What began as a hobby, grew into a booming business with tours being arranged across six major cities. With 50 employees on the payroll, Museum Hack brought in nearly $3 million in revenue at the time Nick decided to sell his company in 2019 to his employees.

When Nick wrote “The 2-hour Cocktail Party”, he tapped into his experience of running Museum Hack, which was a people-centered business. He discovered that just as a successful museum tour requires engagement, interaction, and mingling of the guests so does throwing good parties. 

“I want to see at my party people mixing and mingling and talking to new people. I find as I get older number one, it’s harder to make new friends… the best opportunities come from my extended network, my acquaintances, my loose connections, my weak ties, my real world LinkedIn. That’s where we find out about new jobs, new customers, new opportunities, new employee relationships even.”

In the book, Nick offers a unique cocktail party formula that will help you build new relationships, as well as enrich and transform lives. In this episode, Nick discusses how Museum Hack became a hit overnight and breaks down his unique party formula to help people throw killer parties.

Listen to the full podcast to learn more about Nick Gray, his book The 2-Hour Cocktail Party, and his tactics to “hack” your social life by driving networking and relationship-building with a twist.

Nick’s Book Recommendations:

Write Useful Books by Rob Fitzpatrick

The Art of Gathering by Priya Parker

Atomic Habits by James Clear

Where to Find Nick:

Follow him on Instagram: @nickgraynews

Follow him on LinkedIn: Nick Gray

Follow him on Twitter: @nickgraynews

Find him on Tik tok – @nickgraynews

Links to Additional Resources:

How to Host a Party Website
The 2-Hour Cocktail Party: Book info
The 2-Hour Cocktail Party: Amazon
Do’s and Don’ts in Planning a Networking Meetup
Clothing Swap: How to Plan the Party
Hosting a Happy Hour: Nick Gray’s How-to Guide
How to Host a Dinner Party
Guest Bios: My Secret Weapon
Nick Gray’s personal website

Episode Transcript:

00:00:18,720 –> 00:00:23,377

[Desiree]: In today’s episode we have Nick, the man behind Two Hour Cocktail Party. Nick, welcome to the show.

00:00:24,397 –> 00:00:25,409

[nick__nickgraynews]: Hey thanks for having me.

00:00:27,870 –> 00:00:34,421

[al]: Hey Nick, I appreciate your coming on the pod. Just to get started, maybe to introduce you I just looked you up and I know you used to run a startup called museum hack then you wrote this book two hour cocktail party. But I think it’s best to let you introduce yourself. I think that’ll be ideal so our viewers know who you are. Could you introduce yourself for us please?

00:00:54,017 –> 00:00:57,443

[nick__nickgraynews]: Yeah sure my name is Nick Gray and for startups, I think the thing I was most famous for was this business called Museum Hack which is really like a lifestyle business. We did renegade museum tours at some of the biggest best museums in America. so it started at the metropolitan museum of art and then went to The Getty in Los Angeles, the art institute. What is a renegade tour? I would hire people like stand-up comedians and broadway actors to lead those museum tours and then they were live experiences not an app, a live live experience. I grew that too at three million dollars in sales. We had about fifty employees and then I sold it in 2019.

00:01:38,312 –> 00:01:44,223

[al]: Just to talk on that tiny bit, I read your bio and it said that you was acquired by one of your two of your employees?

00:01:47,097 –> 00:01:47,302

[nick__nickgraynews]: Yes.

00:01:47,950 –> 00:01:51,476

[al]: You tell us the tiny bit about that as well cause that’s not kind of usual. The usual case would be you sell your startup to a competitor, a private equity firm. That’s how it usually works out. But in your case, you sold it to your own employees. Could you tell us a bit about that? 

00:02:04,197 –> 00:02:09,706

[nick__nickgraynews]: Yes a thousand percent. So I did what’s called a seller finance transaction and I sold it to my then-CEO and marketing director. What does seller finance mean? It means that they put zero money down and basically acquired the business by saying that they would pay me back over a period of, I think we decided about five years. spoiler alert they did so well with the business that they paid it off much sooner. But it was an interesting way to sell a business. I think maybe your listeners may have not heard of seller financing before.

00:02:41,000 –> 00:02:46,008

[al]: Yeah I mean hundred percent. If you’re coming from a private equity background you might know that. But for startups, that’s not as usual. So could you tell us a bit about the seller finance bit? How does that work in real terms? Like we, how do you do that? How did you come to that even even thing like is that something proposed by your buyers? that is your employees? or how did that come about?

00:03:06,057 –> 00:03:08,842

[nick__nickgraynews]: So let me think about how best to explain it. Yes, the employees planned it, they came to me with the idea. 

Add Nick’s part highlighted above

And generally seller finance happens when a business is already profitable. So the business is already making money and spitting off some cash. And it can allow the business owner to lock in those profits with basically zero work for many years to come in the future. However, were they to miss a single one of the payments then I would get the business back so I would resume the ownership if they missed any of those payments. So that’s the general gist. I’m happy to go into more of it if you’d like to know. It’s a really unique structure that worked out very well for us but it’s it’s not for everybody.

00:03:53,171 –> 00:03:57,340

[al]: Did you keep any like part of the shares for you after the sale or was it like a hundred percent sale to them? How did that happen?

00:04:02,047 –> 00:04:02,387

[nick__nickgraynews]: I kept fifteen percent of the business which I’ve since sold back to them, but I kept fifteen percent of the new business that was created.

00:04:12,580 –> 00:04:17,628

[al]: Got it, so that means you trusted the business right? Usually, you don’t keep the shares for it unless you actually trust the business is going to grow further, so you did actually trust in it, you had faith in the business that is going to grow. and just to talk a bit about it, why why this why the museum hack thing? Is that because you are good at networking? So it is people business right? It’s not necessarily a technological business, a people business. Personally, based on who you are, are you an extroverted person? Are you comfortable working with people? Are you comfortable talking to people? Do you love that, passionate about that, is that why you did that?

00:04:52,438 –> 00:04:55,087

[nick__nickgraynews]: I think that I started out not being very extroverted or confident. And when I first moved to new york city, I wasn’t, I was a little shy. I didn’t know how to talk to strangers and I had to learn those things through a lot of practice. That was fifteen years ago because when I was in school in grade school I was not very popular. Yeah no no it’s something that I learned through a lot of practice and then leading a lot of museum tours and then later hosting a lot of house parties and cocktail parties and networking events. I think it’s a skill that anyone can get better at. 

00:05:33,640 –> 00:05:38,233

[al]: Right in terms of museums is that something you’re passionate about as well? Is that something you were totally into when you’re young?

00:05:41,207 –> 00:05:43,612

[nick__nickgraynews]: I was never into museums. Where do you live now? Are you in London or where are you? 

00:05:45,814 –> 00:05:46,356

[al]: Yeah London.

00:05:46,837 –> 00:05:49,672

[nick__nickgraynews]: Nice nice have you been to the British museum there? It’s pretty big right? It’s a nice it’s a nice museum, but it can be a little bit boring. At least I found that those museums can be a little boring and,

00:05:59,890 –> 00:06:00,632

[al]: hundred percent

00:06:01,507 –> 00:06:05,370

[nick__nickgraynews]: Right? And so that’s why I started to go to the metropolitan. I was like this place is cool but it’s boring. And I don’t like the free tours. And so I started to do my own

research and just explore and find fun things to do. And then when my friends were in town visiting, which maybe happens to you Al when folks come into town in London, they’re like oh I’m in town, you’re like oh great now I have to be your tour guide. Well, that would happen to me and I would take them to the met museum and just show them basically ten cool things I found and like three things I want to steal. So that was how my tours got started.  

00:06:40,100 –> 00:06:46,250

[al]: Excellent I mean so what it’s like a personal thing you did without any commercial expectations so you just did it for your mates to get to know them show them around. Then when did you realize right I’m going to commercialize this, we can I can turn this into a business, how did that come, when did that happen?

00:06:59,797 –> 00:07:05,747

[nick__nickgraynews]: So it started as a hobby project for me. It started as something I never wanted to make a business. I just did it for fun for free for my friends and then it became very popular and I started to give tours and there was a long waiting list and then because word of mouth was spreading. And then this one blog wrote about it and said Nick Gray’s museum tours are the best thing to do in new york city is what they said. And literally, overnight one thousand three hundred people emailed me wanted to join the tours. I said wow there’s something special there. So I need to hire people because I can’t do tours for all these, I need to hire more guides. And so that’s where, then I said okay the tours are free but there is a long waiting list, maybe you can pay money to skip the line, so that’s kind of where it started.

00:08:00,450 –> 00:08:04,562

[al]: Right so thirteen hundred people that’s a lot of people who want to do the tours right? A lot right all right, then when did you think it’ll be a real business?

00:08:13,597 –> 00:08:16,142

[nick__nickgraynews]: I don’t know, I guess when when I finally had enough money to hire the first employee our first employee was a sales guy named Mark. He was the first full-time employee. I think maybe that’s when, it’s hard to say, it’s hard to say when it was a real business.

00:08:29,140 –> 00:08:35,345

[al]: Right and how did the momentum go like did things catch up really quickly things grow real really fast as soon as you hired the first person?

00:08:39,727 –> 00:08:41,490

[nick__nickgraynews]: The momentum It took a long time. I worked on the business for seven years. And I didn’t hire the first employee until probably two years after I had been doing the tours. So it certainly wasn’t overnight, but I think some people think it was.

00:08:56,140 –> 00:09:00,333

[al]: Right seven years is a long, when was this like? Was this like a twenty ten? When did you start?

00:09:01,997 –> 00:09:02,460

[nick__nickgraynews]: I did my very first museum tour let me think in probably twenty twelve and the business or twenty eleven, and then the business really kind of started in twenty thirteen.

00:09:18,730 –> 00:09:21,718

[al]: Right, the first two years you just did it for your mates, people you know. Then maybe the first commercial one in 2013 two years into it, got it. Right, and when was this the idea for selling it where did that happen?

00:09:35,787 –> 00:09:38,752

[nick__nickgraynews]: So I sold the business in twenty nineteen. And I think they first came to me with the idea maybe in December of twenty eighteen. And then it took us several months, probably three or four months to work out the details and the business sale closed I think in April of twenty nineteen.

00:09:54,730 –> 00:09:58,797

[al]: Got it. And how big the business was, I mean I know in terms of revenue you went to three million. As in the number of museums or cities you covered, how how big was that?

00:10:04,508 –> 00:10:05,892

[nick__nickgraynews]: So we were in five or six cities at that time. And we had five or six cities at that time you know seven or eight museums, several dozen tour guides, and yeah now these tour guides were working for us not full time, they’re working part-time we certainly had a big full-time staff and there was back office and sales and marketing and things like that but yeah. 

00:10:31,760 –> 00:10:33,543

[al]: When you say to our guides, let’s talk about them. What were they like professionally trained tour guides? Is that what they usually do? That’s their day job or is there something they do more as a side hustle like maybe a student driving an Uber? Is that how it was for them?

00:10:46,717 –> 00:10:46,797

[nick__nickgraynews]: So we didn’t like to hire people who were classically trained tour guides. Why? Because they had bad habits. And we wanted to teach them. Such as they would be this idea of stage, on the stage. They would just talk and lecture. We would say hey look you know you’re going to do some ice breakers, some name tags, they’d say, no that’s not how you do, that’s not how I do museum tours. I say, well now you work for me. So that’s how we’ll do it. So instead we teach new people. And what we looked for was that they could connect with people. They could control an audience. They were good storytellers. I don’t care if they know the facts about the art, I can teach them about that.. 

00:11:30,620 –> 00:11:36,677

[al]: Yep, so I think you had a training process when you get somebody on on as a tour guide right? So you had your own way. You think the whole museum hack thing, the way you ran it had an influence on your two-hour cocktail party book?

00:11:49,477 –> 00:11:50,458

[nick__nickgraynews]: I think so for sure. because I learned that the number one indicator of a successful museum tour, was do the guests ask me questions? Or do they just sit back and want to listen? Are they engaging, are they talking? And that came over to my parties as well because I knew successful parties are people mixing and mingling, is there networking happening? And so that was really important for me.

00:12:20,482 –> 00:12:25,350 

[al]: And so let’s talk a bit about, let’s more to your book right? So just did some reading on the I think that’s really important especially if you’re coming from a startup background. I personally started off in finance. I mean we’re kind of introverted, we’re kind of awkward when it comes to social interactions. A typical party we might go to let’s say it’s a barbecue it might be you just go there with your mate, you talk to your mate. Maybe you know somebody, you speak to the person you know and then you come back right. There is no real mingling with other people right, in a regular pay, it doesn’t happen. But that’s what it’s supposed to do, like but you don’t actually do that. Unless you are an extremely extroverted which I’m not, most people are not right, so you just go walk in there talk to the people you all know, and then you come back right that’s what usually happens. So I think that’s not the way to do it. But you came up with this really good thing, a system to do that, could you walk us through it I think you call it your NICK concept. Walk us through it, please.

00:13:21,387 –> 00:13:24,813

[nick__nickgraynews]: It’s the NICK Party Formula. So what I’m focused on, which by the way I should try to convince you to host a party like this there in London, would you do it? 

00:13:21,387 –> 00:13:24,813

[al]: Hundred percent.

00:13:21,387 –> 00:13:24,813

Okay, oh my god that would be amazing and I think you would crush it too I think you would do really well. So I want to see at my party people mixing and mingling and talking to new people. I find as I get older number one, it’s harder to make new friends. Number two, the best opportunities come from my extended network, my acquaintances, my loose connections, my weak ties, my real-world LinkedIn, okay. That’s where we find out about new jobs, new customers, new opportunities, new employee relationships even. So how do we build that? It’s by hosting one of these two-hour cocktail parties. and the easy way to think about it is something called the Nick Party Formula. So think about my name Nick and then think about N I C K. N stands for name tags, I stands for ice breakers, C stands for cocktails only, there’s no drinks, no dinner, and K stands for kick them out at the end it’s only two hours long.

00:14:42,640 –> 00:14:46,076

[al]: Right why name tags though is that a must?

00:14:46,727 –> 00:14:52,854

[nick__nickgraynews]: Name tags are an absolute must. And here is why. The right number of people to have at your party is between fifteen and twenty. I’ve experimented with this. I’ve hosted hundreds of parties myself and I found that less than fifteen, there’s not a critical mass. There’s not enough people that are in the room. More than twenty, and it’s too, a little bit too hard for people to run the ice breakers, too many people for a first-time host. If you’re very experienced you could do twenty-five but I think fifteen to twenty is the right place to start for the first party. Why name tags? Not everybody will know everybody’s name. It’s very hard to remember the names and the name tags help show that there’s no cliques. This isn’t, these work friends, these school friends, these neighbors, everybody is there to talk to everybody else, no cliques. The name tags show that it’s a safe space to meet new people. Now, what do you think about that because I heard you asking why name tags what do you think?

00:15:55,880 –> 00:15:57,142

[al]: I mean, that’s really important. I mean, you mentioned the cliques. That’s something I experienced right? Because let’s say you go to that party, you talk to the people you know and there’s always cliques. Like let’s say three people come from a certain startup, that’s their clique. They don’t intentionally do that, but they’re only comfortable speaking to themselves. I mean there are a lot of cliques like that. mingling doesn’t happen between the cliques, right? So that’s quite common. I think yeah definitely name tags will open up a bit, so you don’t necessarily need to know somebody, right, you know that person’s name now go speak to him. 

00:16:35,507 –> 00:16:36,269

[nick__nickgraynews]: Yes yes yes I like that, going to talk to people like that and just mixing it up, it’s it’s so hard to make new friends as adults, and this is just a way that I found that makes it easier. 

00:16:48,270 –> 00:16:53,094

[al]: And let’s talk about the, all right, maybe go to the next step, ice breakers. A question I had was, what’s the aim of this party? Is it more professional, or just to make friends personally? How much of this is professional? How much of this is for personally just to make mates? How would you describe that? At least in your view.

00:17:11,747 –> 00:17:14,772

[nick__nickgraynews]: Your first party, the one I want you to host, should be just for your mates, at first. So that you can get comfortable with the format. Because frankly, you’re not going to have confidence to use the name tags, to do the ice breakers, if you host it as a business for professional purposes, you know you’ll be like oh I want to impress these people I don’t want to do name tags, ice breakers. I just want to do normal stuff. So your first party needs to just be with friends, so you have the confidence to try new things. After that then you can turn this into networking, oh my god it will change your life. However, you’ll be the most successful if you can mix your personal and professional. Why is that? People can feel it when it’s a professional party. You know they can just feel, but if people if you mix all these different people in your life from different areas, that’s exciting, that diversity of attendees, that’s what’s exciting at a party.

00:18:13,750 –> 00:18:18,334

[al]: So lets on to the next one, icebreakers. So why icebreakers, how to do that?

00:18:21,417 –> 00:18:23,639

[nick__nickgraynews]: Why do you do the icebreakers? Well, the purpose of the party is to make new friends and to talk to new people. The icebreakers have you ever been to a party and you’re like dan, I wish I knew who else had a podcast here. As I have a podcast, maybe I want to talk to other people with a podcast. You never know that, you don’t know unless the host tells you or you ask or you randomly talk to people. So when you have an icebreaker it gives everybody a chance to sort of say a little bit about what they do. Now I don’t like the icebreaker questions like what was your worst first date or what’s your biggest fear.

00:18:56,841 –> 00:18:58,848

[al]: So what would you say the ideal questions would be for icebreakers, give us a few.

00:19:01,268 –> 00:19:04,414

[nick__nickgraynews]: So all the icebreakers should have three parts. Number one, say your name. number two, say what you do for work. And then number three, the icebreaker. At the beginning of the night, you want to use what I call a green-level ice breaker, an easy one. The green level ice breaker that I always start my parties with is what’s one of your favorite things to eat for breakfast? Sounds very silly, sounds childish even, and yet it doesn’t take you long to think about, there’s no judgment, everybody can answer it, the answers are short, and it is a little bit of your personality. The purpose of the first icebreaker is not to know, oh my god I have to memorize what’s your breakfast. No. It’s just to get people to start talking, get, speak up. Get talking in the room. So that is the purpose. And afterward, after you do the icebreaker the room explodes, and all these new conversations, everybody’s talking it’s incredible.

00:20:04,380 –> 00:20:09,565

[al]: cool. I mean, is there like a specific day or time for these cocktail parties? Maybe on the weekend? Do you think weekends are ideal for this or no? How do you see that?

00:20:14,781 –> 00:20:18,190

[nick__nickgraynews]: Yes yes yes, good question. I think that the best days and times are Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday nights. why is that, because they’re non-competitive social nights. What do you think about that all?

00:20:27,200 –> 00:20:30,505

[al]: All right. When you say that it makes sense right? On weekends we have plans. But the first thing that came to my mind was like it has to be on the weekend, that’s when people go out. But now you said it, it won’t be that competitive that makes sense. Because we already have plans for weekends. A lot of things are planned. Yes, all right, that’s really good that’s good, right?

00:20:49,127 –> 00:20:55,019

[nick__nickgraynews]: The number one fear for someone who’s never hosted a party before, the number one fear is that nobody will show up. They’re worried that nobody will come to their party. And so for your first party, because you know I’m all about giving you an exact formula that’s going to work and that your party is gonna be massively successful and so we’re doing things that I’ve tried that I’ve tested, and by hosting on a Monday, a Tuesday, a Wednesday night more people will say yes, you’ll have higher attendance ratio and your party will be more fun.

00:21:24,277 –> 00:21:25,037

[nick__nickgraynews]: Yeah so when are you going to do yours Al? let’s think about it ideally three to four weeks from now, so you need to pick what day of the week would you do.

00:21:38,790 –> 00:21:43,958

[al]: Now you said it, I think it’ll be an ideal like a Tuesday or Wednesday. It’s like the midweek nothing much planned I guess. So it’ll be much easier to get people on board I think. So probably if I had to pick between Tuesday and Wednesday, I’ll go with Tuesday it’s kind of calm. I mean you hardly do anything on Tuesdays. At least in my case, so I think I would stick to Tuesday.

00:22:06,117 –> 00:22:06,497

[nick__nickgraynews]: Nice I like that now what time for you do you think would be best what time what two-hour time block would you do for your party?

00:22:16,060 –> 00:22:21,789

[al]: All right based on a regular, but let’s say a person doing nine to five, so until five pm they won’t be able to come. So you finish work at five. Give a couple of hours for them to maybe get rest, change, go home, come back to your place probably like six pm? Six pm to nine I think that’ll be ideal. What do you think is a good time?

00:22:36,648 –> 00:22:36,768

[nick__nickgraynews]: Six to eight, because it’s only two hours.

00:22:38,789 –> 00:22:40,753

[al]: Sorry two hours so six to eight you think that’s that’s the ideal time?

00:22:43,037 –> 00:22:46,183

[nick__nickgraynews]: I think it’s good, I think you need to know what works for your friends.

and so what you’ll do is you’ll do a test. You’ll think about five friends who are your core group. Your core group is your close friends, your mates, your buddies that you know you can laugh with and and they joke with you, and if only they come you’ll still have a good time. and you’ll text them and you’ll say hey I’m thinking of hosting a happy hour at my place on November first, Wednesday from six to eight pm. If I do it would you come? So by sending that out to five people, you’ll check, is my time right? Now what I  can tell you is when I lived in new york city things started later. People were seven to nine. That was before Covid before lockdowns. Then when I moved to Austin, Texas things started earlier. Happy hours here were like five to seven. It’s just culture in different cities and towns and with your friend group.

00:23:43,220 –> 00:23:50,186 

[al]: Right, got it. So it has to be midweek ideally. So why two hours though? I think you mentioned a two-hour block, why two hours? Why not three hours? Why not an hour?

00:23:53,957 –> 00:23:56,180 

[nick__nickgraynews]: So two hours I found, one hour wasn’t enough because maybe people are fifteen minutes late and then they don’t get a chance to speak to people. Three hours is too long and three hours, here’s the benefit. When you host a party and you list a start time and an end time, then people don’t play that calculus. That mental math oh Al invited me at six, so I guess I’ll show up at seven. Right, I don’t want to, but when it’s only two hours they know to show up, if you show up an hour late then you’re going to miss everything. You’ll miss half the party. So number one when it’s only two hours more people show up on time, there’s less of what I call the awkward zone when nobody’s there it’s just awkward. Number two, when you keep it to only two hours more people say yes. They know even if they’re busy they can still come by. It’s a short two-hour party, this isn’t a long night of drinking. And I know that people in London love to drink alcohol. They love to do this and it’s uh it’s different. So I’d be curious to know how it goes, but I’ve had a lot of people that are in London who host this party and people just love having the excuse to go home. They’re networking, they’re making new friends with intention and then they get to go home and they have it’s very nice, it’s nice.

00:25:16,090 –> 00:25:21,644

[al]: And I think you mentioned some probably on one of your pods, I think it’s cocktails only why though?

00:25:24,547 –> 00:25:27,372

[nick__nickgraynews]: No dinner, no food because that’s too stressful. It’s too much work. For some people that’s too expensive. I want to show to you the idea of the MVP minimum viable party. What’s the easiest party that you can possibly host? A lot of people think oh I have to cook dinner, I have to do food. You don’t have to. Your friends are adults. Your friends can feed themselves. They want to come for you. For the conversation, for the people. So that’s part of what I’m teaching people.

00:25:57,640 –> 00:26:01,227

[al]: And you think the food is going to come in the way like so the people will be a bit distracted with the food. They won’t be able to mingle as much is that another reason as well?

00:26:07,237 –> 00:26:08,602 

[nick__nickgraynews]: Yes, no. My experience is that it’s too stressful for the host. It takes too much work and the host gets too stressed out so that’s why we don’t do food.

00:26:20,250 –> 00:26:24,095

[al]: No food, got it. So purely cocktails can they have any snacks or is that too much?

00:26:25,747 –> 00:26:30,194

[nick__nickgraynews]: Yes, snacks you can do. You can do easy snacks, some salted nuts, some chips, some hummus, things like that. Some grapes, people love grapes. Some cookies, something you could just buy very easily at the shop.

00:26:39,271 –> 00:26:46,883 

[al]: Right. So it’s gonna be lightweight. nothing serious so some cocktails, some snacks, got it. and the last is k, kick out time. Why specify the exact time?

00:26:53,687 –> 00:26:55,330

[nick__nickgraynews]: So you got to kick them out at the end because it’s a school night, it’s a work night. It’s Monday or Tuesday people have to work the next day. This isn’t a crazy party of drinking and getting crazy. It’s just come in to mix and mingle and make new friends. So I have a whole chapter in the book. I think chapter fourteen is about how to end your party. I’ll tell you this, when you tell them in the invitation, when you list both a start time and an end time, when you tell them in the reminder, start to end, they understand that there will be an end time. It’s not a surprise to them. Many people oh my gosh how do I kick people out? Well, the book speaks about it, but I’m just telling you, already when you let them know that there’ll be an end time you give them the expectations.

00:27:37,900 –> 00:27:43,304

[al]: So while you’re on the party, let’s say half half an hour to end do you make an announcement and let them know the party is gonna end in half an hour or X amount of time or no?

00:27:49,188 –> 00:27:49,909

[nick__nickgraynews]: Yes exactly, ten or fifteen minutes before the end you can make a last call. Hey everybody thank you so much, the party is going to end in about fifteen minutes. If you want to grab another drink or say hi to somebody new, we’ll wrap up in about fifteen minutes, just like that.

00:28:05,170 –> 00:28:10,525

[al]: Right, And how often would you say you need to throw a party like this based on your experience?

00:28:13,407 –> 00:28:14,689

[nick__nickgraynews]: Oh I’m so glad you asked that. Because the biggest benefits come when you can make hosting a habit. When you can make hosting something that you don’t just do once but you do repeatedly. And that’s why my formula is so simple and basic because I want to give you the tool to make it a habit I think best every six weeks, seven weeks or so.

00:28:35,720 –> 00:28:39,871

[al]: That’s like the ideal gap in the parties? Six or seven weeks? Why?

00:28:40,967 –> 00:28:41,429

[nick__nickgraynews]: Six or seven weeks it depends, it depends. If you love it, I know some people that are hosting every month. If you don’t like it you can do it every three months. whatever you want, but for me in my life, I found the best benefits about like every six weeks.

00:28:54,740 –> 00:28:59,768

[al]: Right and during a party like this, how deep do you go in a conversation? Like alright, you met somebody right, somebody new. And are you supposed to go like really deep in, ask a lot of questions, or the first meet you just have to limit to a certain limit is there something like that? Or what would you recommend?

00:29:16,677 –> 00:29:21,205

[nick__nickgraynews]: Many of these parties is just easy little conversations. It’s not a deep forty-five minute talk with somebody. If you meet somebody interesting then you say hey I’d love to go out sometime, can we get a coffee? Can we have dinner? Maybe go on a walk. then you can go deeper with them. But this party is where you build and you get to know them as an acquaintance, as a new friend and then you build the big relationships afterwards.

00:29:42,750 –> 00:29:48,696

[al]: Right. Got it. So this is not necessarily the place like you go deep into that conversation. you get to know him, see if you have any similar interests like you. He or her. So you want to get to know that person more. Then there will be another meetup with that individual person. got it. And where would you say will be the ideal place to host a party like this? I think you speak about hosting at your own place. Or is there other alternatives as well or your home is the best place to do this? 

00:30:20,517 –> 00:30:21,900

[nick__nickgraynews]: So I would say based on my experience, from hosting hundreds of parties and helping people to host many parties, hosting at home is the best place. And I’ll tell you why. It because it’s the most generous, it’s because it’s the most vulnerable and because you create the biggest connections. You know, inviting someone into your home is scary. And it is almost like going on a little date with them. You will turbocharge your relationships when you host at home because they will feel a closer deeper connection to you. 

00:30:55,510 –> 00:31:00,080

[al]: Right I mean let’s say somebody living in a flat, can they do it as well, or do you need like a proper house with a lot of space to do this?

00:31:03,917 –> 00:31:06,140

[nick__nickgraynews]: A flat works perfect, even better, because it’s smaller and has more energy. When I was in New York I had a tiny flat, barely one bedroom, and those were some of the best parties because it’s so exciting.

00:31:17,470 –> 00:31:21,714

[al]: So well, it doesn’t necessarily have to be big? Like I thought you need a lot of space to mingle, do things. Or that’s not the case here.

00:31:25,807 –> 00:31:27,491

[nick__nickgraynews]: No no no you don’t need a big place. Actually, the smaller spaces are the better because people are more crowded and you have higher levels of energy and excitement.

00:31:36,491 –> 00:31:42,000

[al]: Right. Got it now. so that’s the basic formula. What other tips can you give for somebody who’s going to host their first party? What other aspects do you think we’re missing here? So if you have this, what other things would you add?

00:31:50,757 –> 00:31:51,799

[nick__nickgraynews]: I think we got a lot of the key points. You know the first step is to choose a date. So look at your calendar and choose a date that’s three to four weeks away, on a Monday, Tuesday, or Wednesday night. Don’t do it around holidays 

00:32:04,253 –> 00:32:09,682

[al]: Wait, why is that? Is that a thing? Like specific you think there should be a gap like that not like next week or a certain day this week why?

00:32:14,817 –> 00:32:17,080

[nick__nickgraynews]: Right because you need time to invite people. You need time to meet

people. You need time for your guests to rsvp. You need time to send reminder messages. you want everybody to show up. The biggest mistake I see, somebody messages me on a day like today, it’s Monday when we’re recording this. They say hey I’m hosting a party on Friday, how can I use your book to help? I say bro, people have plans. It’s too late, they’re busy. People are busy, they have plans. Even if they don’t have plans a lot of people will. and so you want to get ahead of that by planning your party weeks in advance so that people save it in their calendar. they can adjust their lives. I want you to have minimum fifteen people. So this isn’t like oh nick says fifteen and I’ll try to get eleven. no, minimum fifteen and for everybody.

00:33:05,560 –> 00:33:06,584

[al]: Minimum fifteen right. 

00:33:07,597 –> 00:33:09,039

[nick__nickgraynews]: Yeah and for for a lot of people, fifteen is not easy. You know they have to really think about it. And so they start week one they get five or six or seven, week number two then they start to get more. So, so that’s why I think it’s helpful to take three to four weeks for your first party really gives you the time to plan and get all the invitations and everybody to say that they’re going to do it.

00:33:31,020 –> 00:33:35,868

[al]: And can they bring their partners as well, is that something you recommend during a first party like this or just ask for the mate to come, don’t bring your partner or anybody else what would you say?

00:33:42,567 –> 00:33:43,208

[nick__nickgraynews]: I’m so glad that you asked for the first parties when it’s just your mates when you’re making friends, when it’s just for fun, yes they can bring their partners. The more the merrier. Just make sure that they rsvp. Later parties, when you might want to do them for professional reasons, for more business networking, then you’d say something like. Hey, I’m really trying to curate this towards business professionals so we can have more targeted discussions about eCommerce or SaaS or hiring or whatever, and for that reason, if I’m trying to curate the group for professional reasons then I’ll suggest maybe maybe not bringing a partner or spouse or something like that.

00:34:27,082 –> 00:34:31,283

[al]: Isn’t that kind of like rude to tell them or is that okay?

00:34:31,147 –> 00:34:31,929

[nick__nickgraynews]: I think it’s okay. I’ve never had a problem before when they understand that the purpose is professional. But just remember we’re getting ahead of ourselves for your first party you’re just going to invite whoever and your first couple parties you’re just learning the formula. So that then when you’re ready to do this for business or networking you know that you can crush it. 

00:34:53,660 –> 00:34:58,886

[al]: Got it. And what other tips would you say that are things you need to watch out when you’re hosting the very first one?

00:35:01,428 –> 00:35:03,010

[nick__nickgraynews]: So you want to make sure that you send three reminder messages. Those reminder messages keep your event top of mind so that people will show up. And the second and third ones have my secret weapon that’s called guest bios which I can include a link may be in the show notes, all about how to write them and what they are. And as we’re speaking about the show notes I’ll also include about how to host a happy hour, how to plan a networking event, even how to host a clothing swap which people are loving so that could be fun.

00:35:36,090 –> 00:35:46,227

[al]: Cool. right. I’m just thinking. Okay, so the very first party. let’s say I’m going to do that, and the second one after that, you said the seven-week gap, is that a good gap for the very first one? Let’s say I call my mates in, the second one is going to be in seven weeks, is that okay?

00:36:01,597 –> 00:36:03,024

[nick__nickgraynews]: Or you can do six weeks that’s up to you. Six weeks, you can do a month, you can do a month that depends yeah.

00:36:07,750 –> 00:36:12,158

[al]: Got it. That was definitely helpful, we’re gonna add all those links in the show notes, so people can look it up. And this is something I ask pretty much everybody I meet. What would be the three books that really did help you or change the way you look at things? So this so I can add them to my reading list right. So this is how I discover books, I ask my guest.

00:36:33,927 –> 00:36:38,795

[nick__nickgraynews]: I like that. That’s really nice. so the number one is, the best book I ever read about how to write a nonfiction book was called write useful books. Write Useful Books by a guy named Rob Fitzpatrick. Number two, there’s a book about hosting more of the theory. My book is very tactical and practical. There’s another book that’s theoretical. Why do we gather? What’s the purpose? That book is called: The Art of Gathering by Priya Parker. And then the third and final book that I’ll recommend. I’m sure you’ve read it by James Clear, Atomic Habits, such a good book.

00:37:16,690 –> 00:37:18,413

[al]: Hundred percent, hundred percent, definitely one of the best books and helps a lot.  You seem to be quite extroverted right now, but you said you quite introverted back in the day. What tips would you give to somebody maybe not necessarily fully introverted, somebody in the middle to be more extroverted? Anything they can do apart from housing parties. What can they do personally to be a tiny bit more extroverted? Maybe he can walk up to somebody and start a conversation. The social awkwardness, how can they improve that?

00:37:51,528 –> 00:37:55,708

[nick__nickgraynews]: That’s a good question. I think you know I’m going to sell my own book and I’m going a push it. But I think hosting a party, when you can control a crowd, when you can lead conversation amongst your friends when you can host in your own home, I’ll give you an example. There’s a guy here in Texas, whose name is Adam. He told me I always want to meet more people, I always wanted to have more social confidence. I never did that before I hosted your party. Now he’s hosted four parties, he read my book. And he said when he goes to other people’s parties, he runs these rounds of icebreakers. When he goes to other events he’s bringing people together to lead these icebreakers. His life has totally changed because he knows that it works. He’s seen that it works so that’s the biggest thing. You need you just need to see that it works.

00:38:45,250 –> 00:38:51,946

[al]: Superb. That was definitely helpful. Nick thanks for coming on the pod. Appreciate the time. Thank you very much.

00:38:52,917 –> 00:38:54,670

[nick__nickgraynews]: Awesome, thank you for having me, thanks, everybody.

00:38:56,651 –> 00:38:59,564

[al]: Cheers

The post Nick Gray, Author of ‘The 2-Hour Cocktail Party’, Shares his Tips on Hosting The Ideal Party to Build & Strengthen Friendships appeared first on Founder Story.

It was at this juncture that Codie decided she wanted to learn more about ‘money’, the catalyst for social change.

This led her down her path toward finance and private equity which eventually led to creating her own investment fund.

“ If you want to have big outcomes, you need to do the hard things. I don’t think there’s any way around that. It’s whether you choose to allow something to break you or you break free… if everybody could see the things that challenge them not as difficulties but as an odd, backwards, heart wrenching, awful opportunity to grow, then we’d all probably be a little bit more successful”

Today, she is the founder of the media company Contrarian Thinking, built on a mission to “free minds and build bank accounts”. She has also created a fund called the Contrarian Thinking Capital, through which she invests in “boring businesses” which are often overlooked by traditional investment companies.

Listen to the full podcast to discover more about Codie Sanchez and her building journey for Contrarian Thinking.

Where to Find Codie:

Follow her on Instagram: @codiesanchez

Follow her on Twitter: @Codie_Sanchez

Follow her on Linkedin: Codie A.Sanchez

Where to Find Contrarian Thinking:

Linkedin: Contrarian Thinking

Website: www.contrarianthinking.com

Episode Transcript:

00:00:04,923 –> 00:00:10,532

[al]: Codie Sanchez, welcome to the show! For those of you who aren’t familiar, Codie is the founder of Contrarian Thinking, an innovative media company, and she is also a private equity investor. So, Codie, a lot of people know you from Twitter where you have a big audience following. Tell me, what were you doing before all of this, for those who don’t know. 

00:00:31,820 –> 00:00:34,945

[codie]: Sure. So before I was public, I was in private equity. So I mostly did invest in small companies and I ran a business in Latin America and an asset management firm as well, where I would do deals. And so now I talk about the deals that I used to do privately.

00:00:51,113 –> 00:00:56,401

[al]: Great, so I believe you used to be a journalist back in the day, yes? Let’s talk a bit about that. How did you enter the world of finance and private equity from journalism?

00:01:08,240 –> 00:01:08,381

[codie]: Yep, that’s right. So back in the day, so when I was a journalist right out of school. So I was a journalist for my senior year of college and then the first year after I graduated college. And I covered human trafficking and drug smuggling along the US-Mexico border. So yeah, I’m definitely different from what I do now. And then I kind of quickly realized that you know those stories that I was telling they were getting out but they weren’t getting changed and so it started becoming more important to me to try to figure out how could I actually make a change to the story as opposed to just telling people about it. And that’s when I realized I wanted to learn about money. Because I think money is the thing that creates social change that’s lasting, it’s the best tool we have in modern-day society for that. And so then I went into finance to try to figure out what do I know about money if anything.

00:02:00,463 –> 00:02:07,622

[al]: Fantastic. Tell me, how did your social media journey begin? Coz, you got on all the platforms across the board and gained traction in a very quick timeframe. How did it all happen? 

00:02:15,190 –> 00:02:17,214

[codie]: Well let’s see. In January of 2020, I was you know I was in private equity. And I was doing deals, running around and making investments, and raising money. And then the world stopped and I wasn’t able to travel anymore. So I had a little free time on my hands like many of us. And I realized you know I missed sort of those engaging conversations that you have with humans when you are able to meet one on one and get that intellectual stimulation. And so I thought well what if I start a newsletter where I can start sharing my thoughts with some of my smartest friends pull them into the conversation and then see what transpires. And from there Contrarian Thinking was born that was my media is my media company and it started small with just a few friends and family and then grew into what it is now two million followers across social media. So it started by accident and then it spiraled

into an actual business. 

00:03:10,023 –> 00:03:15,315

This is a topic I’m fascinated with. “Outlier outcomes”. It’s common knowledge that people who have faced adversity early in life achieve outlier success. From Steve jobs coming from an adopted family to Chamath Palihapitiya who grew up in a deeply dysfunctional home with abuse and alcoholism. What are your thoughts on this? 

00:03:54,910 –> 00:03:55,451

[codie]: Yeah I mean I do think that iron sharpens iron. And difficulty and struggle often leads to a stronger human. It’s the same way with working out muscles work right? you actually have to stress the muscle to the point of breakage micro breaks continuously in the muscle fascia in order to grow. And so I think that seems to be true. If a seed breaks and then it becomes a tree, and only by breaking can something become quite larger than it started. so I think there’s a kernel of truth there for sure. and that if you want to have big outcomes you need to do the hard things. I don’t think there’s any way around that to be sure. it’s whether you choose to allow something to break you or or you to break free. Easier said than done but I think if everybody could see the things that challenge them not as difficulties but as an odd, backwards, heart-wrenching, awful opportunity to grow, then we’d all probably be a little bit more successful. 

00:04:57,583 –> 00:05:02,351

[al]: Perfect. Moving on, tell me what projects you’re involved in at the moment. So you have the media company Contrarian Thinking, you’re also running a fund I believe. Walk us through all that you’re working on right now.

00:05:14,352 –> 00:05:16,195

[codie]: So today, we have Contrarian Thinking, which is comprised of a newsletter which goes up to about a 160-170 thousand people. Then we have our social channels which are across all socials. We just launched youtube probably 4-5 months ago, and then you know my idea was, I think more people are curious about the word ‘money’ and about financial freedom. And I think if they get financial freedom then they can move to physical freedom AKA where they want to work, doing the things they want to do with the humans that they wanted to do it with, building something that matters in the world and then they can get to philosophical freedom which is actually thinking for themselves as opposed to letting narrative spin them. And so the idea was build this media company and then add satellites around it. You know in finance we call them ancillary acquisitions right? So you start with your main platform company, so for mine that is the media company. The media company is my platform on which I do add on acquisitions of new businesses. And so I started a fund we have a venture capital fund called Contrarian Thinking Capital, where we invest in boring business infrastructure. Which means, you know the companies that you don’t think of but you use every day, adding technology to them and seeing what happens. So what happens

if you digitize all the billboards around the world put it on a marketplace just like Google Adwords or Youtube ads. We invest, we’re looking to invest in a company that does that right now. What if on every truck that drove by for last-mile delivery, you had a billboard that could actually Geo locate and target users based on their pixels on their cell phones from Facebook and et cetera. There’s another company we’re looking into investing called Agile. So where can we take this thing that was boring, a billboard, a truck? We have another company that does postcard or direct mail but with technology on top of it and add this 21st century layer to it I think that will be the future.

00:07:07,183 –> 00:07:11,850

[al]: So why should someone consider these boring unsexy businesses as opposed to, let’s say, investing in the public market or even real estate? I’ll let you make that case.

00:07:31,167 –> 00:07:31,390

[codie]: Sure. First of all, I think you should have as diverse array of assets as the colours in the rainbow. I think it really makes sense actually to have diversification. Lots of people push back on that today. They say no go all in on something, if you’re not all in then you know you’re not going to execute. And I think that’s fine except bankruptcy sucks. And so it really sucks to become insolvent, nobody wants that. And so I think you actually have to protect the house you got to lay the foundation and then you can build on it. So the reason I like investing in boring businesses is a few reasons. One they’re not sexy so the valuations for them are not at you know 25x forward-looking PE ratios, right these businesses trade on a multiple of their profits and not a double digit multiple typically. So one is it’s a value play. Two is I think it’s better for the world that there are less Starbucks and Walmarts and that there are more corner stores and more local coffee shops. And so if we can put our money into those kind of companies instead of throwing it into the S & P and indexing to all the big guys then we have a cooler community of small businesses as opposed to the concentration of power and money in a few hands. Which is what happens when you only invest in public stocks and largely large caps. So the second is because it’s building a world that I believe in. And the third is because most people in this day and age have been told that they should invest for enterprise value for exit. For this one day if I buy this at this price it will be worth this price eventually. But in the meantime how do you eat? You can’t eat speculative price increases. You can only eat cash flow. So these businesses’ cash flow, they’re profitable now they were profitable when they were built and these businesses don’t require massive amounts of VC money to burn. And so that to me is a huge difference and most VCs miss that, and most people listening to VCs miss it.   

00:09:28,014 –> 00:09:35,664

[al]: Very true. Usually, most businesses are overlooked or hardly discussed until they come up with some private equity. I used to work as an analyst back in the day in private equity so I get it, but if you’re not coming from that background you won’t see it. Why do you think these businesses are so overlooked? 

00:09:48,931 –> 00:09:49,91

[codie]: Well I think to your point, one it’s not sexy. So I don’t think anybody wakes up and says I don’t want to go and I want to own a trash collecting company, probably not. You know two, I think because most people don’t have enough money to invest in private deals and so you can very easily go buy a fractionalized share of Facebook in the stock market. You can’t buy a fractionalized piece of a plumbing company. You have to own the whole thing or a relatively large part of it. And then three a lot of people aren’t accredited investors so they can’t invest in things like private equity funds or alternatives until recently when they started to become fractionalized investing platforms in the alternative space. So I think it was really that private equity has been the playground of the uber-wealthy. Billionaires have a higher allocation to private equity and alternatives than any other type of asset class. And so for the little guys, you know we put our money into the stock market, and the big boys they owned and bought businesses because they knew that’s where multiple expansion actually was with cashflow at this rate and you could do a lot of value add to these businesses. So that’s why in my opinion.

00:10:55,783 –> 00:11:02,794

[al]: Great. Let’s talk a bit about the great resignation. I think it plays into your area of business too. A lot of baby boomers are retiring now so a lot of businesses are going to get shut down or they’re trying to sell them. But I don’t think there are a lot of buyers in the market right now. How do you see that? Do you see it as an opportunity for you? 

00:11:23,391 –> 00:11:25,314

[codie]: Yeah. I think, you know the truth the matter is there’s something like 11 million businesses for sale in North America in the small business realm which is businesses below let’s call it 20 to 10 million dollars. So there are a lot of businesses for sale. To your point most small business owners will not sell their business or either shut it down or they’ll you know continue to kind of let it lag on or they might hand it down to someone of their employees for a very discounted amount. I think we have an opportunity to come in as the next generation of business buyers and invest in these businesses. And that is rare. Typically you do not have a wave of business owners transitioning out with assets that have real worth, and a way to buy them through SPA loans, seller financing, raising capital that is available to younger generations. So this has actually never really happened before in the US. We’ve never had this massive transition of businesses that the younger generation could buy. Even if it is buying a job, buying a business that is smaller, and transitioning away from these mega-corporations where I think a lot of people increasingly are moving to work. 

00:12:36,193 –> 00:12:43,225 

[al]: What are your thoughts on the macro environment right now, with the increasing inflation, the war in Ukraine, all things that can potentially lead to a recession? How do you see that affecting your portfolio companies? Does it have an effect?

00:12:55,571 –> 00:12:58,975

[codie]: Well, I don’t know what I think about the war in Ukraine in this instance at all. I think this is an American localized issue. And you know I’m sure there are opportunities in Europe. But I really think about what is happening right here in your neighborhood, in your backyard with the people you already know and probably businesses that you already frequent. This is a global phenomenon that you can act on very very locally.  

00:13:26,685 –> 00:13:32,151

[al]: On The Pomp podcast I recall you mentioning that pretty much anybody can be a multi

millionaire. Could you expand on what you meant by that?

00:13:38,663 –> 00:13:42,844

[codie]: Well I think that’s true today. So increasingly we have incredible access to resources in this day and age that people in the past just did not. You know you couldn’t go online and figure out how to get a loan from the government in a few clicks. You know you weren’t able to buy a business on let’s say Flippa for a couple of thousand dollars and start an online business. So democratization of information and really democratization of capital isn’t perfect, there’s a massive unfair advantage to some for sure. But it is an option. Just about anybody can take the steps I think in this day and age to become financially free. It just depends on where you’re allocating your focus and are you surrounding yourself with other people who can actually get you to that level as opposed to focusing on something that’s more entertaining. 

00:14:38,175 –> 00:14:43,541

[al]: So what is boring? What are the boring businesses right now that you think are interesting? Ok, let’s make it a quick challenge. If I give you 3 people, with 3 amounts of capital. The first person having 50k, the second having 250k, and the third with half a million dollars. If you’re one of these three people, where would you invest? 

00:15:04,201 –> 00:15:06,46 

[codie]: This is a great question. We actually just created something called the IOS, the Investor Operating System based on this question. Because the big fallacy here is that the most important part is how much you have. The truth of the matter is is that you actually have to have a lot of different determinants to what you should do. The bad answers that many people give you on social media is oh right now you should go out you should buy a laundromat, you should buy a carwash, you should do whatever the thing is that I have done. That is the cheap and easy answer to most people because it’s satisfying. It’s like she said I should do this right now. But the truth of the matter is you need to spend the first couple of tens of thousands that you have learning how to become a dealmaker, learning how to negotiate, learning how to increase your salary, learning how to look at financial terms, looking at how to read a PnL, looking how to read a balance sheet, looking at how to do a thirteen-week cash flow. Most people don’t know those things. Even if they have half a million bucks they might not know those things. So that I think the place where you start no matter where you are is actually your financial literacy, it’s not how much money you have. We have something called the investor cash flow matrix, which basically takes you from spender-saver to master-allocator and there are four levels so two in between. Most people are spender-savers. So they basically have money, they spend it to a certain amount, they might save a little bit without a lot of thought they don’t understand why they put their money there, they don’t understand the return, they don’t understand the context for money, versus a master-allocator which is where you want to be is somebody who understands what’s the difference what a good real estate fund and a bad one. Why should I invest in inflation-protected securities right now? What does it mean to negotiate terms on this deal? How do I determine if one investment is better than another? And this person has leverage at the top, this person doesn’t. So that’s what I think people should focus on, no matter where you are we have a series of questions if you go to Contrarianthinking.co and you look up the cashflow investor matrix, it’s free, a newsletter on our site, you can see we have questions to ask yourself to figure out which one of those you’re in and your whole goal should be moving up the knowledge chain before you start trying to make your money work for you.

00:17:19,553 –> 00:17:26,665 

[al]: Tell us how you’re leveraging your audience through social media to your business’s advantage? 

00:17:32,851 –> 00:17:34,373 

[codie]: I think audience is the biggest form of leverage there is. I don’t think you have to have a singular mission to realize that attention is one of the highest forms of leverage you can have in today’s society. I mean I was saying this along time ago, but then then you see it so perfectly this week with like Kim Kardashian launching a private equity fund or night media Mr Beast’s manager raising a hundred million dollars from TPG a huge private equity firm they realize that capital has become relatively a commodity there’s not enough good places to invest it and so what they’re trying to do as they’re trying to become content engines because it’s become really expensive to advertise, privacy laws are increasing across the board and so any business that is not a content business today will need to either buy or become a content business. And I’ve been saying this for years and people thought i was nuts when I was leaving private equity but now they are starting to realize that this is the case. So I think the real answer is you make content for the sake of content you want attention so that whatever you do you could do it at a really low-cost basis because you have a trusted audience. It’s like raising capital without the strings attached. And then yes it could be dealflow, it could be investors, it could be new projects, it could be new partners, could be all of those things but the mission should really be creating incredible content that serves an audience that you’re interested in and then watch the opportunities that spiral from there. 

00:18:59,536 –> 00:19:02,982

[al]: Let’s say somebody is going to come with a content company. Their first concern would be ‘how to come up with good content?’ It’s not as easy as it sounds. So what are your strategies, how do you come up with your content?

00:19:14,912 –> 00:19:15,212

[codie]: We talk about the three Cs. So you start with what you’re curious with because whatever content you do, you have to be consistent. So you have to be something that you’re willing to talk about or put effort into at least daily for at least a year. So where are you curious? Then we talk about where is there a crowd. Where is there a group of people that are interested in this topic? If I’m super niche, like I’m into green grasshoppers only, maybe that’s a tough audience. So you want to find a crowd of people. I usually like to do that by looking at Facebook groups or I might look at Reddit threads and see if there is a crowd of people who are pretty voracious about this topic. Then I go to cash. Where is there a group of people who spends money on this subject matter? So you know if it is I’m curious about hunting. I really like to go hunting, cool. I could talk about that all day. Hunters are a voracious crowd, they love talking about it, there’s lots of them around the world, they’re really into it, and three they spend a ton of money on hunting every year. So that is a great audience to target. And then it becomes easy to create content around the things that you’re interested in, especially when you get feedback from your crowd and you can support yourself by making your content business profitable.

00:20:29,264 –> 00:20:36,203

 [al]: I believe I came across this probably from one of your TikTok videos. You said something along the lines of “don’t nurture girls to be princesses” what did you mean by that?

00:20:44,584 –> 00:20:48,369 

[codie]: So I think it’s really important when raising daughters to think about raising them similar to sons in a lot of ways. You know people asked me all the time you know, how do I raise a strong daughter or you seem really confident how did you become like that? And I always thought those questions were weird until I started thinking yeah you know when when my father was raising me he always talked about you could be president, not a princess. And so you know he didn’t play the card that I think a lot of people play which is like you talk to your son and you’re like the son you’re going to go out there and you’re going to crush it and you’re going to work so hard and you know you get back up you fell down and that thing is bloody but get up you’re fine and you’re not going to die let’s keep rolling you know that guy hit you in the face what are you gonna do about it right that’s how we talk to our sons at least stereotypically in the US. How we talk to our daughters is something like, oh my sweet princess she can do no wrong you know I’d give her anything she wants, isn’t she so beautiful she’s so perfect she’s so whatever. And what I think that does, is I think it creates softness. And it’s okay to be light and it’s okay to be kind. But I think the world can be tough in many ways. So you want to create daughters that are comfortable with struggle. You know it’s it’s life is hard you know none of us to get out of it alive. And I think one of the most important things you can do is create a daughter that starts to love difficulty, that likes to strive for things. And you do that not by creating a false reality of princess hood. But you do that by telling them that that they can be the president and then if they want to be a princess that’s awesome. But it’s because they’re choosing to not not that’s because what somebody told them that they were capable of.

00:22:24,163 –> 00:22:29,348 

[al]: So if I were to go back and talk to your high school buddies, how would they describe you? Were you an introvert, extrovert, an athlete or a geek? Just want to get a sense of who you were during your high school times. Were you as confident as you are now?

00:22:42,381 –> 00:22:42,481 

[codie]: It’s a great question, you might might have to ask them. I think I was probably pretty confident when I was younger my parents would probably back that up. I certainly wasn’t a nerd because school was never my biggest forte. I did okay in it you know I got As in everything, but I was never the smartest in class and I was super into athletics. I think probably more than anything else I just I was a little bit of a loudmouth, you know I knew what I wanted, I was a little bit of a rebel. I threw my first protest at fifteen years old I think and got the whole school to go outside of our principal’s office and protest some new rule that they had for us which I now can’t remember. So I think I was always a little bit of a contrarian and I had that rebel spirit from a young age good, bad, or otherwise. But I certainly you know I don’t think I could say that I was super confident when I was that age. I was full of doubt and misgivings and concern about who I was and typical teenage angst and does this boy like me. Am I pretty enough? And all those things. But it takes a while to grow into the fact that you can be a multi-faceted human and it’s not the tragedy that we think it is when something goes wrong like in high school

00:24:02,434 –> 00:24:07,303

[al]: You mentioned somewhere that your dad used to make you play softball all day long. Could you tell us a bit about your experience with sports and how it influenced your life?

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[codie]: yeah group sports are incredibly important in my opinion. I think they’re one of the most important things that you can have your kids do. It teaches them competition, it teaches them coordination and teamwork, it also teaches them to lose, and learning to lose is an incredible thing to learn early. Especially when you’re part of a team, even if you’re the best all the time, you can still lose. And so I think that ability to lose with grace makes it a lot easier to fail consistently and realize that each failure is moving you forward. My father was very intense about athletics, volleyball, and softball when I was in school and would coach me in softball in which I played a competition league and in school. At the time I was annoyed I didn’t like him yelling at me all the time and you know I felt like he was harder on me than the other girls. But now I’m very grateful for that opportunity to spend that time with him and to have a singular focus and know what it is to compete so early in a healthy way.

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[al]: Tell us a bit more about your fund. Since you have a media arm, you can leverage that towards your fund yes? Could you tell us about what’s happening with your fund right now?

00:25:37,813 –> 00:25:38,414 

[codie]: Yeah the fund, so it’s called Contrarian Thinking Capital. We are closed to new investors at the moment. So we we’re fully fully sold out on that perspective. But what Contrarian Thinking Capital is is we invest in early-stage companies that we think are going to be the future of VC that people are paying attention to now. So typically when I reach out to mainstream VCs they want to see a really big market size, they want to see an incredible TAM, they want to see a potential next Youtube, Facebook et cetera and I don’t have any interest in investing in those. I’m not smart enough to compete with the top VC’s out there. What I do have is a really unique insight into smaller medium businesses and into things like what is going to be the best technology for a carwash. why is that going to matter? who’s going to buy it? how big could the market really be? and how sticky are those users? and so our goal is to find more of those. Where can we find the postcard company that adds tech to it? where can we find this other company that adds fractionalization fractionalized investing to AirBnB? where can we find these companies that are doing things that most people think are pretty nonautomated and boring and add technology to them? And so we’ve made six investments to date, we’ve allocated close to a million bucks and you know this fund I think you know I think we have an interesting mission. We’ll see what we’re able to do from the returns perspective, but in my mind, this asset class will be one of the ones that moves forward in the next generation, because it’s slightly underserved, the valuations are more reasonable than generalized VC, and simultaneously we can have an unfair advantage in the fact that if I with my audience of let’s say ten thousand carwash owners or carwash investors across the country can tell them that we invested in this company, we can help them reach their audience size and get a product out that’s quite a bit into a niche that would be very hard to reach typically.

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[al]: Is your fund limited for accreditors investors only or can anyone invest in your future funds?

00:27:59,320 –> 00:27:59,520

[codie]: Yeah it’s, they’re all accredited investors only. You know they’re on angelist. This is probably the most retail fund that I’ve ever done. Before typically my investors have been pensioners and sovereign wealth funds. So it’s interesting I think to have an opportunity to get to have investors that are like me and you. My mission is sort of this mainstream greater than Wallstreet mission and so it feels right to me that those are our main investors we actually cap the limit that investors can give us and so because we’re only doing a ten million dollar fund we didn’t let anybody invest in the fund at over two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. And so the idea was get more people into the mix, I like the idea of getting rich together, as opposed to getting rich fast and that’s our goal and we’ll see if we’re able to accomplish that.

00:28:50,844 –> 00:28:54,914

[al]: So when do you plan on starting your next round? Is there’s going to be another one this year or what’s your roadmap looking like?

00:28:57,860 –> 00:29:00,664

[codie]: You know, I want to spend we’ve, we’ve allocated about a million bucks of it, like I’ve said we’ll do I think we’ll spend the next two years allocating. I don’t want to go fast unless we get into a market where which which could happen where there’s a ton of opportunity. So we’re going to move really diligently in this because it’s not the main way I make money and you know we have a portfolio of twenty-five, twenty-six other businesses, my goal here is to do this really systematically and then you know, and then double down will allow co-investment rights to the companies that do well for those people in our portfolio. And I think that will be the opportunity. But if anybody’s interested to get on the waitlist, it’s Contrarian Thinking Capital is the name and you can go there and there’s a waitlist. And you know we may open it up to a small amount, but we’re not going to raise a mega fund. I think we’re going to make a ton of interesting investments, with a small group of humans and then if that proves to be scalable, then you know maybe we’ll raise something bigger from strategics on a go-forward basis. 

00:29:59,773 –> 00:30:06,231

[al]: So how can people find you via your socials? Which ones are you on?

00:30:08,990 –> 00:30:15,241

[codie]: yeah my Twitter is codie_sanchez and then Instagram is Codie Sanchez TikTok youtube and Contrrianthinking.com you guys pick your pick your poison on platforms we’re on all of them!

00:30:22,465 –> 00:30:26,411

[al]: perfect thanks Codie. Thanks for coming. Thanks for your time. Appreciate it. Cheers

00:30:27,020 –> 00:30:27,443

[codie]: thank you

00:30:28,514 –> 00:30:28,697

[al]: Bye now

00:30:29,550 –> 00:30:32,057

[codie]: Bye that was great thank you made it super easy

00:30:34,296 –> 00:30:34,576

[al]: all right, all right we’re good to go

00:30:38,945 –> 00:30:40,089

[codie]: I appreciate you having me.

The post Codie Sanchez, Founder & CEO of Contrarian Thinking Discusses The Journey of Building Her Media Company appeared first on Founder Story.

Grasshopper Kids is attempting to tackle two major challenges in the education industry. One of the challenges is that teachers are not adequately compensated for their services and find it difficult to teach in person due to certain logistical issues. On the other hand, despite the popularity of online learning, parents are looking for ways to limit their children’s screen time and find it difficult to organize lessons on their own.

Grasshopper Kids offers the perfect solution for these challenges, as they make sure to place everything under one roof while providing in-person lessons. The platform makes it simpler for parents and children to discover one another.

“ You know you want to see things happen pretty fast but I think I would tell my younger self that it’s okay if things take longer than you think or go a different direction because you know those unexpected twists can really lead you to where you’re supposed to be””

Today Grasshopper Kids is now helping children discover their passions by giving them access to a variety of unique topics that aren’t available in school. In this Founder Story episode, Arielle delves into the challenges she faced while building her startup.

Listen to the full podcast to learn all about Arielle Mackenzie and her building journey with Grasshopper Kids.

Arielle’s Book Recommendations:

The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz

Hooked by Nir Eyal

The Alchemist by Adriel Brandt

Where to Find Arielle:

Follow her on Twitter: @digitalarielle

Follow her on LinkedIn: Arielle Mackenzie

Where to Find Grasshopper Kids:

Twitter: @trygrasshopper

LinkedIn: Grasshopper Kids

Website: www.grasshopperkids.com

Episode Transcript:

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[desiree]: in today’s episode we have Arielle. the woman behind Grasshopper. Arielle, welcome to the show

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[desiree]: thank you

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[arielle]: thanks thanks for having me and what are you building

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[desiree]: for the first question briefly tell us who you are

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[arielle]: I’m Arielle Mackenzie, Co-Founder & CEO of Grasshopper Kids. We’re building a platform for kids to discover their passions through in-person learning experiences. So you know they get to work with a teacher in a small group, typically at home, on all sorts of unique topics you typically can’t find in school. So kids are learning stop motion animation with our teachers, they’re learning about dinosaurs immersively or you know they’re getting off the screens you know and into real-life learning with Grasshopper. 

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[al]: Right I mean, so what is the challenge you’re trying to solve here with Grasshopper Kids?

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[arielle]: so there’s two challenges you know on one side there’s parents and the other side there’s teachers who use our platform. You know on the teacher’s side of things you know there’s a lot of data showing that teachers do a lot of jobs typically on the side to their teaching for things like at least in the US where I’m from, teachers aren’t paid typically very well. You know they’re doing things like walking dogs, they’re driving for Uber, they’re bartending and that was something that we found out pretty early in our journey. My background I was a dance teacher before you know I went into tech and just you know all the side hustles that creatives and teachers have to do to make ends meet you know. What one thing that’s harder for them to do is to teach in person because of a lot of logistical challenges, talking to parents is sometimes the hardest part about teaching kids anything and so you know on the teachers side we saw also those challenges. But on the parents side it’s actually pretty similar you know things like online is pretty easy you know to be honest parents can go online. And their kids can learn about lots of things but when kids are like 3 to 10, when they’re not really you know they’re not able to be online in that way parents are actually looking for the opposite. They want to keep them off screens and organizing that is not so straightforward you know. They’re taking to Facebook groups, they’re jumping on waitlists for summer camps. It’s not very straightforward for parents to organize and so what ends up happening is kids miss out and working parents tend to spend a lot of time you know organizing this and that for their kids so in Grasshopper they can get everything under one roof and we can make it a lot easier for them to find each other.

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[al]: Got it. so when you look at like recently the issue was with covid. so a lot of people went into like homeschooling that became mainstream before how do you see that did it act like

a catalyst for you or no 

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[arielle]: yeah absolutely so a couple of things and we can tell tell you more about the what came to Grasshopper later, but my parents actually home-schooled me when I was little. And so this was or there was you know obviously the pandemic all of that and you know, but I think there was already a movement of parents choosing alternative education for their kids. You know I was part of that and you know my kids chose my parents chose this for their kids for a few reasons, but having flexibility over their own schedule was actually a really important reason why they chose homeschooling. They wanted to travel and expose us to a lot of things and they also wanted us to be able to learn you know on our own terms. I was able to you know, be an apprentice to my dad. I was able to do all sorts of things that the school schedule didn’t allow me to do growing up. And I think there’s that was already happening before Covid, but then I think there was a really big awakening of what was actually happening at school I think parents finally you know saw their kids curriculum up close and so by both you know the forced homeschooling they had to do during the pandemic and also understanding that there’s alternative ways to learn I think fueled a tailwind for us for sure. But I also think it showed the gap between online and in-person that school was really important for the in-person learning and we need to build a supplement for those families and other families too.

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[al]: where are you at in terms of your gun right now are you at like an earlier stage building the MVP or do you have bata users or do you have live users where you are

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[arielle]: so we, we have quite a few users. We’re only live in one city so we’d still consider ourselves in beta, but something that we learned pretty early on was that you know something for kids like anything to do with kids you know the mv p is a whole different concept. You have to, trust is really important and so we actually had to build a lot to get to the point of building this whole marketplace end to end was important for us in order to earn that trust with parents, to make sure teachers can do you know all the administration they needed so our MVP was actually pretty advanced but you know we’re live in one market and we’re growing pretty fast we have you know parents and teachers both using the platform right now and you know an adventure it’s been fun to get this out live into the real world and to iterate. You know since we’ve only been line about about nine months collecting data from parents and teachers.

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[al]: let’s talk about the mainstream education as we have right now i small cookie-cutter regardless of your passions abilities you learn the same thing right in a stand school that’s what you learn. You think that has to change going forward yeah

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[arielle]: you know I think the world is changing really fast and education hasn’t kept up.

so that is you know true across the board from we definitely see at the most at university level. People are choosing all sorts of careers that are actually taught in traditional university and so actually we just take this all the way down to the early years which is how to school prepare kids for the real world. You know there’s a lot of research on this topic but I think the truth is that not one child is alike. So their education being the same I can sometimes be really hard if you’re neuro-divergent if you learn in different ways and so I think mainstream

curriculum prepared us for mainstream jobs that are starting to get automated. So I think re-thinking education as an entirety from you know birth all the way up to university is definitely what we’re in the middle of right now and Grasshopper is really thinking a lot about the early schooling and enrichment side of things.

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[al]: right let’s talk about the funding. so have you raised funds for this or you’re bootstrapped?

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[arielle]: yeah so we raised funds. So we raised a pre-seed round last year which was interesting. We were the pandemic was still in you know kind of up and down, we actually hadn’t launched yet, when we raised our first round of funding. You know there was a few reasons for it, like I said before, we had to really launch both sides in order see how this thing would work, so we had had to raise money that way. You know at the time we had to raise money completely online, so this is, I did a complete zoom fundraise which I think is also different now that I’m seeing you know what life is on the other side, but we raise to pre-seed round of about a million US and was able to build our MVP and you know obviously we’re still iterating on our concept right now.

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[al]: come I did some digging I found out that you spend quite a lot of time quite your time outside of US how did that help with the start-up is there anything you learned push you

towards this

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[arielle]: definitely so I mean Like I said my parents exposed us to lots of different topics

and growing up a couple of years that we homeschooled but they were always prioritizing travelling and seeing the world you know a lot of Americans don’t travel the world and my parent’s mom’s from Canada originally French-Canadian and so she kind of immigrated from a young age to the US wanted us to see the world and so they that started when I was little so I think I always knew I wanted to go overseas and work. I had an opportunity a few years ago to move to Sydney, Australia and live and work in the APAC region which I think really taught me a lot about the differences but all also the similarities and challenges that parents and families are facing around the world. I’m not a parent myself but I was working with a lot of parents in my workplace and just saw that actually you know some of the challenges were very similar to what we’re dealing with in the US and then the UK so I think it it really showed me the commonality of challenges and that parenting is hard. And that like raising young kids and having a career is not straightforward and then obviously depending on what your government decides to do, it makes it easier or harder. But I think it showed me a lot of different problems that were worth solving from seeing more of the world.

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[al]:  let’s talk a bit about your competitors so I think oh the school course into the school that loosely based on Elon musk experience how he home schools here kids, especially with a state education how do You see that you think you see them as a competitor are are they doing the same thing or trying to accomplish the same goals as you oh 

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[arielle]: so, I think you know we have a very common mission. I think they see the world very similarly to us which is that you know we have to rebuild the education system. I think we’re starting from different sides of the equation. So they started with online for 7 to

12 year olds. You know I was that kid so I was actually would have used Synthesis as a kid. I was you know in that same age group. So I do think you know they were solving a really important problem. But I think there’s a world where all these new education systems need

to work together and meet. So you you may learn one you know one part of your school online and then know Grasshopper is maybe where you try the thing for 3 hours with a teacher. They’re probably not going to be the same things, so I see us more as a supplement to Synthesis, but we definitely see the world and we’re solving a very similar problem for kids. 

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[al]: right let’s talk about who’s paying for this right right now I’m assuming the parents are paying for this out of their pocket do you see going forward the states going to from this alternate method of education as well just like the men education

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[arielle]: It’s a great question. I think this is something that you know we’re only just starting to understand. But I think, our hope is that ‘yes’. You know there’s there’s all sorts of different pilot programs happening, you know something abou the US is that a lot of education is dealt with by the states, like individual states. So actually you know that this answer may look different depending on where you live. You know different states already look at homeschooling differently. There’s a lot of different requirements that you have to meet, but what is what is pretty pretty important is that states are finally starting to look at things like Universal Preschool, Universal Pre-K like in the US those still aren’t covered. And so parents right now are still paying out of pocket up to age five. So I think the big opportunity for us is first to be able to fit in and supplement kids that are you know going through traditional school but yeah as homeschooling picks up we think there’s a great opportunity for our enrichment to kind of fit in to places that government already funds this. Places like Arizona where my home state is just you know passed a bill that funds extracurriculars and we think that can apply to us one day too.

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[al]: right I’ve found this interesting thing I mean you were working on rubies campaign and I think the same time compass running yes how did that effect you is there any learning from that working on election campaign compared to running a start-up think that you can maybe take from that

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[arielle]: Absolutely. I think political campaigns, at least national level campaigns like presidential campaigns are very similar to startups. I don’t think I realized it as much at the time. I’d worked for a startup previously, I was early employee. But the similarities where, I think you know, being able to fundraise as fast as you execute is a very common between the two we you know in the Rubio campaign at least in the US is mainly self-funded from the campaign so you know you build your list you also fundraise from that list and that list votes for you so it’s honestly a massive marketing machine. You know my role in the campaign was you know part of online fundraising and the digital side of things and so you know our goal was to turn regular people into advocates for us, and so I think you know you don’t realize how similar that is to your early users because you know startups can’t really rely on ads either similar to political campaign. There’s a lot of you know barriers for each. For startups, it’s usually fun that you can’t really typically at least in the past people have done this but it’s not as possible anymore to really rely on Google and Facebook ads when you’re a startup. You have to get people to love you and really advocate for you with their friends and their family so the biggest thing I learned was how to do a lot with a little. Very similar on a campaign you have to get people to love what you’re doing and believe in what you’re about your mission and you have to be able to deal with the pressure that comes with like you know like day in and day out trying to acquire users, fundraise and do it all and I think the pace is very similar and I took that from you know that experience even though we didn’t win you get back up and you try again which is also important in startups.

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[al]: all right let’s say go into from that marketing how did you manage to get your initial uses what kind of market means did you use

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[arielle]: Very grassroots marketing. So this is something we’re you know obviously still learning about since we’re you know early. But you know for a product like ours like I said before there’s high trust. So this is not so that you you know try without thinking about it we you know we have to convince you that we can solve your problem, but also that you can trust us with your most precious family member you know these are kids and so I think the first thing that we did was you really get really excited early adopters. We ran a waitlist campaign before we even you know launched because we wanted to see who’s excited about this already, um you know where do they live, what communities are they in and can we start there. So we actually you know we went pretty slow to start with and went directly to users and we actually helped them activate their own community so this reminds me a lot of the political days where we instead of going very wide with our marketing, we have to go very deep. So if we find one user that really loves us the chances are as they have you know friends that are very similar to them, they might have kids and their classmates that they can share this with or our entire marketing revolves around a referral flywheel because that’s how people you know can gain that trust quicker in a company like ours. So we optimize everything for you know people inviting their friends, people telling their friends about it and so we a pretty strong word of mouth, because we went after those very excited users early instead trying to go very wide.

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[al]: you said you’re only live in a single city where is that

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[arielle]: yeah So we’re live in den in Denver, Colorado. I’m only smiling because we always get to asked why Denver like

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[al]: exactly i was literally going to ask you

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[arielle]: so right so I’ll just to go in there. So this is a very common start-up story but you know we actually, the Grasshopper as we know it came out of a previous idea. So this previous idea was a B2B startup, so this is like kind of you know a little different from that but we were in an accelerator program that was based out of Denver called Techstars, and you know we were selling this B2B concept, it was an employee benefit. And we were selling it to Denver companies and so we already had a bit of a base there during Covid. And the other thing that we love about Denver is that it was very funny and it sounds kind of weird but during Covid it was very important that the weather was good because we had a lot of our experiences outside because parents felt more comfortable with that so even though lots changed in the last year Denver was a great starting point but we did have to cold start Denver. Like I have family that’s there but beyond that like we don’t have a huge base in Denver so we had to really launch this thing without a network which I don’t recommend other startups do but it taught us really quickly what people wanted and what they didn’t want because we didn’t rely on our friends just telling us they loved it it had to be completely pure in terms of feedback from users.

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[al]: so you you mentioned that there was another start-up before this another company did you pure to this concept

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[arielle]: Yes, so again something that I wish I would have known before starting the journey is just sometimes you know even if you’re wrong about one concept what you learned might be really important at the time. So you know our original concept was something called Care Split it was a child care startup that had an employee benefit angle like I was saying earlier and what we found was actually, you know we thought we could sell this startup to employers and they’d sell it to their employees but he ended up happening is that users started sharing it with their friends way more aggressively. They were like and maybe it was a Covid thing but people felt you closer to their neighbours and friends and people they go to church with than they were you know their colleagues and we ended up our B2C play started actually working and so we really listened to those early users and it turned into a different concept called Grasshopper but now we’re glad we started with with the employer but now you have to pivot, be willing to if you’re a founder and listen to what users are telling you what they were telling us is they want to do this in groups with their friends with their mom’s groups all these places that you were at the office, that we thought it was.

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[al]: I mean potting can be really a tough thing right more mentally than anything else because you are tied up to their initial idea now suddenly you make a outen how did that feel for you how did you come back

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[arielle]: yeah a good question. I think you know for us where we’ve always been very customer-centric I think as I’m a marketer my co-founder Chris she’s, you know has always worked in products and engineering her whole career and really focused on consumer products and you know we kind of believe that the best marketing campaigns, the best political campaigns, the best products come from users themselves. They tend to, these these moments that you read about are, like these slogans that you read that typically come from a focus group you know a lot of time. So I think for us it was more about like what are users telling us, how are they behaving and being willing, you know you have to put your pride aside right, and you go out and fundraise and you tell investors this is going to happen but actually you know if a user starts pulling a product out of you that’s more powerful than anything and so I think it was important to listen to users and that that gave me the confidence to throw my old idea away and you know really take a bet on a new company and you know that bet’s paying off now for us.

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[al]: as a female founder did you face any challenges maybe found raising or building the start up at all no yeah

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[arielle]: I think the answer is yes. I think, but it’s you know I think it’s more it’s like It’s not one moment, its many moments I think that you know you look backwards and you you look back I think something that’s important that I’ve observed not just with Grasshopper, you know we’re two female founders, starting a company about kids. And, so I think there’s sometimes a disconnect between you know the funders and the people whose problems you’re solving. So obviously Grasshopper serves parents, dads, moms but the vast majority of our users are moms. So we had to not only it wasn’t just being a female founder was actually building a company targeting moms is actually sometimes difficult right to, because sometimes investors would say well I don’t have that problem and then you know typically we’re like well are you sure you’re your partner doesn’t. So there was actually, we probably experience more pushback from the product we’re building, than the female founders, but I think what’s important to know is that you know we are making progress I just went through you know a program full of female founders. I think you’ve met Capri where I think I met more female founders in a week than I had in a year and so we were all able to share learnings and share contacts and all of a sudden I feel like the in the field is evening. But I do think you know founders have to do more and you have to prove that people really want what you’re building and that there’s a market for your product when it’s not the investors’ problem you’re probably solving some of the time.

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[al]: what are the challenges you’re facing right now at the moment in your company what

will be your biggest challenge right now 

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[arielle]: I think, you know right now the world is really uncertain as a whole. So you know I think even 6 months ago when we first raised our first round of funding I think the economy was in a different place, you know customers were, had a different sentiment. So I think you know us understanding you know how users are feeling I think everyone’s gotten you know this pretty price sensitive. For an example, like the people are like figuring out what stays in their life and what goes, I think for us we’re really trying to understand how you know what’s the path forward in terms of launching in additional cities, where should we go, is our roadmap still the same, you know all of that sort of thing. But I think, what’s exciting about it is that we’ve definitely seen on the teacher’s side of things, teachers really want to earn now more than ever. So you know how quickly can we launch outside of just Denver would be the you know the challenge we’re thinking about. We’re going to be launching our our next city in a couple of months actually. So that’s kind of on my mind constantly is can we take what we and Denver bring it to a different city amidst all the craziness that’s happening in the world right now.

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[al]: let’s look back to your previous answer you mentioned launch house right we spoke to our founders from much house recommended highly what your experience with launches how much did it help you as a hand yeah

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[arielle]: Launch House was huge. So you know I had a great experience with you know I actually am the type of founder that joins a lot of different networks. I did Launch House, Techstars and On Deck. All the founders programs, obviously this was over you know a period of time. So it wasn’t at the same time. But Launch House is special because of the in-person component, which obviously my company is all about in-person education. You know IRL interactions. But I didn’t realize how much I really missed that and I think Launch House was able you know to put a bunch of smart people in a room and just see what happens. Like Launch House doesn’t have you know like a specific program that makes this effective. I think it’s bringing people together and letting serendipity happen. And also like you know Launch House just treats you like you know you’re just anyone else in the sense that like we’re female founders but we’re just Launch House members. I think that was also pretty important is that we just got the normal experience and you know in the process we got to a lot of cool founders and got to get, build real genuine relationships they aren’t just transactional they’re real because you have that in-person you know bonding.

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00:23:57,822 –> 00:24:03,228

[al]: but all right if you had to go back when you’re ten your soul if  you had to give advice to your younger self what would it be knowing what you’re not right now

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[arielle]: I think you know this is pretty common for founder types. Back then I was impatient. I think I still am in a way. You know you want to see things happen pretty fast but I think I would tell my younger self that it’s okay if things you know take longer than you think or go a different direction because you know those unexpected twists can really lead you to where you’re supposed to be. So kind of relax go along for the ride and you know let life surprise you a bit. Because I do think some of the best things in my life have been these surprises. Even with Grasshopper, it wasn’t exactly the company I started, but it’s you know where it is for a reason.

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[al]: But this is going to take the last question

Arielle 

So the first thing first book was ‘ The Hard Things About Hard Things’. It was probably the first founder memoir that I read that kind of showed what it was really like to build a company and lead it through you know all sorts of growth and how hard it could be. Let’s see, I think the book ‘Hooked’ by Nir Eyal, so it was about building products that was kind of a you know a great primer to how growth and product aligned to build these like iconic companies. You now Nir invested in Grasshopper which is very exciting and you know building a habit-forming product has really informed me and I think ‘The Alchemist’ which is not a business book it was you know a story about how your life can change and you know you could become who you really are if you just listen to your inner voice, it was really important for me too. thank you thank you both for having me.

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[al]: yeah thank you

The post ARIELLE MACKENZIE, CO-FOUNDER & CEO OF GRASSHOPPER KIDS TALKS ABOUT BUILDING HER INTERACTIVE EDUCATIONAL PLATFORM appeared first on Founder Story.

Neville was introduced to copywriting by one of his pals in the hopes that his rave firm, “House of Rave,” would draw more attention. He then understood how much he had been losing out on and transformed his rave company into an email marketing firm overnight. He began presenting sales in various ways and discovered that getting people engaged in the product before it hit the market may result in greater sales. All it took was a few changes in words to create a dramatic result.

This was his secret to getting a number of targeted people to come to his website, consume the material and even buy.

Today, Neville uses his copywriting expertise to assist thousands of entrepreneurs and minimize the number of non-performing content on the internet. He also offers training material to those interested in honing their copywriting skills.

“ I’d say some people are a little too fascinated with the internet and trying to get their word out there when in fact to some of these old school marketing methods are coming back in style. In fact, you can buy billboards for cheaper than you can buy ads right now.”

Listen to the full podcast to learn all about Neville Medhora, and his building journey and walk away with some valuable tips on all things copywriting!

Where to Find Neville:

Follow him on Twitter: @nevmed

Follow him on Instagram: @neville_medhora

Find him on Linkedin: Neville Medhora

Where to Find Copywriting Course:

Website: www.copywritingcourse.com

Episode Transcript:

[desiree]: In today’s episode we have Neville, the man behind copywritingcourse.com. Neville, welcome to the show.

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[neville]: Thank you for having me, appreciate it.

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[al]: Could you tell us a bit about, what does copywriting mean for those who don’t know, how would you describe that?

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[neville]: In my opinion copywriting means putting information from my head into your head or my head into a million people’s heads. And using the best conveyance possible. So

sometimes that’s text, sometimes it’s images, sometimes it’s video, sometimes it’s all of the above. And that’s in my opinion what copy writing is, and with the specific focus on

trying to sell something or convey some specific piece of information.

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[al]: I mean where do you see this as coming into play like, I see that we can definitely use that on let’s say landing pages, what are the use cases for copywriting?

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[neville]: My personal favorite one is email. Because you can send it to a 100,000

people and if you get the message across effectively and they need your product at that time, you give them an option to buy, and they buy immediately. And so it’s actually across any medium that you think of. So like I said text, video, images all those things you are trying to sell something eventually. So if you have a Twitter account, if you have a Facebook account, any social media account. You’re putting out videos right now. The ultimate goal of all of these is to get someone to buy your product right? And so what’s the best way to do that? And sometimes it’s actually putting out helpful content like this, where it’s not specific, we’re not saying buy CloudDevs or anything like that. But at the same time you’re trying to establish yourself for an authority then people check out CloudDevs. So that’s what copywriting is. It’s the train of thought to get people to a sale, and which is the best way to do that. It’s constantly changing with technology.

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[al]: Right, what would be your real one like first time you had result with copy copywriting? Maybe you did something like, a real world, of shit moment, this thing works?

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[neville]: Yeah. And it was it was quite dramatic actually. I was running a rave company. Like rave parties. I’ve never been to a rave in my entire life till this day. But I ran a rave dropshipping company and it was called ‘House of Rave’. And it was essentially the way that we got people to buy was, we dominated the search engine results, people found us and they would buy. So it was almost like, I would hope and pray people find us and then they would buy. And that worked fine. But then I started learning about copywriting from a friend’s recommendation. And I started reading about this and I was like I was sad and happy at the same time. Sad that I realized I think I’ve been messing up how I’ve been trying to sell things this whole time. And happy that I just discovered it. And so overnight ‘House of Rave’ became like an email marketing company, more so than an SEO company. And the reason was we started we started presenting sales in different ways. Before I’d say we have a product on sale, buy it. That’s it. that was that was the whole thing. That’s what I thought you do. And I never realized maybe you can tell a story about this, maybe you can show some reasons people would be interested in this, maybe you can show some alternative use cases for this product. And really get people invested in the product see the value of the product and then offer them a sale. And so we did that and overnight that was like our top selling day. And and from then on that’s how we made most of our money from email and that was because of copywriting. Just we just changed the words in our email around and there was a dramatically different result. Because we were already sending emails we already had email sending software, no technology change, just the way we approached it changed that’s it. 

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[al]: What kind of difference are you talking about here, in terms of numbers? Let’s say pre revenue before you did this, the revenue was x what kind of increment did you see after that?

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[neville]: Yeah, so I actually know exactly. So it cost me eighty bucks a month for the email sending software and I would make forty dollars a month off of emails. So I was going negative actually. And I thought that maybe I’m just doing it to put my brand out there right. That’s the way I thought at the time. And then when I started doing this each email would bring in 3 to 10 grand depending on the sale that we did right. And so every time we sent out an email we can depend on revenue.

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[al]: You used to be in negative? Then you went to like thee to ten grand like literally overnight?

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[neville]: Yes. It cost more to have the tech to send the email, than we’d actually make on

email. Yeah. No one was buying anything. That’s the funny part, that’s why I told you it was dramatic from negative to actually being the main driver of our sales. And then, I’m not even counting, I’m not even counting the time that I took. So I very much prided myself on making good images, so we take all these images. So if you count the amount of time per newsletter, it’s probably 10 to 20 hours of my own sweat equity. Putting that in not to mention just we were just going negative on the money part so it was it was almost kind of a hilarious type of thing I was doing it was almost negative, its negative, which is not a good business practice.

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[al]: So let’s say a founder, just starting up, he has his landing page explaining his product. Maybe he has generic stuff right now. How would you go about describing it? What would be the best approach to selling on a landing page?

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[neville]: Well it depends. So so the landing page just remember, the landing page is not the thing that we’re focusing on. The landing page is just a piece of tech that we currently use. Currently a lot of people expect to go to a landing page. Just remember 30 years ago no one ever went to a landing page ever because it didn’t exist. And so so that it was a different way of getting the message out. So I would take stock of what that person has,  right. So let’s say you have a real really large LinkedIn following of SaaS founders. Well I would probably start right there. You know, screw the landing page first. I would focus on that audience. And the other thing, but to answer your question, what would you put on the landing page? I would basically, I would describe it in one sentence like we were talking to each other. So for example CloudDevs, explain in one sentence what it does.

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[al]: We provide vetted developers from the LatAms.

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[neville]: Okay so so if you need tech talent from Latin American countries you go to CloudDevs right? So I would I would put something like that. So I think a lot of founders, especially very technical founders, will try to describe their technology, in technologist type terms. And that’s great if you’re talking to a CTO. But if you’re talking to the average user, they don’t really care about your technology, they kind of care about the end results that you get. So when I buy an Iphone particularly care that they develop some sort of neuro network chip, I just know that it takes really good photos. That’s, that’s all I really care about, and then if I really want to dive down I can find that information, but it’s not necessary to show you know on the front of the homepage necessarily. Just show me that this takes more awesome photos than anything. And so just simply describing things like you would describe to a person is the number one thing, especially I tell to engineers, it’s like how would you tell me in one sentence or your mom what this product does? And that’s what the landing page should have, just a bunch of different features. And my favorite thing to do for software, is just show it. Show it in action. Show a GIF, show a video. Software is pretty binary, it either does the task or it does not. You can’t really lie about it. So so it’s great. So if I’m buying let’s say software like Calendly. It shows me a GIF of someone booking a time and then it just goes to my schedule, that’s it. I understand intuitively from that GIF what happened. I don’t even really need to describe it.

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[al]: So based on what you’re saying, you make gifs count as copywriting as well. So it’s not just necessarily words right?

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[neville]: Absolutely, I think the term copywriting expands as the the technology expands. So when people say it’s just the written word, I’m like I mean look at any software company’s web page. Do you think its only written words? I would employ you to find any of them that is just written words. And so like I said, my definition of copywriting is not just text on a page, it’s getting information from my brain to your brain in the most efficient way possible. Maybe it’s an image with zero text on it, I’d still consider that copywriting.

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[al]: Got it. Let’s look back to the initial question. Let’s say you’re just starting out as a founder right, you want to bring in traffic. You’re using copywriting, your writing skills to bring in traffic. I think you mentioned a really important thing like bring traffic from let’s say your Twitter following. What might be, what would be the best support for a founder just starting out?

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[neville]: Well do you want, let’s work backwards here. I think the goal is incorrect there. The goal seems to be traffic, but is that really the goal?

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[al]: The goal should be conversions right?

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[neville]: The goal should be sales. Right?

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[al]: right exactly

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[neville]: So so so just keep in mind the goal is sales. Whether that’s offline, online, they don’t come through the web page, they come through the phone. I don’t really care which which method it is yeah. And so so just raw traffic, we’ve built a lot of sites with you know half a million visits per month in search engine traffic, but that converts to zero sales, right. So traffic is irrelevant. I’d rather have you know two traffic and two sales rather than a hundred thousand traffic and zero sales. And so so the goal is sales. And a lot of times, especially with B2B products, most of the sales are created over the phone and so sometimes people put too much investment into their web pages, when I’m telling them your web page should have one goal and that is not to make a sale, it’s to get them on the phone, right. That’s, that’s your number one goal. And so whenever I look at any sort of piece of marketing, I tell people to look backwards, what is your goal and everything we do is just to get to that goal, that’s it. There’s no other purpose of the page. So a lot of times people will try to spend too much time like what about this color, what about this background, I’m like does that matter or are we just trying to get them on the phone? Are we just trying to collect their information? Because I’d rather do what what best does that and sometimes having a fancy web page is almost the opposite. So actually, I bet, you’re in the B2B space. I bet, if you notice, you go to almost any B2B site, look what’s working, look what everyone does. The reason everyone does something is oftentimes because it works. What they have instead of a buy button for B2B software, they often have like an intake form, like so download this white paper, enter your name, enter your email, enter your revenue, enter the size of the team all that kind of stuff. They’re doing that because the way that all those sales are made are over the phone, over a sales call, not from someone clicking buy like a consumer product. So that’s what I always tell people. Work backwards to the goal and everything should revolve around that.

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[al]: i mean what’s working right now especially I think social media marketing is like really primarily used by pretty much all the companies right now. How important is that? Is that something founder should be in seriously?

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[neville]: Of course because because it used to be that the only way to get leads was go outbound, so you have a team that calls everyone and maybe one percent of those people respond. Instead, now you’re getting inbound leads. So the internet has been very much a game changer for that. People can come to my website, explore my content on while I’m sleeping it doesn’t really matter and then they sign up, they do all the work, they are an inbound lead. So the internet is a great way to do that. So if you have a social following, I would also just say ignore the term social media it has such a negative connotation, I’d say ignore social media. It’s just, we’re just connecting with people whatever platform you choose you do a Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, TikTok, YouTube whatever it doesn’t really matter. But the point is, go where your audience actually is. So if you’re selling B2B software oftentimes your prime audience may not be on TikTok for four hours a day, right? But LinkedIn is where it’s all happening. So I would say try to dominate one platform where you think you you know that most of your customers hangout the absolute most. And and if you put out content based arond hiring devs in Latin America and people start following you let’s say you do this for two years straight you make a commitment that you’re going to put out a lot of good information on this topic, you become the authority whenever someone does want to hire a dev from Latin America or for a better price than they find here in the States then maybe they can come to you. So you get inbound leads. But it does take effort. Everyone knows everyone wants inbound leads right? It’s a high commodity. So everyone wants to be at the top of the search results, they want to be at the top of social media, they want to be top of mind, but you have to put effort into that. So it’s just rather directing a budget from like a sales team into a marketing team so you get inbounds.

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[al]: And let’s say if somebody wants to get started to learn about copywriting, you’re offering up an excellent course, one of the courses I took when I started up. It definitely did help me and also the marketing person we brought in the first thing we did was literally she had to go through the course, asked her to do that. So that definitely did help us a lot. I mean for a lay person who’s just listening to it maybe doesn’t know about copywriting as much just getting introduced to the whole thing, what can a person learn from that course right now? How helpful would that be for them?

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[neville]: So here’s the thing. One idea can pretty much change the trajectory of a lot. So whenever I told you that example of our my rave company went from an SEO company to an email marketing company overnight, that was from a friend saying you should probably learn about copywriting. The way I did it, I read this old school copywriter named Gary Halbert. It

was called The Boron Letters that he wrote from jail. He’s a kind of you know gray area, black area, direct response marketer. But there’s a lot of interesting lessons to learn about psychology behind him. So the technology changes throughout the years but the human brain hasn’t changed in quite an amount of time. So creating demand, creating a sale, creating interest for someone has been the same for a very long amount of time. So I started reading all these old school copywriters and applying it to my own business. And I think the applying it to my own business part was far more impactful. So of course there is the learning aspect, but then there’s the actual doing aspect that as you know, you can teach someone to ride a bike all day conceptually, but until they put their legs on a pedal it doesn’t really matter that then it all of a sudden clicks in place. So with Copywriting Course, it’s actually more than just a course, there are videos that you can watch with training, but then we put assignments to everything. And we’ve actually been increasing that as the technologies gets better, we have an entire forum inside there. And not only do you get assignments but people will give feedback, so professional writers get feedback on your writing. So that I think is the most helpful part that you can go learn, practice and get feedback so you can learn, practice and iterate on your copywriting. And you’ll start to notice that let’s say you learn how to write a cold email a little bit better, you’ll notice that that lesson applies to sales pitches, you’ll notice that that lesson applies to social media, that lesson applies to youtube, it applies to basically getting information across to another person in the best way possible. That’s what we’re trying to teach you. So no matter what the technology that springs up next is, let’s say VR takes over, you’ll be able to tell a good story and make sales in VR because it does, the technology is irrelevant, the psychology is the most important thing. So that’s what we pride ourselves on, so when people join the Copywriting Course, they get access to whatever they’re working on so if they’re trying to send emails we say just go to this email writing course and we’ll show you the best way. Then you apply that and iterate and get better and better and better and the cool thing is once you know how to do that you kind of know how to do it for life so that’s why it’s such an impactful skill. I say just being able to rearrange words or rearrange the story that you’re telling someone is it’s such an good impactful skill because it costs very little to know money but the result can be tremendous.

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[al]: Let’s talk to me about email marketing. How important is that today? Is it still working today or is it most spammy if you’re doing it right now? How do you see that?

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[neville]: It’s still, it’s still the number one thing. I know I know social media so you get TikTok and Instagram all that kind of stuff, that that’s hot and sexy but email marketing still is the way that most big companies make most of their money. That is that every single person I know it’s usually where most of the money comes in. If they do a product launch they send it out to their email list. If they have a product, a brand new feature, they send it out to their email list, if they are trying sign up free customers the number one thing they ask for is their email. If you’re giving away a download the number one thing they ask for is an email. Look at every single big social media traffic site or social channel that you’e looking at, whether it’s Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok they still try to get you to their website so they can sign up your email. And so it’s like why is every single person in the world that’s good at marketing trying to get your email. And it’s because the single path that you completely own for the most part. Maybe you could argue that, maybe Google owns it a little bit, but most you control that path. So Facebook pages, remember Facebook pages a long time ago, ten plus years ago people were spending millions of dollars to boost their Facebook pages. When’s the last time you’ve been to a Facebook page? It is wiped off the face of the earth for the most part and so the technology changes quite a bit, but email is always the same. Email you can depend on. And also email is not quite as annoying as text messages. Text messages interrupt people when you send them. Email is like you can send quite a bit of email and you don’t actually interrupt people’s day rather they check their inbox at their own leisure and see your emails. But the nature of email has been changing. I think you cannot spam people as much, people have far more filters which thank god otherwise my my  gmail would be a nightmare. But you have to send good stuff by mail. You can’t just send like, hey buy this, hey buy this, hey buy that. People will unsubscribe. Unless they specifically want for whatever reason that product to spam them. So for that reason I’d say email is still the number one marketing channel. If I had to give up all of my different channels, I would still keep email over everything. That is is where all my revenue comes from. All the people that have consulted with us, that’s pretty much one hundred percent of the case the email list is still by far the most important thing even though it’s been around for a while email still seems old but it’s far better than any social channel I’ve seen so far.

462

00:18:16,215 –> 00:18:21,524

[al]: So how do you stand out? I mean if you let’s say my email gets flooded with mails every day. So let’s say you want to stand out among the other emails, how do you do that?

468

00:18:29,450 –> 00:18:33,657

[neville]: Give good content. So here’s the thing, I made up a rule. So I was I was part of this company called AppSumo right? And so I was writing all the emails out to a million plus people a day. And the number one thing I know so I made up a pneumonic, it’s 70% content 30% sales. If I was trying, I was trying to sell something to someone every single day we were basically like Groupon for software. We’re trying to pitch you something every single day in email. So that means every single day I show up in your inbox and I go hey buy this thing. Now that’s pretty annoying for the most part. So how did I get around that? I said let me give them mostly good content, it had to be way above 50%. So I said 70% good content 30% sales. So if I said let’s say there’s a there’s a software called Grasshopper which is like a phone tree system, so when someone calls your number it has a phone tree system an automated response system and directs your call. And so you can make a one person lawyer look like they have a big law firm. You can make one person ecommerce shop look like they have a big support department right? And so I said instead of saying Grasshopper, a $100 off here you go, that’s a little bit annoying and doesn’t provide much context. I would say how can I provide 70% of the value. So I say here how I used Grasshopper in my own company and made my small one person company look like a big company and it also gave me more time to get on the phone and answer someone’s question. A nd so I would show that process and by the end people go oh that’s really cool I could use that for my company, I can use that for my law firm, I could use that for my plumbing company, I could use that for my electrician company. And then at the end I say by the way we have a deal on it. So I’m actually telling them I’m informing them with something new, they learned something from that email. And they could look forward to opening that email every single day and learning something new even if they don’t buy it. That was my deal with them and so people said I love your newsletter and in the back of my mind I’m like I mean I’m trying to sell you something every day I should be an annoying person but I’m not. And it was because I was giving them a lot of value and so that’s what I think the cardinal sin of many email newsletters, they’ll be an insurance company and they’ll just say buy this product, buy this product, here’s one of our other products. It’s all about me me me me me rather than what can you give them, what you give the user that’s educational for them right? That that’s the secret to a really, really good newsletter 70% content 30% percent sales.

522

00:20:47,585 –> 00:20:53,860

[al]: Right. And going forward on the horizon what is that you’re seeing as new means of marketing apart from social media in marketing do you see something interesting coming up that people should be looking out for?

525

00:21:01,790 –> 00:21:03,392

[neville]: Yeah, going back to old school stuff. So so people have moved away from all the old school they moved away from radio, they moved away from newspapers and moved from bill boards, bus station flyers, sponsoring a bench you know those types of things that used to be the way that people marketed. But now all this new fangled internet stuff is coming up. And the internet stuff is far more interesting cause if you buy a billboard, you have no idea who’s seen it there’s no there’s no numbers, no metrics. Very, very vague metrics that you can get, whereas if you sponsor a Facebook ads you can see exactly how many people bought it, How many cents you spent, all that kind of stuff. So people get fascinated and move towards the internet but forget that there’s a whole world of offline like most of the economy by and large is off the internet. And so I think people forget about those old school marketing tactics let me give a quick story. This woman came to me a few years ago and wanted to dominate the internet for her, she lived in a medium sized city in the United States. She wanted to be the number one realestate agent online. And I remember thinking like why online? Because she didn’t know much about the internet, she was very not internet savvy. So she spent two years trying to do this and came to me as a last resort and I said what were your past results. And she told me she used to be the number two realtor in that whole area and I was like what are you doing on this internet stuff? And she’s like don’t know I just thought the internet kind of the future whatever. I’m like you’re competing with Redfin, Zillow, all these different marketplaces that are really good at the internet. There’s almost no way you, who have no benefit or advantage on the internet, will win. And I asked what did you used to do to be the number two real estate agent in the entire area? She’s like well every Tuesday I just went and knocked on a bunch of doors and just talked to people. I was like well then do that! Like you should not do this internet stuff, you’re at a huge disadvantage. And so so she started doing that again and going up the ranks incredibly fast. Her second marketing method that worked really well, you know the signs on the side of the road that say we buy your house that kind of thing, they put those up. That’s it. That was her whole marketing budget. Her knocking on doors and putting these signs up. And she started going up again and she ditched the whole internet thing. So I think too many people try to compete on the internet when in fact the internet is sometimes a little bit zero sum. For example how many number one Google results are there when you search. There’s one so that means everyone’s competing for that one spot, right? But but how many intersections are there in a city? Hundreds, thousands that you can put signs up that you have no competition on. And so I think actually going backwards sometimes is the best. And a lot of people come to us saying like how do we get leads on our home page and get them to convert with an auto responder. I’m like have you ever thought of calling them? You know that is still one of the biggest ways that most business is done. So if you look at Facebook, Microsoft, Google all these places have 20,000+ sales people. All their biggest accounts have people that they’re just two people talking over the phone. That’s most of what the business is, that’s most of how the economy runs. And so I’d say some people are a little too fascinated with the internet and trying to get their word out there when in fact to some of these old school marketing methods are coming back in style. In fact you can buy billboards for cheaper than you can buy ads right now. so I’ve seen companies buying billboards and spending 10,000 dollars on that to get all this all this publicity on billboards rather than just you know a few days worth of Facebook ads. So it it just depends what’s the cheapest way to get the word out to the most amount of people.

600

00:24:24,959 –> 00:24:33,011

[al]: Let’s talk about a bit about AppSumo. Did AppSumo stop marketing aside from email period at this point? They are a huge company I think they are at nine figure revenue. How instrumental email was for them?

606

00:24:40,311 –> 00:24:40,998 

[neville]: I mean email is the whole thing. Where else does AppSumo make revenue? It’s all email, 100% email. I wish there was a better answer I wish I could say oh partially social, it’s all email. All email, so I mean, so and it’s also you send out an email informing people of a deal and show them how it works and all that kind of stuff and at the end you say this deal is about to go away, and you’ll always see a big flood of orders on that last day when it’s about to go away. But AppSumo the most valuable thing is the email list, I mean absolutely by far. And if someone were to acquire a company like that what they’re buying is that customer list, that email list. That’s what they’re buying. so another company I’m involved with, called The Hustle sold, and what HubSpot bought The Hustle for was the access to all those readers. the email list. That was also an email marketing company. That’s it. I mean can call it an events company, you can call it all that, but everything was based off the email list.

627

00:25:40,545 –> 00:25:47,680

[al]: Right how about if a new founder tried to create a list of email what be the best way to collect mails right now?

629

00:25:50,010 –> 00:25:53,716

[neville]: I think the, so number one is still the same tactics, like if you go on Google and type in how to collect get email addresses all those articles would be correct, all those tactics are exactly the same. What I think is hard is for people to want to be on your email list. So just remember the jig is up. Everyone knows that email is valuable now right. Twenty years ago is still kind of a secret only a few people knew about it. But now everyone knows and so what can someone get that they’re going to sign up for your email with. So I actually think software companies have done a good job so if you want if you want access to our software for free for a week you have to sign up your email list. So they get your email address over there. The other way is social media nowadays. So if you follow Twitter or anything, you see most people when they write long threads in order to get followers, they’re all actually eventually trying to convert you to an email subscriber. That’s the ultimate goal. or if you look at any big YouTube channel they always try to direct you to a website where you sign up your email. And so you can put out content to get people’s email but just remember content marketing is a long term game. There is something to say that like you should be willing to do this several times a week for two years. If you’re not willing to do that I don’t think content marketing is going to work too well. And so that’s the number one way offering free downloads of something so something valuable that people can get. It used to be like download this pdf. Which works still works to this day, but I think for example let’s say here’s a couple of different downloads I’ve made that are really good. I made a pricing calculator, so how much should you charge, let’s say you want to make a million dollars in revenue. so I type in a million and it shows me how many products I need to sell to make a million dollars, right. so I need to sell ten products at a 100,000 dollars or a 100 products at a 1000 dollars to make a million revenue like that. I made a little calculator like that and offered that download and a bunch of people downloaded it. That was a good example of how to get people their email. another one is giveaways. This one works really well, but can bring in low quality people. So let me tell you how to do this. giveaways are very effective, saying like we’re going to give this away there’s some software called KingSumo, some there’s different Rafflecopter there’s all sorts of different software that will do it. And you can run a giveaway and then people can bring in their friends for extra points. These work very well, but you have to be very careful about what you give away. So for example, I run a writing company. If I was saying I’m going to giveaway a Macbook Pro, you know who wants a Macbook Pro for free, everyone in the world. There’s no one who doesn’t want that or I’m gonna give away a Tesla. everyone wants a free Tesla. But instead what I do to make sure the giveaways are very targeted like targeted email addresses I say I’m going to give away my ten favorite copywriting books. So it’s not a very high price prize but the people that really want that are all going to be the people that I want on my email list. So giveaways are still a very good tactic to do. I’d say going on ProductHunt, so if there’s there’s a new founder, I’d say doing something like ProductHunt and launching and then on their web page saying get on our web beta list and sign in for an email address, that is a very valid way also to get interested customers. Just remember if you’re going to get custo.. emails you want your target customer preferably. You don’t just want random emails. You’ll eventually have to filter those out and then people will not be interested in your emails in the long run. So all those methods are very good and the funny thing is I wish there was some secret but every big company have been involved with to make a big email let’s let’s say The Hustle or the AppSumo reaching million, two million things and then my own email lists in hundreds of thousands, that kind of stuff it’s like just doing these things over and over and over for years is how you build those big email lists. Doing a giveaway and then sometimes the giveaways don’t work all that well and then you offer a download, and then you have a popular post on google or SEO ranks number one so you put a download at the end for that doing all those things is how you build an email list overtime. I wish it was more magic than that but that is the answer. It’s a little bit boring but that is how you do it.

717

00:29:46,399 –> 00:29:48,550

[al]: So if people are to find you where can they find you on socials so they can learn more from you?

723

00:30:01,981 –> 00:30:05,266

[neville]: The ultimate place where most of my writing lives is copywritingcourse.com. So if you go there you’ll see our blog, we have a podcast all that kind of stuff. You can also follow

me on twitter @nevmed. I’m most active there in terms of most amount of activity. And then it flows into all our other things. So you can follow me on LinkedIn and Facebook I post all

the content there too. But for the most part I’m active on Twitter if you want to interact with me or you can join our copywriting course so not only is it of course, but we actually I’m in there all day. So we acually have a big community that’s the main thing that people come for and then every Thursday we do office hours so if you want to ask me a question say hey how can I make this email newsletter better well I’ll actually review it for you on live and we’ll just talk about it. So it’s kind of like get free consulting too. So pretty accessible inside the course so I’d say go to copywritingcourse.com. And if you want to see what we do for email newsletters you go to copywritingcourse.com or copywritingcourse.com/newsletter and we send out a Friday newsletter and then we also offer all these different copywriting tips that we send out every single week. So probably send two emails a week to you including a Friday newsletter. So if you want tomake your own newsletter for your company I would say making a weekly or bi-weekly newsletter is probably one of the best ways to do email marketing right now. People like newsletters. People like getting it at the same time on the same day and it’s actually very simple. I wrote a, if you type in copywritingcourse.com how to build a newsletter, I made a really good video that a lot of people have used and copied and I’d say do it too. A process on how to make a really good newsletter and you can actually put one of your employes in charge of it. It’s  pretty good, so follow me on copywritingcourse.com basically.

754

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[al]: And what about Youtube? Are you active on Youtube as well?

755

00:31:43,190 –> 00:31:47,923

[neville]: Yeah if you type in Neville Medhora on Youtube or Neville copywriting on youtube so its Youtube.com/kopywriting and it’s spelled with a K so yeah

759

00:31:53,435 –> 00:31:57,141

[al]: So I think that’s going to attach all the URLs on the description as well on the video

so people can find you. The that was super helpful I’m sure of people who like to reach out to you follow you and sign up to the course. So they can find you details from the description we’re gonna add that and thanks coming in thank you very much, appreciate it!

767

00:32:13,000 –> 00:32:16,173

[neville]: No worrie thanks for having me I appreciate it was an honor. Thank you Al thank

 you desiree appreciate it thank you 

The post NEVILLE MEDHORA, FOUNDER OF COPYWRITING COURSE TALKS ABOUT BUILDING HIS COMPANY appeared first on Founder Story.

After graduating, Jeremy began working at a marketing agency, where he found himself doing boring local marketing for small businesses in Southern California. During this time, he learned about different types of content marketing.

When the agency’s founders parted ways, Jeremy ended up working alongside one of them. From there onwards, the company shifted its focus to serving technology, software and SaaS companies. He discovered his passion for the industry here, and six years later, he and his business partner founded their own agency-uSERP.

“ …entrepreneurship, being a founder, anything like that has a of highs and lows. And if you ride those, and you you think you’re really great when you’re at the top, you think you’re really bad when you’re at the bottom, you can start to kind of blame yourself internally and say there’s something wrong with me, this isn’t supposed to happen. But in reality, entrepreneurship is never a straight line, it’s never linear growth, and there’s always going to be ups and downs.”

Today, uSERP serves several high-growth startups such as monday.com, Robinhood, Active Campaign and Hotjar. 

Listen to the full podcast to discover more about Jeremy Moser, his building journey with uSERP and how he managed to amass an 80k Twitter following.

Jeremy’s Book Recommendations:

How To Win Friends And Influence People by Dale Carnegie

High Output Management by Andrew Grove

Expert Secrets by Russell Brunson

Where to Find Jeremy:

Follow him on Twitter: @jmoserr
Find him on LinkedIn: Jeremy Moser

Where to Find uSERP:

Twitter: @userp_io

Linkedin: uSERP

Website: www.userp.com

Episode Transcript:

Jeremy_uSERP

[00:00:00] Intro

In today’s episode, we have Jeremy, the man behind uSERP. Jeremy, welcome to the show.

So how are you doing today? 

Jeremy [00:00:25]

Yeah, thanks for having me. Excited.

Desiree [00:00:28]

Briefly introduce yourself and what are you building. 

Jeremy [00:00:30]

Yeah absolutely. 

So my name is Jeremy Moser, I’m the co-founder and CEO at uSERP and we’re a digital PR and SEO agency that serves high-growth startups, mostly venture-backed companies so brands like Monday.com, Robinhood, Active Campaign, Hotjar and mostly kind of tech startups of that nature.

Al [00:00:50]

Would you mind telling us how did you get into content marketing, SEO? What is your background before this? How did you get into it?

Jeremy [00:00:59]

Yeah absolutely. It’s a really good question. So I kind of started and just fell into the content marketing world after college. I got a job at a marketing agency that was doing a lot of local marketing for kind of smaller businesses in the Southern California area. So got my start doing like really boring local marketing stuff for companies that you know weren’t doing all the most exciting on-trend things but it was good you know a spot to get your feet wet. In terms of working with businesses and seeing how they grow and learning, you know what types of content marketing actually work for different types of companies. So I got my start there and then really shifted the business kind of went through a transition period where the founders parted ways and kind of went in two different directions and I stuck with one of them and then they ended up transitioning that company to serve more kind of technology, software, SaaS companies overall. I just really fell in love with the whole idea of working with software companies. The idea of tech in that you’re just moving much quicker, you’re doing more ambitious things and a lot of local companies where a lot of it is kind of that it in true material and marketing whereas in the tech software world you get to experiment a lot more you get to test new things and so really found a calling there and then from there after I think about six years there I spun up my own agency with my business partner and really started focusing on a lot more of the SEO, digital PR off page style stuff and really tying that back into software growth and marketing goals and it’s been a fun journey since then.

Al [00:02:30]

I had a look at your client list, at least the prominent ones. You’re working with big brands like monday.com especially some of these are leading companies like Freshworks. How did you acquire them? Is there something that you did at the very beginning or you had to build up a rapport and approach them? How did that work?

Jeremy [00:02:49]

Yeah absolutely so at the beginning stages when I started I had a few clients that were kind of smaller scale clients overall kind of a mix between maybe some smaller software companies at the time really worked a lot at the beginning stages with more seed stage start ups where they had smaller budgets they were kind of just getting off the ground needed someone to kind of run the strategy element of things and so it really transition from there you know we didn’t start off acquiring like monday.com or Freshworks as clients and really built up our momentum from there and we’ve used all sorts of kind of lead generation models really from the beginning stages it was really just about how do we go out there and we just use our existing connections and so as I mentioned you know I had around six years of experience in this direct space overall and so I just built up a lot of relationships people I knew clients that I had worked with before may I’d been intro to other folks before so really just leverage my existing network to kind of get our foot off the ground there and really just build up that initial client base to where our focus in the early stages was just how do we deliver as good a results as possible so that people will give us referals because especially when you’re in an early stage agency it’s really hard to go out there and acquire customers buy things like outreach or just connecting with people you need to build up some sort of trust and rapport in the market and so a lot of how you can do that is really just how do I get those early stage clients how do I over deliver for them under charge them build up a lot of that really good relationship status to where they’re actively going on promoting us and so that was really key for us in the early stages was just how do we do the best work that we can then transition that into actually building a long term brand to where folks are coming to our door they’re coming to us out of you know they’re coming from organic maybe we’re doing outreach and it’s working better because people can trust our brand. They see us around so we’ve tested kind of the whole range of lead gen models but that was really you know what got us our first start there. 

Al [00:04:41]

Right and in terms of your company size right now. How many employees do you have right now? What’s your revenue like currently?

Jeremy [00:04:50]

Yeah yeah, so we’re at about I think we’re around like 33 employees total now including myself and my co-founder and growing month over month so yeah we’ve been growing really rapidly in the past year or so and I think we’ve tripled maybe in the last year and so we started in um 2019 a little bit later in 2019 and since then we’ve been growing pretty well and it’s exciting to see the trajectory of where we go from here.

Al [00:05:17]

In terms of revenue, you’re doing like seven figures right now or hit close to eight? Where are you in terms of revenue?

Jeremy [00:05:23]

Really good question so we’re kind of we’re approaching that mid-seven figures of revenue right now and everything we do is monthly recurring for us so we work with brands usually from at a minimum of around six to twelve months since but typically for us you know clients tend to stay for quite a long time because we really do prioritize how do we get the best results because obviously it’s much easier to keep existing clients and do great work for them than going out and trying to source hundreds and hundreds of clients on a yearly basis. So it really enables us to to be selective on who we work with which is always great because we can really build out really long-term partnerships and relationships with our clients.

Al [00:06:01]

I mean when you talk about scalability, especially in the service industry right, copy agencies any people businesses the recurring theme is, is hard to scale people businesses or agencies. What would you say to that is that for real do you think that is the case or it’s not the case less they compared to a SaaS business it will be much easier to scale because everything happens itself right? What’s your take on that?

Jeremy [00:06:31]

Yeah definitely I hear this debate quite often and I like it from one perspective because it disincentivizes people to start agencies which means I have let competition overall. So in one sense, I like that on the other sense of reality I think the lines are a little blurred and it really does depend on what type of service you offer how good you are at the business aspect like how much do you charge what are your margins things like this really all play into how well you can scale an agency and I thought I think a lot of folks tend to start agencies in the wrong perspective of shifting from something like a freelancer or to an agency at some point versus having that intention from the beginning of I’m going to start this agency I’m going get myself out of the day to day I’m going to build a team around this and I think when you have that intentionality of I’m going to start this as an agency from scratch you really tend to build it a little bit differently and you structure it much more different than you would as a freelancer. And I think a lot of that plays into what’s the brand you’re building what’s the credibility that you have can you get results and then obviously can you charge the amount that you need to charge to really deliver extremely good results and pay your people well have a team that sticks around for the long term so I think you know overall you can definitely scale a sass business a little bit quicker and a little bit easier in the sense that you know obviously people tend to not be the bottle neck in software versus in an agency you do need to constantly be hiring new people training them developing them so there obviously is that really people focus element of growing it that that tends to trip people up and I think one thing we’ve done really that’s helped us there is establish a really strong and firm hiring process to where we’ve got folks on a you know little quick sheet that we can go to at any given time and we say okay let’s say we have five new clients coming in this month and we don’t have the capacity for that let’s you know have a quick list that we can go to a folks that we’ve already interviewed we’ve screened maybe even given them kind of paid test work before where we understand how they work they understand how we work and we can get them on board really quickly and for us that’s been a really key kind of game changer and being able to scale especially as the demand goes up we  don’t have to go through the process of training new folks and getting them up to speed that generally is going to take you anywhere from 30 to 60 days depending on how you structure things and what you do and how technical it is so doing that for us has been a really key kind of growth level that’s allowed us to take on a lot more clients.

Al [00:09:02] 

Uh yeah if you take somebody like Neil Patel who happens to be the king of agencies you can easily name him like he’s doing like nine figures right so he is definitely scalable but I think as you said it mostly has to do it how could I deal with people if if you can handle people, manage people well this will work for you whereas that’s not your scale maybe SaaS will be a better option for you right you think that that’ll be that’s a good explanation for that.

Jeremy [00:09:31]  

Yeah absolutely. 

You know I think obviously Neil Patel gets a lot of hate in the kind of SEO marketing industry for a whole variety of reasons. But I think it’s undeniable his ability obviously to grow a successful agency. I think he makes some really good points around the idea of just agencies versus SaaS and the business models overall on that either way if you’re looking to scale the company that does multiple millions of dollars a year in revenue you’re likely going to need some amount of people management at some point it’s very unlikely it’s uncommon to see folks like there’s Pieter Levels etc who are like kind of the exception on the rule where they’ve got really cool SaaS companies they’re doing great stuff and it’s just them I mean they probably have freelancers other things they source to obviously but again it’s the exception of the rule and really if you’re trying to scale a company that’s going to do multiple millions of dollars a year in revenue you need to get comfortable managing people hiring people training them. If you look at a lot of  the biggest software companies in the world a lot of them are not profitable and have huge huge teams to scale right so it really depends on what angle you’re looking at if you want to build the biggest software company in the world you know you’re going to be managing way more people, your profit is going to be much lower your margin is going to be non-existent, you’re gonna be burning a ton of money. I think if you’re talking from a small perspective of like you know this is a person that’s looking to maybe quit their job and go a certain route I think if you are kind of code or technical incline and building a small software startup is a great idea there’s no doubt. I think the competition you’ll face there tends to be a little bit more firm than agencies and I think agencies if you have that skill you can really productize what you’re doing thereby really creating system standard operating procedures just basically brain dumping everything that’s in your own mind and putting it into documents that other folks can come into they can learn you can build them up so I think you know both both models are really viable I think it just depends on what you want to go if that software you know you might get a better valuation if your end goals to sell pretty quickly if you’re looking to have a more sustainable company that generates really good cash flow on a yearly basis agency route is probably better for you so it kind of just depends on on the route you want to go down.

Al [00:11:47]  

All right, on that software discussion, I think you do have a software company as well on the side, could you tell us a bit about that I think it’s a SaaS product.

Jeremy [00:11:59]  

Yeah absolutely so we acquired this company in late 2020 it’s called wordible.io and it essentially exports your google docs so if you’re like a content

company or you’re a writer you own a blog or you’re working at a saas company anything like that and you publish content to your site on a daily weekly monthly basis it essentially exports your google doc straight to your CMS and does all the formatting image compression and all those kind of all attributes all those kind of minuscule things for you so it automates that process of going from actually writing on the doc to publishing on your site and we acquired that in late 2020 and have just since been kind of growing that on the side.

Al [00:12:38]  

How do you see that in terms of growing? Do you see it as easy as your agency to grow it or do you see that as more challenging?

00:13:21,260 –> 00:13:21,480

[jeremy_moser]: I think  it’s it’s it’s definitely more challenging to grow than the agency especially with the momentum that we’ve generated on the agency side of things and our contract sizes on the agency side that just tend to be much larger than that of the the saas product and saas product is more kind of a mid market sass where we’re not looking to get every single kind of low quality publisher on the market or anyone that writes content we’re really looking see how do we target agencies there you know media companies publishers folks that are doing twenty thirty fifty hundred pieces per month on their site is our main target customer profile for wordible um so it’s kind of mid market there but a little more tricky to grow overall than the agency side where a single contract value might be let’s say 20K a month for a year right so the difference there is pretty massive in terms of the sales process over also I do find the agency with just the momentum we have it’s a little bit easier to grow from just sheer top line revenue standpoint but i think the sass  is a really good kind of supplemental to what we do at the agency where it’s almost like a trip wire in a sense right of we get folks in the door on a cheaper cost on the SaaS side of things start to get into that echo system it’s really vertically related to our agency in that folks that are publishing a lot of content they need a lot of help with the strategy they need a lot of help with the off page link building digital PR and so it’s really a natural next step for us to then go to those folks who come through on the software side and just say hey we see you’re publishing a lot of stuff here you’re doing good here and then just give them feedback advice and potentially next steps for strategy to where it’s just a really good kind of getting their foot in the door it’s a good lead generation for us as well as obviously just its own company too.

00:15:07,221 –> 00:15:14,780

[al]: Let’s talk about SEO. How important is SEO for a SaaS company compared to paid marketing?

00:15:16,140 –> 00:15:19,085

[jeremy_moser]: yeah definitely I think SEO really comes to shine for SaaS companies when you get beyond that kind of Series A around where you really have some sort of product market fit, you have an idea of what and it’s like, what they don’t like, what’s your hero. You know what’s winning for your company is really key to know before you jump into SEO. So I think if you’re a Seed stage or anything around that, paid marketing just kind of accelerates the idea of if you’re going to get product market fit or not, really helps you understand what’s going to work for your product and what isn’t, and you might have to pivot at some point in those early stages right so I think doing SEO too early is a little bit dangerous depending on how solidified you are in the vision of your product so if you think maybe there’s room to adapt its a changing market it’s based on trends or anything like that I’d avoid SEO until you have some of that Series A funding until you have product market fit where if you you know transition the whole product so you divert something all of that SEO that’s bringing in relevant traffic might not be relevant anymore and so that’s something to consider when you’re in those really early stages but I think once you hit that Series A mark once you know people enjoy your product they’re sharing it on their own, SEO is a really great way to just amplify that and capture even more demand. I think it’s really critical um to it can give you super great insights for even you know your paid campaigns as well of what’s working, what converts best on an organic perspective, how do we extrapolate that to more paid ads and retargeting. So if you’re bringing in it’s on a really valuable traffic that you know is pretty warm based on SEO and then you re-target those you’re paying pennies to the dollar in comparison to just cold advertising right. And so there’s a lot of good mutual benefits there and I really recommend companies at least once you get that product market fit to start investing in SEO because it is a long-term game right you need to at least give it a couple months to start seeing results and then the results really compound when you get to that six, seven, eight, ten, twelve-month mark is where you start to see that become a really popular and major growth acquisition channel for your company.

00:17:21,953 –> 00:17:25,759

[al]: Let’s talk a bit about link building right? How do you do it at scale right? There are a lot of sites that are offering links, that you can buy links from, they’re quite sketchy. How do you do it at scale? Could you walk us through that?

00:17:37,060 –> 00:17:37,621

[jeremy_moser]: totally yeah. So right off the bat, I would almost always avoid any sites that are offering kind of paid links so if you go to you’ll see this is pretty common which is what makes link building really difficult and that is it’s super hard to get high-quality links from high-quality sources because those are the sites that you can’t buy out. You can’t go to Hubspot and email their product marketing manager yeah their blog manager and say hey let me buy a link on your site they’re going you know tell you to screw off they’re going to block you move you to spam and so it’s really difficult to scale the high-quality link building and so first of I’d recommend not buying any links on low-quality sites I think it’s, you know you’re just putting yourself at risk long term for sustainability and SEO and that’s really the key is how do you sustain SEO as a growth engine for one, two, three, ten years down the line to where you look at major companies like Canva, Mailchimp, Zappier et cetera very good teams when it comes to SEO overall and doing things the right way and those have been leading you know lead generation machines for them for decades at this point and so what you really want to look there is longterm. So when it comes to scaling really good quality link building a lot of it for us comes down to how do you build the right relationships with people to where you’re not just sending a cold email to an inbox that’s getting 50 to a 100 of those same emails on daily basis. I mean anyone that works at any given company, you guys have probably seen this yourself right of folks emailing they want to link from your site, they’re asking for a guest post, they’re asking for something from you. You just see that so often that sending those emails is just going to have a super low conversion rate and you really want to focus and prioritize, how do I build relationships with site owners, journalists, media owners, bloggers things of that nature to where you’re kind of skipping the line so to speak and you’re just going directly to the source versus kind of singing a cold email and hoping it works those can work but on a very small basis so you need to send and you know thousands and thousands a month and and by a year’s time you’ve kind of burned through a massive list of contacts that are probably marking you as spam so you run into a lot of those issues so if you’re trying to scale high quality link building you know number one is going to be build as many good relationships as you can number two is going a be prioritized content that is really impactful and that people want to share and that’s not always going to be directly SEO related so it’s kind of counter intuitive in that sense most folks try to go out and they try to promote their you know x x best marketing tools list and no one wants to share that content because it’s super generic it’s boring we’ve all seen it before but that’s the kind of content that ranks right so then you run into that counter intuitive nature of SEO where sometimes you need to write content on your site that is not directly keyword focused and maybe it’s really a long form kind of thought leadership style piece where it’s maybe contrarian or it gets people to think differently, it gets people to react and share it, a lot of that type of content can really generate high quality links that scale even if it’s not directly keyword driven, you’re still going to get tons of that benefit of a lot of those links coming to your site, lots of authority and lots of shares and I think that’s going to be you know one of the ways we see what we’re seeing right now is a lot of brands that are winning or doing this form of content where they’re not just trying to promote a generic SEO, piece they’re really writing something that’s very thought leadership driven and then that’s just getting them much more shares much more connections and they build really extend the link building that they’re doing.

00:21:08,172 –> 00:21:13,701

[al]: You said something earlier for SaaS companies, not to do SEO focus on SEO initially. Why?

00:21:14,970 –> 00:21:18,817

[jeremy_moser]: ye yes so I think the biggest factor there is that you know you just don’t know yet what your final product is or what product market fit you have yet and I think if you have to pivot too soon you run the risk of, now you’ve invested a lot of money in content that is not directly related to your product anymore, the traffic that you’re bringing in now might not be as high intense. So let’s say your software you know exports google docs to WordPress like ours, maybe we shift that into something else where it’s like you know an AI writing tool, it’s like the traffic that we’re getting now is probably much more complex, its a little different, the user intent isn’t the same. So if someone’s coming to our site from a tutorial of ‘How do I upload something into my content management system?’ and now they’re coming to our site and it’s all about an AI tool, you know they might just be a little skeptical the traffic is probably going to convert at much lower rates, so I think it’s really key to get that product-market fit to really have an established kind of longterm vision of what your product does, so that you can tie into those SEO goals and really publish content that’s going to rank long term but also drive really good traffic long term.

00:22:24,072 –> 00:22:29,800

[al]: You just mentioned about AI writing tools. Like Copy.ai there are a lot of tools out there right now. How effective are they when it comes to creating content? 

00:22:35,800 –> 00:22:39,526

[jeremy_moser]: yeah I think they’re extremely effective if you use them in the right way. So I think the wrong way to use AI tools is looking at them as kind of a one and done solution in that you go to the tool you click a few buttons you have thousands of pages of content and you publish it, I think is the wrong way to do it, I think the right way to do it is using AI tools for a few different ways like maybe it’s inspiration, maybe it’s creating an outline that you can edit and adapt from, maybe it’s writing a few sentences or paragraphs in your piece that then you can go tweak, edit, you can add expertise that an AI writer is just not gonna be able to pull in in the extent you need some of those vertical experts to where your content is really going to resonate with the audience that you’re targeting especially if you’re in more technical areas your phermographics are different if you were trying to write let’s say to someone who is really technical and you’re talking about like database security AI is probably not going to be able to pull in a lot of that key insider information that you have and that only you have from that ground ground level experience right, so you need some of that human input in there and I think AI tools are really impactful for making a process more efficient, I mean personally we’ve used tools like Copy.ai, Simplify a lot of these other ones where you know we can really findtune our process to say we’re going to save time here on headline creation, we’re going to plug in ideas and it’s going to generate a hundred of them for us like this is going to save us a tone of time and writing headlines, subject lines. Here’s how we generate like an outline in ten minutes that we can then go in and adapt versus doing all of the primary research ourselves. So I think you know having a combination there of of actually using it as inspiration but then find tuning it to fit your audience and your goals I think is a critical distinction that it is hard to miss sometimes you think that it’s kind of a one and done but it’s really just that you know assistant that can help you reach the next level.

00:24:32,932 –> 00:24:38,362

[al]: Let’s talk a bit about the economic downturn. A lot of the companies are cutting costs on marketing right? How has that impacted you do you see that as a thing especially compared to agency business can you feel that they’re cutting back on marketing or no?

00:24:49,170 –> 00:24:51,534 

[jeremy_moser]: yeah super good question. So we’ve seen kind of a mix of different things. We’ve seen and it goes in line with you know what I would expect where smaller companies who may be aren’t as clear on when they’re going to raise their next round, if that funding is going to close, they tend to pause their budgets first and be more reactionary, whereas brands who they have really established a fit in the marketplace, they have a really strong market share, they have a lot of runaways, lot of revenue, there probably profitable as well those are our ideal clients to where they know that this is a long term investment and that it’s not kind of an on an off switch where they can pause things at any time and then just pick it back up down the line. We see this really often to where when you do these sort of things you tend to lose a lot of market share, you lose a lot of momentum to where if you’re pausing on and off and your competitor isn’t, you’re going to lose so much time so much energy and resources that if you had probably just kept that on, you would have seen things turn out better in the end and we see this a lot during downturns like we did kind of in you know the earliest ages of Covid and things like that where folks were pausing their budgets. Your marketing efforts that you put in now generate results in 6 to 12 months from now. So there’s a really strong misconception that you can kind of pause and restart your marketing and it’s going to be fine and it usually stems from the idea that, okay our business is running well now everything is fine let’s just pause for a couple of months and then we’ll pick it back up when everything is a little more clear but then you create that little disaster for yourself down the line where okay it’s 3, 4 months later since you’ve paused and now your pipeline’s drying up sales qualified leads are gone everything is kind of slowing down and that’s the cause and effect there of when you stop your marketing you might not see any direct impacts for 3 to 4 months, once you get to that point now you’re left with a low pipeline, you don’t have any lead sales coming in and then you’re marketing again its going to take you 3, 4, 5 or 6 months to see those results again so you’ve now created almost an entire year of slower growth for yourself by just pausing it so we you know back to the question and answering your question you know we see smaller companies definitely go and hit the pause button conversely though we see larger companies which is the vast majority of folks that we work with we see them actually double down in these times and say okay this is working like let’s put more fuel on the fire let’s gain more momentum, more market share and I think that’s the most smart move you can make in a time like this because as I mentioned when your competitors are pausing that’s an opportunity that you rarely get in the market to gain more momentum and it just gives you a whole host of opportunity to gain significant ground that you otherwise couldn’t. 

00:27:31,701 –> 00:27:41,136

[al]: Okay let’s talk a bit about Twitter. You have around like 80K followers. What’s your strategy on Twitter?

00:27:42,020 –> 00:27:43,162 

[jeremy_moser]: yeah So I started Twitter back in January of 2021 and it was pretty, it was don’t wan to say new back then in terms of you know folks posting threads and things like that, but it’s obviously changed in the past almost two years at this point a little over a year and a half I guess, but when I was posting back then, the threads were pretty rare and there weren’t that many folks that were posting kind of like detailed long threads diving into cool topics, there was a few people doing that at the time and I just thought that was really interesting and I said okay I have all this information this knowledge from directly working on some stuff around copywriting, SEO, content marketing it’s all in my notebooks like why don’t I just share some of this because I see other people are doing it it’s pretty cool you know they’re gaining momentum nothing to lose here so I was just like okay let me just start posting a lot of this and that’s really where it stemmed from you know I just I think I was a little bit more of an early adoptor which helped I think now is really difficult to compete it’s just the sheer amount of content that’s being post posted on Twitter especially if we’re talking about anything in like the business, entrepreneurship SaaS, SEO type spaces are just really crowded now on Twitter but my strategy there was just let me take everything that I’ve already done that’s like put away in notebooks or maybe I wrote articles for a site one time let me just take all that information and just share it on Twitter in a form that it’s much more digestible um and I think that’s the way that you win long term with twitter now is you know there’s two ways to go about it you can either A. Make it your full-time job in the sense that you’re going out you’re researching new ideas you’re coming up with new stuff you’re writing new pieces for Twitter new threads posts ideas or B. You can take a lot of the stuff that you’ve done existing and just re-purpose and reform at it into a way that’s much more digestible and meant for Twitter itself versus like sharing a link or making things too long form. I think personally at least for me is the right move just because it takes less time and it’s not my main focus and really it’s more about how do I amplify some of the stuff that I’ve already done versus come up with new ideas because it just takes too long for me personally it’s not the highest use of my time. But if I were starting new from scratch on Twitter and I wanted to grow quickly I’d say connect with you know your first couple hundred people that are around your size or maybe a little bit bigger build good relationship with them start sharing and engaging with their content build a really small community that can help amplify you even further and once you get to that couple thousand follower mark that’s when you can start to see a lot of the impacts of things like threads where you need some of that initial traction to see good success. If you’re just posting threads with a hundred followers extremely unlikely that you’re going to see any traction so you need to build up that base over time and then really go full steam once you get a couple of thousand followers that are you now engaging and interacting with you on a daily basis.

00:30:33,952 –> 00:30:38,077

[al]: And how beneficial has Twitter been to you? Is it helping you in terms of building, generating leads or in any other way?

00:30:42,410 –> 00:30:43,811

[jeremy_moser]: yeah absolutely. So Twitter is a really strong lead generation for us for the agency side of things. It’s just a really great way to connect with folks that are in kind of the SaaS spaces over overall and like VPs of marketing, CMOs, directors of content strategy are kind of the main folks that we connect with and we see Twitter as a really good place for that because you’re really going direct to source and a lot of Twitter is less salesy, unless kind of how do I get someone to buy compared to something like LinkedIn. I think LinkedIn is fantastic too for lead generation. I think it’s just a little more direct and so you have to be aware of that when you’re on the platform, whereas Twitter I think is more about how do I build long term relationships with a lot of people that I’m connecting with and I think that’s where a lot of the lead generation tends to shine. It’s less like an on an off switch of I’m going to post on Twitter and instantly get you know 5 or 10 leads a month and it’s more of how do I play the long game of build real connections, post valuable content that maybe in 3, 6 months is going to generate a ton of leads for us and we’ve seen that as being a really big driver of new business for us. And it’s also great too to connect with other folks in your space and just learn from other founders, other marketers, other people that you can get new ideas from that you might not have been able to connect with in the first place and I think that’s the really great thing about Twitter is that people are really open to sharing all their ideas and everything that they’re doing that’s working, that’s not working I think it’s a really great way to just accelerate your learning and kind of the secondary benefit there is obvious you build connections and you get more leads and you get more sales.

00:32:17,593 –> 00:32:20,080

[al]: I see that you are verified on Twitter. What’s the secret for that?

00:32:20,891 –> 00:32:21,212

[jeremy_moser]: yeah you know I wish I had some sort of secret there but I applied like two or three times and they rejected me and then I applied again for a final time and they accepted and I didn’t do anything different on any of those applications so I have no no words of wisdom there to share

00:32:40,903 –> 00:32:47,496

[al]: Right. Okay, so if you had some advice to give to your younger self what would that be knowing what you know now?

00:32:50,380 –> 00:32:53,546

[jeremy_moser]: yeah yeah. So I would say you know the biggest piece of advice I give myself earlier is to to really just like zoom out a bit from what I’m doing and you know entrepreneurship, being a founder anything like that has a of highs and lows um and if you ride those and you you think you’re really great when you’re at the top, you think you’re really bad when you’re at the bottom you can start to kind of blame yourself internally and say there’s something wrong with me this isn’t supposed to happen but in reality entrepreneurship is never a straight line it’s never linear growth and there’s always going to be ups and downs so I think zooming out and really even if this involves like writing things down for you or however you process these types of things create like a journal of like you know when things are going good and when things are going bad and then what happened after that almost always you’ll find yourself if you just keep going everything turns out to be fine there’s plenty of days in the last couple of years of running this company where I’ve felt like oh no a bunch of clients are leaving revenue is like way down and our spend  is way up where you start to feel in the short term like things are going wrong and then you look back on that instance like five months later and you think okay why was I even stressed any of this in the first place. So really you know keeping keeping a journal of like all of your feelings, your day-to-day things I think is really key as a founder because it really tells you like everything that you thought was such a major deal in the long run really wasn’t so really just zooming out looking at things on a longer time period can really put things at ease for you and make you feel a little bit better when you know maybe things are going worse than you expected. 

Al

So Desiree is gonna take the last question yeah.

Desiree

Name 3 books that changed the way you think.

That’s a really good question. I’d say to put one as the number one I’d say ‘How to win friends and influence people’ I think yeah the you know most people in these spaces have read this I think this is one that you could read over

and over and again if it was one book that you could possibly read till the end of time I think that’s probably the number one winner. I think everything in business success really comes down to engaging, connecting with people, learning how to speak to people, learning how to motivate people, inspire people, get them to buy from you all of these different things are really key so I’d say that’s kind of the number one book. Another good one is ‘High output management’ by um I think by Andrew Grove really great book on yeah yeah exactly really great book on really just how to manage people and I think if you’re looking to scale a company of any sorts and really get to pass that 10, 20, 30 people mark I think it’s a really key read just to understand how do you best incentivize people to do their best work and how do you motivate them. A third book I’d say would be probably ‘Expert secrets’ by Russell Brunson I think this is a really good kind of more introductory book of like how do you get started with a business, like how do you grow it online, how do you create funnels and trip wires and how do you get leads kind of a multitude of different aspects of growing a business online and I think Russell Brunson has some really cool ideas there that you can implement.

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