Katelyn Bourgoin - Unpacking the hidden secrets behind why people buy!

I looked at the lessons and I looked at the things that we did right, and there were some, and I looked at the mistakes that we made, and there were many, and what could I learn from it? And one of the big things that I learned from it that I think I take with me even now is that I don't— I think that there are, you know, there are different types of people in the world and there are people who are, you know, more risk-averse, which I put myself in that category, like I'm somewhat risk-averse. And then there's people that are, you know, be under an extreme amount of pressure and just operate and kind of like put it to the side and do the work. And that's not me. Like, when I was under that extreme amount of pressure, I was crippling under it. Like, I wasn't that like superhero that's like under all this pressure and just figures it out and just ignores it and keeps moving forward. Like, I was crippled by that pressure. So it made me think, how can I build a business that is not going to put me in a position like that again?

Welcome to the Undefeated Underdogs Podcast. Where I unpack and narrate stories of ambitious people who turn obstacles into opportunities. My goal for this podcast is to create a platform to narrate underdog stories and maybe play a small, teeny tiny role in inspiring you. I intend to highlight the underdog mentality and make authentic conversations with people who play the long game, take action with a chip on their shoulder, and convert obstacles into opportunities. Buckle up as I'll be bringing some authentic founders, VCs, community builders, and content creators who got underestimated their whole lives, and yet they beat all the odds to become insanely successful. Now today I want to tell you a little bit about our awesome sponsor acquire.com. Selling a business is as tough as building a business. As someone who went through this process once, selling my own startup, I know the pain it takes to get to the end zone. This is where our sponsor shines. Imagine this. You're a founder who's built a solid SaaS product, acquired customers, and generating consistent monthly revenue. The problem is you're not growing forever for whatever reason, lack of focus, lack of skill, or just plain lack of interest. And you feel stuck. What should you do? The story I'd like to hear is you buckle down, somehow reignited the fire, get past yourself and the clichés. And start working on your business rather than just in the business. You start building an audience, move out of your comfort zone to do sales and marketing, and in 6 months you triple your revenue. The reality isn't as simple. Situations may be different from every founder facing these crossroads, but too many times the story ends up being one of inaction and stagnation until the become business— the business becomes less valuable or worse, worthless. If you find yourself here, or your story is likely headed down a similar road, I offer you a third option. Consider selling your business on acquire.com. Capitalizing on the value of your time is a smart move. acquire.com is free to list and they've helped hundreds of founders already. Go to try.acquire.com/shiraz and see for yourself if this is the right option for you. Now let's get into today's episode. Do you guys know why customers buy certain products? Well, my next guest mastered the art of behavioral science behind buying, and she mastered to an extent that she writes a newsletter called Why We Buy, right? So it's, it's so awesome to see, uh, my next guest developing this skill in public over the years, and I've been a big fan of hers, and she also is one of the prolific marketers I follow on Twitter and on LinkedIn everywhere who teaches marketers how to be authentic. That's the keyword right there, how to be authentic. She's one of my favorite persons and a fun story before I introduce or like bring her on the show. I built like this tool, ShoutOut, like a few years ago, and she's one of the first few early believers in the product who amplified it. So I owe a lot to her. in my journey as a founder. So without further ado, Caitlin Burgoyne, welcome to the show. How are you feeling?

Thank you. What an amazing introduction. I'm feeling great.

Awesome. That's— so one of the things, like I said in the intro, I really admire your positioning of yourself as a founder, as a marketer, on the internet, which is authenticity, right? And you tweet a lot of things. So I was telling you before we hit record, you're probably one of the guests I had on my show who I find hard to research on because there are so many topics to cover and we will try to pack it in a way that people can digest it. But right off the bat, I want to talk about authenticity. Let's start with that before we get into all the tactical, technical stuff. You kind of are very transparent with your personal life, mom life, how things go inside in the day-to-day versus the highs and the lows. You tweet about the revenue, you tweet about some of the lows that experience. So, where did you develop the skill of being authentic?

I'd say, so, like many of your listeners, I was a founder. I was building a VC-backed company. And oh my goodness, I did not know what I was signing up for when I decided to build a startup. I'd had marketing agencies, but I had no idea how to build a scalable tech product. And so, it was a big learning experience. And through that, it was so effing hard. And I didn't feel like founders were being honest with each other publicly. About what they were experiencing. But behind closed doors, there was this real camaraderie and sharing. And I was lucky enough to be part of an incubator in my home city of Halifax. And so I was surrounded by other founders all doing the same thing. It felt like we were in, you know, college dorm room, we were just getting together after work and talking over beers about how soul-crushingly hard it was and how anxious we were and how little we were sleeping. And like, but then people would go out in the public and they'd be tweeting or they'd be getting press coverage or whatever. And of course, everybody was just crushing it all the time. And I thought, this is so detrimental to the mental health of other founders who just think that what they're seeing people share publicly is the full story. When in fact, the full story is so often hard, hard, hard, hard, hard, almost want to quit. Pivot, pivot, pivot. You know, eventually you find the thing that works, or in our case, you don't and you have to close your doors. But I just felt it was a disservice. And so when I ended up having to close down that company, we, you know, we just ran out of money. We weren't able to hit product market fit. I was licking my wounds trying to figure out what I want to do next. And I just started kind of sharing some blog posts at the time about my experience. And I remember My first one was, you know, I killed my startup and then some crazy shit happened. And I told a story about how my community, my startup community in Halifax, they really came to support me in a major way. Like my VCs were like the first to ask like how I was doing. They were the first to offer me a job. The other founders that were part of this community actually paid for a trip for me to go on vacation to Mexico because they knew how burned out I was. of the 3 years and all these, and, you know, I got this great job offer from like, I would've dreamed to have years earlier. So, but along all of that, there was also the really, really low points, you know, super anxiety, super burnout, stress. I had to go personally bankrupt after that company 'cause I'd invested so much into it myself. And I just shared that. And I, the response was surprising to me because for me, I was just like, I just feel like it's like, you know, at this point I've got nothing to hide. The company's clearly like done. I'm just going to be honest about what I've gone through. And part of it was kind of like feeling it was very cathartic to share that story publicly and to let people hear the whole backstory of what had happened, as opposed to just like, you know, what you see in the media or what you see kind of like on social. And so it was really cathartic and I was doing it more for me. But then I shared that and it kind of went viral in my little community of startup founders. And suddenly all these people started reaching out to me and I was getting all these DMs from other founders being like, I think I'm gonna need to close the business. Like, can we talk? Like, and it just made me realize that there's so much success theater. I've heard it called that happens online where people only share the wins, and that doesn't help anybody because like most of the time when those wins happen, they came after so many losses, so many fuckups, so many mistakes. And so because of that feedback from that initial post. I started being, you know, when I started posting on Twitter, I was like, I'm gonna bring this there too, and I'm gonna share the ups and the downs, like not just the highlights but the, the struggles too. And not just the struggles as a way to kind of like get somebody to buy something, because I feel like there's so many people that will just be like, here's how hard this was, but then I found success and now buy my thing or sign up for my thing. I wanted to share the hards when there's no real success story yet too, you know, not like Here's what went wrong and here's how I fixed it. Like show, show the whole thing. And I thought that it was, we were overdue for that.

I remember vividly about this because, you know, this is, I think the first time I came across your profile on Twitter is around 2020. You know, at the time I was building this, you know, SaaS product and CustomerCamp is, that's your company, right? And I think someone from your company reached out to me about this tool and I was like, oh wow, someone actually is sharing good things about marketing, the highs and lows. And I started following you. The reason I'm telling this weirdly is because at that time you were not offering anything. You're just like sharing left, right, center. Like, this is what I'm going through, or these are the lessons. 10 tips or et cetera, et cetera. You write a lot of threads even now that actually really helped me. Oh, there are people who does this purely to deliver value, not to bag revenue or anything. There is no CTA after a bunch of value. So you've in a way inspired me to You know, in a way, like you know reassured what Gary V says, which is give, give, give, give, give, and you'll end up you know having a point where you ask, right? Saying that's so phenomenal. And talk up speaking about the company, the startup you want to you you you know you closed. How did you kind of overcome? I wouldn't call it as a failure. I think there is no failure. It's all lessons in the making, right? Like you know. How did you overcome that, that phase and came out of the phase in a way that you've become who you are right now?

So I think to your point, I looked at the lessons and I looked at the things that we did right, and there were some, and I looked at the mistakes that we made and there were many, and what could I learn from it? And one of the big things that I learned from it that I think I take with me even now is that I don't. I think that there are, you know, if there are different types of people in the world, and there are people who are, you know, more risk adverse, which I'd put myself in that category, like I'm somewhat risk adverse. And then there's people that are, you know, can be under an extreme amount of pressure and just operate and kind of like put it to the side and do the work. And that's not me. Like, when I was under that extreme amount of pressure, I was crippling under it. Like, I wasn't that like, superhero that's like under all this pressure and just figures it out and just ignores it and keeps moving forward. Like, I was crippled by that pressure. So it made me think, how can I build a business that is not going to put me in a position like that again? Because I wasn't— I'm not good at that. And maybe that's a story that I'm telling myself. And maybe I could get over that. Maybe if I had an idea for a big, you know, big, like a game-changing company, some moonshot that I would like try to figure it out. But more than anything, I just thought like, okay, how do I build a company that is going to give me, you know, financial security in the sense that like we're making money, we're not reliant on venture capital, like that I'm, I have a team around me, it's not just me that is having to deliver this. And this is something that like took me a long time to figure out, I'm still figuring it out. But I think the thing I took away from it was we, what we did well, Was we were good at marketing, we were good at building hype, and we understood our users to an extent. Now, I made a lot of mistakes in our early customer discovery with that company, which is what led me to start Customer Camp. Because after that company, I looked back and I was like, what did I do wrong? I mean, we went out, we interviewed 300 customers before we built the product to validate that we were building the right thing. And then when it wasn't working, we went out and did more customer research. But what I realized in my kind of like Postmortem was that we had done it all wrong, and that there wasn't anybody teaching how to do it, or at least nobody that I had encountered teaching how to do it the right way, which isn't to like just go out and talk to customers and pitch your thing and show them what you're building and get their feedback, but it's to actually really dig in and understand what they're already doing to solve that problem today, how they find their solutions. Ideally, those are your direct competitors so that you have the most kind of like contextual congruency, and so like the more. Kind of dug into that world, I was trying to figure out basically like, where did we go wrong? What can I learn from it? How can I not do it again? And that brought me to discovering Jobs to Be Done, which is an innovation framework around what drives demand in a market. And I discovered Clayton Christensen's book and Bob Moesta's work. And I got really excited about that. And I thought maybe because I'd had a marketing— I had a branding and marketing agency Years earlier, and I thought maybe I can get back into consulting in the short term, work with some other startups because like I knew lots of startups were much better at product than we were. We sucked at product. We were much better on the marketing side. I was like, I know all these startups that are great at product, bad at marketing, so I can help them out. And so I went and I sat down at the boardroom table with all of these great teams, some of whom had raised tens of millions of dollars and had like huge companies as their clients, like Microsoft or Tesla or whatever, and. I'd ask them, tell me about your customers. And I was so surprised how rarely I could get a good answer. Like the answers were either really broad, like, you know, we target, you know, B2B companies with anywhere between 10 and 500 employees that sell stuff online. And I was like, oh, so basically every company, like every B2B company, like, or I would actually hear founders Arguing at the table around who the priority was, and one person would say we're going to these folks. Another person say well yeah kind of but like they're less important like first these folks. And so I realized that a lot of these teams didn't really understand their customers, and they didn't understand why those customers bought. And so that led me to start Customer Cam. It led me to start my newsletter, which was basically a way to build an audience for a future insights agency that I had in my mind. And all of it came out of the back of that failure. All of it came at looking at what I did that I could have done better, where I fucked up, how I could learn from it, and then thinking, well, how can I help other people not to make these same mistakes?

You know, where I think you kind of turned an obstacle into an opportunity, that's so fascinating. I think that's the whole point of this podcast as well, is to like, you know, is to unpack that a little bit. You've dropped so many things in that answer. I just want to tap into a few things. So when you realize that, okay, we did something wrong, we fucked whatever the thing is, like you said, our product is not great, but our marketing is great. Let's play our strengths. Why did you end up in this particular niche of customers? You would have done so many other things, right? Like in marketing, there are so many other things. So why Customers, why did that triggered you?

I love that question because I think that this is the smartest decision I made, and I I would credit it to discovering April Dunford a few years earlier. Many of your listeners will probably know April's work is all around positioning. She primarily works with tech companies, B2B tech companies. But I remember meeting April, and this is before she had blown up, before she was like you know the. Like thought leader she is now. She hadn't written a book or anything like that. She was a consultant living in Toronto. I'm from Nova Scotia, so we're both in Canada. She was doing kind of the workshop circuit and coming around and talking in front of early-stage startups. And I remember her talking about positioning. I thought, this is so smart because like as a marketer, and any of your listeners who kind of have a deep understanding of marketing or at least a surface-level understanding will recognize this, as a marketer, it's so overwhelming. Because it's always changing. It feels like it's always changing. Like there's always a new channel that people are getting excited about, always a new tool that's getting hyped up, always a new tactic that everyone's using. And so I remember listening to April and then hearing a little bit about her business and thinking, that's so smart because no matter what happens in the world of marketing, one thing's never going to change. And that's going to be that you need to have a really clear positioning for your product. And that will be one of the catalysts for your success. And so I thought about April, what she was doing. I was like, April's being known as the positioning person. And that doesn't matter what happens, you know, whether Facebook goes away, you know, there's a new social media channel, whether email dies, whatever happens, positioning is always going to matter. And then I was like, what are some other things that are always going to matter? And I feel like that's the most important question I asked myself. And I said, If you understand, you need to always understand your customers. It's the underpinning to all the other stuff. And what does understanding your customers mean? Well, when I was starting, it meant customer research. It meant actually reaching out and talking to customers, like analyzing their feedback, like really getting a close sense of your ideal customers. And that's where I was starting. And that was kind of the first 2 years. When I was consulting was all around how to understand your customer, how to identify who your best customer is. And that was kind of the thing. And then from that, I had this plan. And like, my plan was like, I'm going to grow from a consulting agency where it's just me doing workshops. And I want to grow this into like a productized service company. And I want to build an insights agency. And that was my plan pre-pandemic, pre-baby. I now have a 2-year-old. And so I started this little newsletter with the intent of, you know, building an audience on my newsletter to hopefully become clients. Some of them will become clients of my insights agency later. And I asked myself, like, nobody cares about customer research. It's really important, but nobody cares about it, right? It's like eating healthy. We all want to be skinny, but nobody wants to eat healthy. And the best way to get skinny is to eat healthy. So you can't sell eating healthy. You got to sell them something else. And the other thing is research, like customer research is usually project-focused. So I was like, I want to start a newsletter around something that people are going to always be wanting to open, not just when they're in a project phase of doing research. So I thought, what are other ways to know your customers, right? Like thinking from a jobs to be done perspective, what are other ways people understand their customers? I thought behavioral science, like I'd always kind of been interested in it. I'd read a few books, you know, I'd read Robert Cialdini's Influence. I'd read Jonah Berger's contagious book. And I was like, this is really interesting stuff. I bet you I could write a newsletter where we talk about behavior science. And then I'm going to be attracting the right people, right? People who are geeky about understanding their customers, people who would probably be more likely to hire an insights agency to help them to better understand their own customers because they're learning about people broadly from our newsletter, but their people are unique. So that led me to start the newsletter. And the newsletter then became a business, which I didn't ever plan for it to be. And it became— and at the same time that I was getting interest from sponsors to pay to get, you know, in front of our newsletter audience, I had a brand new baby at home and my husband broke his neck. So it was like, I was looking at, okay, do I want to go through the process of trying to like recruit people and build an insights agency and like put the systems in place to kind of productize that as a service and build all the efficiencies? Or do I want to write the newsletter that I already write and get paid for it and try to figure the rest out? And so I focused on the thing that was the easiest, that was right in front of me at the time where I had very little time and a lot of pressure. And then that became a good decision too, because that kind of led to new opportunities outside of the done-for-you customer research space that I'd originally planned to be in.

I love that. I remember the tweet. I still, I think one of the part of the research, I found it. It was in December 2022, you were talking about, you know, a year ago my husband needed major surgery. Fast forward today, I had like $400K in sales, you know, I'm gonna crush 2023, and you did it. So, uh, there are so many things. I think we have to definitely talk about behavioral science of building an audience. That's for sure. Uh, that's the topic. Uh, but there are a few things I wanted to like, you know, ask you about. Talking about customer research, customer discovery, what is that people make biggest mistake when they do customer discovery? I know an answer. I did fail, like, you know, in the beginning before becoming a maker, I kind of worked on a startup idea with a friend. We spent like 18 months Like a solid month of work on the customer talking, customer discovery, having calls, and spent a ton of money, failed miserably. Like, you know, it didn't even launch. So I know the pain, but I want to understand from your perspective as someone who recommends customer research, discovery, and what is that people, founders, first-time founders, second-time founders make mistakes? How do they kind of, you know, overcome those mistakes when they do customer discovery?

I would say that I feel you on the idea. I think that there's 2 traps you can fall into. You can fall into the trap of, I'm going to validate my idea before I build it and spend a ton of time on that. And that's a trap because the reality is that you need to do enough discovery that you have a sense of what might be right. But real clarity is going to come from engagement with your audience. It's going to be putting something in front of them, right? So you need, you should do a little because otherwise you probably are going to get just really wrong. And you might end up realizing that you built the right thing, but your messaging was just really wrong. And your messaging could have been better if you would have done a bit of discovery. So do a bit. I'm not saying don't do any before you build, but then the mistake is either they spend all their time up front trying to validate their idea, Talking to people who fit some persona that they think their ideal customers are, not talking to people that are actively, that have recently bought something to solve the same problem that they solve. So not really understanding what the competitive set is in the customer's mind. So that's mistake number one, spend a bunch of time validating your idea before you build it. The other mistake that people make is they take the opposite approach and they go the, I'm going to fail fast approach. Henry Ford never talked to customers and Steve Jobs never talked to customers. So, I'm not going to do that. And where people make mistakes on that approach is that, for one, Henry Ford never said that famous quote about the horses. Everybody loves to parrot that. I said it myself when I was building my startup as an excuse not to do more research. But it was actually said by a cruise ship interior designer in a magazine. And then, it became this, like, it just spread. But the idea that you're supposed to ask your customers what to build is incredibly flawed. That's not what customer research is. It's not market research. It's not going out and putting something in front of somebody and saying, would you buy this? Or what would make this better? Because what's going to happen there is you're going to get a bunch of opinions from a bunch of people who want to give you the right answer or are trying to be polite. And those probably aren't going to be that useful, right? What you want to do again is you want to understand people who are solving the problem you solve, who have that same job to be done? What are they doing today? And where's the friction, right? And what's their choice set? What are they looking at as competitive alternatives? Like, maybe you're going up again into a market where there are big competitors, like you want to start like another chatbot, like going up against Intercom and Drift. We even talked to Intercom and Drift's customers, right? But like, in a lot of cases, you're probably going into a space where maybe there's not that much competition. And people are solving the problem in other ways. And you can talk to people who are solving it that way. But the mistakes people make is they either spend too much time without launching something and they're not talking to their customers. They're just talking to like people. Or they go the complete end of the other spectrum and they go, I'm not going to do any customer research. We're just going to launch and iterate and iterate and iterate and iterate as fast as we can. And the solution, as unsexy as it is, is in the middle, right? It's like move quickly. Do be nimble in your customer research. Find ways to make it easy for you to get the people that you want to talk to. Find ways to gather that insight that aren't necessarily like this long in-depth research project, which is again, like, you know, it's not making— it's often not the solution. So those are the things that they're on 2 sides of the spectrum. They go way too in-depth and they're not talking to the right people or asking the right questions, or they go the opposite end and they don't do any. And then they're just building in the dark and hoping that it's going to work. And that the solution is in the middle. Move quickly. Talk to people when you have real problems that you want to understand, and talk to people who are either your customers or are paying or searching for a solution like yours to get a job done. Because everybody else is not going to be that helpful. They're going to give you lots of information, but it's probably not going to be useful to you.

I think balance. I think that's the right way to do it. And I feel just to add on top of what you said, I think the best way to maintain that balance is do things in public. Like if you have a product, put yourself out and you have to be really good at picking those signals. Like people are excited about this one thing I talked about my product on a random day. Are they losing interest? Are they like, you know, so I think those are the signals I would pick. That's how I worked on this SaaS product initially was like, you know. some random people joining the waitlist. But when I started putting myself out and the product out, I really attracted like bootstrappers or like, you know, founders who really want or care about social proof, you know, for that content. But I love that.

I love that you said like building in public, because I think that a lot of people think about building in public as, you know, a marketing play, and it is, But like you said, like, you know, if you don't need to always be getting on the phone or surveying people, if you're building in public, you have that insight coming to you in the comments. Like, that's golden. And you have people commenting, getting excited, you can then reach out to them and go, hey, like, I saw your comment, love that you're interested in this. Can we chat for a minute? Like, I'd like to like pick your brain on some stuff, new stuff we're doing. And it makes it so much easier. To get that insight.

Yeah, totally. 100%. And you've also mentioned in previous answers about founders giving random answers when you ask about, hey, who's your customer? So do you have a framework that you recommend for founders about defining who their customers are? Like, is there a set of rules that people should play in when they define their customers?

So we talk about this in Unignorable because we actually help people to figure out like who are going to be our future buyers. So with my program Unignorable, I run with the Demand Curve team, we help founders and entrepreneurs build an audience, but we're not trying to build an audience for vanity's purpose, right? You're not trying to just build this broad audience, people who like liked your generic tweets on your top 10 tools, like that's not gonna, that's not really gonna get you customers. And what we're trying to do is help entrepreneurs and founders get customers. And so we walk them through this kind of like 2-part things. I think that again, like the solution is in the middle. So, you'll hear people who are like jobs-to-be-done zealots. And they're like, customers don't buy things because they're 30-year-old women who have a cat and like are working in marketing and live in a city. Like that's a bunch of like demographic stuff. But that's not why they buy. And then, on the other side, you'll see that a lot of marketers for most of the last several decades Have built personas that are purely based on demographic and some psychographic or firmographic stuff, not digging deep enough into really understanding the utility of how people are using that thing. And as per usual, the answer to how to define your customers comes in the middle. So it's like a great example I give is Amanda Goetz. She's a founder. She's popular on Twitter. She's fantastic. She launched her company that she then later sold with an. a couple of years, and it was, um, uh, House of Wise. Mm-hmm. And House of Wise was a CBD, um, gummy business, and she had 4 very specific jobs that she helped her customers do. The first one was to manage their stress. CBD is great at that. The second one was to get better sleep. Again, CBD is great at that. The third one was to feel sexy, which, um, you know, people who are under a lot of stress, not sleeping well, Might not be feeling the most sexy. So something to kind of get you in the mood. And the 4th one was a gummy to take when you were working out and exercising to kind of like get you in like the zone. So those are 4 very specific jobs to do, right? And if you were to look at this from a jobs to be done perspective, you could say, well, like, you know, lots of people want to sleep better. Lots of people want to be less stressed. Lots of people want to have better sex. Lots of people. So like, Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But then, you start drilling in on, well, who really would be a great customer for this because they probably have challenges in all those areas. And then, you look at the way that Amanda marketed her company, which was so smart. She was targeting career women, many of them moms, many of them founders. Because guess who's under a lot of stress, not sleeping very good, probably not feeling very sexy because they're stressed and not sleeping good? Career women who are entrepreneurs like with young families. And so she was very specific on the who, but she was also had built a product, these kind of 4 unique products around the what and the when, right? Like when do you take one of Amanda's gummies? It's when you're feeling stressed, you take the stress gum. When do you take the, the one for sleep? You can't sleep. Most other CBD companies had said, oh my God, we found this miracle cure that's good for all of these different things. So let's just put all those use cases on the bottle and people are gonna love this thing. And guess what? People don't think about, I have— I'm going to buy CBD today for all of these different use cases. Same reason why you go to the, you know, your pharmacy and you go down the aisle for painkillers and there's Tylenol for fever and there's Tylenol for headaches and there's Tylenol for back pain. Guess what all the main ingredients in those are? They're all the same, but they're marketed differently around your specific job to be done. So I think that smart founders will both start by identifying Who's you? Like, you know, what do people use our product for? What are they actually trying to achieve? Like, what does a good outcome look like? And how, who do we like, once you kind of have a sense of that, and it's like, well, who do we do that for better than other people? Like, who's uniquely gonna like us, like, because of our brand, or because of our, you know, particular feature set, like, and then zeroing in on the kind of like persona, because you can always start with that bowling pin strategy, which is probably what Like is happening with House of Wise now that it's acquired, where it's like you start off with those career women who are like really driven young families, and then you start to expand the brand, right? But if you can't get a foothold somewhere, then you're never getting a chance to expand the brand,

right? I love that. It's kind of going from top down, like what's the jobs to be done, figure that out, and then niche down, go with one person, and you can expand later. You have the opportunity to like go broad. So that's amazing. And what would you say for founders who are struggling? So they, they did all this, they found— so for, I think Amanda Goetz is amazing, by the way. She's on the show before. She's phenomenal. I love, I love her. The way she, you know, positioned herself is awesome. Phenomenal. Uh, it worked well for her. For people, for founders who the same thing, top-notch, didn't work, like, you know, for whatever reason, what would you say they approach defining the customers again? They have to pivot, like the product didn't work, like whatever it is, like, you know, for whatever case they did this niche down, didn't work. What do you say? Like, where, where should they go from?

Often it, like, oftentimes the first step is message market fit, right? Before you even get to product market fit. Like, and a lot of times you see products that are winning, not because they're the best, not because, like, you know, not because necessarily— I know that product people love to think, you know, like, it's all about product, you know, if you have to market, you're doing a bad job of product. But there's a lot of products that aren't necessarily the best, but got the message really right. And so before you kind of change the customer, before you change the utility and kind of focus on a different, like, job to be done, I would focus on Cycling through different messaging, like figuring out which messaging is going to bring in people because it sets the expectation. So like, we just did a lot. We're in day 2 of a launch for a product called Wallet Opening Words.

Mm-hmm.

And as I was, you know, this is a product that is a little bit unique compared to like other digital products out there because there's a lot of online courses that will teach you how to write better. And I didn't want to create another online course because I've taken a bunch myself. I've bought them, And I know, we all know what happens. We buy the course, we feel this kind of like burst of momentum. We open up the LMS, we watch the first few videos on 2x speed while we're doing the dishes or whatever. And then we're kind of like making notes while we're like, you know, doing something else, trying to capture those like nuggets. But we don't often finish it because like, who has time to just sit down in front of a computer and watch a bunch of videos? Nobody. And so I was, I wanted to create something people would actually use. And so we built an interactive playbook with a bunch of chatbots that are actually to help you like apply the things that we're teaching. So we teach 26 and a half behavior science-backed copywriting techniques. And but I also knew that when people download this thing and they get a document as opposed to, you know, 19 hours of video content, they're gonna have a question around, is this good value? Because they might compare us to a book. And guess what? Books are $12. Online courses about writing, you know, $500, $2,000, much more expensive. And what's in this stuff is the same, but the format is different and the usability as the end user is different. And so I was like, I need to really be careful to position this in their minds that we did this as a service to them. So they will compare us Not to books, which isn't a good competitive set to us because we're much more expensive than a book, but to online courses, which is a good competitive set for us because we're cheaper than most courses and we're going to be far, far more useful and it's going to be easier to consume the information. It lives on your desktop. You can come back to it, open at any time for inspiration. So in the positioning of it, we have a welcome video where I talk about that. In a lot of our marketing, I compare it to an online course. So Again, coming back to this idea, I didn't change the target buyer. I didn't change how we're kind of like what the core product is or what the utility is. But what I did do is I was careful with the messaging so that I would be able to build the right competitive set. And now I'm seeing it in our reviews. Like people are coming back and they're saying, you know, I learned more from this than courses that I spent big money on. And I think if I hadn't done that, some people would have opened it up and they would have gone, this is a document. Documents should be either free or cheap. And so maybe I'm not going to get a lot of value from this, but I primed them and I framed it so that when they opened it, they had an expectation of this is done intentionally to help me. And it was, and this is going to be better than the alternative, which is an online course, not an alternative that is a book because I don't want to compete against a book. So I guess the answer to that question really comes down to If you feel like you've got the right— if you feel like you understand the utility of your product, you understand what it helps people do, what else will achieve, you understand who you can help, and you're still not getting traction, it's the message. Change the message, improve the message, get better educated. You don't educate the market, you want to tap into something that they already know about, but like get better at tapping into that. And I think too many people go, oh, the product's wrong, or the audience is wrong. Without really analyzing to say, no, the way we're describing this is wrong. The way we're talking, that's the easiest thing to test, right? You can run Facebook ads, you can do whatever. It's so easy to test that. But it's very— it's hard to slow down and say, how might we talk about this differently? Because it's much more fun to go back into building mode. And I'm guilty of that too. Builders love to build. Yeah. We like to make stuff.

Yeah. And I love the, for the first time I'm hearing this message market fit. Yeah. I've heard like so many fits, you know, before founder market fit, product market fit, like, you know, VC founder fit and all that. But I think, and like I said, it's very doable if you bring that iterative mindset, because you can do A/B testing, you can do like iterate, you know, taglines can change. Yeah. Opening Words is a great course, by the way. I think the copywriting techniques we want to talk about a little later. There are so many things I just want to tap into. Great tips. Thank you so much for kind of educating the audience about the listeners about how to bring, how to boil down to a customer persona, how to do customer service in the right way. Let's talk about why we buy. You know, one of my favorite newsletters, period. The reason is it is so fucking tactical, like so on point. I love— I think these days you're starting by a snippet, did you know, and you're kind of introducing, you know, the framework or whatever it is. You wrote so many, man. My God, I just, I ran out of the list. Like there is Choice Paradox, Ostrich Effect, IKEA effect, Dunning-Kruger effect. I can go on and on. How are you bringing this every week to life? Like, how are you finding it? Like, what is the process of your research, or how are you writing this insanely tactical newsletter on a consistent basis?

So for one, I'll say that I'm not the one writing it anymore. So it started off as me, and now I've got an awesome writer. Eve Arnold is on my team, and she's is like our fractional head of content. She's with me 3 days a week, has another job 2 days a week. And she's writing the newsletter now for the last 3 months. So, and prior to that, I had another writer I was working with. So, I like, I conceptualized the newsletter and I kind of like figured out what the concepts were going to be and how it was going to— and I've kind of like consistently iterated. There was a period where for about a year and a half, it was just me writing it. But as a new mom, as you know, to have your second— I wasn't. I didn't find I had often the mental capacity to really to do that and the other things that I needed to do. So I brought on some great writers and I put the you know put them in place. But the beautiful thing I would say about why we buy is like people will like say like oh Caitlin Bergoyne is like a you know buyer like a buyer psychology expert. For one, buyer psychology is not a thing. I made that thing because the actual term. Is cognitive biases or behavioral economics. That's what the— this— that like kind of like wing of science is. But guess what sounds really fucking boring and does people don't understand? Behavioral economics. So I don't use terms behavioral economics or, you know, like behavioral science because they don't sound very exciting. Buyer psychology sounds— people immediately know what it is. Right? It's really clear. And so people will say like, oh, Caitlin Burgoyne is like a biopsychology expert. And I'm not. I'm somebody who found something that I was really interested in and curious about and wanted to learn about. And every week I get to learn about it by writing this newsletter. And the things that we share, we share cognitive biases, which are these kind of like ways that our brains work That are not necessarily rational, but this is why, you know, scarcity is a really effective marketing technique. Should scarcity be as effective as it is? If you think about it purely from an economic and rational perspective, probably not. But if you think about it from like an evolutionary perspective where there were limited resources and we were fighting with our, you know, peers just to survive, yeah, it makes sense that we have such a scarcity mindset that we're willing to jump at things. Absolutely. So like, there's all of these things that from an economic perspective Aren't necessarily rational, but from a human perspective are. And so, there's hundreds of these. So, my job is basically to just go out and research them and think about which ones are actually really relevant to people who want to grow sales through, whether it be like through marketing sales or product design, which ones are the most relevant. And so, we rehash some of the same ideas. We've been doing this now for 3 years. Writing an issue every week. So we'll do updates. We'll do updated issues where we kind of share new examples. And we don't just talk about cognitive biases. We also will go deep on topics like we'll explore a brand. Like this week we did Lego. Yeah, great. And we'll break down some of the smart things Lego's doing. Or we'll look at a specific application like email subject lines. And we'll share like tips on how to use behavioral science in your email subject line. So it kind of gives us this endless playground to create content from. Because something you said in the beginning of the podcast that kind of I thought was interesting is like, you know, you're doing so much stuff. Like, to me, the thing about marketing that's so interesting, it's very exciting. And it could also be very overwhelming depending on your mindset around it. It's like, everything is marketing. Everything is marketing your product, you build marketing in your product, you know, social proof and finding like there's so much that you can do from a customer experience perspective, from an outbound marketing perspective, from an inbound marketing perspective that you— so like it just gives us this endless playground of topics that we can talk about.

Yeah, I think it's inevitable. You can't— founders should be at this point in this age, 2024, every move you make is packaged under marketing. So that's why I kind of personally hate the word marketing. It's so overabused.

You

kind of have to define your own thing. And community comes under marketing, which I hate. Community building is completely different. You build a relationship with people. Build in public, they say it's a marketing tactic. On paper, yes, but you're basically narrating your own story in public, right? By tweeting, writing blog posts, doing video, whatever the format it is. It is so overabused and it is, but at the same time, it's so important. How do you say founders should differentiate themselves when they do quote unquote marketing?

Well, it depends. Like, are we talking about founders building their own personal brands and being known personally just in support of growing their business? Or are we talking about the business? Because they're kind of, they're different, but they're obviously interconnected.

Yeah. Well, let's, let's go one by one. Like, what do you think about founders building businesses first? And then we come to personal brand because I have a question about personal brand.

Yeah. Like, I think like, let's look at, so I mean, the strategy that's going to work for different companies that are selling to different people It's obviously going to be vastly different. To your point about like, you know, marketing, everything's marketing. Like I think of marketing as like 2 words. Like there's the market and then there's the ing part. There's like understanding the people and there's the doing. And what that looks like is there's no template for like, there's no, everybody wants one because it'd be, and people like to sell them because they're lucrative, but there is no kind of like step-by-step of like, just follow this. And you'll be successful. Because if you look at all of the, you know, the huge successful companies out there, like we love to talk about, like Dropbox is like early growth, like growth hacking or like Airbnb and they were scrappy and they used like Craigslist. Like there's so many stories of these brands that did these clever and interesting and fun things early on. And then there's so many companies that followed and copied those things and tried to use them themselves. But they didn't work. And they didn't work because your market might be different, your product might be different. It's all about the context. So I'd say I don't have a good answer for how founders should, you know, think about marketing. What I think as a whole answer, what I would say is that I am a believer that context is king, right? I think that it's not about, you know, there's the old, in the marketing world, we talk about like content is king. But I think context is king. Like if you can get The right message in front of the right person at the right time with the right offer—that's how you win. And that's hard to do because if you get three of those right and not the fourth one, you're still going to struggle, right? You can have a great message; you know exactly who should be getting it. The offer's killer, and you're getting it in front of people who don't have a need to buy right now. So they might make a mental note and go, "Oh, that's interesting." But like if you can't figure out, like you need to have all four. And there's that's not easy. So I think that the the most important thing for founders is to understand their buyers' context, and I'm going through this right now with Why We Buy. So when I started Why We Buy, sponsors were coming inbound to us, and it was really easy to sell sponsorships because there was a lot of hype and excitement as you know that being a growth channel for companies. And then there's been an explosion. In newsletters. And there's been a bunch of innovations that have happened on the product side where ConvertKit has like their own, like, you know, sponsor network. And like, there's been all these changes. So now there's a lot more competition for sponsors. I don't think that I ever really meaningfully have gone through the discovery phase with my sponsors so that I can figure out how do I make Why We Buy a no-brainer for them compared to all the other newsletters that they're looking at. I haven't done that yet. So it's kind of one of those things where you can be in a market where you're doing great just because the market is hot, right? Justin Jackson talks about this, and I love his approach to it. He's like, you know, if you're in the right market at the right time, you can make all sorts of mistakes and you can still be successful. I feel like that's where I was with Why We Buy 2 years ago. And now things are shifting. And now if I want to continue to be successful, I want to continue to attract really great sponsors and grow the newsletter that way. Like I need to go back and I need to go, okay, I need to step back and I need to do a bunch more customer discovery because I need to find a way to make our offer stand out. Because I know who, I know what, I know when, but my offer is not— my offer has to be really competitive. Like it has to be really good. And I still, I need to figure out what that looks like because I haven't done that work because I didn't have to because it was easy. So I'm at the same stage where it's like you can have the 3, but if you don't have the 4th,

I love that. And I think pandemic in a way spoiled everyone because during the pandemic everybody was craving for everything. And suddenly we see a surge of SaaS products being shipped and there is creators being like, I think there is still a big market. I feel what ConvertKit did for writers is phenomenal. Of course, like Substack and Beehive is competing. with each other, but they're all playing their game in their own way to ultimately empower creators, writers, and build these businesses. I love that. Let's talk about building a personal brand. I think one of the things you mentioned is the behavioral science of building audience. Why is it so freaking important in 2024? And why are people not realizing the fact and still yet doing startups, business, building businesses without realizing the fact? What is that they're missing? And what is that that people are gaining building an audience?

Well, I think that there's like, I think that we live in this interesting time where you can have all these great products that are bootstrapped and they're bootstrapped by small teams that we can actually come to follow, be interested in, be rooting for, want to see be successful. So like you think like some of the ones that I think of as like Sparkloop is great product. Like I know who the founders of that company are, right? Like HypeFury, I know who the founders of that company are. Wynter, I know who the founders of that company are. I've watched them grow it. And the cool thing about understanding, like, again, those like 4 things, like, you know, the who, what, when, and the offer, is that right now, you know, you might not need— have a need for a newsletter referral tool like SmartLead. But you might be rooting for the team behind it, Louie. And like, you might be saying, I want to see him be successful. I've been following his journey. It's pretty cool. Then in 4 months' time, suddenly you're like, okay, now I'm going to bootstrap this thing. I've decided that we're actually going to build an audience. And it's like, oh, fuck. Well, of course, SparkLoop, because it's Louie, right? We follow people, not brands. Like, you're like, you know, I don't think the future is going to have behemoth companies Like we did in the past, you know, the Apples and the Coca-Colas and the Nikes of the world. We're not going to see those. Like there's going to be more like competition and smaller winners that are kind of like uniquely positioned for one audience as opposed to these behemoth everything brands. Humans, we we connect with other people or other people like we connect with faces essentially, right? Like people love their dogs. They love the you know snack crapple pop. from like Rice Krispies. Like, we are drawn towards other creatures like us. And so the idea that a brand can exist that exists completely, you know, separate from the people behind it, whether those be the people that are building it, the founders, the team, or whether that be the customers that are advocates for it, that are talking about it, that are loving it, is crazy. Yep. People try to do it all the time. I try to do it with Bendy. Like, I remember talking myself out of trying to post on social personally because I said that that was just a vanity play. I'm like, I'm building a brand. I'm not like, I'm building a company. I'm not building like my own personal brand. Like, how silly is that? I don't have time for that. And I reflect back, that was a huge mistake. But I think we do it all the time as entrepreneurs and founders. Like, we want to stand behind our company. And part of that is us talking ourselves into that being the right approach. And I think part of that is Our insecurity and overwhelm at the task of trying to build an audience personally. Because for one, you have to put yourself out there personally, and that's scary. And for two, it takes time, it takes effort, it takes investment. And a lot of us, if we're builders or marketers or whatever our role is, we'd rather be writing a landing page than writing this Twitter thread. We'd rather be coding the next feature than writing a LinkedIn post. And so we default to the thing we'd like to do, and then we justify it later. So I think though that the as you can see it in your own purchases, like look at the things that you're buying from a software perspective, from digital products, from the service providers that you're hiring, right? Like even down to the B to C products that you're buying, a lot of those are probably being purchased not necessarily because you're following the founder, like you know Amanda Goetz with. with House of Wise, but maybe because you're seeing it promoted by a, you know, a person that you like that is, you know, already somebody that influences you, whether it be an online persona or whatever. And so like, there's always a person attached to it. And wouldn't you rather be the person attached to it? And you can actually control the message and you can actually, as that message evolves, you can kind of like help it move and you can be the person that people come to know and like and trust. As opposed to shelling out money to influencers or trying to like, you know, con people into like joining your affiliate program. Like, wouldn't you rather people actually follow you and be rooting for you? It's a huge opportunity, but it's not easy. And like, like anything in business, it's not easy.

And it's like you said, I think one of the things that baffles me when founders come to me, early-stage founders especially, They say that, hey, we're really good at coding, we're really good at building product, and we don't know how to build in public. I'm like, it's literally you talking to me is building in public. It's like you expressing that concern or acknowledging the fact that you don't know how is building in public, right? I feel that's— I think on top of what you said, I just want to add the point that You basically start by expressing yourself without having any agenda. I think once you put an agenda, there comes pressure, there comes goals, there comes metrics, there comes numbers, then you're lost for sure.

Yeah.

So building, building a brand in a sense, what you said is 100% true, is putting yourself out. Would you rather put yourself out than paying someone else? to be the face of the thing you're building, right? It's so, it's so like, you know, so like out of the, out of the box, you know, way of—

Pouring all your money into Facebook and Google to like, you know, try to get in front of people who are searching. Like, there's only so many people that are searching for a solution like yours. There's only so many people that want to watch your interruption ads show up in their feed, right? They want to watch— they come to social media or they go into their inbox to read emails from people. And like, you could be one of those people that they're going for, that they're enjoying, or you can pay other people to be that. And it can work in the short term if you've got a bunch of VC money, you know, it can give you a little bit of ignition, but like, it's not a good long-term strategy.

Yeah. I want to talk about a couple of projects you're working on. Wallet Opening Words. Let's talk about that for a minute. Why, why, why do you think you have to build like a course about copywriting at this moment? And what is that that that is something that people should really invest in copywriting?

Well, I think at the end of the day, when we talk about like everything is marketing, like the people at the end of the day, there's the words that. we share to promote our stuff, to promote ourselves, that we are, when we're building in public, like, that's everything, right? Whether you're, you know, doing video, whether you're writing like a Twitter post, like, the words are everything. And there's a hugely— it gives you a huge competitive advantage if you know how to be persuasive. There's a reason why Steve Jobs built Apple. He was an incredibly persuasive founder, right? And I think that a lot of people are not necessarily well trained in how to write persuasively. And what I found was that there were all of these amazing, like, you know, science-backed studies showing that even subtle word changes could actually make a significant difference to your conversions. These are all tested across like, you know, different peer-reviewed studies. They were living in these dusty, you know, academic art like journals. People didn't know about them. And as I started thinking about like, I want to create a new product for the Why We Buy audience. I don't want to be fully dependent on sponsorships. Like lots of businesses, being dependent on sponsorships kind of sucks. It'd be much better to create value and sell that to your audience. Than to sell their attention to other people. And so I was like, I want to build something.

Wait, wait, wait, wait, can you repeat that again? That's amazing. Can you repeat that again?

Well, it's much better to create value and sell that to your audience than to sell their attention to other people. Like,

that's— can you please tweet about that? It's so, so, so, so important to realize that you're basically taking control as a creator You're not, you're, you're in a way, I think sponsorships, you're bought, you're kind of like, you know, helping other people get visibility for that you're paying. But what you said is so important, especially once you reach a stage that people, some, some creators, they still rely on sponsorships than taking control of their own audience's attention.

I think that—

Please, please, please tweet about it. It's so amazing what you said.

My sponsors that I do work with, because I work with brands that I love, right? And like, I do want to promote those products to the audience, but I also don't want to be reliant on those brands. And I don't want— and as this space changes and evolves, I don't want to end up with the— like, it costs a lot for us to produce the newsletter. Like, you know, it takes 2 days to actually get like an issue, like all the promotional tweets and stuff around it, like create the graphics, get it populated, like We're not— there's lots of newsletters out there that people brag about, you know, I create this newsletter in 2 hours. I'm like, good for you. That's not what we're doing. It's a big lift. And for it to justify that lift, it needs to make sense on the number side so we can keep selling to sponsors, or we can sell to sponsors that we're really excited about working with while we also build up additional revenue streams that are creating value directly for the audience that we intend to serve. So wanted to create something like that I could sell directly to the audience, something I knew would create a lot of value for them, something that I wish would have existed sooner. And I loved Phil Agnew. Phil Agnew and I partnered on this. For your listeners that may not know him, he's the host of Nudge. He was— The Nudge is the number one marketing podcast in the UK, number one behavioral science podcast probably in the world. And he was formerly a product marketer at Buffer, and before that he was at Hotjar. So he knows the SaaS world. He's earned his stripes. He's an incredible creator himself and now gone full-time creator. And I've been on his podcast and we talked and I was like, you've got people in their ears. Like people are listening to you every week. I've got people's eyeballs. They read the newsletter every week. Like there's something here we can collaborate on. So we've been talking about a bunch of different stuff. And ultimately what I wanted more than anything was something that people would be able to get value from right away, you know, something that would be accessible, that would be— they could go and say, I can apply this. And the thing about a lot of behavioral science studies is that they're done in labs or they're done with big brands. And so a lot of the people that are reading our newsletter, reading our newsletter and listening to Phil's podcast, some of them work at big brands, but a lot more of them are marketers in-house with smaller companies or founders building startups. Like, and so we wanted something that would be relevant to those And that's what inspired Wallet Opening Words. I was like, there are all of these subtle changes that you can make to your copy that can actually make a big impact and people don't know about them. And so we're going to compile all of those into this playbook and share those with people. And then we're also going to build tools to help them actually go from idea to first draft faster. And so we built individual bots. We live in a cool time where we can all build our own bots. So we build individual copywriting bots to help people apply the techniques that we're teaching. And we built like a system, like we call it the copy test cheat sheets, where they can like prioritize their copy test ideas, their campaigns that they want to run, and like organize them and kind of measure them. But like at the core, what it is, is it's a resource to take you like within like you know, 50 minutes to consume the whole thing, you are going to be a whole lot smarter about how you rework your copy. And it's going to be based on science, not based on looking at your competitors and going, oh, I bet you that works good because they're writing it that way, or buying some online templates from, you know, the copywriting gurus. That's a great business model for them, shitty solution for you if they're really popular because you're gonna sound just like everyone else. Right. We wanted that. And so that's what we built. And we launched it. We did a presale at the beginning of January and we sold over 300 people for the presale. We hadn't really gotten deep into what the product was going to be. And we're still truthfully building the product because like, like I said to you in this podcast, you know, like go out and like the best feedback is going to come from people who are actually paying you to solve the problem. So we went out and did some customer discovery with those folks. And then continued to iterate. And over the— we'd been working on it for a couple months before that, but we hadn't really— like, there was still more to be developed and the messaging wasn't quite where it needed to be. And then we did our official launch on Monday, less than 2 days ago. And now we're up to, I think, 540 sales for that. And like, and the feedback has been amazing. Like, the people that are— the reviews that we're getting are Fantastic. And it's— I'm just really proud of it. I think it's a really good product and I'm excited for people to get it.

Yeah, we're going to link that for sure in the comments. And it sounds like you're— it sounds like unique, right? It's not something that you get, you know, plug and play type of thing. You have to like invest your time as well to research, you know, and adapt to, you know, some of the techniques that you ship. I think It's so fascinating that you, you're backing everything by science. So it's, it's truth right there. Science is always truth. So how do you link— like, I'm just so fast curious about how do you link some of the tactical stuff that we do, uh, on a day-to-day basis building businesses to the science? Like,

Mm-hmm.

where is that bridge? How did you develop that kind of Wiring per se.

I love Rory Sutherland, is an amazing marketer. I think he heads the behavioral science unit for Ogilvy, which is one of the world's largest and most successful agencies. And he says something that I just really love. He says, you know, good marketing is part curious science and part magic. And I think that the science part is like, there's, there's, if you really look at it at a behavior, And why somebody's buying something, what's kind of motivating them, what's moving them, what's like— you can break it down, you can understand this underlying science behind it. But that's often a jumping off point because again, the context might change, right? Like if this worked really well for this brand, understand why it worked based on the, like, the behavioral science. But that doesn't mean you just go and do that thing. You need to take the insight of that, the nugget of kind of like genius that they applied And then you need to think about it under the lens of your business. And to do that, you need to understand your customers. So the 2 things come together. It's like understand the science of human behavior, but then understand the context of your customer situation so that you can then take those insights and come up with great campaign ideas that are going to work for your audience. And I think that you, you know, you can do okay with using one and one of those and not combining them, but you're going to do so much better if you combine them. So that's kind of my outlook.

I love that. Caitlin, this has been like a phenomenal conversation. You dropped so much knowledge, I would say. So many tips, so many frameworks. I'm just so fascinated by the way you approach marketing. It's unusual. It's not like very typical, which is what I admire you about. Any closing thoughts before we We close it out.

Yeah, I mean, I would, I want your, your, you know, founders are listening, and they're thinking about building in public. Think about when you're building in public, again, go back to that message of context is king. Because as you're sharing your stories, you can wrap those in so many different ways, right? You can, you have to come back to, if I'm sharing this, who cares? And how do I explain this in a way that they get some value out of it? Because sometimes people go into like the whole content creation or building in public and they just are kind of like, these are the things that happened and they're just being very matter of fact about it. But you also need to say, these are the things that happen and here's why you should care. And that is sometimes people forget. So when you come, you know, as you look at your marketing, as you look at building in public, come back to that. I need to understand the context of my ideal customers and that's going to help me perform so much better. No matter what I'm doing in my marketing.

I love that. I think that's the best way to wrap it up. I love that tip. Appreciate you, Caitlin, for joining the show and dropping so much of the knowledge. And thanks to all the listeners for— if you ended up listening to this point, you're amazing. It's a big episode, so appreciate you for your attention and time. We do this for you. Want to provide value in one way or the other way possible. And definitely do follow Caitlin. I'm going to link all the links in the show notes for sure. Uh, that's a wrap. Appreciate you so much. Thanks, Caitlin. Thank you.

Bye-bye.