The Flywheel Model and Service as an Agency Growth Center?

All right, this week it's my pleasure to bring on Moby Siddiq, who is the co founder and head strategist at Red Pandas. Moby, do you say Red Pandas Digital or just Red Pandas when you're introducing yourself?

We say Red Pandas Digital. We also drop Red Pandas.

Whatever, you just go with it all. Well, awesome. So Red Pandas and Red Pandas Digital. He's got two different agencies. Just kidding. Moby, welcome to the podcast. Happy to have you on here.

Thanks, Greg. Good to finally be here, man.

So tell us just a little bit about the agency and what you guys are doing.

Yeah, sure. So we're based in Sydney, Australia, so we largely cover the Australian market. We're an inbound marketing agency, HubSpot partner, but not a fanboy because our customers come first and it's all about the right solution for them. And yeah, we've been operating now for, I think we're now into our third year, you know, hitting that kind of growing pain level, which I'm sure a lot of kind of third year, four year agencies kind of go through. And yeah, just sort of started the agency because I don't know, I'm kind of like one of those people. I don't think I can work for people. I was working for another agency and I was like, man, I can do this better. You know, ate a humble pie for a year and thought, shit, this is a lot harder than it looks. But yeah, we're finally getting the swing of things and yeah, loving what we do.

That's funny. I'm working right now as an entrepreneur in residence, just on a very part time basis at a local business incubator helping some startups out. And that question comes up a lot of like, well, how did you, like you started a couple different businesses now. How did you get into it? And it's like, well, to be honest, I'd probably be just a terrible employee. Like, I really want to do things my own way and that's important to me. And they always laugh. I'm like, no, but I'm being serious. Like I really would be a bad employee. And they always just laugh at that. So it's funny that you've got, you know, I feel like a lot of people who start this kind of realize like a job is just not for me. And even though we work more hours in the beginnings, you make less money, you're creating a worse job for yourself. It's better because you're the one creating it.

Yeah, it does sound quite stupid. When you think about it, like you quit working 40 hours for someone a week so they can work 100 for yourself. But exactly those who do it understand, yep, 100% well.

So you and I, not that long ago, got to catch up real quickly at inbound 2018. And I thought what might be cool to share with folks is kind of coming off the back of that, but also just from conversations and what we're doing as far as learning and professional development. Looking ahead at 2019, I know that you recently led the Sydney Hug HubSpot user group for anyone who's not in the hug. Sounds. You led the Sydney Hug. That sounds strange to anybody. Sounds very.

Yeah.

Outside the HubSpot ecosystem. Inside the HubSpot ecosystem. You know that stands for HubSpot User Group, but I know you led that and talked about kind of some of the things that you're seeing in the space right now. So I wanted to throw that to you and just see what are some of the big things that you're seeing as far as what's trending now. Maybe not even trends. Some of it's certainly trends, but where's the space going, basically?

Yeah. So I mean, I'll talk about the flywheel only because you opened that question with Inbound. So like the whole thing, you could not turn a left corner without seeing a bloody flywheel. Like, you know, it's enough to have like, I don't know, like a 20 foot screen. That's like three screens together on a keynote stage. But then like, you know, Dharmesh. Sorry. Brian Halligan, one of the founders, co founders of HubSpot, had a literal, like, you know, kind of Wheel of Fortune kind of flywheel there. And it's like, yeah, like a lot of had a bit of a chuckle. But look, I want to be, I want to be really, really fair about this. Like, the thing is great, I'm sick of every year something being broken, right? It's like SEO is dead and this is broken and that's broken. And it's like, it's actually, actually I didn't even think about this, but last year, Gray, not this Inbound. Last year you and I were talking about, you know, it feels like just to kind of break out and get people's attention. You actually said this, not me. You have to just put something controversial, right? Do you remember that? Like something has to be broken. So it's funny you said that a year before, but anyway, the whole thing, just for people who don't really understand, like the idea of the funnel is you have your typical funnel. You have, you fill in the top marketing works on creating marketing qualified leads, obviously converting them from visitors, they trickle down to sales, and then at the end you get customers. So the whole thing around the funnel apparently being broken is apparently that it doesn't focus on its customers. So if you've seen it, great. If you haven't seen it just for a quick visual for everyone, you have customers in the middle. Then you have sort of these three chevrons or three kind of components around customers and one's service, marketing, sales. So you got obviously marketing and then that chevron's into sales and that chevron's into service. And the idea is the customers are at the center. I cannot help thinking I'm gonna like, don't worry, I will give it kudos, but I'll slam it first. I can't help thinking, if we're being honest, Gray is this is just a model because HubSpot now has service hub, like it now has products that meet this. And it's kind of like, you know what? This is a thing. And I think as. And look, we're HubSpot partner, we're gold. I would not use any other system out there. It is the best in class system, right? But again, at the end of that, these are these software as a service companies and we have to take that, you know, we have to be smart about this, not just eat up everything that these companies tell us. Like if next year they release something else, are they going to turn it into a star or a pyramid or like an octagon or something? You know what I mean? So I take no issue with that. But this is the thing, this is my problem with it. The funnel is a great tactical tool, right? So the idea of the funnel, it's a very tactical tool. So what do we need to do to fill the top? And that's, you know, all our kind of, you know, maybe top of funnel, maybe our SEO, paid media, all that sort of stuff. Then what do we do to kind of convert those visitors into leads? Then tactically, what do we do to the to get those leads into sales and work with the sales team to come up with SLAs and whatnot. And then at the end of the day, we have customers. So the thing is the flywheel, this is actually, I actually almost think that Brian actually almost undersells it when he says the fly funnel is broken because the fly was actually more of a strategic direction. So the funnel is a tactical tool and the flywheel is a strategic Direction. And he referenced the companies like Amazon. Right. So companies like Amazon who are truly customer centric will actually build the entire business around the customer. It doesn't matter if you speak to a vendor of Amazon or you call their support or you're using their website. Everything is designed to reduce. Whereas typically now, if you ask. And this is status still for Michael Redboard, who interviewed at Inbound, he said that 80% of customers, sorry, companies will say they're customer centric, but when you ask their employees, sorry, if you ask their customers, only 8% will agree. That's. That's brutal, dude. Like, you know what I mean? Like, they're. Obviously, there's a huge gap there. So this is the thing. The funnel is more of a tactical tool. And the flywheel. Go for gold. Create your flywheel. We presented at the hug, as you mentioned a couple of nights ago. We gave some examples of great flywheels and the takeaway was for people to do that. But don't just kind of break one. One is a tactical tool that you still need to focus on with workflows through each stage and whatnot, and SLAs between sales and marketing. And the other one is more of a strategic tool, something that you take into a boardroom presentation, something that you would take to investors, you know, who think like funnels just doesn't make sense. You know what I mean? So that's. That. That's my issue with. I don't believe it's broken. I think there's a place for both. And one is more a tactical tool and one is more of a strategic vision tool for the entire company.

Right. No, I 100% agree with you. And Andrew and I were talking about it and said basically this. The same thing is where this flywheel could have existed. Like, it's not like all of a sudden word of mouth in 2018 became 100 times more important and that broke the funnel. Flywheel.

Exactly.

This is when it came out. But I think you're right that all these are models for us. It's just a simple analogy for us to wrap our heads around. Okay. And visualize how this works. Because the way that our brains work just relate better to things that we can relate to. But you're exactly right. Once there's some kind of operational tool built into HubSpot that we're going to have those three, no longer is it marketing, sales and service, then it's going to be growth, delivery and operations. It'll all change depending on whatever. Just like, I mean, there's so many examples. So I don't fault HubSpot at all for the way that they're presenting it. And I think it's absolutely right to understand, okay, well what from this model is useful and can be applied and what should just be kind of ignore it. I don't know how the funnel suddenly just broke. There's certainly flaws with it. I mean with any model there's going to be flaws because we're dealing with people and not everyone fits perfectly into whatever it is. But I think that's a really good point.

Final point, I'll say on the funnel, the other kudos I'll give it. Sorry. On the flywheel is they speak about waiting, right? So if you've ever had a car and you know, every so often you hit road bumps and you hit potholes and then you have to weight the wheels, there's an actual word for it, you have to balance the wheels because there's too much weight on one particular force. So the other great thing about this flywheel is you can see, look, are we actually focusing way too much on the marketing side? Are we just filling the pipeline, filling the attract stage? What about our actual service delivery? What about our sales support? So it also helps you visualize where your possibly not giving the right distribution of forces. So kudos to HubSpot. Seriously. But like guys, give me a break. It's not broken, right? Everything doesn't have to be broken for you to sell it.

I think specifically in the agency application, the flywheel can be a useful illustration and something to keep in mind for agencies is what often happens in the consulting world is that as, as the marketing and sales performs better and gains momentum, like so consultant example, you start off and charging someone whatever the amount is and you're able to consult with them and you're servicing them, you're giving them some amount of attention. Then you sign on client number two and the amount of available attention for client number one goes down. And obviously by the time you get to 10 or 20 clients, you, you've probably raised the price because you've gained confidence and you don't need that revenue quite as badly and your attention level has diminished. So often the service that you're getting, although the person is more experienced, you're getting less of the service and the experience can actually diminish as you get more people in. And almost every agency listening to this probably has gone through that. Where you started out with a founder, a couple founders, you were servicing clients directly and at some point the value that you could deliver to your clients had to change. They no longer could work with you. And they saw it as at least a temporary decrease in the value that they got from your agency. And a lot of people lose those early clients because they can't deliver the same value at the same price that they had. And so the whole business model needs to shift and evolve. And part of that is natural. But the other thing that we need to think about as agencies is how do we design an experience where it continually gets. It doesn't get worse as we add more customers in, but it gets better as we add more customers in. And it's challenging to do. In the professional services environment, which the agency world is, the only way to scale revenue is to scale a team along with it. You can make incremental improvements where you improve your process or you narrow down what you do so you don't need as many different skill sets. You can make a lot of incremental improvements, but at the end of the day, the only way that you're ever going to completely scale it is to scale with more humans. And so just to think about, how do we design an experience where we have to add people, but the experience still doesn't get worse because now we have new people who are brought into the process, but the experience actually gets better over time. So the flywheel can keep building. Instead of we're closing more clients, but because the experience has gotten worse, we're losing old clients, and now we're just making small gains, large gains as we go.

That's so spot on. Like, if you think of. Sorry, just like on the agency side, I didn't even consider this. The thing is, in professional consulting services, your competitors are always stealing your clients. They're always doing that. Right? So as an agency, we do all these kind of outbound sort of stuff to thought leadership. At Red Pens, we have a podcast, all these agencies doing all this stuff. But you have to keep in mind, the moment you keep your eye off, there's someone else poking holes in your work. And you can poke holes in anyone's work.

Right.

Someone else trying to. So it behoves us to consider the flywheel and say, you know what, the service support side, we need to actually, you know, focus on these guys as well, like, remind them that we are thought leaders. So, yeah, sorry, just quick point there for me.

No, great point.

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So I know you had a couple other points. Video was one of the core themes this year. Last year it was all about bots and what was it? Bots and Facebook ads. A year ago. This year, video took center stage. Any thoughts on the video side of things?

Yeah, it's funny because like, video's been the year of video the last five years, right? So it's quite interesting. But I think this year when we think about video. So I did have one key thing, right. But I think before, just as a quick prelude to that, I kind of disagree with the fact that people are still touting, you know, get like an iPhone and get it in front of your face and hold it with your hand and, you know, send out a message. I disagree. Yeah, like the LinkedIn, you know, like people, the whole, I'm a professional and I'm on LinkedIn and he's my iPhone or my other bugbear and my friends have done this as well. They're in their car now. I know, I agree to disagree. I totally, I totally get it? Look, the thing is, if something, if a setup is holding you back, if like, you know, Tripod is holding you back, you know, if like you can't afford the $200 for Camtasia and whatever freaking do it, do it. But don't think that that is going to keep you in the thought leadership place. Like, and this, this is my opinion, but I think, like, especially with professional video, you have to have a level of polish. Unless you're a superstar or you're an influencer, no one wants to see that stuff. Like, everyone sees it. So I'm always trying to think of ways to kind of break out. I think even some of the guys from HubSpot were talking about this. I don't agree with that, but this is where it differs. So this year I think it's the era of more sort of video in the sales process. Like more one to one, like me to you, gray, as opposed to like me too many. I definitely think now that's changed and HubSpot's done. Finally, finally, finally. And we spoke to Mark Andrews who's in the product marketing team there, and I said to him, mate, this is finally, like, thank God you guys have finally released the video platform. This is awesome. We've all been asking, you guys have finally done it. So just to give you a quick example, for example, great, I might be selling you our digital marketing services and you and I have a great conversation and I brought you in, into what we do in our philosophy and we're a good culture, personality fit. What happens if you leave and now I got to do all that job again, Right? Or what happens when your bosses ask you and say you're not from a digital, you know, you and I are not a good example. But say you're not from digital marketing. How are you going to articulate everything that I've told you to your managers? How are you going to talk about how great we are? You know, so like, for example, here's a good example. I will send you a proposal and then off the back of that, you know, through HubSpot, for example, oh, I don't need HubSpot, but I would do it through HubSpot. I would send you a personal video. I thank you for your time. I'd say, look, you know, just to kind of recap, it's essentially an executive summary. It's some like the key points that I know that kind of brought you in and what your organization is looking for and then sort of saying, you know, if you need to get in Touch with me, this is what you can do. So that kind of mitigates that issue. That mitigates that issue of you leaving the organization or me having to sell because like what are you going to do if someone asks you what is Moby? Like what are Red Pandas like? You're going to send them that video I gave you because you're like, man, I don't have the time or the expertise to explain that to you. Again, this dude actually did a video, you know a friend of ours who I think you know as well, George B. Thomas, right? You know George B. He gave a really good example where if he sends out an email, like a prospecting email or a reply back email, he has a video in his signature and it's personal, right? So in that video he'll say, look, this is who I am. I'm Georgia B. Thomas, I'm an inbound evangelist. This is what that means. And by the way, I like old cars and old boats. And he's a call to action. If he was to try to put that in an email, that would be, that'd be like War and Peace, he'd be like 800 words. But he's done that. So to HubSpot's credit, now from a tactical point of view, things you can do, you can actually add videos in live chats, right? So if you're actually having, if you jump on my website and my live chat or our bot is connected to HubSpot, I can actually just quickly turn on my camera and send you a direct video. It's like me to you. Great. You know what I mean? I can record video at a HubSpot. I can. And this is, I'm sure people have already thought about this trigger follow ups. So if you don't watch my kind of top of funnel basic video, there's no reason why I should send you a bottom of funnel video. But I can create a workflow now because it's all in HubSpot. So I could actually say If Gray watches 50% of this video, then send him the next video or if he opens that video five times, then send me a ping to call you. You know what I mean? I know not everyone is, you know, obviously let's be platform agnostic and I'm sure other automation systems will do this. But even without HubSpot you can still use free tools like Loom or Soapbox. And actually I think I learned from Loom from you Gray man. I've learned a lot from you dude. So I think you sent me A loom. Like we were inquiring about, you know, one of your businesses in the past and you just quickly jumped on and I was honestly, I was so impressed you quickly jumped on and, and said hey Moby, it was great to chat with you or thank you for your email. Let me just take you through a quick walkthrough. And then you sent it to me and I had it in 10 minutes. So that's what we're talking about when we say this one to one sales process video.

I think that's a great point that is becoming more and more popular and what I found is when I send those to people, I found during the sales process, the views on that is rarely, there's rarely one view that gets forwarded way more than emails that I sent, you know, a follow up email that doesn't have anything else. But when you send that and I'm sure at some point this will become, it's becoming more commonplace already and it'll become an expectation, it won't be new anymore. But right now there's a huge opportunity because most people aren't doing that to send it out. And inevitably people are going to forward that out and say, hey, just so you know. Because right now that's cool. When you get that, it makes you feel special. Two years from now it's not going to be as cool and we'll be like, okay. But I've had that happen quite a few times where I'll get back on the phone with someone after we've had an initial call and sent that and they said that was really cool. Like I shared that internally. But it makes them feel like, wow, someone took the time to shoot a video like just for me. So I think there's an emotion, like there's real specific tangible value, business value. There's also emotional value in doing that right now. So I think that's a great point that the video and the sales process has really come a long way. The other thing that was hit on and HubSpot has announced some product changes around but the conversational marketing piece and I think that was one of the points that you had in what you shared at the HubSpot user group as well. What's your take on conversation? Like basically a chat, live chat, whatever the right term is. I appreciate that we're trying to get away from live chat a little bit as the name for it and calling it conversational marketing. I'm still not sure that everyone understands or that that's the best phrase for it either. But that's what we'll use for now. So what's your $0.02 on conversational marketing?

I do like conversational marketing as a label because, you know, we're. And I think it's quickly becoming mainstream as opposed to calling it live chat or chatbot or chatbot marketing, because conversational marketing encompasses the fact rather that you that chatbots and live chat can work in unison together. So a chatbot can help qualify, it can help inform, and then at some point a human can take over. So I love the fact that conversational marketing, when you think of conversational marketing, you do have to think of bots and people or on the sales side actually working together in harmony. So it works quite well. So I think if you, because you referenced this earlier, like last year was all about chatbots and automation and they bought motion AI and kind of went quiet for about a year. And it's finally good to see what they're doing with it. Everyone who you'd speak to, they're like, oh, yeah, yeah, cool, we want to get onto it. But no one really knew how. There weren't really any playbooks. There weren't any really case studies. So I think this year, if anyone wants to take anything away from our discussion now around conversational marketing, is that it's finally mainstream and you can no longer avoid it, you can no longer ignore it. So the thing about it is you have to understand too, what it's used for. It's not a shiny new form. It's not a way to get more traffic. Our mate Remington, who works at George B. Who owns Impulse Creative, he spoke articulately around the fact that it's not about increasing conversions. It's not going to be driving more visitors. You still need some flow of visitors to your website. So if you're not even getting visitors to your website, you have a different problem. It's about increasing conversions and enhancing the customer experience. So I think with something like this, there are a few different things too you got to think about. So on our podcast, like, I actually interviewed a bunch of people, Remington and also Alisa from HubSpot, because even me, I couldn't get my head around it. I'm like, okay, is it a Facebook bot? Is it a HubSpot bot? Is it some other company like Drift? Like, how that, like, what the hell? Like, how do all these things fit together now? Like, one thing we should kind of clear up for people is you have Facebook messenger bots, which, you know, can have a full workflow and a full, like, kind of what Are you interested in. And if you say yes to this, whatever, they can also live on your website. But kind of a lot of the experts at the moment are saying that it's not a great idea. I mean, maybe you have that on Facebook, but it's not a great idea to invest too much in those. Because Facebook, you know, you gotta love and hate Facebook. It's kind of like, you know that time when they were saying like, everyone get Facebook pages and people are spending millions of dollars on print media and on TV ads to promote Facebook. And then Facebook. You think Facebook cares? No. They're like, well, now only 10% of your fans are going to see your post. You have to pay to Play. Now only 5% are going to see your post. You have to pay more to play. So already there's indications that they're cracking down on what you can do with their bots. So that's Facebook bots, right? And then you have like bots like Drift, who honestly Drift. If you really, really want to double down on conversational marketing, they are the best. HubSpot is a baby compared to what Drift can do. But HubSpot's conversational marketing and their bots are a great way to start. And like some of the. And I'll give a few quick tips. A lot of these tips you can use with HubSpot bots or HubSpot conversations. So I think one key thing is like the first question I always get is where the hell do I start with this thing? The first thing is to look for your high intent pages. So if you have pricing pages, everyone's got. Actually no, not everyone has pricing pages, but pricing pages or service pages, everyone has service pages. Everyone has pages about what they do or bottom of funnel pages like get a quote, inquire. Now landing pages, they're the best places to start. So the tip there is look for your high intent pages and then think about the personalized experience. If someone is on your, say you sell building supplies, concreting building supplies, if they're on that page and say, look, what do you think? Or what are you looking? What kind of project are you looking for? With concrete, Obviously I don't know concrete very well, but it's contextual to that actual page that they're on. Or would you like to see case studies where we've done work in this particular field? And an amazing thing happens when people start thinking like that. They start personalizing the bot for a different context. It simplifies it. But the other thing that happens, they realize, oh, Holy shit. We actually don't have content. Like it'd be nice to have a case study for this page. It'd be nice to have a blog post about this page. There's more work that needs to be done. So keep in mind it's not just you just turn it on. You have to do some work, you have to kind of storyboard the high intent pages. That's not the hard part. Then you got to think about what you do after that. The thing is, I would jump on now, I would jump on today, this week, whenever you can. Because people are forgiving right now. You know what I mean? Like when live chat first came out, if you take a couple of minutes to get back to them, people didn't really care, right? But like iPhone, social media, instant this, insta that, it's really like, like you can't do that anymore. If you're in a live chat experience, you have to get back to people right away. But because this is still new, people are still forgiving. Like we would tell our clients is, you know, deploy it. The first part is going to be a learning phase. The bot's going to stuff up, the bot's going to be stupid and that's fine. Then the human jumps in and this is where the conversational part comes in. The human jumps in and say, look, sorry, forget our chatbot, he or she's still learning. And we actually kind of do something clever like we'll give the chatbot a name, like one of our clients. They're in the MMA game and we call them, the bot's called Warrior bots. And then we've got another client who works in childcare and we call the Casey bot because it's an acronym for their brand. So yeah, like look, sorry, the bot, he or she is still learning. He's dumb. I'm a human, how can I help you? So that's, I think the approach we should take.

Yeah, I think that's a great point and it's interesting even just to see the change. So we've had started off with chat for customer support and our software tool for I don't know, three or four years and initially used Intercom and actually we're still using intercom. We've tried Drift and looked at HubSpot. Do you think HubSpot will make strides? Right now they're behind but it's early in the game and it's interesting just to see the attitude change where already you'll get every once in a while the people who just can't Tolerate the fact that you'd have live chat on a page but not really be there. And I think we're going to see that, which is just kind of a picture into people's minds that some people are just having bad days and are stressed out, but that the expectation, even though they might express the expectation inappropriately in some cases, that the expectation is, if you got chat here, I want an insert instant response. And that desire to have that quick feedback and quick answers to their questions, that's not generated by the bot, that's just. Or by the. By having chat on the page, it's just expressed by that. So it's there regardless. Not having chat on your site doesn't absolve you of leaving people not getting what they want to have. It just means that they don't have the chance to express it as easily to you and they probably won't go to the contact form and tell you about it. So I think it is the perfect time to get in. And one thing, though, that's kind of curious to me hasn't been around quite as long as video, but conversational marketing is hot right now. We've got a handful of agencies. You mentioned Remington, who you interviewed, we had on the podcast earlier this season. He's going very deep into the conversational marketing piece.

He's the. I call him the conversational marketing guy. Like he's the guy.

Yep.

You know, he's at his game.

Right, Right. And we've got a handful of other agencies out there who have kind of bought in as well. But what's interesting is it's not that much newer than video, and yet there's all these agencies. I mean, video has been around for a long time, but kind of the. The big push around video in the last couple years. But there's a ton of agencies who have video listed on their site as a service, and there's still only a handful of agencies who have conversational marketing out there. So I think it's something that is going to become commonplace and the strategy behind it. Like most things, the initial wave of servicing, you're going to have most of the people offering services who are just basically there to set it up and use kind of the same stuff, but the strategy behind it, there's big opportunities there, and it's one of the quickest ways to showcase value. For a site like you mentioned, that already has traffic to go in and say, okay, here's the conversations you could be having right now with people who are here, Obviously, if they don't have traffic yet, that's a different problem. And the amount of value that you can show somebody right out of the gate with conversational marketing isn't quite as high.

Agree.

Well, that's a lot to dive into, a lot to take in. I'm sure we could go on for a while here, Moby, but you shared some really good stuff and we'll definitely need to bring you back on and dive more into it. But before I let you go here completely, I wanted to talk about. Because you've been podcasting with your podcast Inbound Buzz for a while now. I'd be curious to know. This comes up anytime I talk to an agency owner who is podcasting. I try and get a sense of how does that impact the business. So that's kind of the last question I have for you is with Inbound Buzz, how has podcasting, how does that impact the business? Is it a traffic generator? Is it a way to nurture leads? Has it been a revenue component? Is it an educational piece for existing clients? How do you use that and get value out of it?

Yeah, I'm going to. I'm going to be really honest here and, you know, it's hip to be vulnerable right now and whatnot. In all seriousness. So when I started this thing, I just started it because, like, I'm a big believer of just getting it out there. And I think ours now will be the third year that it's running now. And at the time there, I know in Australia there might have been, you can count on one hand the amount of agencies that had one. And for me, it was important to get out because, like, and this is because we do a lot of video coaching for clients as well. And we help, you know, like, we're not full podcast like consultants, but we'll help them with that. And one thing I always say to people is, keep in mind the first thing is going to be crap. It's going to be crap. It's not going to be great. And I mean that. We're not going to put it out crap. We're going to put it out as a pass. But compared to what you will do, 10 videos or 10 podcasts down the track, that's going to be HD. You're going to look back and whatever. So just accept it and get on with it. For me, when I started, I really didn't think about too much about monetizing it. I probably was doing it for a year and a half when I realized, oh, shit, I should actually be taking people to show notes. I don't think I did show notes until episode 30 or so. Yeah. So I was kind of like, I didn't really think about it that way. Has it brought us new customers? I'd probably say no, if I'm honest. Great. I don't think it's done a great deal in that regard. But what I've done, what I have noticed is when people get. It's a great sort of middle of funnel. I won't say Miller funnel. That's not the wrong word. But when people are in our process and they actually see that there is a podcast, when they're in the consider in their consideration phase. Right. They have a couple of brands in the consideration set, then the podcast helps a lot. Like, I've had a bunch of clients say to us, you know what? Like, we were looking at Red Pandas, we saw you had a podcast, we jumped on. And this is the thing you don't realize, like, some people may not listen to any, but some people. I had one client tell me that she listened to six different podcasts, like, just to kind of understand what we were about and actually learn something on the way. And so when they get into our ecosystem, then it's definitely helped convert clients faster. The other thing that I don't think that can be lost, like, doesn't matter what field you're in, whether in digital marketing or floral designs or whatever. I mean, I think it goes without saying you have to love what you do. And if you love what you do and you want to be a continuous learner, podcasting is great. Because when I started great, I was like, okay, look, I'm just going to start. If it never gets any listeners, it doesn't matter. Because at least now, because I've done all the degrees I can do now, like, I've done all the qualifications I can do. I mean, I'd love to get more certifications, but really there's not that much more I can do apart from learning myself. But how many people do you know have a solid? There are a bunch of people, but you probably count them on one hand, have a solid learning plan, that they'll read 10 pages of book a day, that they'll do one certification once every two weeks, or even once a month, or even once every six months. Very, very, very few people. Because we're busy. Right. But the thing is, with a podcast, it is a learning experience for me. They say the best way to learn, to. Sorry, learn, Is to teach you yourself. So I have a podcast and we try to do it weekly. We had some growing pains out of the year, so we had a bit of downtime, but we're finally kind of back into forces me to. As opposed to I like a link or like a Facebook post or, you know, we all bookmark that we never read. I actually will talk about that. I'm like, shit, I've actually got to talk about that. And even at Inbound, the last day, you find like, honestly, 50% of people have left. The rooms are all empty. But then I almost did that too. I almost, like, I was kind of like, oh, let me just start my New York holiday early. But I was like, well, what am I going to talk about? Because we did a podcast every single day at Inbound. What am I going to talk about to the fans for day four? You know what I mean? So I'm like, well, I better stay. And I learned a shit ton of stuff, so you cannot discount the fact that it is such a learning experience. And now, honestly, honestly, Grant and I say this humbly, there are very few, if any conversations now I can have with people in digital marketing or marketing, and I won't know what they're talking about. Very few conversations where I can't add value because chances are I've done a 30 minutes, multiple 30 minute podcasts on the exact topic, the topic they're talking about.

Right, right. That's awesome. Podcasting is like your golden ticket to talk to almost anyone you want to. Obviously there's limits, but people who wouldn't, maybe wouldn't normally, not because they don't want to talk to you, but because they just wouldn't have time or you wouldn't get their attention, who wouldn't talk to you. Having someone on a podcast can open that up in a lot of cases. And it's been interesting. I talked about this with conversational marketing. That's starting to shift a little bit where people who probably would have come on a podcast a couple years ago might not, you know, I'm much less likely to accept a podcast invitation from someone else today versus three years ago where it was, you know, anybody who's got a podcast like this would be cool. Now there's a bunch of different shows. So that's not because the podcast medium is diminishing or less impactful. It's because it's more impactful. And so now we can be a little bit more picky about when and where we go and appear. I want to make sure that it's in a good place. So if you're thinking about it, definitely encourage people to jump in and get to it. Kind of like what you're talking about with conversational marketing. Same thing with video. Same thing with the podcast is jump in and make it happen and learn from there. So good stuff, Moby. Well, I appreciate you making time to jump on and share here. Obviously, we'll link up the website redpandas.com au I know that you're on Twitter, Obi Siddiq, which we can include in the show notes as well. Is there any place that you'd recommend that people connect or follow you?

Yeah, the biggest place where I do most of my content these days. And this is another, I guess, maybe side tip. There's a lot of, I think, growth at the moment in LinkedIn. So really, that's where I live socially. LinkedIn is I'm putting up videos and I'm putting up content, but that's one place I definitely would recommend to connect with me.

Awesome. Well, we'll definitely include that in the show notes. Moby, thanks so much for coming on the podcast today.

Great. It's always fun to talk to you, man. I'm glad we could finally do it on the airwaves.