like if you haven't done it for years and years and years and it's kind of like before Picasso became (44:03) Picasso he was a traditional painter right like have you seen his paintings before he drew the the weird stuff like he was a master painter and then after mastering the traditional way of doing things you can do your own thing and you cannot it's very hard to rush it uh and of course you can always move fast and and learn fast and do and uh by just shipping fast like don't think about it more doing less thinking about it because then once you do it then you have something to think about yeah now okay let's say we we have a Founder who (44:40) has those ingredients uh you now mentioned you know the initially I asked you kind of how long it it would take to to do this from ground and you would say a year you can get something done that that sounds like a horrible Prospect to be spending couple hours every month you need to post three to five times a week that's a lot you need to learn maybe content creation or marketing or LinkedIn and it takes a whole year of doing this to really start seeing stuff how what should people be looking at before that year to validate whether they're on the right track or whether they need to abandon this whole idea or (45:22) well you need to you need to be seeing some momentum but like there's a reason why why only you know 5% of the world are like um entrepreneurs right you need to make a bet you need to take a you know have some conviction like you need to believe Founders are eternally optimistic overly optimistic naively optimistic you know and that's that's part of it uh and if you don't have those things yeah just get a job dude you know if you can't bet yourself year in advance if it's too nerve-wracking for you then maybe it's not for you mhm (45:57) uh you you talk a lot about kind of positioning differenti and differentiation specifically on messaging website messaging and homepage messaging what of that applies to content on LinkedIn or podcasts when a Founder goes out how how would you go about figuring out how to differentiate yourself how to say different things what to say absolutely I mean internet is a noisy place and get gets you know noisier every year so if you come as a new person and you're saying the same things as everybody else there's you know you can post every day if you want to it's the the chance (46:40) that you're going to cut through are slim you need to have something different about it so we can again look at like what Anthony Pierry is doing like like did people talk about product marketing and messaging and all that stuff before him of course for decades of course they did but his way of approaching it uh how the content he created the points of view the humor the personality the charts something different right so you got to figure out what that is um and and of course you need true expertise as well you got to (47:16) you got to have a baseline of knowledge and before you you can start challenging um so lean into personality uh is also a major thing like um yep especially in the age of AI uh David B uh from relato ask P pep sorry has massive reach on LinkedIn and other channels I left to learn how his messaging converts into leads and how the team manage pipeline from DM to closed one well as I said earlier 70 to 80% of uh Winter's signups and demos are mentioning me as a lead Source you know so that's how it's um converting into things (48:06) yeah and then but but I'm assuming someone else is taking the sales calls or are you still doing fun uh rarely these days uh in there in the you know years year one 100% me uh now I do you know maybe 20 demos a year uh or something like this um yeah nice hard to argue with uh with uh doing this type of content when 75% of your your inbound and leads come from it um and then Ed ask I was wondering lately this a little bit off topic I was wondering lately about Winter's blog strategy they have some classic SEO focused articles but (48:48) also blog series about wider topics around marketing and I was wondering how especially the later letter is working out for them you know SEO is is is not a major contributor to us today and it's it's uh you know because our topics are like let's go let's say they are marketing topics and so then in in in Google of the world we are competing with everybody who publishes content on on marketing so that that means you're hop spots of the world your six senses and and all those companies that have a quadrillion back links uh (49:29) and they can outrank us for anything like I'm I think our domain ranking is like 60 something we cannot rank for any competitive term also now with the the AI stuff integrated into Google anything that is like a a glossery SEO like what is blah blah blah AI answers that so it's pointless to create that kind of content and we have quite a bit of that from way back when um so today SEO and the strategy is um it's evolving let's say uh we got a in fact I'm I'm having a a meeting tomorrow to basically discuss going forward what we want to do and we probably want to consolidate most of it delete most of (50:18) it how do you even justify having any marketer on the team and paying a full-time salary which is a lot of money depending on the role when 75% of all your inbound leads Revenue comes from your content which kind of there a bunch of other small things you know like we do uh you know weekly online workshops webinars you know somebody needs to configure it invite the person create the graphic publish The Landing P there's a lot of nitty-gritty send the newsletter you know so I mean our marketing team is like we have one Junior marketer who's like a Swiss Army knife generalist that does everything (50:59) you know that is doesn't require top expertise but it just takes time right and by somebody doing it for me my time can be spent Elsewhere on more higher value activities you know um yeah that's that's how the you know getting leads getting inbound is kind of the obvious benefit that people think about when they think about founder marketing what what do you feel like are some non-obvious things that you've experienced how it's benefited you that people maybe don't talk about uh well there's also in B2B you know Myspace (51:34) it's also a lot about personal relationships so you go to conferences people know your face and so they talk to you uh and uh once you've uh transferred the relationship from let's say I'm a passive LinkedIn consu content consumer to I'm talking we're talking like maybe even getting becoming friends that just transforms the the relationship and if somebody is friendly with you like in real life that means that they way more likely to buy your stuff if you know if it's a IC fit uh and they they're more likely to (52:11) uh produce Word of Mouth for you uh so that is a is a massive um massive massive you know asset yep uh guys we have five minutes left so if you have a question for Pep now is the time to either unmute yourself or drop it in the chat until then I'm going to ask one more selfish question would to go back to the agency thing uh if I'm doing 50k a month um what trajectory would you be looking for to decide you know whether to build this out to a certain extent and give it a certain amount of time another year (52:47) another six month another five years versus saying hey let's transition out of this focus on a different type of business different business model Etc well uh agency valuations get more generous once you uh either cross 10 million in Topline revenue or 2 million iida and so you take your current growth rate put it in a simple Excel spreadsheet and like how many years till I reach Topline 10 million revenue or or 2 million iida um and so look at that math and like if it's three years well keep going my friend and you know you're sure you're soon there if it's like oh it's 17 years (53:37) then you gotta change something you know that's not to say that an agent you you make by making changes you couldn't get there but you need to change the way you do your goto market like you look at some of the biggest agencies in the world you know like power digital if you go to powerd digital. (53:56) com it's the one of the worst websites in the world it's the classic cheesy stock photo men in suits it's horrible and they're they're um they're like Valu at a billion dollars this agency and so how do they make money well their go to market is uh PE so personal sorry person private Equity companies open doors bring them in everywhere uh to Deals uh to companies their portfolio companies there's a just so and and how how do you get those deals well first of all I mean maybe PE needs to own a good chunk of you you need to know all these people so your go (54:30) to market needs to be okay how about I identify 50 PE people I need to know with the next um year make a list of 54 uh people that are movers and shakers make a point to get lunch of then a zoom Mee or whatever over the next course of the year you know things like this like hopium is not a strategy right like you cannot just hope that maybe my growth rate will be better next year you know it won't probably won't be right ad I see you finished cleaning your apartment very nice uh did you did did uh pep answer the question or did you have a followup for him yeah yeah he did and also yeah I have a followup if if (55:10) that's fine if I take the time so um um pep as someone from marketing myself and trying to buy a solution like winter for years uh how would you say um something like winter is different from just AB testing messaging because at least from from like when I was checking out witer like two years ago it was just for mage testing and you do a lot more now but how would you say um how would you help a marketer to kind of win over his um his boss to by winter well AB testing and message testing are totally different things different use cases they're (55:46) complementary not alternatives to each other so a testing of course requires huge sample sizes right so you need at least if you if it's a two way split you need at least around 500 conversions per both variants to know if a is better than b right if you're in B2B so that means a th transactions within 30 days you got to be a big company to even get that volume so 99% of B2B companies can never run a single AB test ever so that's out the window so if you click up if you're at Doby of course different you can run a lot of tests now but what a AB testing does it tells you if B is better than a and by (56:29) how much that's it what message testing tells you is what do people think about messaging a or messaging B and you don't need an a split at all you can just here's my home page or like whatever it is can be any page can be Google doc what do they think about it what is the friction what what ideas in your messaging resonate oh yeah tell me more about that I'd like to pay for that yes that solves my problem and what about it is like sounds like everybody else I don't believe this this is crap uh like what's the friction so if you know what's the (57:04) what's the problem with your messaging you can address it delete it rewrite it uh and if if you know what's resonating well build more of that oh this is your top problem and of course message testing is related to ICP research before you write messaging you even need to know what is the top problem in their head how are they thinking about that problem what about that problem is a problem what are the symptoms they're experiencing in their business because of those problems now you can translate it into copy in a website so it's qualitative research essentially uh (57:36) it's not whether a is better than B love it and that's time also a great last example of ferlet marketing I mean how much better is this answer for an FAQ section than some answer that a product marketing person wrote up for the company there we go all right pep thank you so much for your time uh you are free to go now the podcast will go live week after next I would say from the current pipeline I will send it to you then and uh yeah thank you for your time awesome Margie says thank you for having me guys thanks for showing up (58:11) I'll see you on LinkedIn there you go all right guys thank you for joining we do this every week um I'm gonna drop Pep's LinkedIn in here I'm assuming that all of you guys follow him but just for the slight possibility that you don't um here's his LinkedIn you can follow him uh and then yeah actually the Anthony Pierry guy he mentioned uh he'll be on the podcast soon um so yeah any feedback obviously you guys can run to your next meeting if you need to but if you guys have any feedback for me now I'll take it is up for next week do you know already no no no no no I don't think for next week he just replied to (58:53) me uh he sent me his calendar so we'll need to find a slot I just app you do this as regularly as you do Finn say that again I said just appreciate the fact that you do this as regularly as you do it takes a lot of work to do this so I just restarted about a month ago I did like a three-month hus uh for like the summer break and hiring and stuff uh which was not smart uh definitely not going to do that again because you lose momentum and everything but uh yeah I'm excited to keep these rolling I'm actually going to make a couple changes to it because recently (59:29) I've been doing them kind of on different days different times always depending on when guests are available and it's always been guest interviews um and I think I'm going to simplify it a little bit make it just a recurring weekly slot right now I decided on Thursday evening C time kind of midday EST time and then do it every week and some weeks we have a guest and some weeks it's just me sharing some thoughts and insights that came out of our projects recently so yeah that's that cool guys thank you for joining thank you Kar EP Ivan Margo (1:00:09) Matt um if you joined late this is going to go out on our podcast as I said week after next you can subscribe to that here I'll just drop this um boom yeah man I got like eight minutes I was really excited to join as well but um my 15 minute meeting every day at this time went over by that's that's how they always go no worries appreciate it cool there's a link if you guys want to sub it's G to go out um yeah all right enjoy the rest of your day guys byebye thank you guys for joining