How Gretta van Riel Built 5 Multi-Million-Dollar Enterprises in 5 Years

Hello everyone. Today we have Greta Van Riel hailing from Australia. She is a serial entrepreneur that has built companies such as Skinny Me Tea, The Fifth Watches, Drop Bottle, Hate Influencers, and probably 10,000 more other things that I don't know of, but we'll talk about that in a second. But, and here's the cool thing too. A lot of you that ask me about influencer marketing all the time, well, guess what? She is influencer marketing queen. She has an audience of over 16 million people spread across her social channels. I'll let her elaborate on that in a little bit. Greta, how's it going?

Yeah, good. Thanks. It's morning here, so just starting the day off. I've got a cup of Earl Grey tea at the moment, so not too bad.

Wonderful. And we're going to talk about that tea in a second too. But yeah, I mean, why don't you tell us a little bit about kind of, you know, what your story is because you're doing so much stuff. I mean, there has to be some kind of background to all this.

Yeah. I guess my more entrepreneurial story started in 2012. I started my first startup which was Skinny Me Tea. I was working full-time at the time at a digital marketing— well, it was in a digital marketing role at a print transitioning to digital agency. And I just had done a lot of detoxes on the market at the time and I'd basically run out of them and I'd always been really addicted to tea. So I started playing with my own tea blends that were detox tea blends, um, and I was testing them out and I was doing them at work and doing my own little detox with tea. And people started asking me what I was doing and they wanted to try as well. And then they would get really good results from the detox with tea and they'd let their friends know as well. And so I started getting some demand and I was— Getting a bit frustrated, like dealing with everybody over Facebook Messenger and email and stuff. And I was like, there's gotta be an easier way to do this. Like, how do I make an online store for this? So I was thinking about all that. And then just one night in bed, I kind of came up with my like aha moment, which was the word Teatox itself. So I was trying to think of a way to describe the detox with tea, and Teatox would make a lot of sense now. What is that, by the way?

What— like, I love tea. I don't know what a teatox is.

It's, um, it's like a 2-step program. You have a tea in the morning that is like quite metabolism boosting and also a bit of an appetite suppressant, and then a tea at night that aids digestion and helps you sleep. So it's a 2-step program and it goes for either 14 or 28 days.

Oh, cool.

So yeah, I guess it was that it was coming up with that term, Teatox, that really sparked it for me. Like, I've always been quite communication-driven, so I just had to pursue it after that. And so I got up the next morning, and it was a weekend, and I made my Shopify store in that day. And we launched for sales on— I think it was a Monday. And we sold 4 packs of tea to people that I didn't know at all, which was— Really exciting. So yeah, it all began though with Instagram for us.

Got it. Okay. And we'll jump to that in a second. I mean, with SkinnyMe Tea, I mean, it seems like you got success pretty quickly. I mean, in the first year, how much did you do in terms of revenues and where are you sitting at today?

Well, we grew really, really quickly from $0 to $600,000 a month. So in under 6 months. So that grew Very fast. I'd never had a company before. I was a uni student. I was used to earning like all of nothing.

Haha.

And so, yeah, it was— it did grow very, very quickly. I think our first 2 to 3 years were our highest for growth, and now we've kind of plateaued a bit. But it's like, it's a lot easier to manage these days because obviously we've been running the company. 5 years old now, SkinnyMe Teas. So I mean, as far as people say, a lot of people come to me and say, oh, so it's just on autopilot now? And you're like, absolutely not.

Yeah.

But there are a lot of things that we do that are similar again and again. So it does, you know, get a little easier 5 years in as opposed to that first year that was just insane. I was just— I had never founded a company before, obviously, and I didn't know much about business at all. In fact, I made some Absolutely monumental mistakes. The first of which being I operated as a sole trader for the whole first year. I didn't even know how to set up like a company structure, which meant that I was taxed at an individual rate rather than a company rate.

What's the difference over there?

Oh, 50% for an individual. So that was a big one. And a lot of other things have kind of been huge mistakes that I've learned from, especially with Sydney MeTea.

Got it. Okay. So, you know, first year, I mean, you hit that $7.2 million a year, you know, run rate. And it sounds like, you know, a lot of success was built off of Instagram. So what did you do in the very beginning with Instagram and where are you at today? I mean, massive, massive audience, right?

Yeah. Instagram to begin with, it was a really, it was an emerging platform probably back in 2012. Not many brands were on there at all. To put your brand on Instagram, all you did was like change your username to a brand name. So we just had an Instagram called SkinnyMeTea. I had had like a bit of success growing my own personal Instagram already because I kind of liked the shift away from like the friend-centric economy of Facebook, for example, to the interest-centric economy of Instagram. So I started kind of building an audience around interests rather than just around like personal relationships. liked the idea that you could follow people that you didn't know already, a bit more like a Twitter or something. So back in 2012, it— like, a lot of people do that whole follow/unfollow thing for automation, like through automation now. Well, not so much lately, seeing as a lot of the automation platforms have been shut down by Instagram. But I basically— it was a matter of just doing things that didn't scale. Like, it was just interacting with the audience nonstop. There was a bit of— I would follow, like, I would think, like, who is my demographic? And all my friends were really interested in the TikToks. So I'd follow all of them and then I'd follow all of their friends and then I'd follow someone from a different city and then follow them and all of their friends until I seriously felt like I'd followed every single girl around my age in Melbourne and Sydney.

That seems like a lot of work, right? How did you, like, stay on top of that? It was a lot of manual work.

Well, I don't know. I just did it each night like after work when I was watching TV or something. It was just a very manual task at the time doing that stuff, but then it became increasingly, you know, to do with customer service and stuff. And I did our own customer service for SkinnyMe Tea for the first 6 months as we grew from like that $0 to $600K a month. So I learned so much about our audience in that time. So that was really, really helpful.

Got it. Okay, so, you know, I'll start with the big number first. So you have 16 million people spread across different social channels. I mean, what are you able to do with that audience right now? Kind of, if you can provide examples, that'd be great. And then I'll have a follow-up to that.

Yeah, for sure. Well, I think that having that audience has taught me that, well, more so the importance of audience over product potentially. Like just the idea of product-market fit, for example, for me, I have a bit of a semantic problem with it. I prefer the term market-product fit because I think that it's about finding your audience, growing and establishing your audience, and then developing a product. And just the idea that if market comes before product, you might focus on market first, just chronologically. So yeah, with Instagram, that audience has helped establish multiple different brands. We use that audience as well to help us launch our watch company called The Fifth watches. And the Vith watches grew even quicker than Skinny Me Tea did. And we, on day 1 of sales, we did $100,000. And on our first birthday, we did $1 million in a day of revenue.

Wow.

So that was a really, really fast-growing, really exciting brand as well, because basically the way that it worked was it was through scarcity and exclusivity. Exclusivity. So we only sold our watches on the 5th of each month for 5 days. So that's kind of the way that it worked. It was exclusive through time, not by price, because the price point was quite accessible. All the watches are under $200.

Got it. Yeah, you know what's interesting? I'm looking at everything that you do. I mean, you know, we mentioned before this podcast that, you know, you're always hanging out on Facebook, you're sharing a bunch of knowledge around marketing, you're hanging out in different groups and And then it's like, you know, you hear the info marketers out there, you know, when the people launching courses, well, you know, there's the scarcity thing, right? They're taking it away, they're opening it, taking it away and things like that. So you're kind of doing that with Instagram, which I think is genius. But a lot of this other stuff too, it's like, you know, you had success with SkinnyMe Tea first and you have a template for successful ecommerce and you're basically duplicating that across the board right now. Is that what I'm hearing?

Yeah, it's a repeatable framework. For sure.

Love it. And then I think you also did a course with Nathan Chan, who we've also had on this podcast. I mean, is that basically your framework right there?

Yeah, it is. It's teaching like our— my ecommerce framework broken down into kind of 6 steps. And yeah, it's a really good one. We've only had it out for a couple of months at this stage. So we haven't done all that much marketing around it other than to the Founder Database. But we'll definitely be letting people know more and more about that course as time goes on.

Awesome. Love it. And then, okay, so, you know, my follow-up question is, you know, most people are like, oh, you know, 16 million people, that's very daunting, right? So probably most people here are like, if I can have 100,000 people, that'd be awesome. So if you were to give people kind of a framework or a process to follow, whether it's watching TV or using specific tools, how do people go from 0 to 100K on Instagram, for example?

Yeah. Well, my following is quite diversified as well. It's not just obviously on the one account. That's my combined following across all my different accounts. And what I've been successful in is building up accounts in the vertical that I'm interested in. So for example, with SkinnyMe Tea, well, I learned this actually because our Instagram account got hacked and deleted when it got to 200K at the end of the start of 2013, actually. So I was like, oh God, like, what is the quickest way I can possibly grow this back? So I had to like suddenly think of like everything I'd learned on Instagram and the way to kind of like hack that growth back as quick as possible. And that was mostly for me through growing vertical accounts and then using those vertical accounts as a funnel into my main product accounts. So for example, Skinny Me Tea, we have that Instagram, but then we also have like 10 others around the health niche, like detox tips, detox water, Be Fit Foods, Be Fit Smoothies. Like, there's just so many different vertical accounts for us. And it's about kind of, yeah, they're kind of closer to the top of the funnel. And then we keep moving people down the funnel and the product pages are more for like lead nurturing. And then once you get them to kind of more sign up to your email database or like across to your website, that's more the conversion stage for us. So definitely developing those vertical accounts has worked really, really well. And vertical accounts are much easier to grow because you can do things like leverage viral trending content. And the way that I would identify viral trending content, it's pretty simple. Follow some of the vertical accounts that are like your industry leaders within your niche. You'll be able to find them. They're just large accounts. You can check in the top posts in hashtags, for example, to find them, then find their best performing content. Say like usually they get like 4,000 likes on a photo and then one has like 12,000. That's the photo that you want to kind of repost and repurpose. And so that's kind of the main way that we find like viral content. And then it's about growing that viral content again. So I mean, as you know, like in any kind of content marketing, when you do Like repurpose content. The next stage is all about the distribution and the best way that's working for distribution right now on Instagram. And we're actually releasing a tool for this on Monday, uh, is engagement groups. So have you heard of engagement groups?

Are these the same things as pods?

Yeah. Pods basically.

Yeah. I need to be in more pods. I've been in one like really crappy pod and like nobody helps each other.

No. Yeah, see, that's the issue as well. So like, there are a lot of problems in pods, but first I'll describe what pods are, I guess, because if some people haven't heard of them, basically they're, they're private groups of like-minded people that are willing to mutually interact with each other's content in order to grow their accounts. So basically, if we want to put it down on a like really simple to understand level, you find other people in your niche with a similar sized account And within the first, you know, certain amount of time after you post a post, you engage with each other's content with, you know, authentic comments and you like and you might do, you know, whatever else is asked of you within the group. Maybe, you know, if it was a Product Hunt group, you'd upvote. If it's LinkedIn, it's mostly liking, commenting, and even sharing if you're comfortable with that. So I'm a part of some really powerful LinkedIn groups at the moment actually, which have like increased my LinkedIn engagement by an insane amount. I used to be getting closer to like 10,000 to 30,000 views, and I think my best ever was 70,000. Now I have 14,000 comments— I mean, comments— I have 14,000 followers on LinkedIn. I get 100,000 views on every post, and like my best post has close to 500,000 views. Yeah, let's talk about that for a moment. And that's all from engagement groups.

Okay, so what do you do around kind of engagement groups in LinkedIn?

Yeah, well, it's the same as all of them. You create a group of like-minded people from within your niche. Just see the people that are also posting and getting great engagement that you follow already. Then you just approach them and you can create a group together on whichever platform. The issue is They're like all engagement groups are across all different platforms and there's kind of no way to discover where they are unless you're a part of like the inner circle or unless you go ahead and create one yourself. But then a lot of people are already a part of them and then they won't maybe interact as much in your one. So basically the problem that we're solving with our new product— So basically the problem that we're solving with our new product, which is called HeyEngage, is it's a pod discovery platform as well. So you can go in, you can discover the pods that already exist. You can also create pods through the platform and you can manage your pod in the platform. And we have like a few different things to help keep the engagement within your engagement group up because as you know, like engagement's most powerful when it's received as close to the post being posted as possible because I mean, the way that social media algorithms work is that It releases— like, the algorithm releases your post and, like, determines who can see your post to a segment of your audience first. Let's say 10% of your audience first, and then the remaining 90%, that is determined— like, how many people of that 90% see your post is determined by how well the first 10% engage. Um, so that's kind of the way that it works. So the most sensitive aspects in engagement groups are definitely time and niche. So time, as in you want to engage as quickly as possible, and niche because accounts engaging within your niche with your content will boost that out to your following more so because platforms like Instagram, for example, classify all accounts into niche. Like, for example, you might notice that if you like, like, 5 photos in a row of a car in your newsfeed, then as soon as you go to the Explore page, the whole page is now full of cars.

Right.

Because it's like, well, that's your niche interest. So that's also the way that it works for engagement. So if you are engaging with other people within your niche, you're far more likely to get pushed out to their audiences as well on the Explore page, and those audiences will also be more engaged and interested in your content. So you're much more likely to get more engagement on your post from that. You know, somebody that's interested in cars would rather look at a car post than a picture of a smoothie. So it just makes sense. So our entire platform, HeyEngage, is built around— it's very niche sensitive, it's size sensitive in terms of matching accounts up of a similar size, and it's time sensitive. We have things like engagement timers that you can set, and only the people that engage within that timeframe are counted. within that engagement group round.

Love it. Yeah, so I, so I'm looking at, I mean, so you have, there's HeyEngage, and then is that the same thing as HeyInfluencers? Did you rename it or are they different?

No, no, that's different. HeyEngage is the engagement group platform, um, which works for any platform, um, and HeyInfluencers is my influencer marketing company. So one of the main successes that we've had in building our brands alongside my own social media audience has been obviously leveraging relationships and other people's audiences through influencer marketing. For the Fifth, for example, apart from launching with my Instagrams, we also launched with 30 different influencers that we'd sent out sample watches to, to do anything from, you know, content creation for us through to, you know, converting through to email signups, because our signups obviously for a launch were a big indicator of kind of the sales that we thought we might be able to achieve. Well, I've been doing influencer marketing for like 5 years on Instagram. With Skinny Me Tea, I first realized influencer marketing was really, really powerful when a girl with 1,000 followers posted on us and we had our biggest day of sales ever back in 2012. So it was like— and 1,000 followers wasn't— it's like, that was an influencer.

How much was that? I mean, so 1,000 people, I mean, how much sales did you get from that day in terms of volume?

Oh, we got— well, that was like very early on within the first like couple of weeks. But I think that was the first day that we did over $1,000 in a day.

Crazy.

So we were like, okay, so this girl has posted on us. So every time I was going through and like engaging with our audience, every time I saw like a girl that was quite health conscious that was engaging with us with over 1,000 followers, I just screenshot her account, reach out to her and send her some tea for free. And that was kind of just the way that We started doing influencer marketing back then, like because nobody else was doing it on Instagram, you could get away with just product gifting. Now, of course, you know, influencers like larger macro influencers often expect a payment per post. But yeah, back in the day you could literally just send it out and you had like a 90% positive response rate as well. So that was awesome.

Influencers, that's basically a place where you can go and connect with influencers because they're, you know, they're hard to find, right?

Yeah, yeah, of course. We take you through kind of the entire process, like from campaign creation, which are templated kind of campaign creation. It's a templated campaign creation tool. So you pick from one of 3 different goals, like whether your goal is content creation, sales, or increasing your social following. And then we take you through the entire step of like, we take you through step by step creating a campaign for an influencer marketing Like campaign as well. So then it takes you to the find stage where you can connect with influencers, and it works kind of from 2 different ways. Obviously, you can either reach out to them or they can reach out to your campaign. But on HEY, you need to have matched to then go and work together. So both the influencer and the brand need to HEY each other before it takes you through to the negotiation stage.

Oh, cool.

So it's like a dating app. Which is kind of handy. Yeah, just because, well, it does make a lot of sense that it would be like a dating app rather than like a marketplace, because I mean, marketplaces work really, really well for things like houses with Airbnb or cars with Uber, but people can't really necessarily be a part of a marketplace. Like, the thing that brands need to stop trying to do is imagining that influencers are just like a number on a page or a figure line in a budget sheet. Like, they're still people at the end of the day, and relationship building is the key to influencer marketing. It's like, it's not trying to scale some sort of like, you know, like ROI, right? Like the confusion between influencer marketing and performance marketing is becoming really detrimental to the influencer marketing space. Like, yes, there are ways to track influencer ROI, and we're building them into the platform at the moment, you know. For sales, for example, it's through, you know, maybe using individualized discount codes or cookie tracking. But for following, we are building a tool at the moment that can track, like, say an influencer posts on your brand, it knows how many new followers you've gained off their followers. So it's able to kind of show that, and it really helps with diminishing returns as well. So you can see something like, okay, the first time this influencer posted on my brand, we gained 50 followers. The second time we gained 20. Now we gained 3. Okay, maybe it's time, you know, that we start like cultivating a relationship with somebody else. Got it.

Okay. You know, this is— I mean, I'm thinking right now, I'm looking at, you know, the stuff that you're working on, and there has to be some kind of master plan here. I can see how some of this is connecting, but I don't want to, you know, I'm not going to make any assumptions. I mean, what is the master plan for Greta?

Yeah, well, I've definitely been more so in the e-com space until more lately after we started Hey. So Hey Influencers and Hey Engage will go together obviously really nicely. Like, we've always kind of like with Hey, I've always focused on kind of the more multidirectional nature of influencer marketing, not just that kind of commercial relationship that's from like a brand working with an influencer, but also having understood the market from both sides as a brand interacting with influencers, as an influencer interacting with brands. I know that 80% of your time as an influencer is spent in growing your own account and maybe only 20% is spent interacting with brands. So we wanna build growth tools that help influencers to maintain the growth of their accounts as well. But definitely moving more into the educational and software as a service type space because like every entrepreneur knows that like if they could just clone their brain and like have 2 versions or 3 versions of themselves, like their day would just be a lot easier and their life would be a lot easier. Basically, that's the way that I see software, like as a way that you are kind of able to like clone your brain or the information that is in your brain and Like activate that at scale for like a lot more people than you would physically be able to reach if you were just, you know, having one-on-one conversations.

Love it. Okay. So I mean, we've talked about, you know, Instagram, we've talked about LinkedIn, but we also talked about how you're really prolific on Facebook. So what else are you excited about in terms of, you know, business and marketing right now? You're everywhere.

Facebook, definitely. Like it's just a huge opportunity again. Like I've spoken to so many people that have been like, oh, I haven't used Facebook in years, but this year I've got right back into it. They've done something really smart cultivating these kind of micro-communities through groups. Facebook groups are just such a huge opportunity right now for everyone. The other huge opportunity on Facebook right now is Messenger bots as well. I'm having a play with my Messenger bot at the moment which I'm calling 100 Days of Health. You get a healthy tip to your inbox for 100 days, basically. But it's just a different way to diversify your user base— sorry, your database of customers, or your database of leads, or whatever you'd like to call them. I've always been like very into diversifying the risk of my data. So like I wouldn't just keep it all on Instagram, for example, because Instagram can change the algorithm, they can delete your account. You don't own that data yourself. Email, yes, you do, but email open rates are going down and down over time. So it's just about getting where the most eyes will be, I guess. And I'd say Messenger is like Messenger bots and Messenger marketing is like the single biggest opportunity behind email marketing right now. Right.

Totally agree with that.

In terms of contacting your leads.

I mean, we're seeing open rates up to 94%, and I mean, that's, you know, that's B2C, right? So that's crazy. You never get that unless you're It's like email back in the day. But I am wondering too, because, you know, people in the audience are like, oh, you know, Greta's talking about Facebook groups. So which Facebook groups do you really like? What do you recommend?

My very, very favorite Facebook group is Badass Marketers and Founders. Do you know that one?

Yep, I'm in that one with you.

Yeah, yeah. And that's Josh's group, Josh Pitcher.

Yeah.

And he's a friend. We actually met in real life recently, which was awesome. And he's a super, super switched-on guy and amazing growth marketer. And he just has a really similar mentality to me as well about founders helping other founders. So he's always willing to kind of have a chat. And I met him up in Queensland, actually in Australia. He was over at QUT, which is the Queensland University of Technology, helping their accelerator founders like learn more about community building and stuff. So Josh and his group BAMF, so Badass Marketers and Founders, is probably my favorite. But then I'm a part of all different ones. All Things Social Media is another amazing one, ATSM. I'm loving Charm Offensive, this like copywriting group at the moment. Like there's just so many that I'm a part of that I use like Nonstop all the time.

Yeah, those are great groups. I think I actually joined Charm maybe on your recommendation or somebody else's. We'll just give— we'll just say you gave me the recommendation. Basically, I think I just—

Pretend.

Yeah, let's just say that. I think it was you, 99% sure. Yeah, you know, one thing I read, I mean, before we even talked today, I mean, it's one of the big struggles you face is, well, $1.3 million mistake around the SkinnyMe tea. Do you want to talk about that?

Well, no, but yes. No, no, I talk about it all the time now. Obviously wasn't the best moment in the history of the company, but learned a lot from it. Basically, we were— I moved to Hong Kong for a while after SkinnyMe Tea started for different reasons. I just loved the city. And we were playing with, you know, tea manufacturing in China. Like when you think of tea, you think of China. A lot of the tea is grown there. So, you know, I was just like, okay, this is a great opportunity. Um, went over and put in a few smaller orders with a manufacturer and was really happy with the quality. Was even having it sent back to Australia to get quality tested as well so that, you know, we knew that the quality assurance wasn't, you know, being gamed or anything like it can be in China. Um, so we were really, really happy and I was like, okay, I hate distribution. I hate manufacturing stuff. I don't want to have to think about any of this again for a year, so I'm going to place a year's order of tea, and then I won't need to think about it again. So I did that, and that order cost $1.3 million. And we got it delivered, and we opened it up, and it was basically like Compost that had metal bolts in it, springs, E. coli. You know, it was just like, yeah, E. coli is a type of bacteria. It was absolutely disgusting. Like, I wouldn't even touch it without gloves. So, obviously, I had to throw it all out. It cost $15,000 just to throw it out as well.

Who are you going to hire for that? Like, hey, I need to hire someone to throw this. Like, how does that work? Who do you look for?

I just— it was just a garbage disposal company, like trucks that take things to the tip, basically. Like, that is all. Like, there was nothing we could do with it. There was nothing that we could, you know, like, because it had metal bolts in it and stuff and E. coli, you couldn't even use it as mulch in a garden or something. Like, it was just absolutely ruined. So that was a bad day.

But— What did you learn from it?

Well, I think the biggest thing that I've learned from like my combined mistakes in like starting startups has been basically the same thing that like to not fail overall and to, you know, have like a successful company, you need to get like, you need to cut your losses as quickly as possible. Like you, you need to just be like, okay, well, that was terrible. And then just come up with whatever you can see as a solution. And sometimes that solution is just getting over it and not thinking about it.

it again. Right.

Or sometimes it's obviously solving some kind of problem that led to that. So, I mean, obviously you're never going to repeat the same big problem twice, but that's not really the main learning that I learned, like, from that happening to me. It was honestly just that, like, you just— like, things just happen again and again. If you're still kind of getting over the last one, then it'll just, like, slowly but surely pull your resilience down. But if you can just get over them really, really quickly, like, I honestly just I like, you know, I'll do everything and cry and be like super upset for like a couple of hours or even a whole night sometimes. Like one day is my longest like mourning period that I allow myself to have. And then the next day I get up and I'm kind of like newly inspired again. It's kind of chaos theory stuff like, you know, what comes up must— well, what goes down must come up type of thing rather than the other way around. So I don't know. Yeah, I think that definitely just trying to cut your losses as quickly as possible and admit when you have made a mistake and just don't have an ego in it. Just be like, okay, that was my bad. Don't try to blame it on other people and stuff. You're just going to spend so much more time getting over it and then you lose all that time and opportunity cost is huge.

Totally. So suck it up and get over it, right?

Yeah, literally.

Cool. So we're going to work towards wrapping up here. Just a few more questions on my end. But I'm really wondering, I mean, you know, with, you know, the different companies that you have, you know, the new Hey Influencers, Hey Engage as well, how do you structure your day?

Yeah, it is dependent. I can't do the same thing every day. Like, I can't be like, okay, this is my morning routine, this is my evening routine, this is what I do during the day. Like, that's just not the way that my brain works. It hates routine. And as soon as I get into too much of a routine, then I kind of get complacent, and then I like, I can't be motivated enough to keep doing what it takes to do all of this. But I have incredible teams, of course, that are like so, so helpful without ever, like throughout everything. But in terms of the day, just for me, like if it's not in my calendar, it's not going to be done. I just use my calendar as my kind of accountability tool, and I'm just entirely accountable to my calendar. So I'm very careful about what gets added in there and what doesn't. So I just use my calendar as much as possible and work from there. So I mean, I know kind of what my basic outline of my day will look like from my calendar, and then as priorities move and get shifted, so does the calendar.

Great. Makes sense. I'm the same way too. So what's one new tool that you've added in the last year that's added a lot of value? So you can't name your own tools. And an example might be like Evernote.

Well, what would one tool be? God, I use so many different tools all the time.

Or your favorite one.

My favorite would probably be, and it's apparently about to get scrapped by Microsoft, but I love Wunderlist. I have lists for everything. Usually I have like a million tabs open in my browser and to be able to close all of those tabs, I add them into their corresponding lists in Wunderlist. So I would definitely say that is a tool that I cannot survive without. But apparently, yeah, it's getting scrapped by Microsoft. So RIP Wunderlist.

Well, come on over to Evernote. Great.

Yeah, I use Evernote as well. Well, of course. I use Evernote more for— I use Evernote for like different things like product planning. Like I would start a product Evernote and then have different notes on all different parts of the product. I just use the tools differently. Wunderlist I just use for lists.

Got it. Okay, makes sense. Final question from my end, what's one must-read book you'd recommend to everyone?

Well, as a marketer? I would say the book that changed my perspective of marketing the most was probably Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion. Have you read that?

Yeah, by Robert Cialdini.

Yeah, yeah. Just honestly, like, that's like my marketing framework now. I literally go through and tick off certain parts from that book. I'm like, okay, is there, you know, I'm running a Viral marketing campaign for referrals? Is there reciprocity in here? Is there scarcity? Is there social proof and liking? I honestly go through and check my marketing communications to make sure that those techniques are in there because they do work so well.

Love it.

Great.

Well, Greta, this has been incredible. I think we can talk forever, but I mean, all good things have to come to an end. So what's the What's the best way for people to find you online?

Probably LinkedIn would be one good way. I'm definitely doing a lot more in my LinkedIn at the moment. So yeah, just Greta Van Riel on LinkedIn and just follow me there.

Great. Well, Greta, thanks so much for doing this.

No, thank you, Eric. Thanks for having me.

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