JEREMY MOSER – CEO & CO-FOUNDER OF USERP DISCUSSES BUILDING A DIGITAL PR & SEO AGENCY TO HELP STARTUPS GROW & SCALE
Soon after graduating college, Jeremy stumbled into the world of content marketing and since then he’s made leaps and bounds to now building and running a seven-figure, digital PR and SEO agency.
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.