https://www.listennotes.com/e/ee0830dd086242d0aec8c17f41df95b5

Using AI, I find that the most interesting use cases are to create more efficiency in the marketplace is how I talk about it.

I'm not a fan of AI automation. I'm a fan of AI based quality. I'm a fan of using AI to enhance the quality of our work.

This is the annoying answer, but I really believe this to be the truest answer. Start building stuff. Just start getting in there and building stuff. The best experiments that I found are ones that are creative and thoughtful.

Welcome back to Unfuck My Startup. Last week or a couple weeks ago, I heard about a guy making or having a retainer fee of 10K a month and he was only sending 80 emails a day for his client. And I was like, you've got to be kidding me. What is going on here? So my ears clearly perked up, hopped on the phone with him. His name is Brendan Short. He's the founder of the Signal. He is here today as our guest. the crazy thing is Brendan was telling me that he basically decreased the amount of emails he was sending by 10x and then 20x to his reply rate. So if there's anything that's going to make a former sales director or just marketing guy have his ears perk up, you know, it's coming from Brendan. People already dropping, saying the signals are great newsletter. So obviously we had again on the, on the show today, Brendan is a go to market engineer. He is here to walk us through step by step how he built this incredible workflow. He's going to share his AI powered strategy for getting 20 times the positive reply rate. with 10x less sales activities. Okay, 20 more times results, 10 times less the activities. It's all about doing more with less. This is the future of outbound. Brendan Short, welcome to the show, my friend.

Wow, thank you, Pete. Appreciate it. Yeah, somebody said must be selling private jets. Can confirm it is not private jets on discount that I'm selling. Thanks for having me, man. I'm excited to talk about AI and how it does not mean, spam cannons.

I'm extremely excited for this because as I look throughout all the different stat startups and people starting go to market companies and products and starting up motions, it's all about AI automation. And I'm not a fan of AI automation. I'm a fan of AI based quality. I'm a fan of using AI to enhance the quality of our work. So we're going to dive into all this in just a second. Before we do, this is, you mean more isn't more. That's exactly right, Wes. When more isn't more or less is more. So we're going to do our pitch slap section. So this is our classic kind of intro, Brendan, what we do. We're going to call somebody up. We'll have people raise their hands as you see them starting to get raised. What the audience member is going to do is pitch the rest of the attendees. I think there's like over 500 today. pitch them, yeah, 503 right now. They're gonna pitch them their business or pitch us their business. We're gonna give them two minutes, we're gonna call them up, they'll be a panelist just like us, we'll be able to see their face and everything. Make sure you have your camera on whoever's coming up. And we're also gonna have a running poll. It's gonna say yes or no. So along with people trying to book demos, we're gonna have the running poll. Yeah, camera on, camera on, camera on. Everyone make sure the camera is on if you're raising your hand. And John, you want to go ahead and pick somebody who is raising hands here?

We are going to bring up Joe Meyer.

There we go.

He is coming up.

And what I will ask of come on down. That's right, Joe. Love that. So, Joe, if you could also drop the URL to your website in the hey, Joe, drop the URL to your website in the chat so everyone can pop over to your website. That will be great. And then we will put two minutes on the timer. And after that, we'll have you drop your calendar link if people are in.

All right, there's the website, digitalvisor.com Thank you. We are a, before AI was cool and automation was cool, we were doing automation, primarily accounts payable automation and different types of automation. We've also got a, ERP company where we bring in the entire back office. So everything from HR, financials, payroll, everything on one integrated platform, kind of like a net suite, but gears more towards SaaS companies and product led or product based companies. And so, challenge, do you want to hear my challenge? You want to hear more about what we're doing?

So we've got, pitch the audience, try to get somebody to, to, to, you know, want to put time on your calendar. Yeah.

So we've got, most companies have a hard time with revenue recognition and having multiple systems to drive their back office. And so we're one integrated platform for the entire back office. So we've got companies such as Ariba's Brothers, which is a Disney partner, and they've got 30 stores, and we drive everything from their point of sale all the way back to their warehouse management. We've got SaaS companies that have probably 20 different systems that they're providing to their customers. And all that usage-based system has to come back to one system to do billing. So we took them from three weeks and three people to get all their billing information to literally on the second of every month, we hit the push button and on the morning of the third, all the invoices are sent out electronically and people could pay their bills that way. And so I've been a serial entrepreneur of four times, built and sold them. and this is the hardest one we've ever had to do. So I'm curious as to how to best go to market more efficiently and talking about product led growth and what we should give away free because we got a lot of stuff we can offer versus what we charge for and implementation fees. And it's that's the proverbial challenge we're having.

Awesome. Well, thanks, Joe. Now also, Brendan's going to talk to us all about like finding these, you know, niche within a niche micro campaigns, all these great things. So I think the info he shares today is going to be great. If you could drop your calendar link into the chat, if anyone is interested in Digital Advisor, hit Joe's link. Joe, thanks so much for coming up and sharing with us.

Thanks guys, appreciate it.

John, you removed Brendan instead of Joe. Joe, you want to co-host?

Fix it right now.

I'm one of nine kids. I can do anything.

There you go. Four business, you said nine kids? oh, man. Joe, Joe, Joe. Run it.

Sorry about that, guys.

Yeah, we're good. More Joe, nine kids. You are a champion, Joe. All right, we're back to Joe.

Brandon's coming back, but we lost him in the attendees, so give me a second here and we'll bring him back up.

Someone said, to be honest, it's a little weird having us tell people aren't in his ICPE. Well, we don't.

We.

Quite know that, although that is the goal, right? Is to kind of angle people who are pitching more towards our ICP. But, but yeah, maybe, I don't know, should we have people like apply beforehand? I have a link for the unfuck my startup section. Would that be easier? Okay, what I'm gonna do, so yes, yes, yes, apply beforehand. Okay, guys. All right, all right, all right. I get it. I get it. Let me drop the, I'm gonna paste this form to the unfuck my startup segment section. You can apply for both the unfuck my startup section and the pitch slap. Let me share that while we're pulling Brendan back.

Pete, what's happening is we're waiting for Brendan to re-sign in and I'm gonna add him back in. So just give it a second. I'm sorry about that.

No, it's all good. We'll fill a buster. We'll fill a buster. Is there any subjects that we have not talked about on here that people want to? Is this recorded by any chance? Yeah, it is. We're just gonna go live on YouTube. It used to go live in the morning. Then following morning, we just hired a YouTube producer or YouTube editor, whatever you wanna call them, consultant. And he's helping make this show YouTube friendly. We're also launching a second recorded show. that's going to be all recorded, not live, more highly produced. Adam and I will be in the same room. And, yeah, John's actually here this week helping me set up the studio. So this is my first time. How about break down that email that hooked me? Yeah, I mean, we have a lot of attendees. I mean, that's. It's this whole. Oh, whole more with less. All right, first timer. So the other thing, guys, Adam is usually here. He is usually the host. I am the co-host. Brendan Short's back. Sorry for the technical difficulties, everybody. Adam is the co-host or the host. I'm the co-host. He is at a executive offsite right now. That's why he's not here. Someone said, what is the hook for the email? All right, here is the subject line. I'm dropping it in, guys. Ten thousand dollars per month for eight emails. He's booking five times more demos. Dot dot. That's it. That's it. I'm getting strong Mu Fasa Vibes from Pete Ian. It's my new microphone, man. That's what it is. I swear it really brings out the, you know, sort of the more bass and tenor notes, I think, in my voice. So I. Simba, that's, you mean like adult Simba, right? Not.

Whatnot?

I think. Brendan Short. All right, let's dive into it, baby.

We're at capacity, huh?

Yeah, we're at capacity.

Oh, is that what it was?

We were. Yeah. Oh, my God.

I gotta get back in. It's like, that's go.

Oh, my gosh. We broke it. It was. So we were just talking. It's the subject line that really got everyone. Ten thousand. Ten thousand dollars per month for 80 emails. He's booking five times more demos... that's what got everyone in. Nick said good problem to have. Yeah, we're doing our best here. So guys, let's not waste any more time. Brendan, let's dive into it. I hope your heart rate's going down after the exit and re-entrance. Mine would be... I get anxious about that kind of stuff. All right, so Brendan, let's dive into it. You are getting pretty crazy results. You're sending about eight emails a day. We talked about this idea of micro campaigns, and that's really exactly what you're doing. So for people who don't know, can you please describe what micro campaigns are to set the stage here?

Yes, absolutely. And again, just to reiterate, AI is magical, it's incredible. There's a lot of buzz about it. I actually still think it's very early and I can't really be more bullish on it. I think we've got many, many years to go. so, you know, I have no AI course to sell you. I just like AI. If you're not already playing with it in your daily life and professional life, I highly recommend it. AI, using AI, I find that the most interesting use cases are to create more efficiency in the marketplace is how I talk about it. So instead of having to send 10,000 emails a month, how do you send eight emails a day and get even better results? And I think this is better for buyers, it's better for sellers, and it's better in general. There's this concept that I've been talking about called a quote unquote micro campaign. There's three things about it. So number one, it's a small, it's a highly targeted list of say 50 to 250 contacts at a time, super small list. These lists are generated using very specific filtering and or signals. Oftentimes this is using an AI agent to get what I call rich data. this is data that's not in a traditional B2B database like Apollo or ZoomInfo.

So.

And then the third one is, we'll come back to that one. And then a third one is it's relevant this week, but will not be relevant next week or next month. So I forget, was it Michael, the gentleman who is just up here pitching his startup? He's selling stuff, Joe, sorry, selling stuff that to me it sounds like, you know, A new CFO would be interested in this to help create more efficiency in their books as one example. So it's like for Joe, I would probably just go reach out to companies that are getting a new CFO or hiring for a new CFO and reach out to them then. In six months, they probably already have their stack set up. It's not going to be a good email to go reach out with.

And when we're talking about starting these two, I know you said 50 to 250. Historically, this audience, 70% are founders, sub $3 million in revenue. We have some pre-rev folks. We have some people higher than that. We've got a bunch of growth marketers in here too. I would say, well, actually, I'll phrase this as a question. When people are starting out, numbers wise, where should they start out in that range? 50, below 50? I mean, what does that look like?

Lower the better. I think if you've got a list of 50 people, you're going to reach out to 10 of them a day for the next five days.

Right?

Like, there's a relatively small number of people. What's tricky is I wouldn't look at. So, so again, let's go back to this example of CFOs at, I don't know, the Russell 3000 list or something like kind of, quote unquote, big companies. It's not like you can run a list and say, okay, I want to. I want the 50 people on this list. Like, you're kind of, you can only have a list. based on the data that is relevant this week. So it's not like you could say, hey, I need 50 companies that are hiring a CFO this week. You're at the mercy of the data. And so that might be 18, that might be 59, I don't know. And so that's how you would kind of come up with this list. It's sort of dependent on the data. Let me give you another, can I give another quick example of a micro campaign?

Yeah, please.

Okay, so this would be another one. This is where we use Clay for this. You can use kind of anything. Clay is kind of a steep learning curve. So if you're an early stage Founder, I don't know that I would necessarily go, like, I claim, try to use it personally. There's a bunch of other tools that you can use as well. Clay is amazing. It's incredibly powerful, but I just think there's a steep learning curve. But we use Clay. Basically, it's a spreadsheet of a bunch of data. And so an example of one is, like, we want to look for SaaS businesses. Again, there's typically not, like, a SaaS checkbox in Zoom in for Apollo. I want to also look at companies that have raised 5 million in funding. I want certain titles. This is basic stuff. So these are all like normal filters, but rich data. You're layering these on top of each other. I want to see anybody that's engaged with either marketing content or LinkedIn content that I have put up as a founder in the last period of time, let's say 30 days. And then this is for a company that has a pre vetted database of candidate sales candidates. The trigger event, the thing that's timely.

Is.

The company is currently hiring for AEs. And so we have a custom agent, Andreas Wernke, who I work with, shout out Andreas, built this specific workflow in Clay and built the agents to go out and search for hiring data of AEs. And if that is true, then we want to basically, again, we're using all those different filters, and then we're trimming down that list and it's a list of a certain amount of people every single day and every single week. And I'm going to send an email to the VP of sales and I'm going to say, hey, saw you put up a job req for an AE last week. Here are three candidates that I think would fit the criteria that you're looking to hire for. If you want to learn more about our pre-better database of candidates, reply back and let's chat. What's interesting about this email, two things. One, if I send that email in a month, or even in a couple of weeks, it's likely that that VP of sales is going to say, hey, I just hired an AE. I wish you had reached out to me a month ago. So it has to be timely. The second thing is, and we can talk about this, is the quote unquote offer. So it's what I'm giving them. I'm proactively, permissionlessly sending them three candidates that are very valuable to them. The question you want to answer here is like, what is the thing that you can give away for free? that you could theoretically charge money for. And that's where it's like, I don't want to ask for a 30 minute demo. How do you do anything but say, do you want to spend 30 minutes on a demo with me? And that's a really good offer.

I want to get into that, like the sort of what is the call to action besides, Hey, give me a call. So actually there were some questions in the chat. It was like, are you worried about everybody? Where was it? Okay, it says, Brendan, are you worried that the AI wave you and others are riding right now will fizzle out anytime soon? When every dude and his grandma grabs a board, aboard and joins the ride. So I actually view this as like going, as doing the opposite of what the pack is doing right now. We're trying to do that with RB2B a little bit too from like a branding perspective. That's a different story. But essentially what you're doing, you're trying to find these data points that go outside of what, you know, Apollo or Zoom Info is going to get you, and you're trying to enrich them with data points that really identify if somebody is in market. I mean, the old statistic is 95% of your audience is not in market right now, right? So, I mean, we're using rough numbers, of course, but if you've eliminated or if you're doing 10 times less activities than other people, you're basically trying to eliminate everybody who's not in market right now and trying to pull out data points that set you apart from the rest of the pack. Everyone's just grabbing you know, some Industries, some company size filters and just spamming the heck out of them using automation. This is the opposite of that. So you're really doing it to, to increase, increase quality exponentially while decreasing quantity. So let's get into a little bit more of. So a micro campaign, and I'm a big believer in, you know, it's like, whether we call it micro campaign or whatever, like. I think a good offer these days needs, like you have to give something away for free. You need to provide value before they're talking to you. Otherwise they're not all that incentivized to accept a meeting with you. So like what have you found from sort of those, I mean, there's of course tons of things you can give away for free. You can give away your product, you can give away a widget, whatever it might be, what have you found to be working well? And I'm sure that's going to be a few different answers in there. Yeah.

So.

The thing, I would say kind of like the worst thing to think about is, and sometimes actually it's very powerful, but at the basic level, I would think about giving away like a case study or a guide or a checklist. What is a guide or a checklist? What's something that you do in the first 30 days of onboarding? that you can put together as a checklist and give that for free. And it's like you probably could charge $2,000 for that thing. Give that away for free. It should hurt a little bit to give away for free. I think that's like a very general solution that a lot of companies should be able to come up with. Another way to answer that question would be like, if you're a founder, and you're trying to make some cash, what would you consult around? That's the thing that you probably should put into like a one pager and give away for free. Try to think about that. The level up is like nuanced for your business and it's hard, it's not going to be a general solution actually. I can't give you a generalized solution. So in this case, it's, you know, that this company has a pre-vetted database of candidates, they, you know, sending three candidates to somebody that is actively hiring AEs, that's like a very valuable thing. But that's obviously not relevant for RB2B, for instance. And so it needs to be in the same vein, by the way, as like micro campaigns and using AI, the best experiments that I found are ones that are creative and thoughtful. And I actually do think that there's like a lot of staying power in using AI in these thoughtful and creative ways to come up with experiments. I've seen people do like a kind of a micro site using AI. It's like software for restaurants, and you can kind of one click generate a website using AI to see what your website would look like if you used their software. So that's another like crazy idea of a cold outbound Campaign, that's actually very valuable to be able to see that and say, Hey, your website's not currently SEO optimized with our product. It is with one click within five seconds, you can see what it looks like and you can see the lift of what it would look like if you use this product.

Yeah, I'm trying to, so at the same time, I'm trying to grab these questions. They're going, they're coming in so fast today. But I want, one thing I just want to emphasize is on these, on these micro campaigns, you are essentially, you're giving them a taste of the product. So in the context of this job posting one, you're actually giving them candidates from the database and then you're saying, Hey, I have a lot more candidates. So you're actually like, you're almost starting the product demo or product experience during that outreach campaign, which is awesome. And the other thing too, I like about this, this way you phrase giveaways. Now, if anyone was here last week with Wes Bush, we were talking a lot about product-led growth, the offer and the sort of product-led enrichment at the end of this micro campaign, I believe a huge component of it is like, it's not this general check, you know, checklist. It's not this general article or PDF or ebook. It's a specific, like hyper-targeted deliverable or not deliverable is the wrong word, but like hyper-targeted incentive or product or whatever. that only those people can actually action on right now. And it's truly, truly valuable to them. So I really, I really like that. Okay. Dave asks, it likely varies product to product, campaign to campaign, but when you're deciding the non-database signals you're using to target folks, how do you decide what those signals should be? How do we decide which signals to prioritize? I want to give a quick example that I've had previously at a a previous company, and then I want to hear Brendan's take. But so Dave, I mean, that's exactly right, right? Like it's like, what is your magic data point? The way I've looked at it is like, what is the ideal candidate for us? And don't think about what lens of filters and whatever are available on BuiltWith or Zoom. It's like, what are we actually getting at? So at a previous business that I worked for, We were saving people money on shipping e-commerce businesses specifically. We were saving them money on their FedEx and UPS bills. And really what we needed to know is like how much are these people spending on UPS and FedEx? Well, there's not, that information's not public, you know, the, you know, the volume, you can't just like go to somebody's website and see that. So for us, it was about setting proxy metrics. It was like, well, we can assume that if they're any, you know, if they have a shopping cart, and are using one of these handful of e-commerce platforms, plus they have web traffic over X, it's likely that they're selling a lot of goods. So that was my example of that, of trying to find a proxy metric. I want to hear if you have any advice for the group on how to find these kind of magic metrics that AI can assist with.

Yeah, absolutely. So there's hundreds of these, I would basically say some of these are like kind of signals, more or less, there's hundreds of these signals. I would think about two things, which by the way, can I put my blog article with, this is just like a curated list of signals. I'll put it in the chat here. You can pick through this list and see, this will give you a bunch of really interesting ideas. I'll share a few of them really quickly in a second. The other thing I would ask is like, this is a question that I'll ask a founder or a sales leader is like, if you had and many people kind of in the space will ask this question. If you have 30 minutes to research a company, what would you look for? So Pete, to your point, if you had 30 minutes to research one prospect and you could do that or unlimited time for all of your prospects, what would you do? You would go look for that specific data. You would look it up. You would try to figure out like certain things, certain proxies, technology stack, but then some other things as well. Any thing like that that you can write down into a document, effectively, you can have an agent built and trained on that information. Or you can have just like a scraping solution that can go get some of that data. So that's how I would think about it. That's like the best thing to go after is, again, it's an annoying answer, but there's not like a generalized like, hey, this is the best signal to go after. It depends on your business, right? And there are generic ones, like should you be going, you know, should you look at high intent website pages on your website using RB2B? Of course, you definitely should. If somebody goes to your demo request page and they don't hit request demo, like this kind of abandoned cart concept, should you be reaching out to them automatically?

For sure.

Should you be tracking champions from one company to the next? Of course, should you be, you know, if you sell into VPs of IT, should you be tracking any new VP of it at your top 2000 companies? Of course, like these are kind of basic, I call these evergreen plays that are just always on and always running. Then you want to layer on this other set of kind of quote unquote micro campaigns. Think about this as experiments. I think about it as like a portfolio of bets. This is like in the venture Capital world, they make 20 Investments a year in a portfolio. 19 of them go to zero. and one of them hits, but it pays back the fund, quote unquote. So it's 100x fund returner. That's how I think about these experiments is like you want to be running these experiments quickly and then figure out what works and then figure out how to kind of scale that.

I saw a question too about someone said, what if your account list is massive? How do you go about segmentation? It feels to me like the way to go about it is figure out what makes somebody a fit, figure out what makes somebody in market, and then try to combine those and grab 20 people or 50 people who fit those. I mean, start small in the beginning and just start throwing stuff around to see what replies they get. As Brendan said, he spends 20 to 30 minutes on an email. So it's, you know, it's, I say this, I think every week, but I think I'm in like the top 1% of people's ability to mark emails as read, knowing it's a sales email. I think it's like one of my best skills. I wish I could monetize it, but I can't. And, and, and that's what you're doing. But like, there are also people who slip through. Who I open the email, I go to their LinkedIn, I go to the website. And it's because it doesn't look like a sales email. It looks like somebody trying to help me. It looks like somebody sending me three candidates, you know, that when I just posted It's that same type of like right value at the right time.

So can I say something else just to add to that?

Yes.

I also think to that, I have a very strong belief that the message does not matter nearly as much as reaching out to the right person at the right time. And I'll give you a very basic example. Right now, if somebody sent me an email and said, I don't know. Do you want to take a look at our used Teslas? Let's say I'm in the market for a used Tesla right now. Do you want to check out our used Teslas here in Austin? And if I was in market, I'd say, yeah, sure. That email is very bad, right? Or is very basic. It just said, do you want to check out our used Teslas? The inverse of that is also true. So if somebody said, if I'm not currently in market for used Tesla, if they said, hey, , we both know Pete, you live in Austin, here's my favorite restaurant there, blah, blah, blah. It's amazing and personalized. Do you want to check out my lot of used Teslas? I would say, no, I'm not in market for a used Tesla right now. And so what you want to do is you want to figure out who are the companies and people who are in market for your product right now and reach out to them at the right time. Then the message is far less important, though the message should be basically built on top of that list. So again, in the case of this example where somebody is hiring an AE, that is the list. So the message is the list. In that case, you are actually just saying, Hey, saw you're hiring for AEs, let's chat.

Right?

That message is very basic, but it's at the right time to the right person. And that's the thing that really matters.

Huge. I'll also add the right medium. I say that like the, the, the, a successful channel gets the right message to the right person on the right medium. at the right time if we want to keep compounding. And yeah, I mean, that's exactly this. People are asking, let's see this clay table, guys. We're going to get into that in the second half. We're going to have Brendan peel back whatever he can. I know he works with a lot of clients, so we're going to have him just do a little bit of demonstration here, but it is time. Oh, and one other question, someone said, can I get a recording of this? We will post it on our YouTube channel. John will drop in the link right here. We're gonna put it on our YouTube channel. Usually we go live Wednesday mornings. We are working with a new YouTube editor to make it more YouTube friendly, meaning just more engaging if you're not here live. So we were waiting for those edits. It'll probably be live later this week.

We're on a one week delay, Pete.

Sorry?

It's a one week delay. So every other Wednesday now.

You heard him. Guys, you heard him. That's John Ealy, our video producer. Okay, so one week from today, so you'll get last week's today and you can assume how it'll work from there. All right, oh yeah, okay, so that's the recording thing. Guys, it's time for the unfuck my startup section. All right, the way this section works is we are gonna call somebody up. This is not the pitch slap where you're trying to book a demo with everybody. This is, hey, I can't get something to work, I'm stuck. If it has to do with outbound campaigns, all the better because we have the maestro right here. We got some hands going up. So make sure A, your camera is ready. B, you have some problems specifically around or roughly around what we're talking about today. And myself and Brendan will give advice. We're going to give you two minutes to pitch. we'll have you drop in your URL into the chat, and then we'll do two or three minutes of, of advice, and then we're going to hop into that clay table right after, or, you know, just, just a little bit more of a visual representation of what, what Brendan's going through.

So.

Needs more than nine kids. Joe, you, you, you. There he goes. One. Yeah, I'm one of nine. All right. People are getting a little, you guys are like, I don't know if people have been eating Gob Stoppers today, but everyone is like sugar high on this chat today. It's just out of control. I don't even know. Yeah, I mean, it's, you know, I can't even control this. So, John, could you pick somebody from the list?

I mean, Ilya, he's been very active in the chat.

Ilya, we have an Ilya on our team. he is in Serbia. I wonder if this Ilya is in Serbia as well. There he is. What's up, Billy? Oh, it's spelled differently, though. Ilya. Wow.

I can't believe it.

How are you?

Right.

Yeah. Heck yeah. Good to have you here. Before we start and do the timer and all that, could you drop your URL into the chat for everybody? There it is. I'm gonna copy it. vanhack.com all right in a couple minutes could you tell us what vanhack is and what Ilya how many kids do you have we got to see if we can break Joe's record from earlier.

In the show yeah only two so pretty behind there we're gonna have to.

Boot you sorry all right now vanhack I'm on your website right now what I'm going to do is just share my screen briefly while you tell the folks what it is you do at vanhack and then we would love to hear if you're stuck, why are you stuck? What's going on?

Yeah.

So, yeah. Can I start?

Yes, please.

Yeah.

So we help companies like Fellow. So hi, Mauricio. Good to see you here. And about a thousand other tech companies across North America and Europe. Hire tech talent from abroad. Sorry, literally just getting a phone call. at the same time.

Yeah.

And our basically, we have a talent pool of half a million software engineers that we vet for their English tech skills, and then we help companies hire either remotely or we actually help people immigrate and relocate to North America and Europe. We have a fully built out software platform that you can do the entire hiring process as well as ATS integrations. And yeah, I guess the biggest challenge right now is that we're kind of pivoting models or that's the idea is to change the business model from like a recruitment model, more like a recruiting agency into AI tech recruiter model where companies hire VanHack, pay us a $2,000 a month fee and hire as many people as they want. So I'm having trouble switching from kind of services marketplace to SaaS. and all the hires are direct hires. They're on your payroll. We're not an agency. We don't take a markup. So, yeah, that's the kind of difference here as well.

Yeah.

What prompted that? I mean, aside from a more attractive business model, was there a demand from the market that sort of perked your ears up and showed you that the current was going in this direction?

Yeah, I think the biggest challenge was that tech hiring has gone through a huge boom and bust cycle in the last couple of years. And when we were growing really well in 2021, 2022, we had to have a lot of recruiters join our team. And I did, now that the market's kind of scaling back.

Oh, wow. All right, sorry, you can finish your thoughts. Sorry for that. Okay. Brendan, do you have any sort of pivot advice for Ilya? Now it's always difficult going on this road of customer discovery again, and especially if you're going from a service model to a SaaS model. So, Brendan, this is, I feel like right on the nose with your example from earlier. So.

Yeah, I was gonna say that was not a plant, but that seems highly relevant. Definitely, I think, makes sense if folks are hiring, you should definitely go reach out to those people. I think if companies are growing, if there's specific departments, I think that's another low hanging fruit one, is specific departments, growth by department. If you're kind of better with, I don't know, certain departments, you could go look for companies that are growing in a certain department and reach out from that angle. expanding offices, I think is another one that there's kind of data on that. Yeah, those are like kind of the quick ones that come to my mind.

How have you gone about getting your service customers, Ilya? What did that motion look like?

So yeah, a lot of outbound cold call, email, LinkedIn, although that hasn't been working too well. meetups, events. I'm going to South by Southwest this week, so I'll be being Austin first time. And yeah, a lot of that referrals. And then some partnerships too, where we would connect with like Techstars or YC and then they would, or VC and they would share us within the community.

Okay. Got it. So there's kind of a lot of, things that are working? Is there any one clear winner that's just beating everything else or is it all meshed into one broad go-to-market strategy?

Yeah, it's just been tough in general for this business in the last two years. That's part of the reason we're looking to pivot or change the business model because I think we need more. A lot of companies don't want to pay the 15% recruiter fee. so that that doesn't, that hasn't been working well. But yeah, before there wasn't any specific clear winner, I guess referrals probably, but that's not really reliable.

Okay. Yeah, I think, I mean, let's, let's dive, we're going to dive further into Brendan's tactic here. I have a feeling this is like dead on a experiment you should run or, or, you know, something of the sort where you can showcase the folks that are in your, you know, kind of SaaS recruiter database. and do a very similar motion that Brendan's doing. So, you know, it's hard to obviously fully diagnose without all the context, but I just, my feeling is that this is gonna be very helpful for you. So, Ilya, thank you so much, guys. If you are, yeah, head over to VanHack, I'll paste the address in here. If anyone wants to a demo, we'll of course open up Ilya, you can feel free to drop your calendar link.

Yeah.

Thanks for joining. I appreciate you, man. Take care. All right, well, that was serendipitous, Brendan. I don't think we've ever had somebody come up for a section that was so dead on where I'm like, hey, me, you know, some of the advices, like, let's. Let's just continue on with the episode. So pivots are hard, and the thing I like most about these micro campaigns is you do not have to invest a ton in infrastructure to experiment.

Right?

The main limitation, resource limitation, is creativity in my mind, which requires some coffee and some clear head. But we've all got a minute. So I would like to move into this next section. Is there something you can share with us, whether it's just a clay table you can remove any, or whatever, ignore any sensitive information that might be in there. But let's hop into the specifics of how this is working so Ilya can actually see how he might be able to guys, the chat is just incredible today. I know I've been dropping jokes, but like, I mean, this is, yeah, this is, let's ignore sensitive data, guys. No, I didn't mean you, Neil. I meant Brendan. I didn't mean you guys. All right, all right.

Let me, I'm going to show, it's not the clay table of the customer itself, but it'll outline all of the data points and kind of where they're coming from, if that's cool.

Yes, please.

And then I also, I think it'd be helpful, I'm just going to rattle after that, we'll walk through that. I just want to rattle off some other examples because now we're like really harping on this one specific sample. But I put this into a slide, so let me just share this really quickly. Okay.

All right.

So this is an example of a micro campaign that we've been talking about. So SAS, this is a custom AI agent. This is not in databases. Typically they raise 5 million. We're waterfolling this from three different data sources. So waterfolling, meaning Pitchbook, Crunchbase, and I don't know, something else. And so we're kind of pulling all of those and showing the highest amount that they've raised is the amount. Right titles. This is basic logic. So these are the, you know, there's basically 20 titles that not 20, maybe eight titles that they go after. So we have those different titles and variations. If you don't have that, Claude is your best friend there or chat GPT. You can get variations very quickly. Currently hiring AE or SDR. This is the custom AI agent with server.dev, which is basically a Google search that Andreas built out. This is Andreas Wernke. You should follow him on LinkedIn. He puts out a bunch of really good content around this stuff. And Then the, oh, the other one in here is engaged with marketing content in the last 30 days. This is your own first party data. This company in particular sends out a bunch of marketing emails. Um, even if you're a founder, like I was thinking this with, with Ilya, who is just up here posting on LinkedIn, like that's great first party data. If people are engaged, I did this when I was a founder. Um, if, if people are engaging, if you put up a post and 20 people engage with it, meaning like it or comment, Go figure out who those 20 people are. You can do this manually. It takes 10 minutes. What companies are they at? What are their titles? And if those are people that you want to have conversation, sales conversations with, go connect with them if you're not already. And if you're already connected, send them a message. Use that as kind of an intent signal. Okay. And then the final one is once it flows through this, let's say there's 20,000 people that are flowing through this clay table. At the end of it, there's going to be 30 people or 50 people. that are a yes for all of these different data points and signals. Then and only then do you go grab the email address and the phone number across multiple data sources for those 30 people. And so again, if we start with 20,000 people and it flows through this and it spits out, kind of we'll call it tier one, tier two leads, we're only going to enrich, aka pay for data on a contact level. like an email address and a phone number for those 30 tier one and tier two leads. Then what we're doing is, in this example, for the tier ones, we're routing those to a sales rep into a sequence on behalf of the sales rep who are calling and emailing and doing a LinkedIn connection and message. And then the tier twos is an email only sequence from a different rep that is down market and that is an email only sequence. And so again, this email is, like we've said a couple times now, you just put up a job req for a senior AE, we have a pre-vetted database of candidates. Here's three candidates that I think would be a good fit. Let me know if you want to chat and see how our platform works.

And I like what, a couple things I like about this email. And guys, I'll ask about the subject line before you light me on fire.

Candidates for a roll.

What was the subject line?

Candidates for a roll.

Candidates for a roll. That's it. Nice and simple. Don't overthink them.

Ideally two or three words, but, yeah, sometimes you gotta do a little.

Yeah, that's right. No fat on that. And then the other thing I like is there's no, like, you know, hey, Brendan, you know, I hope this email finds you well. I'm Pete. I'm the head of Bubba. It's like. like, all I need to see is I hope this email, and I'm marking it as red. I'm never going to get in there. So everyone looked, like, screenshot this. Look how lean this is. And he's actually giving them. He's actually giving them, like, value. Like, this is actually, like, a PLG. Not PLG, but, like, you know, free offer type of, like, value stacked email here, so. okay, that's great.

Now, can I answer a couple questions in the chat real quick?

A hundred percent.

So it says 20, 000 run through it. Yeah, exactly. How does the formula work? So all of this data that we're, that we're tearing out on the front end, 20, 000, that's like basically zero dollars. It's not exactly zero dollars, but it's very, very, very cheap because in play you can build, you can use native Integrations, you can use an API. So if you use a poll or something like that, you can use an. Apollo API or you can use your own OpenAI API and you can build your own, it's not even kind of an agent, but like a prompt into OpenAI. So it's very, very, very cheap. It's hard to do. This is, again, Andreas Warenki built this one in particular. He's a wizard. I think this is where earlier in the conversation I said it's hard to get really good at clay. This is an example of that. And it does significantly decrease costs if you do it this way, though. Other tools, by the way, somebody also asked about, this is with Clay and then the email sending for this client is Apollo, Instantly and Smart Leader, other ones in the space. Kind of the email sending is kind of downstream of the data acquisition side of things. I would say Sumble is another really interesting product. You can start using them for free and you'll get value immediately. I have no affiliation with them. They look at job descriptions, which is really interesting for certain companies. So Technographics is incredibly good with this company. So like normally- what's it called?

Sorry, I want to pop the URL in for everybody.

Sumbel, S-U-M-B-L-E.com so you can look up like, I don't know, if you want to integrate into SalesLoft. SalesLoft is not like there's no pixel on a website. So programmatically built with would typically grab from a pixel on a website. so like Google AdWords is really good. But if you're hiring for an enablement person and it says, Hey, your text, your tech stack needs to be Tableau and Salesforce and SalesLoft, boom. Now you know that company is definitely using SalesLoft as part of their tech stack. And so this company aggregates all of that. They also do some wild stuff. This is the guy that created Kaggle, which was acquired by Google. It's a machine learning product. So they're starting to do some stuff with like, a cloud migration project. And so they can infer that from a job description. So it's like I'm hiring a data engineer. We want you to help run our cloud migration to Snowflake or whatever.

So it's built with, but without the sort, you know, the sort of source code scraping and then adding in inferences based on job descriptions.

Yeah, exactly. You can do that.

That's pretty wild. That's not unheard of.

Yeah, they're very early.

All right, I'm dropping that in. We have no affiliation. I just learned about it, so I definitely don't have affiliation either. Just Brendan, we're popping to the end. This is all about info sharing. They're assembled. The other thing, could you pop Andreas' LinkedIn? We've mentioned him a few times. Let's pop his LinkedIn link into the channel here. I want to open it up to to, I mean, we have so many questions in such a crazy chat here. Let's do a little audience Q&A. What do you think about that, Brendan?

I would love it.

All right, let's do it. Oh my gosh. Oh man, here they come. All right, let me try to zone in on some questions here.

Can you have everybody just put it in the Q&A tab? That way it's easier to follow.

The Q&A tab, everybody.

There's 10 in there right now.

While you're pulling that up, what are your thoughts on LinkedIn for this outreach? Yeah, I think LinkedIn is great. If your audience is on LinkedIn, definitely use LinkedIn. Also do content on LinkedIn. Obviously, you know, Adam is a good example of that founder brand. Big fan.

Yeah, we're big fans of LinkedIn over here. Oh, here we go. Here's the Q&A. Okay. Let's just start. Do you see how to get there?

Brendan? Yeah, I'm in there. So if you don't, you want me.

To just go through top to bottom? Yeah, let's, what's the name of the AE? Yeah, let's kind of just start ripping.

Through some of these questions. That'd be great.

Cool.

AE hiring platform is the AE hiring platform. That's with Bravado, is the company that's hiring AE's. I think that's what you're asking. Assume you don't find good intent, signal and trigger reason to reach out. What do you do in this case? Oh, I don't know. Try to find an intense signal. Try to, like the whole goal of this is how do you find people that are most likely to have a sales conversation with you this week?

Right?

This is like highest intent folks.

Someone said, how many outreach channels is optimal for laser focused campaigns? They said two to three email, LinkedIn, phone. How do you evaluate that?

Basically, the boring answer is all the data points to the more channels, the better. Like something like, I forget 50. We did this, I used to work at Apollo and we had data on this. It was something like 50% increase for every channel that you add or something crazy. Yeah, more channels. But be thoughtful about it, right? Like where do your people live? Like don't blast them, just blast them.

And especially if they don't live on LinkedIn. Like it's pretty clear when your audience doesn't live on LinkedIn, so don't try to force it just because everyone else is talking about it. It's not going to magically make your folks active on LinkedIn. Someone had said Clay versus Apollo. So those are two different platforms. I'll let Brendan elaborate on what that is.

They're both great. I think different use cases. I would think about Clay as more of like a power user.

This kind.

Of GTM engineer concept or like somebody that's kind of orchestrating a bunch of these plays. at scale. If you're a founder, I think there's like some basic workflows you can build in Clay, but Apollo has kind of good basic data on companies and people and sequencing. They have call recording. They have a bunch of great tools in there as well. So that's, I would just look at them as kind of apples and oranges.

Yeah, I agree. Apollo's kind of like the phone book. It's kind of the yellow pages of today, if you will. Someone said, we've gotten this a couple times. What is wrong with HubSpot that pushes you to other platforms? I assume we mean for email here.

I think if you're doing low volume, HubSpot is, is good. Actually, HubSpot is, I actually think HubSpot's very good these days compared to, like, Salesforce. And if you're a small company, if you're like a small mid or mid-market company, I think HubSpot's very good. I think where it breaks is customization, some of the kind of like AB testing functionality. You know, I think over time, hopefully they'll build more kind of AI functionality, but today there's no real kind of deep concept of client and an ecosystem around integrations, that sort of thing. What would you say, Pete?

Yeah.

So I, well, I think there's kind of along with this, there's some email infrastructure, a lot of questions going on both in the Q&A and in the chat, so. the way I look at it, it's like this, let's start with the smallest, the micro campaigns. What's great about micro campaigns is you can actually send them from your primary domain, from your real email address. You don't have to go through an email service. What's great about that is your deliverability's high. You get to send from your primary domain. You don't have to have all this infrastructure of, I don't know, 50 domains with 25 insurance domains once those get flagged and like these seed emails going out and all of this different stuff. Like it's a freaking nightmare. and when it comes to HubSpot email, I mean, the reason people migrate off of HubSpot, in my opinion, is so that they can go even more high volume. Like that's why people go outside of Gmail, you know, go on to replies and smart lead and all of that stuff is to get super, super high volume. But for people, I think that high volume infrastructure is great for larger businesses who have a lot, a lot of in-market contacts to reach, but for you know, your sub 3 million founder, you know, you're really focused on getting the next batch of customers, not the next 10, 000 to, to show your investors that you're still growing, basically. So let's remember that. I know, I know those large sort of strategies are so, like, talked about and sexy, whatever. What is high volume? A thousand a day? Yeah, that's definitely high volume for sure. I would say anything that you can't, if, if you can no longer send them out manually, you're starting to approach the world of high volume. There's no hard and fast lines here, but yeah. Oh, we got Doug Skinner. Doug is a community member of ours. He goes, they're launching a $49 a month recurring revenue product would offering AI powered system agency owners be a good place to start? I don't quite know the full question there, Doug, if you could elaborate a little bit, but like AI powered businesses into agency owners. If it's a great solution, yeah, I mean, that comes down to the product in my mind. All right, all right, guys, there's so many questions I just, oh, let's end with this one. This is what we're going to end with. This was anonymous attendees, so let's just, people are outrageous in the chat today. Someone said tips and tricks for accelerating the Clay Learning Curve. I'm going to drop in the link for Clay University. which is their educational platform. Other tips and tricks that you know of, Brendan?

Yeah, definitely follow Andreas. There's a lot of really good folks sharing content on LinkedIn. Obviously, like this is the annoying answer, but I really believe this to be the truest answer. Start building stuff. Just start getting in there and building stuff. Build, you know, can be small stuff to start. Clay University is great. They do clay cohorts. I don't know how often every kind of other month or something maybe. So you can go through a clay cohort. It's free. What else? A company called Cargo has a GTM engineering Slack community. That's a really high quality spot if you're trying to get kind of become a super user of these new tools.

Yeah.

Clay University is the best place to start.

There's also some great, Stephen Brady mentioned Patrick Spykalski from the Kiel. We love Patrick over here. He's great. There's a bunch of great content and creators on Clay, really Clay University. And the whole thing they're doing is just having these, these agencies who are experts at it launch out their workflows. There's a ton on YouTube, guys. Just, I mean, I think at this point, I think you can't. I don't actually, I might get ahead of myself. I was thinking on Gemini, you can actually search for YouTube videos now and it'll recommend them, I believe, on Google's Advanced AI. Maybe you can do that now. Maybe I dreamt that, but.

Everybody.

Thank you so much, Brendan. Thank you for joining, my friend, telling us all about the real, the right way to use AI, the AI to beef up quality. I love it. Everybody in the chat, everybody, all the participants, thank you for joining. This was, like, a very Lively episode. I love the energy. Let's bring it. We're gonna have to up our, we're gonna have to up our capacity. I'm gonna, I'm gonna, as soon as we're done with this call, we gotta Pay more to zoom so we can get more folks on here. This recording will go live on youtube one week from today. Everyone's get everyone's complimenting your beard. Brandon, you got that like super beard. It's looking awesome. Yeah. The wisdom beard. Heck yeah, man. Next week we have the founder of boomerang. She's coming back. A Mo Mo founded boomerang and recently acquired a business did a strategic acquisition and she did not use any bankers. They used limited legal hours and both her and the team they acquired are coming on next week. It's going to be three guests. Oh, let's drop in the link for the YouTube channel. So come back next week. This, I think if there was ever a bootstrapped acquisition, if we could call it that, that that's kind of what next week's show is. So Adam will be back next week as well. Thank you all. We'll pop in the YouTube link one last time and oh, there he is. John got it. And folks, thank you so much for joining. And thank you so much to our guest, Brendan. Brendan, you were awesome.

Thanks for having me, Pete.

We will see you all next week. Take care. Have a great week, everybody.

I think if we show up to solve on our calls instead of show up to to solve. We show up to solve in our emails, show up to solve in our DMs, show up to solve in our posts, right? Teach me something. Build trust that you have a brain on prioritizing is revenue. That's it. So I'm looking at who we know, who can talk positively about us, who is well connected, and then how do I hit.