Sarah Stockdale - Lessons from building a diverse community of ambitious marketers!

It's like from the highest level, the perception of your brand has to bring in the right people. If I was, you know, on really techie startup-y podcasts all the time, if I, you know, was trying to get on Bloomberg or, you know, doing op-eds in TechCrunch all the time, I would be attracting a very different kind of community than the one that I've attracted. So the places where your brand is represented And how it's represented are going to be seen by different people depending on what those people like to consume and what they care about. The founder brand matters a lot too when it comes to the community. How your brand is perceived in the market will attract or detract people depending on how you show up.

Welcome, welcome everybody. Thanks for tuning into the Undefeated Underdogs Podcast. I'm your host, Sharad. Today I have a very exciting guest. I've been kind of like, you know, virtually met her on the internet thanks to Amanda Netvidad, who introduced or who brought us together. Shout out to her. Without further ado, Sarah Stockdale, welcome to the show. How are you feeling today?

Thank you so much for having me. I'm doing great. How are you doing?

I'm doing well. I'm pretty stoked, excited to dive a lot of topics around marketing growth with you. And while I was actually kind of researching about you, I found out that you previously worked for Tilt. And shout out to James Bishara. He's a good friend of mine. I think we live in a very tiny world, right? Those are the dots I kind of hunt for so that it feels like we're not strangers. We're like friends but haven't met. type of a situation. So welcome to the show. I'm excited. For folks who don't know about Sarah, let me give you guys like a brief intro. She's done so much, so I can probably like give like a 20-minute intro, but let me actually concise it. Sarah is the founder of GrowClass, an academy where marketers become experts. They seek the mentorship and it's a membership-first community and it's a brilliant network of world-class marketers. So I love your website. You know, it's so— the copywriting is so precise and concise. And she's also a host for the Growth Effect podcast. And like I said, she worked for brands. Oh my God, like she's the director of— she was the director of speakers at TED. She was like head of marketing, if I'm not wrong, at Tilt. She's done so much. So I'll throw the link, the LinkedIn link, and you guys can explore by yourselves. But without First of all, I want to ask this kind of like a basic question. When did you fall in love with marketing? What was the first love? Is it love at first sight? Like, did you figure out by yourself? Who helped you? What is like, you know, let's go back to like 10 years because I think 2013 is when you started off working like seriously before interning, if I'm not wrong. But yeah. When did you go?

I, it is so I accidentally kind of started in marketing. So when I graduated from my master's, I had two job offers. One was with a fancy PR firm downtown Toronto. You know, salary not a huge one, but a real one. Benefits all that good stuff, and a three-month contract at a startup. And this is like. before it was cool to work at a startup. Like, no one really knew what that meant. An accounting startup of all things. It was a 3-month contract. It was no money to go and work on this team of mostly engineers. And obviously, I was gonna take the PR gig. That makes a lot more sense for a recent grad with a bunch of grad school debt. Right. But when I went in for my final interview with the PR firm, I saw someone who had interviewed me cleaning out a closet. And I've cleaned out my fair share of closets. I took out trash, I did all this stuff, but I asked just like, hey, what other stuff do you do other than this kind of thing? And she's like, well, I just got here, so this is kind of the, the kind of the jam of the job that I'm doing. And I realized if I took the crappy 3-month contract, I would get to touch a lot of interesting things. They would let me do a lot of things and they wouldn't pay me very well. There was a lot of risk. Mm-hmm. But I would get to learn. So I took the 3-month contract and that was at a startup called Wave Accounting at the time, now Wave, that was acquired by H&R Block. So I guess now Wave that is H&R Block, but they raised, I think, $21 million in their Series A, like a couple weeks after I joined. And then I got to stay.

You're a good luck charm then.

I'm trying to be.

I'm trying to be. So let's dive into the present life. Why did you start GrowClass? The question I want to ask is more importantly about— there are tons of tons of these marketing communities, like Demand Curve is one of the popular ones. And they're like, I don't know, at this point there is— I can't keep count of them. There are like so many in this wave of communities that actually cater marketers. Why did you think like, okay, this is like right time to start GrowClass? And talk to me about the origin story.

Yeah, so GrowClass is 3 years old. So when I did start it, it was just us and Reforge hanging out. But what I saw was a gap to 2 main things. One, the vast majority of current marketing education that exists right now is either traditional colleges, universities, old programs, instructors that have never worked in marketing or haven't in 10 years. So just very, very old school.

Mm-hmm.

Or Silicon Valley bro-y communities that are mostly men, uh, and don't necessarily feel like the kind of community that I want to learn in, that I would feel comfortable being vulnerable in. Right. And so Grow Class is really focused on women and underrepresented folks and bringing them into a community where they feel incredibly comfortable to ask any question. We don't use any acronyms. It's one of the rules in our course and in our community. And so the goal is really just helping women and underrepresented people get into those 6-figure growth marketing careers from intermediate marketing jobs that they could easily be doing those higher-paying jobs just with a little bit of help with network and with some specialized education.

I love that. I love it. That's the differentiating factor, right? Like underrepresenting folks. We need more of such initiatives to be happening in these days at this climate of the hour. We need more people empowering other people, to be honest. I feel those days are all gone where, like you said, like male dominant society and, you know, whatever it is. I don't want to, like, you know, get into the details, but I'm so glad, like, someone like you took charge with the experience you've built in the past. So kind of like a follow-up question, what do you think is the problem that exists in the startup society or in the general, like, you know, corporates, businesses that don't give the opportunity for underrepresented folks? Is it talent? Is it like, you know, how do you think Grow Class can actually fill that? Like, there is a massive gap. And so I'll tell about myself. I came from India. And as an immigrant in the US, it's ridiculously competitive. And most of the times I get underestimated, like, right on my face. So it's sometimes frustrating, but what I do is I just flip the switch and, you know what, let me actually prove them wrong. I act like, you know, that's the whole point of this podcast as well, is really bring the underdogs, like people who change the narrative from being underestimated to proving them wrong and like turn the obstacles into opportunities, right? So anyway, how do you think GrowClass can actually fill that gap and what are some things that you're doing to address that?

Yeah. Oh, it's such a good question. And I agree with you. My favorite thing in the world is being underestimated because like that is like the itch I always have to scratch if someone underestimates me. Yeah. I always have to prove them wrong. It's super helpful for motivation. It's horrible for everything else, but super helpful for motivation. GrowClass specifically, there's a couple of things. The first one is confidence. So, a lot of the folks who are coming into GrowClass don't have traditional tech backgrounds and don't have traditional marketing education. They're great. They're incredibly smart. They've done a lot of really interesting things. They don't know how to articulate that experience, and they don't understand how great their experience is.

Mm-hmm.

So, part of what we do with education is we're just giving them more context, more case studies, and more examples to justify the fact that they already know this stuff. They already know it, but they do need that additional, just a little bit more, um, when it comes to the education side so that they can feel confident going after the roles that are going to be paying them a little bit more. The second piece is network. So, what I found when I was working in startups is founders hire their friends. They hire the people that are around them. They don't have a lot of time. They need people that they trust early. And then, you end up with this early team and you're like, hey, this is a bunch of white dudes again.

Right.

You just hired all your buddies from college. And a lot of founders are super aware of that and trying to change it. And so, what we want to do is connect people earlier into those founders and startups and Create this place where I, I get DMs every day from founders and from heads of marketing being like, hey, do you know anyone who's great? And we've just opened up a network that is primarily women and underrepresented people that we can direct them and connect them into. Mm-hmm. Um, and then we also have a lot of those folks come in as mentors, so they get more one-on-one time with the students and expand their networks past their Circle of bros, their initial circle of bros. We're trying to open the circle of bros. Hmm. And then the next piece is really the community. And a lot of the time what people are talking about, and a lot of courses say like, we have a community, and like you're dumped into a Facebook group with like 2,000 people and like it's not like a community really. It's a bunch of people which can be helpful. But our goal is really developing real relationships and real friendships from the folks who join Grow Class. For example, Peggy Sue, one of the women who came through Grow Class, flew into Toronto and a bunch of them surprised me for my birthday. Whoa. San Francisco. So, like, there's one— there's a member of our community who's an author. She's an author of these incredible fantasy novels, and she has a dedication in the book to someone else that she met through Grow Class.

Wow.

So, it's— I just— these friendships and this network become a support system for folks. And a lot of the time, if you don't know what you're worth and you don't have anyone to ask that you trust, that you can be vulnerable with and say, this is how much I'm making. I don't know if that's okay. Now we have this group of people who we've built these relationships with that you can go and say, like, I think I should be making more money, or I don't think I'm being compensated fairly. And we also have a huge marketing salaries database where they can actually go and compare themselves. But the more interesting thing I think is those friendships in that community and people who will push you and say like, no, you know, you're worth more than this. Let me introduce you to someone in my network. Let me help you with your LinkedIn profile. Let me help you work on your personal brand. And that enables some of these big salary jumps we've seen people be able to get.

I have so many follow-up questions. First of all, that's That's like really amazing that the outputs you are producing, right? Like the network you said, and you're kind of becoming like a temple of underrepresented folks who want to excel in marketing and founders reaching out to you to find this talent is amazing, right? That's like the greatest signal you can get. So question, the first question I have for you is like, How do you find these underrepresented folks? Like, is there a strategy that, you know, because there are like so many people and in my experience, these folks generally are very, I wouldn't say shy, but they're not quite open like others because they're already in the minority, right? So how do you find these hidden gems in the wealth of like 7 billion people?

Yeah, we've been really lucky. Um, so the first 2 cohorts of Grow Class were very much from my personal network. Um, I didn't really know it at the time. It was a lot of like friends of friends and people who kind of had connected to me through my work. Um, I, I write a really fiery, left-leaning feministy blog. Mm-hmm. Um, that's a newsletter that goes out every couple of weeks that has absolutely nothing to do with marketing. Very much my own personal project that I started around the time that Trump got elected.

I know, I know. I think it's called We Need to Talk About This, if I'm not wrong.

Yeah, yeah, it's that one. So I never thought that it would have anything to do with my professional life. It was like a creative writing outlet, but it grew organically. And a lot of folks have found Grow Class through that network, which I wasn't expecting. There's a lot of like values alignment there, and then those people have gone on to our referrals. Our biggest channel for acquisition for new students. So those we've been really, really lucky, and we've worked really hard on the experience. But we've been really lucky to find these incredible people to become early alumni of ours who have referred a lot of their friends and colleagues, and then that has kind of developed a chain reaction of what I worked on with James. What I built for Tilt was the ambassador program, and so we took a lot of what we learned. at Tilt and built that into the foundation of GrowClass. So the ambassadorizing our former students, they go out and help us find the right kinds of people to be part of the community.

It's amazing. I feel all the dots are always connected. You just have to like, you know, kind of look for them, right? Everything we do in the past, somewhere down the line, like, you know, they come back and probably like be helpful. So the other thing I want to this is something I sometimes struggle as well, is to identify qualities in people, especially in this case, in your case, marketing, right? Like, who never did marketing before. So how do you have that lens to see through them and say, hey, you can do this, right? What are some of the qualities that you see that in those non-marketers, but you see them as marketers?

Oh, like, so when I was at Tilt, one of the— when I got the handle, when I got the Twitter handle for GrowClass was when I was hiring folks on my team at Tilt, and I was really struggling with hiring seasoned marketers. A lot of folks come in with like experience that doesn't super perfectly match what you're doing, and then a lot of ego, and then they wanna spend a lot of money, and we had no budget. Mm-hmm. So I would hire recent graduates and train them. And that's— and at the time I got the handle for Grow Class because I was like, oh, this is hard. Like, this is really challenging. Right. But some of them became some of the best marketers I know. So Emily Lanetto, who's the head of community at Webflow, Nick Francis, who helped us build out the ambassador program at Tilt and has founded a financial technology company. Right. They're amazing. And so, what we looked for was a couple of things. One, just like aptitude. So, folks who were smart, who could learn quickly, and didn't have a lot of ego. Right. And then, for me, a lot of what I focus on is community growth. So, I always want to find people who are incredible hosts. So, if you are the person at a party who will notice someone who's not having a good time or someone who maybe feels uncomfortable or awkward, and you're the first person to go over and include that person and make them feel like they're a part of the community.

Hmm.

Um, those are people that I think will be incredible marketers because they're the ones who are going to notice the gaps in the customer experience, who are going to listen intently to customer support folks or just listen in on sales calls and pick up on the things that we need to be doing to improve the experience. So really smart folks, Um, obviously technically savvy,

right?

Uh, very little ego, but like people, people who understand human psychology.

And any— those are— I feel like most, most of the things you said are very intangible. They're like meta qualities. Uh, one of the things I want to also come back is community. Uh, and shout out to Emily. I, I— so I host this other podcast called Community Decoded at my workplace, and I interviewed her. I think that's the 3rd episode for that podcast, and she's phenomenal. I love— yeah, she's really good at bringing people together, and she's spilled out so many secrets. Shout out to her. I do have another thing which I want to talk about. Givers, right? That's one of the qualities that I hear in this last 18 minutes. You've been talking about people who want to contribute and give. give back, paid forward, those type of high qualities. Talk to me about the tactical qualities that you look for. The reason I'm asking is some of the listeners, especially I'm also asking for myself. I'm not a long-form writer, but I hope you say that writing is one of the quality, the tactical quality in a marketer, right? So again, what are the qualities that you find Tactically that non-marketers can easily become marketers?

Yeah. Well, you called out the first one, really great writers. Mm-hmm. AI is not going to be able to replace folks who can marry conversion copywriting with everything they know to be true about the customer. Mm-hmm. Um, so we teach that in Grow class, but when folks come in with And there's no such thing. I don't think there's any such thing as like someone who's born a writer. But if you have been honing that skill, if you've been practicing your writing, if you're great at writing hooks or you're really good at writing an engaging blog post or article, we can easily transform that into making you a really great content writer or making you a really strategic content thinker who can then go and execute. Mm-hmm. So I think the writing piece is One of the most important parts, data analysis and just having a good grasp on how to think about systems and measuring your work. That doesn't mean you have to come in and understand GA4 or understand whatever analytics platform, just someone who is— Right. thinking critically about how they're going to know whether or not what they're doing is successful. Mm-hmm. Marketing attribution's getting really hard and is not gonna be super useful for all that much longer. Right.

But

that kind of cause and effect thinking, that hypothesis-driven thinking, and then looking at the data for next steps is helpful. Customer support folks, I think, have really great skills when it comes To understanding. And this is one of the really big opportunities I see is you have these really smart customer support folks who are supporting your customers, who deeply understand the problems, who can help resolve their objections in a sales conversation, and who have built out systems and processes for their own work. And then, you keep them stuck in customer support. That's someone who can easily be trained and can become a really incredible member of the, of the marketing team. Mm-hmm. If they're someone who's, who's willing to do a little bit of that more focused technical work. In Grow Class, we focus on customer psychology, growth funnels and flywheels, SEO, some analytics, paid ads, and then email marketing and conversion copywriting.

Mm-hmm.

No one has to know all of those things. No one should actually have to do all of those things at work. That's way too many things for one marketer to have to do.

Right.

But what we wanna do is set folks up with a foundation so that if they, if their boss does toss content strategy on their desk, they have a playbook they can go back to. They have a community they can ask questions to. Right. So they don't have to know it all and they don't have to learn it all either in Grow class. They just, we, we exist as the, their base camp that they can always come back to.

That's awesome. And you've, you've talked about conversion copywriting. I wanna go back to that a little bit. After this question, probably. What do you think, in your opinion, in your experience, what is like the— it's like the Thanos gauntlet, right? Like, what is the most powerful weapon for any marketer? Is it SEO? Is it copywriting? Is it analytics? In your opinion, what is one tactical skill Every marketer should like really nail it down, like master about?

Oh, I'm going to give you a very unsatisfactory answer. That's, it depends. It depends entirely on your product, on your customer base, on your market. So for example, SEO is a really great skill for a customer to hone, but if you're building something that doesn't have any search volume, that you are cornering a brand new market, My SEO skills are not helpful for you, at least not now, at least not in the early days of building your company. So I would say the best skillset isn't necessarily a channel.

Hmm.

It's the ability to adapt and learn based on the situation that you've been placed in. So if you're thrown in, like I, when I started consulting after Tilt, I helped e-commerce companies and the, the best thing we could possibly do is build out affiliate strategies for them. I wasn't necessarily necessarily a master of affiliate programs, but I had built out ambassador programs and I understood marketing.

Right.

Um, so I could take those things and learn the new channel as quickly as possible. Mm-hmm. So if you're someone who has a foundation, a foundational set of skills, and you are willing to like just take off your ego like a cape anywhere you go and just learn the thing that you have to do for that specific company, then you're gonna be great.

I know I kind of had a sense that this, this won't be like a straightforward question, but I had to ask anyway. So I, I, Kind of like, you know, took my shots. Talk to me about the conversion copywriting. In your experience, where do founders— so let's talk about like 2 sets. One is early-stage founders who do everything by themselves. Like they write the copy, they build, they talk about the product, they do customer service, pretty much everything. And talk to me about how they can excel. The other set is they have funding or they're bootstrapping to millions and they have a specific, like, you know, marketer they hired. Where should they excel? So 2 sets of people.

Such good questions. So for the founder, a lot of the time you are so deep in the weeds with your own business and your own product, it's all you think about. You wake up at 3 in the morning thinking about it. You wake up at 8:00 AM thinking about it. Your customers don't wake up. They don't think about your company as much as you do. And so, I think a lot of founders, when they're writing copy, they write it as though there's a foundation of understanding. So, their headline and descriptor copy takes for granted the fact that this customer already knows what's going on. And usually people don't, especially for early stage startups. They have no context. You have to kind of take out a lot of the features language and just assume that they're starting from zero and give them the, this is the thing that you are struggling with. Like get into, get very empathetic with your customer. What is the one pain that you're solving?

Mm-hmm.

And how, what, like, what is the pain that you're solving? What is the thing and how are you solving it? The best headline and descriptor copy is like, This is how you are feeling when you were landing on this page. Here's how we solve that problem. And actually explaining the what of the company, which a lot of founders just fail to do in the early days. And then you're expecting folks to spend more than 30 seconds on your site. They're spending 4 seconds. If they don't get the answer to the what is this thing question, then they're leaving. Right. And that's not helpful. So the exercise that I always ask founders to do is second-person narration. So I'm talking directly to you. You're talking to one customer. You don't get to talk to 3 demographics of customers. You pick one person that you've had a conversation with. You figure out what the aha moment is when you're pitching, because when you're a founder, you're pitching, you're constantly talking about your startup. And there's always a moment where people get it, where they're like, Oh, and like their eyes light up. And sometimes it's not the thing you think it's going to. So for James at Tilt, he thought the aha moment that people would have is you can collect money and make anything happen. So that was like the tagline for Tilt. That was the founder-led tagline for Tilt for a long time. Collect money and make anything happen.

Mm-hmm.

And that was not specific enough. No one knew what it meant. It was aspirational. It was what I would call ecstasy copy, but no one knew what it meant. And the thing that actually worked really well was get your shitty roommate to pay you back for toilet paper, like the very specific detailed problem that we were solving and a very like one-to-one example of what that problem would look like in someone's common life. So we went from this aspirational ecstasy copy to this very specific painkiller copy, and people would have that like quick, like, oh, I get it, I know what that's for, I can use that. That was a very rambly way to answer that. I apologize.

No, no, no, I, I love it. I just kind of like took that note for myself. It's— I think we live in a world where we want to show off our aspirations and we easily Kind of by default want to— it's a way of selling what we are building, right, as founders. And what you said is absolutely true. We don't need to sell it. We just have to talk about it, like really explain in simple words. And I think that is a great takeaway for me. I just literally wrote down because sometimes I tend to— I do, I do build products on the side just for fun. And all the time I want to sell the vision. I want to sell like the bigger picture when, like you said, I am living in the bigger picture, not the everyday user, right? Like, or everybody who's like hopping on the landing page. So that's a great takeaway for listeners for writing like, or building landing pages or writing copy for your website. It's not about ecstasy copywriting. That's a great word, by the way. It's about like really honing into simplicity, like explaining in layman's terms, like specific. Yeah. Do you want to cover about the other set, which is for folks who got hired like in these teams?

Yes.

Where do you think they should think about Uh, writing, especially conversion writing.

If you are, so if you were hired, so say I'm, I'm joining your startup, one of your products that you're building, and I've got this like maybe founder-led copy. Mm-hmm. Um, the first thing that I would do if I was tasked with rewriting the homepage is dig into support documentation. So what, um, especially if there's like a chat on the website,

right?

So what that support documentation will tell me is what are the questions that are not being answered currently by the homepage? And you kind of wanna get like as early, as early stage as possible. So customers who have just joined, folks who are just landing on the site and chatting. And then I would probably just show it to a bunch of my friends, be like, what do you think this thing does? Mm-hmm. And if they can't answer that question, which happens a lot with SaaS companies, Then we have to go back to the first principles of explaining what it is and describing the problem that it's solving.

Right.

And I always like to think of it as like a, you are, you're not the main character of your homepage or of your landing page. So a lot of people are like, this is about my product and I'm going to describe the features of my product. I'm gonna tell you why you should use it. And that, that's making your product the protagonist of that story. And your customer should be the protagonist of that story. So the story the homepage is telling, or the story your landing page is telling, is actually about a problem that a person is having and how you're introducing a solution as like Yoda or Glinda the Good Witch. And, you know, your, your product, your customer is the protagonist and you just get to be this helper that's guiding them and trying to get them to a better place.

Mm-hmm.

Um, a really great example of this, and like, I'm not at all a super fan of How they've dealt with their team and their politics. But, oh, and it's, the name is slipping, but it's like productivity software, like any, any of those productivity software companies. Mm-hmm. But what they did on their homepage was use like before and after copy. So, and second person narration. So someone is landing on the page and they're saying, this is how you're feeling. You're feeling scattered. You're feeling anxious. You don't know deadlines. You don't know what's happening. And then they introduce kind of the magic wand moment of like, this is what your life could be like. And they give you those three sentences of what it's actually like for their customers. And that's what we do a lot of the time on the on the Grow Class website is like a lot of the folks who are coming to Grow Class are feeling isolated, like their career isn't moving fast enough. Like we we can kind of. get into that mindset and then wave that magic wand and tell a story of someone who has come through the program and come out the other side. So if, if I'm joining your product, I am looking to get as much customer information as possible, getting on the phone with people, digging through support documentation, figuring out what that story is, and then building the copy around that story.

I like that a lot because it's coming from them, not from you. And usually the larger set is them because they're not living in your bubble, right? Like, if one can explain what your product is doing in a much simpler way, because they don't have the intention to sell, you just ask a question and they think about simple layman terms. So that's like, I think, true expression. I like that. And Couple of more highlights I want to point out from your answer. Second person narration is amazing. I feel that should itself be a topic where we should talk about in detail. It's so good and right for one. The target is always one person, right? Those are the 2 really incredible takeaways as well for copywriters or people who are listening. It seems like you, you're suggesting an iterative model where you write something, you refine it, craft it over time, over time. One of the things I feel very difficult is where do you stop it? Like, where do you put an end saying this should go out? Do you have like a method or a—

Oh, it should go out the whole time. It should go out the whole time. So the I think the way that I would recommend doing it is you write a draft, you get some feedback on it, you put it out and you get data on it. Mm-hmm. So you're not kind of ever tinkering with copy in a vacuum. That's when you get really bad copy, especially when you get like a lot of folks giving input on the copy. That's when you get really bad copy. What you wanna do is get get it in front of customers as quickly as you can.

Right.

And for that, I really like having a customer board of directors. So like for GrowClass, we have a Slack with 800 alumni and we have a copywriting channel. So I will just put out like, hey, I rewrote the homepage, thoughts? And like get immediate feedback from folks. That plus the data of how that copy's doing from a conversion standpoint will help me figure out You know, do I leave it up for a couple months? Do I try it for this cohort? Do I iterate on it? But it should all— you should always— the feedback cycle should be kind of constant with customers. And the longer you tinker away on copy, the worse your copy is probably going to be.

Yeah, that's true. I feel the more you dwell, because you're not getting the feedback right, like you're just kind of repeating in your own world again. So Let's switch gears a little bit and talk about community. And one of the, I think one of the things I want to also explore in how you think about it as a marketer, I think it feels like a similar job, community building, marketing. Community builders do the same, like they write copy, they talk to a lot of customers, general sense, not like specifically SEO or, you know, I'm not talking about analytics and stuff, but on a high level, there is no distinguishing, like, factors, right, like, that play in between these 2 personas. It's all pretty much the same. In your opinion, do you think the same, or do you think there is a difference? If yes, what would those— what would those be?

I think there— I think it depends on how your company is doing community. So if we use just Tilt as an example, because we had a 6,000-person student community. Mm-hmm. That was a very specific job. It was someone that had a growth mindset and had a marketing skillset, but who was a people person, who's a consummate host, who understood how to scale relationships. which is a little bit different than a marketer who's just sitting behind a screen. Mm-hmm. So for a period of time when we were building out the student ambassador program for Tilt, I was in constant communication with college students. Like I was on WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger 24/7, 365. Mm-hmm. And that was very much a community thing to have to do. It would— a regular marketer wouldn't expect to be expected or wouldn't think like, part of my job is just gonna be talking to college students all the time, trying to understand them and trying to get them to bring their friends into this thing. I literally, our, the, the, um, international student ambassador program for Tilt started with kids I babysat. Wow. Because I reached out to them being like, hey, I don't know anyone in college anymore. I'm too old. What's going on? Like, can, can you help me? Who's cool at your school? Help me understand what's going on. So I think that the community folks, there's an added layer of communication skills, interpersonal skills, and the ability to scale out relationships that isn't necessarily needed in a day-to-day marketing manager.

I love that. So one of the things you repeatedly again, set up in this conversation, especially Grow Class communities, that pretty much everybody's really helpful. They want to pay it forward. They want to contribute. How do you spot a giver in a community? And number one, I have like a pre-question. Let me go back a few steps more. How do you even think to invite a giver to a community? Community is always to me is like high-quality people, right? Like, it's less noise, very serious folks, like, really want to, like, you know, help each other type of mentality. So I always define and kind of scout for givers irrespective of where they are, meaning their intention is much more important to me than their actual skill, because intention can drive qualities like skills, like, that you don't have, and you will eventually, like, kind of learn about them. But again, to summarize the question, how do you scout a giver before even inviting into a community like Grow Class? Number 2, how do you kind of nurture them eventually?

Yeah, I think there's a couple of things. Like, from the highest level, the perception of your brand has to bring in the right people. If I was, you know, on really techie startupy podcasts all the time, if I, you know, was trying to get on Bloomberg or, you know, doing op-eds in TechCrunch all the time, I would be attracting a very different kind of community than the one that I've attracted. So the places where your brand is represented and how it's represented are going to be seen by different people depending on what those people like to consume and what they care about. The founder brand matters a lot too when it comes to the community. I have a very, I'm a very specific type of person. I have a very left-leaning progressive political newsletter. My public presence is very different than a lot of my contemporaries and that is going to attract a very different type of person. Mm-hmm. So I think the kind of how your brand is perceived in the market will attract or detract people depending on how you show up. And I think we show up as like, this is a warm, fuzzy place where we focus on belonging, where we care a lot about people, where we don't use acronyms, and we're not really a Patagonia vest crowd. That's just not really who we are. And that I think on, for folks applying to our community, we just see a lot of these community-focused, empathetic people who feel like this is a breath of fresh air because they're swimming in the waters of tech and they're like, ah, this is, you know, I finally found my people. Mm-hmm. So I think that brand perception is the first piece. The second piece is like who Who is, who are your ambassadors? Who are your affiliates who are connecting more people into your community and what is their vibe? We have incredible alumni who are the folks telling people about us. I just had someone this morning saying like, Hiba told me this would be great and I believed her and now I'm so excited that I'm here. Wow. And that's like, that's how we wanna find people is through other really great people. And then once they join the community, I think we have a big emphasis on like the welcome mat. Like when you arrive at a party, you want to feel a big group hug. You want someone to immediately hand you your favorite cocktail. You wanna be introduced to everyone. You wanna understand the inside jokes. So we think a lot about that experience. How are we bringing you into an existing community? And we do have inside jokes and we have like things that are very Grow Classy. The crab emoji is very important to us. So we want to integrate you into that as quickly as possible so you never feel like you don't belong. So our Hannah, who is our community, she runs community and email and everything for GrowClass. She's very focused on student experience, especially in the first couple of days of joining the program.

I love that. I love the personal touch, right? Like those emojis and inside jokes, they make you kind of, for outsiders, they make you give that FOMO effect. And it also sometimes helps, you know, not every time, but sometimes helps. I love the way you kind of like portrayed the answer. It's always like, I think it's really important to be warm. That is really important and welcoming. Once you have those basics laid out, I feel, and on top of it, it's such a joy to bring people together, right? Like, it's—

Oh my gosh, yeah.

It's for some reason, I know, That's one of the things. I'm a product guy by nature, but I accidentally found community, like just the way you accidentally found marketing. I'm like, oh, this is really fun. And the joy of like talking to others, expressing, sharing, solving other people's problems, and like being really vulnerable when you are feeling vulnerable is like a safe space. So I love that. I'm rooting for you, Sarah. I think I love the way you're building GrowClass. Couple more questions. So one of the things you did in the past is working at TED as director of speakers, and I assume you worked with a lot of speakers and you host a podcast as well, The Growth Effect. This is more of like a Straightforward question, but very specific to hosts. How do you again scout guests and how do you actually recruit them? Is there a framework that you use, that you approach, a way of writing cold DM or copywriting for email that you want to share with us?

Yeah, so for the speaker side, it was specific to Toronto, so I was helping find speakers for an event in Toronto. Um, and it was very much about looking for a diverse set of people who had unique ways of showing up on stage and really interesting stories that needed to be heard. Um, so a lot of it was actually— we had a lot of applications that would come in. As you know, if you are hosting anything with TED, a lot of applications will come in— hundreds, thousands. Um, but a lot of the people who we ended up bringing onto the stage, we reached out to directly, um, and who were surprised to be reached out to. Um, so, and we hired an incredible MC. Her name's Jam Gamble. She's now like a big speaker, um, a big speaker and influencer. And she, she teaches speaking. Um, this was her first gig was emceeing, uh, our event. Um, because we headhunted her. And we looked for people who we knew were charismatic in other mediums. She was great on YouTube and tested them for the stage because we knew they had really great stories that needed to be told. And we were always looking for the type of people who maybe didn't always get the opportunity or wouldn't even think to apply. And that's— we wanted to give those people the stage and the mic.

And any tips about copywriting, especially like In terms of podcasting, how do you approach guests for The Growth Effect? Or what do you suggest for hosts to write a cold DM, for example?

Oh, I was really lucky with The Growth Effect. So I had a producer, Jay Coburn, who booked— we would work together with the sponsor on the guests, and then he would work to book them. And he's an incredible producer. If anyone needs a podcast produced, Jay Coburn of Vocal Fry Studios is wonderful. He produced The Growth Effect.

Great.

And he taught me a lot about podcasting. And the biggest thing was it's not necessarily the person's CV, because a lot of the time people with really fancy CVs don't— they show up very press-trained and they answer the questions that they've written. you know, pre-written and they, they, they're great, they're charismatic, but there's no, you're not gonna like pick open anything interesting and, and get a story that no one else has heard out of them. So, we would always look for, you know, guests who were up and coming, who had done something really interesting, but maybe who hadn't had a lot of media in the past that we thought we could uncover interesting insights coming from a place of vulnerability and storytelling that we wouldn't necessarily get from a more polished CEO.

I love that. One last question before we wrap up. I'm trying to ask this in every episode. What is the most ambitious goal that you're chasing?

That is such a good question. So I think a lot about human belonging, and I would say the biggest And I'm chasing it in one way with Grow Class, and I'll chase it other ways with different things. But I want— and I don't think it'll be solved with tech. So that's also a piece of this that's challenging. But I really want to, even in a very small way, crack how do we help more people feel like they belong to other people. Yeah. Um, I think we have an epidemic of loneliness. I think tech is exasperating this epidemic of loneliness. And I think the core human need that we all have is to belong to someone or to somewhere. And the more I work in tech, the more I see like a lot of the things that we do are actually antithetical to that goal of belonging. We're, we're building things that are isolating people more and more. So, um, what we work on a lot of the time with Grow Class is like, I want people to make more money, but I also want them to feel that sense of belonging. Um, and in my— the mission that I have for my life is figuring out different ways to, to build the life.

I love that. I love that so much. This has been probably one of the best conversations I had. You're so authentic. You're so kind of Yeah, very pure. I would say your thoughts are very pure. Your answers are very intentional. So, Sarah, we can go on and on. I loved talking to you. Appreciate you for joining. Any closing thoughts before we say bye to the folks listening?

No, I think you were one of the most lovely, thoughtful interviewers I've had the experience of jamming with, and I really appreciate that.

Thank you. Appreciate it. And Folks, I try, I try. At least I try to be warm as much as possible I can. And most importantly, I find my guests so grateful because they are the ones who are bringing awesome content, awesome valuable stuff to you guys. And you guys are the reasons why we do this. I appreciate everyone for joining today and have tremendous people like Sarah in the pipeline. So stay tuned for more episodes. Thanks again for tuning in. That's it for today. See you all on Twitter, wherever you meet and greet. But yeah, do definitely— huge shout out to Sarah. We'll put all the links and the names mentioned in the podcast in the show notes and definitely go check out Growth Labs. It's amazing. That's it, folks. See ya.

Thank you so much.