🎙️ catching up post wedding + genius podcast system with trevor longino

To find a new place here. And, yeah, looking forward to it. It's what's new on my side. And yet, like, it's been weird to not work that much for that long. And now to come back to my old schedule and realize that, yeah, man, I'm going hard because I still have this full house schedule now. Me and my wife were supposed to have her honeymoon or second honeymoon this Friday in Cancun, and we're like, it, you know, we don't even want to move anymore. We just want to focus on, like, finding a cool place. And she's got her photograph photography business going on. So it's interesting because who would say no to going to Cancun, right? And like a luxury Airbnb looking out to the sea, then I would have bought sir du Soleil Joya Hoya ticket. So. But, yeah, who knows? I might do it. But she has a photo session at the same day, so. Give it.

Give it time, Give it time. You can always. You can always go there some other week.

Yeah.

Anyway, the so GTM podcast, right? Let's talk about it.

Yeah. So what app are we using first? Like, maybe.

So this is called Squadcast. It is. You get it free when you pay for descript, which I've been paying for for, like two years. And it is. It uploads both of our videos in full resolution while we're streaming at a little bit lower quality. So it gives you the best quality. Like, we're both doing 70p, 30fps upload. Right. So it's good quality upload and it buffers, I think, on your computer. But whatever. It's all bandwidth nonsense.

Anyway, so podcasting today, I'm gonna talk about that mostly. I think what we talked about on the Mastermind yesterday was really interesting. So Benny suggested the idea. Benny Rubin is CEO of Senders and new to that edition of the Mastermind. He basically said I should offer the podcast guest to sponsor the interview and let's call it like, hey, pay me a thousand per month. I'll invest. Like, well, not sure stuff. I need to tell them how much, but it could be like 500 for me to manage the ad, 500 for them to be promoted out there. And yeah, I really like that idea because I would win as well. I would win subscribers and so forth. They would win too. And. And yeah, that. That's crazy smart. What did you think about that idea?

I very much liked it. I think it is. So one of the things, I mean, we've talked about this sometimes on the gtm Podcast is you and I are both guilty of this, right? There's always a new interesting thing to pursue instead of doing the thing that works. And I'm, I'm guilty of that, right? I made 60k on a couple of podcasts in July and then went, nah, why do them in August and September? And now I'm like, well, you know, that made money pretty easily. Maybe I should do it again. Now I'm back at it. In your case, you're doing a lot with podcasting. You're making great inroads with the ability to schedule these for people. And the, the obvious next step is to say, how do you systematize this and form some partnerships? Because I would note like for my agency, partnerships have driven in the last three months half my revenue for this year. Probably somewhere a little over a third, a little over half. Right? A lot of money just lying on the ground basically that the partnerships can bring you. And some of them, some of this is comp around giving folks 10% back of the revenue share. Some of it's just folks referring me business, right? So it's a very obvious, like we talk about gtm. I think you and I are both guilty of both being good at something and then finding it boring because we're good at it and then looking for something more difficult to do instead. And for folks who are both, you know, good at go to market. The market said, hey, I want more of this. And we were both kind of ignoring it in pursuit of something else. And of course, as you mentioned in the podcast, in the, in the Mastermind yesterday, this will get burned out because it will, it's going to become overplayed. Two things I think counteract that. One is if you actually have an audience, it won't burn out. And I mentioned in the Mastermind, I'm not going to go into the details here because this is public, but I'm going to be basically get access to a community that I just can start to work with immediately and I'll be building up my own as well. And you of course have got, and you're building your channel. You've got, you know, 10,000 people in an audience. Even when the idea of let me do a podcast with somebody who no one listens to phase which it will in a year or so. If you've been putting in the work to build a community while that's been going on, you will have staying power. So I can see a big benefit to you in offering what you do to companies. So I think banning idea was really sharp. I think it makes a lot of sense for you. I think anybody who's looking for go to market, right, of course, podcast is a thing now. I think now is the time to hop on this and try to build an audience because all the folks who try it for six months and then go away, you know, those are the folks you want to outlast.

Agree. Okay, many points here. The first one, yeah, fomo me, I think I reached a nice equilibrium with fomo, which is that I never give up on my strong thesis that are constantly being proved right. And yes, I, I go after not the shiny new object, but you know, nice energy return on investment. So first I won't get out of, you know, the outreach or podcast sphere. So I keep on compounding in there and I don't give up on these things. I just keep on working. So I keep on a B, testing new things, but I don't invest that much energy in new things. I still keep on my strong horses like the outreach. I still haven't give up on outreach. I just merged it mostly with podcasting. So I think it's important that folks have some kind of way to ab test like that and not obviously go with fomo because I think that's most humans, right? They just are left and right and they might hold on to something for quite a while until it dies off and they may make good money, but they're disaster, mentally speaking, you know, and they're, they're not aiming for long term. Everything they're built is, is somewhat short term. I don't think my empire is that way. I can't call it an empire yet, but I'm compounding big time. And it's only acceleratings like snowball effect. Now for the podcast theory of things. Will it die down like you said? Yes, audience, but I think yeah, just compounding and being there and knowing what you do while being a temporary visitor will make a world of difference. I sometimes retract my very bold AI predictions that like yo, we're going to see like AGI in less than seven years and that would be like six because I started this prediction the beginning of or even like two years ago or something like that. So yeah, that would be like in five years, but the world will be drastically different. And yes, everyone will be trying to start a podcast for sales purposes and lead gen. Yes. But I do think that people that meet the moat that I see is very high quality questions and Tim Perez reiterated it's yesterday. I'm not saying he's a God. Or anything. But yeah, it's. If you want to really much advance in life, it's on your ability to ask the right question and framing the right problem correctly, right. So that you can solve it adequately. There's folks like Danny Miranda that are doing amazing jobs at asking questions and really going deep. To me, that's like a podcast mode, not only to provide the guests a great experience, but also to just advance very, very quickly in life because you can get the right data, right? And once you have the right data, it's like a laser beam. Most people will never get to there. Asking the right question, looking at the right problem, it's like looking at the diamond. No one gets to look at the diamond because no one knows how to get there. And the ability to ask the right question is the moat. And Joe Rogan has that too. He's a great question asker. He's very curious. I think that's the pod moat. It's data. And then let's not forget the network, right? Like me, I haven't done anything with the network side of it yet, but it's just, it's me sitting on a gold mine. That's, that's how I felt since I started this, this podcast and it's really how it is. For example, I'm going to be test the, the Rubin idea today and I'm pretty sure I'm gonna get a couple of replies. And that's, that's quick. That's somewhat quick money. And it's win, win money. It's, it's beautiful money, you know, so, yeah, that's my, my short, my 2 cents on the, the pod. You started your own pod recently. You reached out to First Connections on LinkedIn. How's that playing for you? And what's your, what's your long term thesis with the bot? Because I wouldn't see your podcast dying down in 1.5 years.

So mine, I think, will have some legs to it, in part because it's focused in what I've been doing for years. Right? So my thesis is I talk a lot about go to market and launch for new startups and there's an endless flood of people launching something new. And I posted to Reddit yesterday with, hey, here's a minimum viable sprint. One of the big things I teach and that I do. Here's how it works. I thought maybe y' all would like to see it. And it's full of people saying, this is all bullshit, this can't work, this is wrong. And I'm like one I'm super surprised. Two, look, if you follow the steps right, you have an audience between 50k and 500k and you sample 1 to 1 10th of 1% of them. I'm not inventing math. That a statistical sample that size will predict the overall population behavior. That's why statistics exists. And people are like, no, it's bullshit, it can't be done. I'm like, okay, that's super interesting, right? There's a. And the reasons are it's bullshit. I'm like, okay, can you argue with any like, logic? No, just I've done this for 20 years and it's bullshit. I'm like, okay, so I you propose something that's counterintuitive and the immediate response. And I was posting in R ppc, right? These are only performance marketers. You think they'd be number oriented. And the answer is no, they are not. So one of my thesis is so much of what works in Go to market is counterintuitive and that's why so many businesses fail. Because you do what feels right, which is not right. And then you go broke. And why want to get on my podcast are people who've done it and what was their counterfactual? What was the thing that when they did it, it worked. And it was against their intuition of what should have worked. And that's across industries, right? Founders, VCs, M&A people, lawyers, all of this because they're all going to have a different view for the founder. The name of the thing is Launched Today. I used to run launch today about 18 months ago. And it was all just like three or four minute snippets of me. And I just got tired of talking into the void, right? I got a couple hundred subscribers, whatever. Now it's going to be conversational. And what I want to figure out is when you launched, right? What was it? What surprised you? What were the challenges? How do you overcome them? Or when you see people launch, if you're in MA or legal or whatever, like what are the hurdles that you see relative to your industry that folks are all running into? And that information for the founders is going to help them. You know, that first year, getting to a million dollars, that first year, that problem, if businesses could just reliably figure out how to get there, like once you're making a million a year, a whole lot of the rest of your business gets easier. And it's not all that hard, it's not easy. I mean, here I say my business is doing 60k a month right now. Right. I'm not a million dollars a year yet myself, but even at 60k a month, which is 2/3 of the way, they're like a lot of the business problems go away. Right. I can solve problems over time because I'm getting paid enough that I can exist. So that's the. What I'm trying to do is give people what they need to launch and then be default alive.

Love it, dude. Yeah, each friend on my side, I have a client I need to attend to but I'd like to pitch you on my idea as well that I had the wedding. Just talk about like other ideas and so forth but it's aligned with the vision of data and having the pure information. It is selling online businesses. So being a broker quite literally, I'd like to pitch on that one. It's international also. Bit like website closers or flippa. But yeah, like I'd like to pitch on that. Love the idea and yeah, I'm not surprised by the way with marketers not being scientific humans, they just go so much with their hearts, you know, they. They follow their hearts and in business it's most of the time it's counterintuitive. What you need to do most of the time is cut out emotions and just try hundred things and let the results speak for themselves. Which is almost an inhuman thing to do when you think about it. Humans don't do that anyway. So yeah, we'd love to come on your pod also and speak about that on the cold email and the experimental level. So. Nice one and yeah dude, let's book that one.

All right, I will follow up on that email. Meanwhile, if you're you know gtm right. Think of the counterfactual what you can do to launch that will work but doesn't feel right. And I will send you this recording for your use. See you, dude.