Using VIP Dinners to Drive Pipeline with Natalie Taylor

How do you start with 0? As a startup, you don't have the built in audience, how do you distribute this video and how do you make sure it's not just a one day pop?

Distribution is such a huge part of it and you can't really start from zero. So that's why we worked with influencers, people who had built in audiences already that we could leverage. You posted on LinkedIn like a week after our launch, which was great too, to just kind of keep the momentum going. The other part is also our investors. So we send out an email to our investors the morning of that launch, like, hey, here's the link to our Tweet and our LinkedIn post, please. Like here's some very quick, easy instructions for you to amplify this to your networks. And that, you know, sends some early signals to the algorithm as well that is really helpful in boosting those impressions. On launch day.

Do a quick, quick intro. Who are you? What do you do? And then tell us about your company, Capsule, and then we'll, we'll dive into the good stuff.

Yeah. So I have been working as a startup marketer or marketing team of one, sometimes both, for the past 10 or so years. I consider myself sort of a marketing generalist with an emphasis in creative and content. It's probably kind of similar to you, Dave, but currently I work for a early stage startup called Capsule. It is my favorite job I've ever had and I'll get into that later. But Capsule is an AI powered video editing tool specifically built for enterprise teams. And what they need, and what they need is to be able to edit videos 10 times faster and easier, keep everyone on brand and, and make collaboration seamless across the organization. So that's kind of a high level of Capsule. I found the job because I got laid off from my last job. And side story is that was the largest company I'd ever worked for.

What was it? What company was it?

The last company I worked for was a company called Everfi. It's not a big company, but to me it was like 500 people. And then it got acquired by an even larger company. And I learned in that brief stint that I do not like working for large companies. So when I got laid off, I posted on LinkedIn, was like, Hey, I got laid off. I really want to move back into the startup world. Here's kind of what I'm looking for. And someone I went to college with reached out, saw my LinkedIn post, hadn't talked to him in, you know, 10, 12 years. And he was like, hey, I work at this startup. We're looking for some marketing help. I'm happy to introduce you to the CEO. So I. So he introduced me to the CEO of Capsule and we just hit it off immediately. We worked really well together. I grasped the product and the vision and got it immediately and loved it and have just been working together ever since. I started for like six months as a contractor and then after our public beta launch In September of 2023, I joined the team full time as the head of marketing.

Did was the contract roll like on purpose because the company hadn't launched yet or were you like, would you have wanted to take full time earlier?

We were both kind of like feeling it out. I was thinking about maybe doing contract work for a few companies. Just working part time.

Yeah.

And they were trying to figure out what exactly they needed on the marketing side. And so. But it very quickly became apparent that it was going to be a really good fit for both of us. Like, I very quickly was like, oh, I'm. I'm all in on this. I want to. I want to do this full time. And I made that clear like a couple months in.

So you probably went above and beyond then a contract marketer because you're like, oh, th. This could be the thing. Like, I want to do a great job and impress them and make it a no brainer to like make me your head of marketing at some point.

Exactly.

First of all, there's a lot of people who. My least favorite narrative about LinkedIn is that like, the real people doing the work don't post there and it's just for vain assholes like myself who want to write there. And then like, I talked to so many real people like you and like, yeah, I posted on link, like I wrote about it on LinkedIn and that led to my next thing. I just can't. I can't under. I can't overstate that enough. I just think there's no downside to like, in an industry like marketing being on a platform like LinkedIn, talking about your career, talking about your work. Do you have to do it? No. This is like the same advice that I give to founders. Like, do you have to do it? No. Does it create an. Can it create an advantage for you and maybe some opportunities come your way that you might not have had otherwise and. Yeah. And sounds like that's what happened in your case.

Yeah, I, I have found several of my. Actually three of my jobs, two of my favorite jobs, capsule, and one of my other jobs I got through LinkedIn. And then in the past year since I've been working with caps, in the past, like six, seven months since I joined Capsule full time and have been posting on LinkedIn about working at Capsule and about things we're doing at Capsule. I have had more like public appearances in my entire career in the past seven or so months just because, I mean, I think largely because of what I'm sharing on LinkedIn. That's how people know about what I'm doing. And so that's part of, probably why I'm here on this podcast too, is just being active and sharing what's going on there.

Yeah, I love that. I love that perspective. I want to talk about working with the founder and CEO at Capsule in a minute, but maybe just career, career wise. I think outside of the marketing tactics, people, a lot of people listen to this podcast because of the career path stuff that we talk about because it's like a, it's like listening to your peer group. Right. It's not, it's not always something that you, you listen to or read about. And we, we can do that here. You've, you've mentioned the term favorite job. So that to me tells me that there were some jobs that were not your favorite. Right. You don't have to get into specifics about who and everything, but maybe just explain what you've seen now that led to this being like the right job, the favorite job. And is there a younger version of you that you've learned some things along the way about what might make for the right place to go and work and the right role to take? And maybe let's talk through some of that stuff.

Yeah, I love talking about this stuff. I think one key thing that has always worked out for me is working for people, choosing jobs based on who I'm going to be working with and working for. So some of my favorite jobs where I've learned the most is where I've had an incredible manager that I just want to learn from. Maybe I don't, like, love the product or like, it's not a particular passion of mine, but I recognize just in the interview, talking with the hiring manager and, you know, looking at their experience, I'm like, I want to learn from this person. I know you've shared a similar experiences too, with your careers. Like, I just want to go work for this person.

Yeah, I think, I think what, I think what people miss. And like, obviously I know this now. It's just like anything in life, you don't, you don't know it until you've gone through a bunch of different things. And if you've tried a different things, you know, like, dated some people, that wouldn't have worked out well until you meet. Met my wife. And I'm like, oh, yeah, wow. This is. This is why we're great, right?

Totally.

But. But there's some. Some things in there. But I also think it's also. I think a lesson I wish I had known a little bit earlier is most early in your career and maybe even ever, are you rarely going to be able to pick, like, check every box, right? Like, love the boss, love the set of work I can be doing, love the industry. And so you kind of have to be like, man, I don't. All right, I don't love this pro. Like, I'm not passionate about cybersecurity, but the team is awesome. The company's growing really fast, and I'm going to get to do something that I've never done before. Or I had a scenario where I was leading marketing at a startup right around Covid, and I took the job under the premise of, like, the budget was going to be this many millions of dollars, and you were gonna have to. You get to hire this many people. And I was like, oh, it's gonna be fun. I'm gonna build a team from scratch. And then, like, March 2020, like, all that went to zero. And I was like, wow, I'm just gonna be here for a couple years, like, not doing a lot of growth. And then I was like, no, the. Or let's look at it from a different standpoint. Like, how can I tell the story a year or two from now from, like, we had our budget cut, we had everything frozen, and yet we still grew. And I took that as an opportunity to, like, find some new skills to work on. I think you have to have that mindset of not all the ingredients are going to be perfect. You're not always going to be in a position to pick the things. But can you see. Can you zoom out and just think of your career beyond the one company that you're at right now and say, okay, can I be in skills acquisition mode for, like, the next one or two years and then, like, see what comes out of that?

Yeah. I view every job before this as, like, a learning opportunity. Like, there's always something to be gained, whether it's like, I learned that I hate this, or I learned that I really do not work well with this. This type of person or whatever it is. And so now I'm. I found this Opportunity that is this perfect combination of my background, my skills, my interests and, and a product that I genuinely love and get and I'm passionate about that. It, it's all working together now. But like I couldn't have gotten to that point without learning that I really do thrive in startups or that I really do understand a lot of the pain points around video editing because I had to teach myself how to use Premiere Pro to throw this thing together. I've had to use these other like scrappy tools that weren't really getting the job done. And now I understand this huge pain point that Capsule solves. And I love using the product and I love teaching people about it and, and getting other marketers to use it as a very easy way to create polished on brand videos.

That's the best scenario in marketing when, when you do believe in the product and you are passionate about it and you can use it. I think it would be very tough for me to do marketing for a company for a product that I couldn't, I couldn't actually use. I think I know enough about marketing and I, I could pull the right strings to like figure that out. And I know this is not going to be possible for everybody, but can you align yourself? Like if you can pick from companies where you can actually touch the product, use the product, I just feel like that makes a huge difference. And in connecting the dots, like the companies that I've worked at where I've been able to like log in and actually use the software, it's always been software companies for me. I've been such a better marketer and I also feel like you're often then on the front lines of like you're using the product. You build so much credibility inside of the company when you're like, wow, this feature is actually super interesting. Like here's how we're using it. This is a different way that we can, we can talk about it.

Totally. Our product team has dubbed me the number one QA tester because I use the product all the time when like new features ship. I'm in there testing it and I am using it for real applications. And so it's nice to be able to be very involved with the product too.

All right, so you meet the founder, what's his name at Capsule?

Champ Bennett is our CEO and co founder.

Champ Bennett. That seems like an AI generated name for a CEO of a startup. That's awesome. Champ Bennett. And maybe like let's, let's talk about this first six month period of you taking that Job. What. What was the mission that you were given? Why did they bring in a contract? You know, a marketer working on a contract basis? What was the. What was the job you were hired to do?

Yeah, the job I was hired to do was to help get ready for their public beta launch. Getting, you know, getting ready to announce that this is a. A product that people can sign up for. Now here's kind of what it does. So I was helping manage the launch video. We worked with an agency to create a really great launch video. I worked with you and a couple other influencers to help get the word out for that launch, partnering with a couple influencers and. And then just kind of experimenting with a few different content formats and just figuring out what works. So I think it was a test of both, like, can we work well together? Can I function in a startup environment and, you know, get things done and work well with the founder and kind of grasp his vision and translate it in a marketing sense? And so that's kind of what the first few months were. Were like.

Okay, let's talk. Let's. Let's. Let's dive into there. I love the reason I and you. You and me are doing a webinar on this next week, next. This. Who knows when this will air, but it'll be beyond. It'll be beyond then. But I love. I love product launches because I feel like oftentimes in marketing, if they just hired you to, like, do marketing and grow the business, there's like, so many different things that you could do that just become like, let's try SEO. Let's try paid. Let's try biggest effort of a launch. It's like, there's a. There's a deadline, there's a thing we have to announce, we have to package it, we have to find ways to promote it. I think it, like, just shrinks the scope and like, you have to have all the other things that follow. You have to have a narrative, you have to have a launch plan, you have to have goals, you have to have measurement, you have to do it all. But it's like, shrinks the scope into that, into like a. A shorter time frame. And it's one of the reasons, like, one of the things that I picked up when I was at Drift is just we launched something every two weeks, basically from. In the startup phase. And as we grew up a little bit, we just. We still did something once a month. And I feel like that is such a healthy habit to drive to build a marketing organization that drives growth for the company. And to get the company shipping, it's like, if you're just kind of always doing, like, always on stuff, it's hard to drive momentum. But we did a product launch the first Tuesday of every month, and it was like, boom, boom, boom. It's just, you still do the always on stuff, but it just gives you an opportunity to go back out and announce something new. And so I'm a huge fan of, like, launch, launch marketing and using launches to drive the marketing strategy for the company. And it's like, we even were just talking about this earlier in the week with Exit 5. We look at months, okay, what are we launching in June? What are we launching in July? What are we launching? August? Okay, well, in June, we got this new thing that we're doing. August, we have this thing. We don't have anything for July. Okay. Then we gotta go figure out, like, what thing are we gonna create? Is it a product thing? Is it a content thing? Can we go and create something to drive momentum? So I love using product launches you. You joined to for the public beta launch of this company. I see a lot of questions about product launches come up in exit 5. The first thing out of your mouth was launch video. And I love that because I feel like to do an effective launch, we often get right in the weeds and we're like, well, we're going to, like, what are we going to. What is the. What is the thing you need? You need a thing, right? And so how did you decide, like, was it instantly obvious that, like, we need a video? A video is going to be our. Our asset to create for this launch?

Yes. We often start with a video for product launches is like. Because that, that helps you define what the story is, what the narrative is, and then, like, have very clear messaging from there. So that's kind of like the starting asset for us is like, you know, if you need to summarize this in, like, a minute and a half, what, what's the story? What, like, what do people need to take away from this? Then it's way easier to create email and social and every other asset around.

Yeah. Because you're. You're forced to, like, write the script for that and that becomes the, you know, whether it's a video or not. I like the idea of having, like, kind of one main asset because then everything else gets created off of that. A video. To me, like, especially for companies in the B2B space now, like, video is how we all communicate. You know, my day is filled with sharing video clips with my wife. And my friends, whether it's about business or kids or golf or whatever, I think that is like the currency of how people share information online. So if you're launching a new product, how do you not have a video? We haven't done a video for Exit, like a real good video for exit 5. And just this morning I was like, man, I think we gotta come up with something. I just, I like marketers thinking like video first for their launches now. Right?

Yeah. Well, I mean, the demand for video, like, you know, B2B is usually a few years behind B2C stuff, just kind of general trends in general. But the demand for videos within organizations even is so high. So like Capsule's focus is on enterprise teams. And these teams are needing more and more video. Not just like marketing teams, but sales teams and HR teams and learning and development teams. And so if you think about like the evolution of like docs being accessible to everyone in the. Everyone in the organization. And before PowerPoint, you know, not everyone could create a slide presentation. And before Canva and Figma, not everyone could create design. And we're still at this point where not everyone can create video within an organization. So that's what Capsule is really trying to solve, is democratizing video, because that's the preferred format for everyone these days. But it just still hasn't caught up to inside enterprise organizations.

So what was the process for creating this launch video? I want to talk through launch video influencers and how you ended up bringing this thing to market, what the launch was like. But what, where did, where did the, how did the video come to life? How did you do it? Did it cost money? Did you do it in house? Did you write a script for it? I want to know all of the behind the scenes.

Yeah. So for that launch video, that was, you know, kind of our big. It was our biggest product launch that we've done to date was that public Beta one. So we, we did work with an agency. I spent time sourcing different partners, interviewing different people and finding a good partner that could fit within our budget. We obviously paid them to help us with the video. We were heavily involved in the storyboarding and the script and kind of the overall narrative and things we wanted included. Even further down the process. We really helped refine even the animations. At the end we have an in house person who's a motion designer and helped with a lot of that. And so, you know, since then we've been doing all of our launch videos in house with just me, our CEO and our motion designer to Kind of punch them up. But for really big ones, we'll. We'll usually partner with, with an outside partner or. Or vendor to help really make it nice and give us some more time to work on other aspects of the launch.

But did you have like a outline and a script and an idea for like the type of video? Like, we have an idea of how we want to what. What we want and then we'll go find the video creator to do this.

Yeah, I mean, it kind of. There were a few projects that were going like moving in parallel. So there was the website launch and the product launch video and kind of all the assets and messaging around what Capsule is. Because this is kind of like our coming out of. Not exactly stealth, but sort of. And so, you know, we have these messages that we want to get across and how are we going to, you know, communicate that in a website format and in a video format. We're kind of the two biggest projects and so they kind of worked in parallel together. As we're developing the messaging for one, we want to make sure that that messaging comes across in the other. And, and so yeah, we, we kind of created the messaging hierarchy and script and included. Want to make sure we include, you know, these key features that we know people love in our beta testers, et cetera.

And what was the process of how did you find a. How do you go out and how do you go and find a good video? Video editor.

Yeah, I think luckily our motion, he's our product lead. He's actually the person who got me the job. His name is Clark on our team, who is a very experienced motion designer, has a lot of connections, used to work at agencies. And so he has a good sense and a good place to start and has a good sense of like the aesthetic that we want and the kind of partner we want to work with. And then, you know, we together would just sort of vet different partners and evaluate to make sure they were good fits.

Do you remember how much you spent to create the video?

I don't exactly. I probably wouldn't share either because our budgets are just so scrappy.

But wait, you wouldn't share because it's too low. So if it was like 50 grand, you would tell us, but if it was like 2, $200, you wouldn't?

No, just because startup budgets are so like all over the place. But like, also they worked with us in a startup, the agency worked with us in a startup capacity, knowing that they would normally charge larger but hoping to work with us in the future as we grow kind of thing. So I wouldn't want to, I wouldn't want to put them in a precarious.

Situation because then everybody would be like, I want the $500 video.

It was more than $500. I'll say that.

Sometimes you got to spend my guy that Lasik a couple of years ago, like instead of wearing contacts and think that, I think it was like maybe four. And I remember looking it up and I found this like Reddit thread and someone was like, I found a doctor who would do Lasik for $400 instead of 4,000. I was like, lasers on my eye. I don't want the discount version for that. I'll pay the full price. That's great. All right, so, so you get, so you get the video made and then obviously, like it's a video company and so you got to use your product as part of this and showcase the product. Then okay, you spend the time and effort to write the script, work with somebody, make the video. This is where I think a lot of efforts then fall, fall flat. All right, we got the thing now, but let's talk about distribution. How do you start with zero as a startup? You don't have the built in audience. How do you distribute this video and how do you make sure it's not just a one day pop? So what was the actual launch plan like?

Yeah, I mean, distribution is such a huge part of it and you can't really start from zero. So that's why we worked with influencers, people who had built in audiences already that we could leverage that we knew would be interested in that. So we worked with a creator named Amanda Goetz. I think you know her as well. She had just pivoted to becoming a full time creator, but hadn't yet monetized it. We had never worked with a creator before and so we were both really invested in making this work as sort of a first test on both sides. And it did. It worked amazingly well. She created this incredible video asset for us that shared her journey of video editing and how intimidated she was by it. And wow, look at this amazing tool called Capsule. And it makes it so easy. And now I can create way more videos as part of my creator business. And that video generated over half of our launch impressions. It was incredible. The story really resonated with people and it was just an amazing asset. We worked with another creator and then I think you posted on LinkedIn like a week after our launch, which was great too, to just kind of keep the momentum going. But that was Really, a really important part of our distribution channel. The other part is also our investors. So we send out an email to our investors the morning of that launch, like, hey, here's the link to our Tweet and our LinkedIn post. Please. You know, here's some very quick, easy instructions for you to amplify this to your networks. And that, you know, sends some early signals to the algorithm as well. That is really helpful in boosting those impressions on launch day.

So why did you pick Amanda? Why did you reach out to me? I want to unpack, like, how you decide which influencers to work with. One of my frustrations is I see people asking about how to find influencers, and I want to just, like, jump through the computer because it's like, if you don't know, like, you have to know, this is your company, this is your industry. You have to know which people have the attention or reach of the audience that you're trying to reach. There's. I get it. Like, and maybe this is different for larger consumer brands. And you're trying, you know, if you're. If you're selling, like, Cheez Its, you want to find, like, some random Bravo celebrity to, like, do a promo with your new Cheez Its or whatever your new Cheez Its flavor. But I think in B2B, maybe in any industry, you got to know the audience and who they listen to and then kind of go down the tiers of who might be interesting. I. I know some people have, like, there's databases, and you can go find influencers off of some database. And I'm sure with large consumer brands, there's. There's whole agencies that do this, but I think in the world that we're talking about, you gotta know. And so how did you pick Amanda as an example?

Yeah, I'm actually gonna talk about our other more recent launches that we've partnered with influencers. Cause I think we've. I've gotten a little bit better at this since. And so the first, like this, I guess the second launch we did with influencers, or creators, whatever you want to call them, I just built a list of people that I follow. I'm. It's very. I mean, I'm fortunate that I am a target user of Capsule, and therefore, like, I know who I consume and I know who I follow on LinkedIn and where I am. And so I just started with a list of people whose content I really enjoy or respect or admire and just reached out to them and DM'd them cold and was like, hey, I Love your content. Do you ever partner with other brands? We're launching something fun at Capsule at the end of the month that I'd love your help, you know, getting the word out about. And the response rate to those DMs was like, I think only, like, one person didn't respond to me out of, you know, 20 people I reached out to. And these are like, a lot of these people have a lot of followers, and I've admired them for years. So I was first, like, kind of surprised by that. And then. And then it was. It was honestly kind of like a sales process where I created, like an intro deck and gave them an overview of Capsule and kind of pitched them on Capsule and pitched them on the campaign, and then, you know, sent up, built up a contract and got them onboarded, all of that kind of stuff. And. But the list building part was like, A, who do I follow? And B, who do I like? Whose content do I think will align well with the kind of content we're trying to create for this campaign? And that's how I kind of started with that list. So, yeah, again, I'm fortunate that I personally had a strong sense of who it would work for, because I'm in the target audience. But I think there's other ways you can do that too. Just talking to your customers and asking them who they follow and, you know, who they respect and admire and trust when it comes to making decisions around products.

What's great about doing this in B2B is the size of the audience. You don't. You don't need to find somebody. Like, you didn't need to find somebody with millions of followers on a, on a campaign. Right? It's like, because of the product that you're selling and because of the industry that you're in, finding someone with like 10,000 LinkedIn followers that are engaged in the niche that you want to sell to, you can drive a ton of engagement on that post, which I think makes it a very interesting channel for. For marketing.

Well, there's even.

Yeah, go ahead.

There's even people who had like 2,000 followers. Like, we had several people that were like under 5,000 followers that drove a ton of impressions and engagement for us because they have very engaged audiences and post really great content.

I love that. I love that as a strategy. Like, I've, I've often, I've thought about this actually with. With growing exit 5. But, like, I think you could go, you could try to find a super big name, you could try to find the middle range 10 to 100,000 followers, whatever. But I think there's a whole play out there where you find, like, micro influencers, and you get a list of 10 to 20 people, and you pay each one of those people, like, $500 for a post. And now you get 20 people writing 20 posts for the cost of what it would have taken you to get one person to do one post. I think that's a really interesting play, something that I would definitely be doing if I was, like, a scrappy startup marketer for sure. She said. Yep, because I guess.

Right.

And then what was the. Let's talk about the play. Like, what was the. What was the offer there? How do you know that these posts drove any business? Because this is where I think a lot. And we. We do a lot of, like, a big part of our business at Exit 5 now is. Is sponsorships. And one of the things that we do is we. I don't do any. Like, when I was just working solo, I would do, like, one off sponsored posts. Like, that's what I did with Capsule as an example. Like, you know, here, here's. Here's my audience. Yes. Here's how much it costs to have me write a post about your thing. But now that we're, like, really growing this business, we don't just do, like, the one off posts anymore, because I want it to be part of Exit 5. And so we do them as part of, like, a bundle. And so a sponsor might do, like, we might do, you know, two webinars, 10 newsletters, and, like, two LinkedIn posts over the course of X months. Right. I think that that works better. But I. I do see a lot of. Sometimes we'll get copy from sponsors or even I just see other things where there's, like, too many calls to action. It's like, we want you to, like, read this link to this blog post and then, like, go to this thing. And then like, here's this UTM tracked link, which I get the intention of that, but you have to understand how these platforms work. And like, LinkedIn does not like links. Neither does Twitter anymore. They don't like links. They don't want to take people off the platform. And so this is, to me, the fun marketing challenge is like, how are we going to work with these influencers where it's not going to be direct response? Because if we put a link here and if everyone in Amanda's posts has to click this link, and then the only way Natalie can measure that is if she gives Amanda the right, like, UTM code It's got to be something like, you know, sign like sign up for Capsule for free and like there's actually no link at all. But the video and the creative and the offer is so good that you want to drive people to like to go to that page. Am I. Do you get what I'm. You get. I'm trying to articulate.

Nailed it.

When we try to over engineer, we try to over engineer. Like everybody wants to do this in like work. Like this is the shift in B2B. People want to work with like you know, influencers, micro influencers, communities, whatever. But they also want to like treat it like it's like a direct response email campaign where you can have perfectly tracked links and it just doesn't work like that. I love what Amanda Natividad says about zero click content. I think you really got to think of like the creative and how you're going to get people to engage without actually like clicking that like UTM link.

Yep, you nailed it. Like the offer, the com, like the whole story. The reason to take any sort of action is all in the video that the creator makes and the copy in their post. And the call to action is usually just within the video or maybe there's a mention in the copy as well. That's like our objective is just for people to create an account and sign up for free and test out Capsule. So that's the call to action. Like try it for free at Capsule Video. And that is just mentioned somewhere. But we don't, yeah, we don't use utms. We don't like have these complex systems and, and we just track, you know, we have like self reported attribution and our signup form which is helpful. But we, you know, we also know we see spikes when we do these big launches. We see spikes in signups and we know that that's attributable to these campaigns and that's, that's good enough for us right now.

Yeah, I love that. I love like just looking at the, looking at the signals like, oh, that was the day Amanda's post dropped and we did that. And so yeah, roughly then you go, you go look at directionally the likes and comments on her post. You go map that back. It's not gonna like, it's not like you open up your dashboard and you see like 75 people said Amanda, you can roughly associate. And I think this is what we're looking for most of the time in marketing. It's not this perfectly measurable thing. It's directionally. Oh yeah, we did this, we spent this with influencers. Like that kind of, that worked. We, we drove signups that day. Let's, let's go do this again.

Yeah. And I'll say at startups, like, it's really important in startup marketing to hone into those signals and not get too caught up in the perfect modeling the perfect system or even, even sustainability and scalability of some of these initiatives. Like one of the things that I think we are doing right now at Capsule is, well, first there's three things that we're doing when it comes to like startup marketing right now. I'd say the first is talking to customers a ton of shipping really fast and then doing things that don't scale. So like things that don't scale for us right now are we're doing these really intimate in person dinners with our ICPs and it takes a ton of work, it's a lot of time, but it is our number one opportunity creator right now and it is working. I'm not too worried yet. We're getting to the point where I am starting to get where I need to start thinking about how to scale it out and make it more sustainable. But right now it's working so well that it's worth spending the time on as opposed to like, well, we shouldn't do it because you know, this will take a lot of time and effort and we don't know how we can possibly scale, scale it at this, at this point.

Yeah, I love that. Talk the startup marketing playbook. Talk to customers, ship fast, do things that don't scale. I'm taking notes. That's great.

That's really, I'm happy to talk about any, any of those as well.

I want to talk about the dinners actually. I want to, I want to dive into the, the dinners. I just want to put a bow on the influencer thing that we're talking about though. Yeah, this is what I want people, this is what I want to push people to think about. I think we spend a lot of time off. We oftentimes spend a lot of time like on the campaign creation and we don't think about the actual delivery of the asset of the creative. And it's like we got this X budget. We're going to do this influencer campaign. We're going to have everybody post this blog post and then we're like, why didn't this work? We're like, I love Gary Vee and I don't care who knows it. And Gary always says that creative is the variable success. And I've always thought about that line. Creative is the variable for success. Creative is like, so when you make the. When you make that great creative, when you make the great video, you have an offer that actually works. You think about the flow. Like, we're going to give this video to Amanda. She's going to post it. Does this flow make sense? Are people actually going to watch it? Are they going to click? Are they going to get back to our site? That's the difference in what makes a great campaign actually work. I. I've, I've done. We did something earlier this year. We work with a company and we're learning. We're learning a lot this year. Like, we're spend a lot more time now with sponsors and, like, we know this audience best. And so we're almost acting like a mini agency with them instead of just being like, yeah, we'll take your money and do a sponsor. We're like, well, we'll take your money and do a sponsor, but we're going to help you do the execution of this because we know how to structure this, how to write it, what the offer needs to be. I just. You got to sweat that part. And that's the fun part of marketing that I think you can have the greatest campaign idea in the world. But if you don't think about the actual execution of, like, what is this going to look like in the feed? What is the copy going to be? Instead, we, like, gloss over those details and go more to, like, well, how are we going to measure that? Where? I'd much rather not worry about how we're going to measure it. I'd rather nail the creative, nail the offer. And how are you going to measure is because you're going to go to your analytics and you're going to see a bunch of people signed up for capital that day. Anyway, that's the end of my rant there.

But, yeah, no, I love that. I think that's one of the things I've learned a lot from Champ, our CEO. He has really great marketing instincts. I've learned a ton about marketing from him. One of those is just like, just a basic understanding of human psychology and really putting yourselves in the position of your target audience and thinking about, if I saw this on my feed, would I do something about it? Is it compelling enough? Is it interesting enough? If not, like, why? Why are we doing this? And just thinking about it, how, you know, where it lives in the wild and what it's going to make people do.

Just taking notes. I got an idea. Okay, so I want to talk about dinners. I also want to talk about CEO with great marketing instincts, too. But so you mentioned dinners. Dinners have been the greatest pipeline driver for you. Let's talk about what does a dinner look like? How many people go? How do you invite them? What is the content of the dinner? I get the concept of dinners. I have done them before. I believe in it. But I want to actually walk through the logistics of this because I think people are wondering, well, how do you do this? And is the dinner. I'm guessing Champ is not standing up and doing like, thank you for coming to our dinner. Now I'm going to pitch capsule, but people still end up buying. So how do you. How have you made dinners work? I know you're trying to scale them, but let's talk about, like, a good dinner that's driven pipeline for you. What does that look like?

Yeah. So we've done three of these so far. We're about to do our. Our fourth one in San Francisco later this month. But the. The way we structure them is. Well, let me back up. The reason we're doing them is because we have identified a pain point that is so strong and so acute with our ICP that we just need more. We need more ways to get in front of our icp. And Cole's emailing asking for an intro meeting is not as effective as inviting them to a dinner with their peers at a really nice restaurant where you can talk about these challenges that, by the way, we know you and all of your peers have. So it's just a more compelling hook, and it's a way for us to build meaningful relationships with people we know we can help solve a problem for. So that's why we're doing it.

Okay.

The mechanics and logistics of how we're doing it is we pick a major city where we know a lot of our ICPs are. So San Francisco, Boston, New York. That's where we've been so far. And it's B2B, SaaS, enterprise companies, heads of creative, heads of video within those companies. So we get them. We. We start with our Networks, our own LinkedIn networks, our investors networks, to try and get warm intros and send those invites to those people, because that's always more effective. But then we also do a lot of cold outreach, too, inviting people to the dinner. And we keep. You know, we pick.

Sorry, the cold outreach. Does that come from you? Does it come from Champ? How do you build the list for that? What does the outreach look like?

Yeah, it's mostly coming from Me occasionally from Champions. But building the list is like a combination of, you know, working with, just using different data providers and combing through my own LinkedIn.

Like, can you, can you talk about what, what, what's a data provider that you might use?

Like Apollo or like other, you know, we have, we work with like a lead gen agency or a like outbound agency that helps us kind of with list building stuff. And I'll just give some criteria, but also like, for example, when we went to Boston, I used to live and work in Boston in the tech scene. So I was very familiar with the companies out there. And so I knew off the top of my head who could potentially be good fits. And I would just do a little digging on LinkedIn and manually search for some of these people. I wouldn't do that for everyone, but it is good to mix in a little bit of your own personal experience if you have experience within those industries. So building the list, sending out invites. I pick the venue first. I pick a cool venue. I spend time going on Eater or Infatuation and looking up the hot new restaurants in that city within the past year or so and then book the venue. We keep it to 16 people and that includes me, our head of sales and our CEO at the dinner. So we have 13 people. We start with inviting a few customers who are in those cities. So like when we were in Boston, we had our contact at HubSpot come to the dinner and our contact at Commvault, who was based in New Hampshire, came down and then the rest are like new prospects and we invite them. We come to dinner. The premise is like, you're going to get together with your peers at this awesome restaurant, talk a little bit about AI and video and talk about, you know, shared challenges, challenges kind of thing. And I will say, the first dinner we did, we actually didn't sell hard enough, if you can believe that. And so in subsequent dinners, we have sold a little harder. And it's not, it's not like if we pull up a PowerPoint presentation and like go through Capsule's value props. It's like our CEO stands up and is like, thank you everyone for being here. Like, and just kind of frames the general challenges that we are seeing across the market and then just like explains what Capsule does and how Capsule solves that. And that's pretty much it. The other way that we are not selling ourselves, but allowing our customers to sell is I then stand up and I say, okay, we're going to do quick intros. You're going to say your name, where you work, what you do there, and then one big bet you're making around video this year and bonus points if it's related to AI. So I start off, I give a little capsule spiel because I use Capsule. And then our customers stand up and say how they're really excited about Capsule solving XYZ problem. And then prospects stand up and share like, well, you know, I'm really facing these challenges with scaling video at our organization and keeping everyone on brand. And then that's just further validation and fodder for our sales to follow up and have conversations. So that's sort of the main structure. And then the last thing I'll share that has been a key kind of marketing play in this whole dinner motion is I'm taking pictures during the dinner on a nice camera. I get pictures of everyone at the dinner that night. I upload them into a Dropbox folder, draft an email with everyone's LinkedIn profile links to connect everyone send a link of the photos and say, you know, thanks again for coming. Here's some photos from the dinner. Feel free to post on social media and tag Capsule. And we get like three to six people from that dinner posting about the dinner, which then creates this whole second round of like, FOMO within their networks and people being like, let me know when the next one is. And it builds momentum for the next dinner.

Yeah, this is great. People are gonna love this episode. This is what I want. The tactical stuff, the real stuff. So I love this. I love this play. And there's a couple things to unp. I love the idea of having customers there, like just a couple to talk about how they're using it. Number two is I think the reason people go to this is because we put a lot of stock into what we do for work and even if we don't want to. You know, I go to my kids T ball game and some person shakes my hand, the very first question out of their mouth is, what do you do for work? It just is how we identify as humans. And so if you can gather people, like all, hey, like, I think if you said, if it was all different roles from all different companies, I don't think you'd be able to fill rooms for the dinners. But if you said, hey, we have, we have like video produce, we have, you know, video team members from like all of these companies coming for this dinner. You're like, okay, cool. This is like a room full of my peers. Because anybody that's been to something like that before, let's say if I'm a copywriter, I'm in a room full of 10 other copywriters. Like, I know I'm going to get smarter. Like, yeah, yeah, whatever. I'm never going to buy Capsule, but they're going to buy me a steak and I'm going to like, you know, get to network with Natalie. But then kind of halfway through the day, dinner, you've like talked to three or four more people. You kind of like the Capsule team. You leave that feeling good. A week or so later, you get a follow up from the sales team. Not with a hard sell, but just like a, hey, let me tell you about this thing that we do. I do think this play works for that reason. And people are more likely. I can be very introvert. I'm like a mix of introvert and extrovert. I can see, I can see. Like I used to be. Like, man, nobody's going to want to come to these centers. Like, I wouldn't want to do this. I want to leave my family on a Tuesday night. All of a sudden you get a highly curated invite. You see who else is there. It's 10 to 12, like people in your industry. It's a nice dinner at a nice restaurant. It's two hours. You're like, okay, I'll go. And it's fun, it's fun to be around other people and to like, you know, share stories about work. And I think, I think this can work really well. And I like the idea of like getting everybody to speak by having them share something. Another, a mistake I made in one of the first dinners that we did was it's. There's usually like two or three people at the dinner. Most oftentimes men who just like hog the entire conversation. And so one trick that I learned from somebody was we had like a multiple course meal and we just would rotate everybody in between or like, hey, sorry, this is going to be a little bit weird. We're going to clean out all your stuff. But like appetizers are going to come. Then you're going to rotate your. George, you're going here. You know, Natalie, you're going here. I just, even if people think that's uncomfortable, it just mixes things up a little bit more and it, and it makes like two people that hog the conversation. Not be able to do that and just mixes the group a little bit better. But I really, I really like this play.

Yeah. Two other things we do that I didn't mention is I'm very intentional about the seating arrangement. So if there's someone we really want to be next to our head of sales to, like, learn more about, you know, what's going on there or our CEO. But then I'll sort of group people because at these dinners we have, like, heads of creative. Then we have some, like, VPs of brand or, like, heads of marketing. And then maybe there's like a couple, like, heads of video. Those titles are less common just because it's not as common in B2B SaaS companies. But I will group those people together. And then before dessert, I make that kind of awkward announcement. I'm like, hey, we're gonna switch spots just so that you have. Actually, I do. I let people know ahead of time that that's going to be coming so that if they're trapped next to someone that they really don't like talking to, they're not, like, dreading the whole night and trying to dip out early. So I say before dessert, we're going to get up and these, you know, four people are going to switch with these four people kind of thing so that you have a chance to. To mingle.

I like that. What else was going to ask you about dinners?

Oh, one other thing I was going to mention is in the invite, like you mentioned, people want to come to these dinners because their peers are there and they want to learn and network from their peers. And also people are still, I think, really craving in person connection post Covid. I think there's just still that, like, hunger for it, especially since most of us are remote now.

Oh, my God. I went to a dinner. I went to a dinner. I got invited to a dinner before an event in New York, and it was like the greatest night of my life.

Exactly. Okay, so at our last dinner in New York, one of the guys that came.

Who am I right now? What am I doing? Am I okay?

One of the. One of the guys that came to our last dinner at New York, he was on his last week of parental leave. He had just had his second kid, and he was like. He was like, I'm so excited. Like, he was having the best night of his life. I was like, I. I know exactly how you feel.

Right.

So nice to be out.

Did he just. Did he even breathe when he ate that steak? Where did that food. Where his food go? You know? And like, look, we're any. You can, like, just in any walk of life, like, you can win somebody over with a great meal. And so I also like that you're not outsourcing this right now. Like, you. You seem to you have, you seem to have an interest in food. Do you have a, a side business with, with pizza ovens or something like that?

Yeah.

And so I like that you're taking, that you take pride in like finding cool restaurants. Again, back to what we talked about with content. This is the, this is the offer here, right? It's like you're not saying like, hey, like come of us were going to go to Cheesecake Factory, right? No disrespect to Cheesecake Factory if you do want to sponsor Exit 5 at some point. But I like that you're kind of like handpicking these like cool spots and curating this experience for, for people. And you can also get a pretty good restaurants like when you pay up front like on a fixed price menu on like a Tuesday night or something. And so they, it's. You can kind of get, get a little bit of leverage in, in what you pay for these things too.

Yeah, sorry. The other thing I forgot to mention was when we invite people in, like the email copy, we keep it very short. We try to instill some FOMO. So you know, we say this is like our fourth VIP dinner. We're hosting around AI and B2B video. Previous attendees have included heads of creative and video from companies like HubSpot, Figma, Brex and Notion. Would you be interested in attending or like can I save a spot for company name kind of thing? You know, we have, we have a few slots left. Can I save them for that?

I like that. I like that. Because you got to know, you want to know who else is going, right?

Exactly.

I'm going to admit something. One, one time I haven't done this anymore. One time I may or may not have sent out it. In my scrapier days, I may or may not have sent out a dinner invite saying something like so and so from so and so is coming. I had emailed them, they had not confirmed yet, but it's like a little bit of like a little like, okay, I said I know people would come if I say Natalie's coming. So I'm saying that Natalie's coming. Then I get those two people in, then I can go back to Natalie and say, hey, and this person's Natalie. Yeah. So yeah, a little bit of I've.

Been there, I've been there before.

And we gotta be able to admit, admit stuff like that. Okay, this has been great. Sometimes I mess around with like what I'm gonna write for the title while I'm doing this. I was gonna. We gotta work dinners into the Title of this episode. We haven't, we haven't had this much of a deep dive. I wanna wrap up and ask about just from a company strategy perspective, your place you're selling to the enterprise but you're, your funnel is free. Like do you want an enterprise customer to start with free? Is free the entry point or do you have like multiple funnels where like somebody might be on free forever but there's also enterprise? What does that motion look like?

So we're, we're an enterprise sales led. Let me back, let me start that over. We are a sales led motion. That's our main focus right now. But we are starting to build a foundation for a true product led growth motion because we don't want what happened to Envision to happen to us. So what happened with Envision and figma, I don't know if you're familiar with this is Envision started with the enterprise top down sales led motion and they dominated the market for a long time. And then Figma was just building this incredible product that everyone was using and everyone was loving and then these enterprise companies would have these contracts come up with Envision and they're like I'm sorry, everyone in our organization is now using figma. Like we, there's, we can't, we can't work with Envision because everyone's already on figma. So we're, we're starting to, now that we have product market fit and you know we've, we're sort of at that point where we're crossing the chasm as Geoffrey Moore says. We're like, we know we have a thing that works and it's going to work. We're building that foundation for a true product led growth motion where people do come in on the free tier. But right now it is a mix of both. We do have a lot of free users and a lot of paid business users but the goal is for them to come from enterprise companies and really fuel the enterprise motion as well.

Yeah, I think it makes for way. I guess I realize it's not possible with every company but I think if you can have a enterprise motion but have a free version of the product, it makes it, it makes it more fun and much easier from a marketing standpoint to get people in. It's hard when you're like it's hard to have two funnels. It's hard to have a, not a free, like a product that people can't like interact with and get and touch and play around with before they buy it. So I just Wanted to mention that. And then we only have a couple minutes, but maybe just talk about your relationship with the CEO. So you mentioned that the CEO has great marketing instincts. Like, like, how do you see your role? How do you bring him into things? How do you not fight with those? You know, you, you don't want to always be an order taker. But some of that is like realizing like, I had kip from HubSpot CMO on the podcast and he, he always talks about how the first job of the head of marketing, the first job of the cmo, is realizing that the CEO is the cmo. Seems like you might be in one of those cases, just kind of want to hear about your relationship, how you work together on marketing.

I was gonna bring up that exact quote because when I heard him say that, I was like, like 100, 100. And I think that's the way it has to. I mean, at least at Capsule, working with Champ, like, it works so well that way. When the founder truly is leading the vision and the brand and setting the tone for everything.

I think it's either, I think it's either that or it's like the CEO, like has no involvement at all and I'm not going to work at that company anyway. So it's like I'd rather only have it this way.

Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, I think we make a really great team because he has a very clear vision and like I said, really great marketing instincts and really understands the value of brand and marketing and messaging that it's easy for me to execute and brainstorm and provide feedback and gut check and provide other ideas as well. But having the founder and CEO really drive the brand and the vision is, I, I can't imagine working in another capacity. It's so, it's so rewarding and, and beneficial to have it work that way.

Well, the most, the most important ingredient in marketing is the story. Because the story, like the story and the strategy go hand in hand. And if you don't have a founder led vision, if you don't have a founder led story and try, there's no vision there. And when I started working for myself, I did some consulting and I was helping some companies with positioning and I was working with one company, we were like trying to beat them so hard. And like, you need a differentiator, you need a differentiation. The reason they had no differentiator is because there was no vision from the founders versus, like, I worked at a company drift where like the founders almost had like too much vision. It was amazing. It was like they could tell me where they thought the company was going to be in 20 years, and I could use that in our marketing and write about. You got to have vision to be able to then go create great marketing, marketing, messaging.

Exactly. I view my role as, I think this is where my background in content has really helped, is when you work in content, you work with a lot of subject matter experts and have to kind of translate their really smart thoughts and ideas into a message that makes sense for a target audience. And so I view that as a big part of my role is like, I understand his vision and his message and what's going on and what he's trying to accomplish. My goal is to kind of translate that and into a format, into a channel, into a campaign, all of that kind of stuff.

Love it. All right, Natalie, great job. Great hanging with you. Great talking to you. I show you my, my. It's upside down, but my lessons and learnings from today. Good, good stuff. Good to see you. I'll see you next week. We're going to do a product launch webinar together, but I got a bunch out of this interview. Natalie Taylor, go find her on LinkedIn, connect with her, send her a message. Be like, hey, I heard you on Dave's podcast. It was great. I learned about X, Y and Z. And check out Capsule. All right. And thank you for being a great member of the Exit 5 community. It's nice to have a member on every now and then, too.

Yeah, thanks. And one, one last thing I forgot to mention is we have a special discount code for anyone who listens to the podcast.

Oh, get out of here. Come on. Did she take notes? Take notes, everybody. Thank you. This is how you do it. Go ahead. Sorry, I'll show up. Go ahead.

It's okay. Our paid Capsule plan, you can get 25% off for life with code E5.25. So use that on a paid capsule plan, which gives you unlimited exports, all the features, everything amazing about capsule. 25% off for life.

Good job. That's called being prepared, ladies and gentlemen. I did a. I took a screen anytime. I'm doing a. We have a. Just a Slack channel in our company. Slack for the podcast. And anytime I'm. I like to. I believe in, like, showing our work and everybody kind of shares, like, what they're doing. I don't really do anything other than, like, respond to Slack Messages, post on LinkedIn and host the podcast at the company anymore. So I take a screenshot of, like, who I have on the podcast to show the team that. And Matt, Matt said he was. He's blown away by your camera, so great, great camera work, whatever camera you got over there. And now I'm gonna have to tell him that you, you overd delivered. So good job, good job.

Thanks so much.

Your camera so great, great camera work, whatever camera you got over there. And now I'm going to have to tell them that you, you over delivered. So good job, good job.

Thanks so much.

See?