Traction: How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth with Justin Mares

Hey, welcome back to the show Bacon Wrapped Business. This is Brad Costanzo, and it's been a few weeks since I've dropped an episode onto your. Onto your podcast machine, whatever you're listening to, whether it's iPhones or Stitcher. By the way, if you aren't subscribing to this, hit that subscribe button right now either. On itunes, on Stitcher, on the website, you can sign up for the newsletter. You can get all of the episodes even before they come out. But just got back from my honeymoon. Three weeks in Greece, in Istanbul. It was a great time and I'm excited to be back. It's one of the, you know, it was fun being away for three weeks, but you lose a little bit of mental stimulation. And I was really looking forward to it. And I am really looking forward to the conversation that I'm about to have today with my guest because from a lot of the research that I've been doing on him, my brain should be overstimulated by the end of this conversation. I want to introduce you to Justin Morris. Justin. Did I say your name right?

Close.

Mares Mary's. Okay, cool. Justin Maris. So Justin is an amazing young entrepreneur who has just really blown me away with some of the credentials that he's already brought to the world of business and, you know, showing startups how to. How to grow their business, whether it's users or revenue, etc. And he is the author of a book called Traction, co author of a book called How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth. And heck, here on Bacon Wrap Business, that's what one of the things, things we're all looking for. I could go on for hours probably about all the stuff he's done, but he is the former director of revenue and growth at Exceptional Cloud Services. He was the founder of Roommate Fit. He was the expert. You know, Justin, I could go on for days about some of your background, but why don't you give me a quick little, you know, a quick little background intro about kind of who you are. Perk these people's ears up.

Sure. So a quick overview. I started two companies. One was a total fail, one got acquired, and then more recently, I was director of revenue. So I ran all of our growth, marketing, everything, sales, at a company called Exceptional Cloud Services, which was a bootstrap company that we sold to Rackspace in 2013 for a million dollars.

Nice.

Yeah.

Impressive. Now, when I said earlier, you're young, like on your website, it says you're 25 years old, right?

I am.

Cool.

Yeah.

So I think that although I don't think age is a big deal, I think this is awesome. And especially because the, a lot of the stuff you've done at your age is exceptional, you know, the. And one of the reasons I'm thinking about this and I'm gonna direct my 21 year old cousin Michael to listen to this because he's just telling me about, he, you know, he's 21 years old, he really kind of wants to do some entrepreneurial things and get in on this and I'm starting to coach him a little bit and I just think it's awesome that, you know the opportunities out there for somebody, you know, whether, you know, I'm 41, whether it's my age or whether it's somebody your age, et cetera. It's really exciting time to be alive.

Totally.

You seem to have worked on a lot of cool projects and with a lot of cool people in your career, right?

Yeah, I mean, I've been very fortunate in a lot of ways. Like I think I've been able to work with some of the, certainly some of the smartest people I've ever come across, which is, you know, which is awesome. And it's allowed me to learn a lot and make a ton of mistakes and like, you know, do do some stuff in a relatively short period of time. Right.

So now how did you get started with, you know, you were the director of revenue and Growth at Exceptional Cloud Services. Was this your first like kind of big gig or were you doing a lot of stuff before that?

Yeah, so I met the founder of that company. Basically my co founder and I were living in San Francisco for a previous company, CloudFab and so I met the founder of this company of Exceptional through that and we just kind of like we stayed in touch. After cloudfab sold, I went and I finished my degree at University of Pittsburgh. And then basically after that happened, after we sold, I was graduating, Roommate Fit had just died and wanted to work with basically the smartest person that I knew. And the founder of Exceptional is certainly at least top three smartest people I've ever met in my life. Incredibly, incredibly successful entrepreneur, incredibly genuine guy. So just jumped at the opportunity to work with him.

That's awesome. Now you said Roommate Fit Diets. Was this a company you started and did it just, did it go out of business or.

Yeah, I mean, basically I shut it down. It just wasn't working. So like, you know, it was the company that I'd started when I was 19 in college and like it I just made so many different mistakes, you know, as I'm sure learned a lot.

Of ways, a lot of things not to do. Right.

Can relate to.

Yeah. Probably learned a lot of things not to do for the next time.

Oh man, so many things. So, so anyway, yeah, so like that, that ended up not working. And then, you know, I was looking at like, what do I do next? I clearly want to work on getting better at this whole entrepreneurship thing. I like it. I, you know, I think that it's something I'm good at and so wanted to learn from some of the people that I thought were really, really good at it. And that was, that was this one guy, Jonathan, who was that Exceptional.

That's awesome. So you, you really focus, like your main focus is on the top line growth and whether it's customers or users revenue, is that safe to say?

Yeah, yeah, exactly. So I just own pretty much all, everything in terms of like, let's have this business grow and make more money. I owned pretty much all of that.

Nice. So let's, let's focus in on that a little bit because I love this kind of stuff and when I have a lot of fun and looking forward to learning a couple things myself from you here. So in your experience, like you've primarily worked with tech companies, I imagine, right?

Okay, yeah.

Awesome. So let's talk about some of the things that gave you the biggest leverage for growing for whether it's customer user growth. I just want you to share. I know your book is coming out Traction, which is probably going to list a lot of these. And just looking at the contents and the description, I got all excited like, oh, wow, that looks really awesome. Let's talk about some of the things that you think had the biggest effect for companies or that you did and surprised the heck out of you. Like, wow, this was awesome.

Yeah. So in terms of big impact, one of the biggest things that I didn't appreciate until working at Exceptional was just how powerful it is to pick up the phone and like actually talk to a customer.

God forbid.

I know, but I mean every article that I read online these days about like how to make more money from a customer or marketing or gross sales, whatever, there are so many of them that are just like, here's how to automate and grow your business using whatever tactic. And while I think automation is all well and good, you know, we just, we saw incredible revenue growth. A large, large portion of our revenue growth just literally came from picking up the phone, talking to our existing customers or people that had just signed up for trials and saying, you know, like, what questions do you have about the product? What challenges or what problems are you trying to solve with this product?

Yeah. And it's not just a sales call. Like, it's a, it's literally I want to get to know you call. And I agree with you. There's so many. I'm even pulled in that direction with, you know, the companies that I've had and work with as a consultant right now. And it's like everybody just wants to get the, you know, the owner wants to get as far out of it as possible, but it's like, no. Yeah, you're missing the whole point. The reason business, you know, business up until this point has always been a person based thing. Like, you know, talk to these people, they'll tell you. And people are so starved for human contact. I believe these days when you do pick up the phone and you just really legitimately want to know how you can help them. That's awesome. So aids talking to, you know, talk to your customers because they'll tell you what they want, right?

Yeah, I mean, talk to your customers, they'll tell you what they want. But I also think if you want, you know, if you're in business, there are certain actions you want your customers to take, like you want your users to take. And for me, we found it was just much, much easier if we could say rather than send them an automated drip email that's like, hey, here's another to do for you Today, along with 50,000 others that are in your overcrowded email inbox. If we could just get them on the phone and say, here is why you signed up. You wanted us to solve this problem. We want to fix this for you. Just like. But in order for us to help you, you just need to do this one thing and set up this widget properly. Let me walk you through how to do that right now. Things like that were just so powerful. We went on one run where we called a bunch of our customers that were paying US$79 a month and just called through them and said, hey, we're working on our product roadmap over the next couple months. What would it take for us? What would we have to build? What kind of value would we have to deliver for you to pay us $500 a month and do it in a way that you are happy to write that check every month? And like, the conversations that came out of that were just ones that I don't, that I think are really, really hard to gather from surveys Email marketing and other automated channels.

So let me revisit that. So you told them. Yeah, so rephrase that one more time because I think that's awesome.

Yeah. So we would call these guys who were already paying us, you know, $79 a month. So they weren't paying us a ton, but it wasn't nothing either.

Yeah.

And we just said, you know, we're working on some new features. We're, like, figuring out our product roadmap. We know we're solving this problem for you. What else could we solve for you? Or what value could we deliver that would make you happy to pay US$500 a month?

So, yeah, that's what I love. You could have very easily said. And I actually, you know, this is. This was worth the whole, you know, conversation for me right there. Because one of the things that I've done and I've suggested my clients do is have, like, whenever their support team or customer service is talking to customers and clients to always just add this on. Like, oh, by the way, you know, what else do you wish? You know, what do you wish we did better? And what do you wish we did more of? So it's kind of that same thing, like, yeah, what do we wish we did more of? But the fact that you actually put a dollar value on that and said, you know, we're working to this. What would make you Happ to pay $500?

Yeah.

They will then tell you more often than not, I'm sure, what would make them pay $500? I love that.

Exactly.

Because otherwise they might just tell you something that's like, oh, yeah, I'd pay an extra $10 for this unless you quantify that. So that, dude, that right there. I'm so happy that we talked.

Yeah, exactly. I mean, it was crazy. I just like the phrasing on that too, where you're coming at it from a point of like, yes, you know, we're acknowledging we're a business and we want you to pay us more money, but really the whole conversation is framed in, like, what can we do that makes you want, you know, to pay us this amount of money? Right. You know, like, man, I. At a certain point, especially as a business, I just don't think that you're price sensitive if you can actually solve a problem. Like if Google called me tomorrow and was like, hey, our AdWords guys found that if you write us a 20 grand check, like, we can get you $30,000 worth of revenue. Like, no brainer. It's a huge check, but it Just doesn't matter to me. You know what I mean?

Yeah. And you know, like with my consulting, I, you know, depending on the kind of company I work with, I charge a good amount of money. But I've always said I'm not worth that money. Like if I've got a $20,000 engagement, I was, I believe I'm not, they're not paying me for 20. They're not paying me because I'm worth $20,000. They're paying me because I can solve a problem that's worth, that's easily worth $20,000 for them. I've got the solution to a $20,000 plus problem. And the reason I bring this up is there's a lot of people who are consultants and experts who listen to my show and they, you know, hey, dealing with self worth issues can be a big thing depending on, you know, how many qualifications you feel you have or you don't have. And it can sometimes be a really like, well, I'm not as, I'm not as credentialed as Justin Maris or I'm not as credentialed as somebody else. It's like, no. But if you have the, if you have the answer to a problem that is worth that to somebody else, price is really no object, completely 100%. So that's cool. You also talk about on your website, on your blog about is it being a marketing technology or is it technology marketer?

Oh yeah, technical marketer.

Technical marketer.

Right.

So explain that.

Yeah, so there's this. So my Partner and I Nat, we run this thing called Programming for Marketers. It's programmingformarketers.com it started out as a free email course basically to help marketers and growth product people learn some cool things that they can do with programming without necessarily having to be technical.

Give me an example.

Sure. Basically there's this language called SQL. If you learn the very, very basics of IT stuff that I can teach you in like an hour or two, you can pretty much look up any bit of information you want about any of your customers in your customer or user database.

Nice.

However, what's happening today is in almost every company, in almost every situation I've seen, marketers will say, hey it or hey engineers. I want to figure out how many customers have bought from us within the last 30 days or 60 days. Can you give me back that report? And that's an engineer literally stopping whatever he's doing, spending 15 minutes to write this query, running it and sending back an Excel CSV to the marketer. After two to three days. The only reason that has to happen is because the marketer doesn't understand that SQL is a very simple thing to learn, that they can learn it in a couple hours and then never have to do this again.

And now do you have resources that you teach people how to do that?

Then it sounds like, yeah, so we teach them. It's just like a free email course. We teach them how to do all of this stuff. And like the, the main reason I wanted to create this is just because I think there's this huge, there's this idea that like in order to be technical you have to learn how to program. And I don't actually think that's true. I think if you want to become a technical marketer, if you go through Codecademy or any of the many online learn to code resources out there, they're going to try and teach you how to be an engineer. I think that's kind of the wrong approach. So instead we just try and teach you. Here are a couple principles that will be useful and then here are seven or eight different ways that you can apply these small programming abilities and skills to make more money and do a better job marketing. I love it.

You know, by the way, just, this is me offering some completely unsolicited advice just from somebody who I think this is really awesome. And I'm on your page, the SQL for Resources for Marketers. This is just off your blog, not the other one, but you call it SQL for Marketers. So I'm a marketer, I'm not a programmer. Although I totally value what you just said. My first reaction is, ooh, that sounds highly technical and like I'd want to hire somebody else for that.

Yeah.

But I love the idea of like mining your database, you know, like, like database mining or database, you know, gold mining your database for marketers using SQL or something like that. Yeah, to me, and as I said, totally unsolicited advice. I just know that my first reaction is, ooh, that looks like code that looks hard.

Yeah, no, it's a good point. And it's something that like I should probably revisit. But it's also one of those things where it's not a full time job.

Yeah, I know, it's focused.

So like I haven't a b tested it. I haven't interviewed customers, I haven't like done any of that stuff.

You know what? One of the reasons this is also really appropriate. So I was sitting in one of my client's offices yesterday and he was Talking to his assistant and he literally did this. He said, okay, I want to find out. He runs a SaaS, but then there's always also coaching for real estate investors, et cetera. And he said, okay, so here's what I want you to do. Get with, you know, one of our tech people or whatever and said, I want to find out who you know, of all of our coaching clients, where did we, what was the initial lead source and also what steps did they do, what all products did they buy prior to becoming this. So 100% legitimate. I mean like what do I want to say relevant to what you just said? And it may take several days, but what you're saying is that based upon some basic knowledge of SQL or SQL and all this, it probably could have had it done that afternoon.

Yeah, I mean he could have sat down and just run that immediately.

That's awesome.

Cool.

So that's really useful. So we're talking about, you know, that's one thing is being a technical marketer, etc. Let's talk about some more bacon wrapped strategies to grow your business. I know on the book cover you talk about things such as just from your bullet points, using offline ads and other channels that your competitors probably aren't using, getting targeted media coverage, boosting the effectiveness of your email marketing with staggered sex of prompts and updates. I'm a big fan of email marketing, so I'd love to hear a little bit more on that. Tell me about some of the email strategies that you've used that have been really effective.

Yeah. So one of the biggest wins that we implemented at Exceptional was a really easy one where basically we said everyone who hasn't completed this key action within a week of signing up, they would get an email, personal outreach from the founder, just saying, hey, I saw that you signed up for a product to solve this problem. It seems like you haven't set up what's been confusing that I could help with. And we got a really, really good response rate from that. And for us being a SaaS business, the biggest problem or one of the biggest problems in SaaS is someone signs up for your product and then never actually uses it, never becomes a user, never becomes a customer, never pays you anything. And so that email really, really, really helped us solve that problem. And then another email marketing hack that we used that worked really well for programming for marketers was when you signed up, we sent you a little short email that just said, hey, thanks for signing up, we're really excited to teach you X topic. We have this bonus that we pulled together, if you click here to forward this email to a friend, we'll kick you this bonus right away and get you started. Yeah. And when you clicked on the link that we highlighted, it opened up an email that was already pre populated with the message that we wanted to send or have the person send to their friends. And then it was BCC'd bonus@programmingformarketers.com so that we could see how many people were taking advantage of this loop and then we would auto fulfill the bonus that we promised them.

Yeah, those viral refer a friend and sharing things can be really powerful.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, this one, this one worked incredibly well. Like, I think it was responsible for 27% of the people that sign up for programming for marketers. And you know, that's like, we have over 10,000 subscribers now. That's a good number of people. And it means for every individual person that you have sign up for the course, you know, they're bringing in a fourth of a person every single, you know, with every person that comes in. Mm. Which is just really, really useful.

Absolutely. Now, a lot of the tactics that you're talking about, you know, kind of fall into what, you know, in the past few years have been, has become like the hot term growth hacking.

Yeah.

And it's growth hacking is somewhat different than just like direct response marketing. But so is most of the stuff that you did, is it the growth hacking tactics or is it like paid media as well? You know, everything from Google and Facebook ads, LinkedIn, et cetera.

So we kind of, we kind of did it all. I mean, I think that you want to cover your bases and I think that your bases oftentimes include some number of paid media. And so for us it was like, okay, we have AdWords that's cranking good, we're doing Facebook good. Perfect audience check. And then you start playing with new tactics that could really move the needle in a more impactful way than just scaling ad spend. You know what I mean? I want to profitably scale ad spend as much as possible, but in an ideal world, like we need, we need to be acquiring customers through other channels. And I would love if we could just cut our ad spend all together because we were the only company in the space that everyone knew about, you know. Yeah, I don't think that's realistic, but I think that paid acquisition, like, I generally just scaled that to a point where it was working and it was profitable and then started focusing on other channels.

Yeah, no, that's, that's you know what's awesome about that too, and especially now with all of the abilities to growth hack, is in the past. It used to be. And when I say the past, I mean not even the super distant past. I mean, just with the Internet marketing past, it's been either paid media or SEO. And people thought of SEO. I love this. Oh, it's free traffic SEO. And organic is not free. You actually have to, you know, work to get that. But this is that in the middle one, it's, you know, that growth hacking and the tactics and strategies from building, you know, from going viral to just talking to your customers and encouraging them to share and just giving them a great customer experience so that they do talk about. They talk about your stuff. When people are asking them, hey, what's a great software for xyz? They're talking about it because they've had such an amazing experience. And these days you can't afford to put out a turd as a product because it won't. The best marketing in the world may get you your first customers, but it'll. You'll fail.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.

Unfortunately, in the past, you used to be ld. I just put lipstick on a pig. And great marketing and great copywriting will do all the heavy lifting. But no longer.

Yep.

What. What else out there? Like, what else is on the horizon? What? Is there anything that you have just started toying with that you're really excited about? Any kind of, like, new opportunities for revenue growth out there that.

That you.

Think are just really right, but underutilized for sure.

I mean, I think that one reason that we're doing a ton of podcasts for the relaunch of traction is I think that they're a huge platform with tons and tons of visitors and listeners, but right now it's severely underpriced as like a medium to reach people. Yeah. Like, if you were to go to a big media company and say, hey, what would it cost to reach 50,000 people who are interested in business on the radio? They would have a certain number, and that number would be far, far, far higher than what it would cost to get on a podcast and reach those same people through platforms like yours.

No, you're absolutely right.

And so it just seems like tons of listeners, tons of attention assets in the podcasting world, and there hasn't, like, the price hasn't risen to, you know, match the value that's locked up in these podcast audiences.

Yeah, you're absolutely right. And the cool part is, is the, the vast majority of podcasters are not making big money off of them. Right? So they are. They are clamoring for great content and great people. And, you know, as a podcaster who's also like, thinking, okay, am I gonna do a topic by myself today or am I gonna bring on a guest? I'm always looking for ideas for great topics. So when, you know, you were referred to me, I'm like, yeah, no, this is great. Looks like somebody I want to talk to. So immediately giving you an audience for free versus, you know, having to go to somebody else and pay for the opportunity to be put in front of their.

In front of them.

So share a couple strategies that I've. This is one of those things that I have not directly done, but I've been toying with this idea in my mind. This is the first time I've actually shared it publicly over the air instead of just with a couple of close friends or colleagues. It's potential opportunity here that I'm trying to flesh out. Remembering that majority of the podcasters are not making. They're not necessarily getting enough traffic to have all these paid ads and pre roll, mid roll, et cetera, advertising. But the one thing that all podcasters want is exposure. You know, myself included, everybody. And it's one of the things that companies can do who have great products, whether it's a physical product or, you know, or a SaaS or something like this, if that company has, whether it's a blog, a social media presence, an email list, etc. It's very. I believe it would be very easy for them to reach out and contact other podcasters, influential podcasters who are kind of like right in that they're not total nobodies, but they're not, you know, they're not getting paid $10,000 for an ad and say, listen, you know, I would love not only just be interviewed by you, but let's do a barter for, you know, some ad space. If you, you know, talk about my show over the next. And I'm just spitballing here, talk about my show every episode for the next month, I will do a social media tweet or Facebook share about you. I'll email my list about your podcast with my episode and say, yeah, and you guys really should go subscribe to this. I'll put a link to you on my blog. Basically, I'll trade you exposure for an ad. I don't hear about many people doing that, but I really think that would be powerful because I know a lot of podcasters out there. The one thing they're always talking about, especially the ones who are trying to make it a big part of their business, which is an outlet for my business. But they're clamoring for exposure. So I'm willing to bet that people could get a lot of, you know, pre and mid roll ads. Absolutely. For free.

Absolutely.

Because they just want the love. Like, oh my God, you're gonna, you're gonna tweet about me and Facebook about me and email your list about me. I will sell my soul to you.

Right.

You know?

Yeah.

So I even said this to a friend of mine who's got a, he's got a powdered greens drink and I told him, reach out to some, all the health podcasters out there, just listen. You can listen to one show for 30 seconds. If they don't have an ad on there, send them, send them the, send them the product, you know, pitch them a. Get interviewed by them and just propose something. Look, I'd like to sponsor your show in return for Social love.

Yeah, completely. I think it's a great idea.

So what else? Any other big, any other big opportunities out there you see you're excited about or that's working, whether you're doing it or other people are? I mean, I have a feeling that you probably pay attention to a lot of the different tactics and strategies out there.

Yeah, definitely. So, man, there's, there's a lot of things that are working well right now. I'm seeing email courses work incredibly well. You know, like doing a free email course as lead gen has just been doing nuts. You know, it's been incredible over the last like 6 to 12 months.

So let me. Let's hunt that rabbit. That's one of my sayings when I used to live in Texas. Let's haunt that rabbit, son. Okay. Because in the past I've toyed with this and I kind of teeter. I didn't have any data to really back it up. But. So email courses, you're talking about the ones that are dripped out like a 14 day email course. Right. Or seven day email course where they learn a little bit every day. So are you saying that they're working really well in terms of a just initial conversion rate of getting people to opt in on your list or getting people to take action once they're on there or both.

Both, honestly.

Okay.

I mean, you know, to give you an idea, my partner and I, nat, we launched programming for marketers as a free email course just because like we both thought it was cool. It was solving a problem for us. It Was something we wanted to educate people about and, you know, become known for and whatever. So we launched it. It was like, cool, let's just see how this does, because I have no idea where this could go. Seems like a fun side project. And we basically wrote like 100 pages worth of content for it. Like not a huge investment, but not nothing. So we tested it, we got near. Now we have nearly 10,000, but we got like 6,000 people or so to sign up. And just from that, like 6000 person less and a 8 email sequence that we sent them, we were like, wow, maybe we should test selling them a video course. And like, in the span of, in a very short period of time, we tested selling this video course and we made like 50 grand from that.

Nice.

And so for me, I look at that and it's like, that's crazy that we can spend like a week or two writing this content, get a couple thousand people to sign up for an email course, and then sell $50,000 worth of like a product launch. Like, you read bloggers who have been at it for, you know, three to five years, churning out two to four blog posts a week, and then they do their first product launch and then they like end up making 25 grand or 50 grand or whatever. You know, it just, it seems like such a way to hack the process and make it go lot faster.

So what do you think makes it the, the format of the course, the free email course work so well versus just giving it to them like you. Because you could, you could have easily packaged that up in 100 page PDF and send it to them. Is it the, you know, the ability to just constantly stay in touch with them a little by little over the.

Yeah, I think that's a big piece of it. I think the other big piece is that there's something about blog posts and even a lot of PDFs that just feel less actionable. Like, you know, I have tons of different, I have tons of content telling me what I should do, you know, telling me what I should think about all of this. But it's really, really hard to predict, you know, like, or decide what to focus on.

Yeah.

And so I think that by helping people say, like, we're going to drip out these really useful, incredible tactics to you once every two days. The idea is you can open it, implement something in 15, 30 minutes, archive that email, go on with your day, and you've actually made a meaningful business improvement.

Yeah.

You know, at least that's what's attractive to me about it.

I like that. So that's been working well. Nice. Are you noticing that people are like it. Does every email that you send out have a call to action on it? Like a. Or a click here to find out more? Like, as far as.

No.

Okay.

I mean, a lot of them do, but not a lot. Actually, some of them do, but again, like, this is. This is part of it not being like a real business for either of us. It's just horribly under optimized right now.

Yeah.

You know, like, there's a lot more we could do that we're just not going to do because we're working on different things. Mm.

Well, let's talk about some of the things you're working on. So, like, these strategies and tactics are really awesome. And you've got your book launching October 6th, right?

Yep. Cool.

Looking forward to getting that. And everybody else should too. It's called traction. And tell me about some of the other stuff you're working on right now, because I like, are you working, you know, with your partner? Is this something, you know, you've got your own business? Are you consulting?

Are you. Yeah, I just did one consulting thing. So I basically finished my earn out at Rackspace and then I had one consulting engagement, which I'm happy to chat more about if your audience is interested in that. But now I'm actually starting a health food product company. So along with my brother, we're starting a health food product company called Bone Broth. Yeah. So basically we're the first and only company selling a beef bone broth that is not frozen when you order it. And we just launched like 40 days ago. But it's been a. It's been. It's been off to a good start. And so this is like, taking up almost all of my time outside of the book now.

Cool.

So what are this company.

So what are some of the things that you're doing following your own advice to grow this?

Yeah, so one, focusing only on a couple channels to start with. So we're really focusing on Instagram. You know, we're focusing on social media to try and grow and drive traffic to the bone broth business, as well as to do, like, customer education, you know, and so that's a big one, is like, focus on things that will focus on, like one or two channels to start that'll actually move the needle. And this is one, you know, social is really, really good for educating people. And we've seen it actually works well to drive traffic as well. So these are just the channels that we're focusing on, really well, right now.

Okay, so really using customer education to get them to come through and then purchase. What's the name of the company so people can go check it out?

Yeah, it's called a Bone Broth Co. So it's just like bone broths dot com. So there's an S on the end there, Bone Broths.

But is it Bone Broth co?

No, just bonebroths.com. so we're doing a as well. Again, poor naming decisions on my part.

Oh, yeah, no, no, that's cool though. And is it starting to get traction?

Yeah, yeah. So we. We launched in on August 12, and so today is the end, you know, end of September, and we've. We've done more than six figures in revenue already.

That's beautiful.

Yeah. So it start. It's off to a really good start. And, you know, there's a ton of room to grow. There's a ton of, like, customer education we have to do. But it is like a hot and trending product. It's incredibly healthy. We've seen a lot of our customers benefit from it. So, you know, I'm excited to, like, be a part of it and see where this goes.

Now. That is exciting. Are you doing paid advertising for that or is it just really all just growth hacking?

We are, yeah. So we're doing some Facebook, some adwords, but, you know, we're trying to. Most of it. We're trying to focus on like, organic traffic, some partnership marketing, you know, and testing out a couple channels, so we'll see. But, you know, excited about where it is right now.

So I've definitely got some people that I can introduce you to who are really big in the health space and organic food and marketers, et cetera, who would probably, who I know for, and I know for a fact, love bone broth, so.

Oh, dude, I would love that.

Yeah. And this might be, you know, some good partnerships and education capabilities or stuff. So, you know, I'm happy to make that introduction there.

That would be amazing.

So what other. Any other nuts you're trying to crack? Oh, I wanted to circle back to one other thing before we go, which is you said the consulting that you were doing, you said. Yeah, we can kind of explore that. So tell me, tell me a little bit more about the consulting.

Yeah, so just basically had one consulting deal that, that, you know, was quite lucrative, I guess, to be honest. And so what I've started doing with my consulting is like, structuring it. Well, what I was doing before I decided to focus on this was structuring it in a way that is where it kind of puts you on the same page as your customer and removes a lot of doubt. And so, you know, one thing that I saw work really well in terms of getting people excited to work with me was just like saying, hey, what do you think of doing an agreement with a very basic retainer? Like call it, you know, a couple grand a month or whatever.

And then bit of skin in the game.

Yep. But like, really, really, really high upside for if we just crush, like the goals that we set up as a contract.

Okay, so what's a really, really, really high upside range?

Sure. So for, for us, we looked at, you know, my partner and I worked with this one company and we said, here's where you guys are right now. Where do you want, you know, if we could get you to a certain place a couple months from now, what would that place be? And like, that would just make you incredibly excited. And so they told us, I'm like, really great. Let's do this. You pay us $1,800 a month as our base fee, which is very, very cheap. Yeah. You know, and then you, you tell us, like, we can see that you're acquiring leads right now through AdWords, through paid through whatever. At this dollar amount for every lead that we drive, you know, that is above the trailing two month threshold of weeds that you're driving, will get paid a certain amount that is less than what you're paying on a per lead basis right now. Okay, does that make sense? Yeah, because it is a little complex. Oh, I get it. Okay, so we said that. And like the first month, because their growth had kind of flatlined, we did a bunch around organic traffic, around conversion rate optimization and the like, and we got our $1,800 base fee, and then they wrote us a check for 42 grand for the amount of leads that we drove that month.

Beautiful.

And like, as a company, you know, it's a big company and like, the numbers back out for them where if they'll, if they can acquire a customer for less than $100, they'll do that all day. Right. And so for them, they're ecstatic. And for us, like, we're very happy, obviously as well.

Yes. So tactically, when you did this, did you, did you set up your own lead capture funnels, et cetera, in order to do this work so that you could totally segregate out what you were doing, or did you just intermingle it and kind of like add on to what they were doing?

Yeah, we Intermingled it. So we added on a lot of stuff, but they were okay with that just because they just wanted to grow for us. It was pretty clear that if we looked at the previous month, you know, anything that we changed going forward, you could roughly attribute to us, you know, minus some percentage, which is why we weren't getting paid, like, exactly what they were paying for other leads. Sure. And so, you know, we could just say, like, okay, we started this date 30 days later, your lead volume has, like, increased by 60%. You know, that's not from something you guys did. That's us. And so we're, you know, they. They were happy to like, pay for the performance that we drove.

Nice. And then you put. So you put a dollar amount based on the per lead as opposed to just a percentage of sales.

Yeah, exactly.

I like that. Yeah, that keeps it even. That keeps it a little bit cleaner as well.

Definitely.

And I.

Go ahead.

No, I want you to.

Yeah. And I mean, the thing that I liked is it makes them think of me not as like a consultant where they're constantly evaluating how well are you doing? Do I like working with. Do I think I'm getting the value of the retainer or the money I'm paying you? And it was much more like, okay, we're going to spend X dollars on Facebook, we're going to spend x dollars on AdWords, and we're going to spend X dollars on Justin.

Yeah.

And then like, you know, if we have a bad month, we don't get paid. We get paid eighteen hundred dollars a month, which is a drop in the bucket for any company doing serious revenue.

Yeah, that's true. Because they know it's the price. The most of it is on performance. I operate mine, you know, very similar too. It's a, you know, a little bit of skin in the game depending on what we're doing. But, you know, in general, I want to be paid based on, you know, the performance of the tactics and strategies.

Totally.

That.

I don't know, I see a lot of people who are like, talk about trying to get their hourly rate up and everything. And to me, that just seems like kind of like the wrong game to play.

I think it's the exact wrong game.

To play because with that, like, there's a lot of negotiation pain, there's a lot of animosity. It's all up front. And then you start the relationship neither of you are probably super happy with, you know, with how their negotiations went. And now you have to perform and you're under a Lot of pressure. Right. I think this kind of flips that on its head.

Right. So in this instance, this is just personal curiosity. Did the things that you did involve them doing a lot or was it a lot of stuff that you could do? Because I know that that's one of the headaches as a consultant is sometimes you're telling the company the bigger they are, sometimes the worse it is because they're, you know, it can take longer to actually execute something. But was a lot of this kind of like you guys had the reins and the ability to make changes to whatever you needed to do or.

Oh yeah. I mean, I make that into the contract. Like, nice, here's what's going to happen. You know, you're, we need something done and we expect it done in this amount of time. Or if that doesn't happen, then, you know that's, that's a breach and we're going to have to discuss that. So. But we brought in our own developers to make changes. We did a lot of stuff where I was like, guys, just give me some leeway here. I'll check with you before we do things. But give me some leeway. It'll allow us to move faster and then we'll be able to make better things happen in a much, much faster way.

Yeah, I've noticed that in doing that, kind of learned the hard way and getting paid just as a once in a while I still have some clients who just pay me to get on the phone and, and consult with them and tell them what to do. However, I have found, unfortunately, that a lot of times they end up not things come up and they don't necessarily do what I tell them to do. And it can sometimes be a very simple thing, but if they don't do it, they don't see the results and then I just look like an expense. Yeah, but it's not my fault. Well, if you did it, it would have worked. And then I toy personally with the idea, like how dirty do I want to get my hands or my team's hands actually saying, okay, move over, let me just do this versus, you know, so I played with that. But I think the way what you said, that's really the fastest way to actually getting results, improving your mettle and staying on board as a trusted advisor who gets paid handsomely is to say, look, I've got the team members, you guys give me enough room, let me run.

Yeah, exactly.

I love it.

If you perform like we can afford to hire people, we can afford to bring in good people, we can afford to run experiments. You know, all the numbers just back out.

Right. And one of the things I tell my clients as well is, look, you know, I've got two goals when we start this relationship is an immediate return on investment and then a forever return of investment. Like, you know, if you're paying me 1800amonth or 5000 or 10,000, whatever it is, a month, it's like my first goal is to make sure that you get that monthly amount back as quick as possible. So I'm going to look for the low hanging fruit and I'm going to look for the things that are going to get, you know, that back. So I never want to be seen as an expense.

Yeah.

And when you can do that, you can really write your ticket.

Exactly.

Awesome, man. This has been. This has been really great and I cannot wait to read Traction when it comes out. Looking forward to it. Anything else you want to share with the folks, how they can either learn more about you or obviously they can find your book on Amazon, et cetera.

Yeah. So if anything that I've mentioned sounds interesting, they can go to tractionbook.com and check out. They can download the first three chapters of the book for free. We don't hard sell our list or anything like that. If you want to check out the first three chapters, it might be useful and hopefully helpful. So we definitely recommend that they do that. Otherwise, I'm a wmairs on Twitter and we'll respond to. Anyone who listens to this would love to, like answer questions or whatever I can.

Nice. Are you still taking consulting clients or if people want to work with you, kind of probably situation dependent.

Yeah, I am not actually. Okay, cool. Yeah, focusing. Trying to focus on the bone broth thing.

Nice. Well, I'm going to remind myself here to make some introductions there that may be able to be, you know, to help you out. And I think that's really cool. And I haven't heard of anybody really tackling that market. I kind of hear visit everybody. I'm big into health and health food, etc. As well. So anybody who is kind of probably understands how great bone broth is, but I always see it as just this little side product that people. Oh, yeah. Is also bone broth.

Yeah.

But I love the fact that you're kind of going directly towards that. So that's awesome.

Yep.

All right, Justin, well, thank you very much for being on the show, my brother. For anybody out there listening, if you have any questions for him or you want to read the book, he's giving you the information, go get it tractionbook.com and follow him on Twitter @JW Maris and if you have any questions for me, if you have any show ideas or, you know, suggested topics, questions about your own strategies, or you want to see if any of my expertise will help you in your business, you can always reach out to me at askbradaconrappedbusiness.com or visit costanzomarketing.com and I suggest that you subscribe to the show if you're not already and go over to baconwrappedbusiness.com, subscribe to the newsletter. I share a lot of cool strategies and events and things invites that I don't share with the rest of my, you know, just here for free. And the newsletter is absolutely free. Doesn't cost you a penny. But look forward to hearing from you guys. And Justin, I look forward to chatting with you more in the future and wish you tons of luck on both the book launch as well as the bone broth.

Dude, thanks so much for having me on. This has been fantastic.

My pleasure man. Talk to you soon. And guys, see you next time.