Dan Norris - Beer, Branding, And Compound Marketing

I like sharing what I'm doing, and the idea that that could be marketing was very exciting to me. Like, I would do it anyway, even if it wasn't marketing. But no one had done it in beer in Australia. So, like, we were researching and talking to people about how to start a brewery. We were told it would cost a million dollars. There was no content out there. So we set about. I started a podcast. We started an Instagram channel. We started a blog. I wrote a book about how to build a brewery. We actually finished the book before we'd even built the brewery. It was unique. Like, people hadn't done that before. And now in Australia, if you Google anything to do with start brewery or, you know, building a portable bar or how much does craft beer cost, then our website comes up first every time.

This is an intro. Intro, intro, intro.

Hustle and Flowchart with your boy, my boy, Matt Wolf.

Joe.

Hey, welcome back to the Hustle and Flowchart podcast.

We're back and we're together in an intro. It's been too long, so we're missing each other this episode. We spent some more time with each other. So don't worry, we'll be together in the episode too. All right. We have a new friend of ours, and I think you're gonna be a friend of his after this episode as well. His name is Dan Norris, and this guy has done a lot in, I would say, a pretty short period of time, and he's doing it in a creative way. So his approach to marketing is. I don't know, I just feel like I jive with it. I like it. It's a lot of what we do, but he's really distilled it into something that really makes sense.

Yeah. Well, he really focuses on four core pillars.

Right.

He focuses on branding, storytelling, community, and content marketing. And I would say that this episode, we kind of deep dive into really, all four of those.

We do, yeah. So he's the founder of WP Curve, and that was back in, what, 2013. He actually ended up scaling that, and we'll talk about a little bit how he did that using this model, but he actually ended up selling it to Godaddy back in the day. And that opened the doors to his new venture, which is Black Hops Brewing out there in Australia. And he told us on the episode it's actually rated or voted the number one craft brewery in Australia. Damn, that's cool. So, I mean, he's. He's learned everything in the sandbox of Internet marketing, but he's Just applied it now to this other fun venture in a brewery form. So, I mean, I don't know how further apart those things are in terms, but, like, obviously they're very similar too, so I think you're gonna get a lot.

Well, there's a similar thread in the way he marketed them, because the marketing that he's gonna teach you on this episode works for both. So you're gonna want the notes on this one. You can go get the notes over@flowchartgroup.com if you go to flowchartgroup.com, it will ask you to join our Facebook group. By joining the Facebook group, you'll also most likely give us your email address. And by giving us your email address, we'll send you the notes. That sounded like a really sort of long answer, but go to fl. You'll end up on our Facebook group, and you'll be able to get the action guide for this episode if you do it within two weeks. All right, huzzah, Huzzah. Let's go talk to Dan Norris.

All right, Dan, I want to get some of your beer, man. Ship some over here. Thanks for joining us.

Actually, we just got a. This is funny. Actually, I got a mate of mine, Sam, who's one of our investors, but he's, like, super nice, and he, like, he lives in Thailand, and he doesn't get a lot of our beer because we don't export it. And he just sent an email to our admin email address and just went like, oh, I'm a big fan of Black Ops. I was wondering if you guys could send me some beer, and I'm happy to pay for it instead of asking me because he knows I'll send it to him for free. That's cool. But, yeah, our beer is actually pretty hard to get overseas, so I might not be able to help you with that one.

Yeah, I figured as much. But when we're over there, we'll make a stop by.

You got plenty of beer in San Diego. You're doing just fine.

Yeah, well, Black Hops is probably my favorite brewery name I've ever heard. That's just such a cool name for a brewery.

Yeah, I thought it was weird, like, when this years ago now, but when me and Eddie were messaging back and forth about the name, like, we just came up with so many shit names. Like, every single option was shit, and we were both sending shit options. And then he sent. He sent Black Ops, and then he sent, like, three or four others, and I was like, wait, Black Ops is awesome. Has no one taken that yet? And then we looked around and I want to take them, like, how's no one taken this name?

That's crazy. Yeah, it's the best. And then you pair it up with all the other stuff. So, yeah, let's. Let's definitely come back to the beer stuff. You know, once we kind of get into the back journey with, with how you kind of got started in all this stuff, because, like, we were riffing a lot of this. What you've applied now or what you do apply now in the beer industry, you got from Internet marketing and doing a lot of this kind of stuff here. So it's, it's going to be fun. And so I think taking us back, like, I know WP Curve was kind of the. Kind of the thing that really launched you into this space, but you did it in a very smart way, you know, obviously using compound marketing, which is your new book that's out and definitely, definitely get it. I love it because, like, you start out and you're like, I have no agenda. There's no upsells, no bullshit. Like, I got nothing to sell you other than some beer if you want it.

I can't even sell that because most of your audience probably in America.

Good point. I don't know. We have a lot of Australians, actually, so you'd be surprised.

Okay, well, if that's the case. Yeah, for 100%, you should buy the beer.

Well.

Well, cool.

Why don't you take us back? How did. How did you get into, like, the Internet marketing world and then how did it eventually get into beer?

Yeah, well, you mentioned just before we're chatting, James Schramko was the person who suggested I come on this show. I was just kind of, you know, I started my own business when I was 26, I think this is 15 years ago, 14 and a half years ago now. Just because I didn't like working for other people for literally no other reason, I didn't see, like, an opportunity. I wasn't an entrepreneur. I just didn't want to have a job. That was the only reason. And I started building websites only because I just kind of got excited about technology. And I just buy these, like, Sam's teach yourself books. I was in human resources. I didn't even have a job in it, but I just liked it. So I'm like, okay, I'm just going to start a business building websites. And I did that for seven years. It really never went very well. I didn't know what I was doing, but I did Enjoy kind of getting into some of the content like the kind of stuff you guys do back then. It was actually pretty hard to find a lot of that stuff. Like I gradually discovered it after years and discovered groups like James and the Dynamite Circle and podcasts like you mentioned Pat Flynn and guys like that eventually. But when I started just really there either wasn't that kind of thing or was just really in its infancy. And a lot of the Internet marketing stuff was really salesy and just like a competition for who could make the shittest looking website that converted the highest and that kind of stuff.

What Warrior Forum days. I don't know if you.

Warrior forum? Yeah, that was it. The war and all of that. So I was never really into that stuff. That stuff always kind of rubbed me the wrong way. But at the same time I liked the online space and I learned a lot from guys like James and Pat Flynn and people like that and there were many others.

So yeah, so I kind of just eventually that business didn't really work out. I tried a bunch of other things and eventually fell on this idea out of desperation of doing WordPress support with WP Curve and during and it was a good business. But B the way which I kind of realized later the way I marketed that business was all sort of based around my story and doing a lot of content and building a really good brand and all that kind of stuff which was sort of like a way of marketing that I'd fallen in love with I suppose and something that I didn't learn at university. It was just kind of like I was just stumbling through it and it wasn't really until last year when I kind of put it all together and thought actually I've been doing this form of marketing for many years and I'm actually quite successful at it now. So why don't I write a book about it. But yeah, the WP Curve was quite good. After a couple of years we sold it to GoDaddy and at exactly the same time we opened a brewery which was just. I was just a part time. I was just doing it for fun, purely for fun. But now it's just turned into this massive thing and this is what I do full time and we've got 60.

Staff and yeah, that's rad man. And I. So yeah, there's a lot to pick up here. So all the way back to, you know, studying guys like James and Pat. Like I know we've, we've studied Pat for a long time. I mean kind of he's San Diego guy as well. So we've kind of run in similar circles, but James probably been the last, what, four years or so. We've been really pretty tight with him. Three, four years. I just wish it was way earlier. We were like, really? Because, like, it's a different way of thinking about people. And like, I know when you talk about brands and stories, it's a lot of subconscious stuff going on. You know, it's not just how you're making things look or how persuasive is your news, you know, your sales letter or some other stuff that everybody thinks it's important. It's like there's a lot of this subconscious stuff that's really layered throughout all your marketing.

That's what I liked about James. I liked his and a lot of the stuff that got me into. And again, this is something I realized afterwards, not at the time, but what I really liked about him was his story. And he had, like. He had a lot of great. He's got an amazing amount of content as well. He's just. He's a machine in reflecting of what kind of attracted me to what he does was, you know, his story about, you know, being a car salesman, working his way up and, you know, trying to build income away from work to match his income and all that kind of stuff, which was all true. It wasn't, you know, and whether it was marketing for him at the time, I don't even know. I've never asked him. But he's a good storyteller and he's good with, you know, metaphors and helping people understand things, and he's a straight shooter. So that stuff I liked. I think with a lot of these things, it's about picking up the bits that suit you. And that's kind of what took me a long time. But eventually I kind of figured out that the Pat Flynn approach, a lot of that doesn't work for me. The James Schramko approach, a lot of that doesn't work for me, but bits of it do. And then, you know, the really heavy marketing, heavy paid ads approach doesn't work for me, but then the, you know, the branding, design, startup stuff does. And the content, like just producing a lot of content on different platforms is something I just fell in love with. So you're just kind of taking the bits that work for you and melding it into your own approach. And that's what I found works well. And I think with guys like James, he's taken. That's what he's done. He's taken a lot of really sort of high level sales.

Conversion, copywriting stuff from John Carlton and these kind of guys.

And they're kind of the business guys he talks about all the time, all the books. But then he's applied it to the online space and added storytelling and metaphors and all this kind of stuff to come up with his own kind of brand that is kind of unique to him.

And yeah, I think that's the way to go. That's what I feel like I've done with things like design because I think design is not something that was heavily prioritized in any of the online marketing stuff that I saw. But it was in the startup world and I really kind of fell in love with the startup world and took that design element. And content community building is a big thing with the online, which is not a big thing with traditional businesses. So that's a bit that I've kind of brought across to a traditional business. And then content was just something I enjoyed doing and realized that it could also be marketing.

Very cool. This is just for my own kind of curiosity, but with WP Curve, I was actually a customer of WP Curve back in 2012 or somewhere around there. We had a company called Learn to Blog and WP Curve was our service to help manage our own blog that we had that taught people how to blog. But anyway, I'm curious, WP Curve, how did it get its initial traction? Like what, what sort of marketing did you do to actually get it on people's radar in the beginning if you weren't doing paid ads and things like that?

Yeah. So. Well, firstly, thank you for being a customer. That means a lot because that, you know, that without WP Curve I would have absolutely nothing of what I've done since.

How did we get traction? So, and this is again reflecting when I wrote this book was like all the stuff I did then is the stuff I'm doing now. But it was just by accident. It was a fluke. So what happened with WP Curve was.

Telling my. I was doing monthly reports on my blog very much Pat Flynn, you know, he kind of pioneered the concept. I was doing the same thing, income reports. But my, because of the startup I was working on was just failing. Like I had no income. So that like I kind of joked when I was doing public speaking that they were more just reports, not income reports.

I didn't have any income, but. But I realized I employed a guy called Kyle.

Who.

I'm just thinking, I think at one point he read one of those reports and then it was when it was taking off, and he's like, oh.

The arc of your kind of income report looks exactly like the story arc from Cinderella. And I didn't even know what a story arc was, but that was kind of like a.

Penny drop moment because I realized that a lot of these people have been following this story of this entrepreneur who was kind of in forums and active and failing really badly. And then WP Curve took off and then they followed the story way more because then it was way more interesting. And I sort of built it without knowing through that storytelling aspect. But the other part of it was the community part of it, which was forums like James Schramko's and the Dynamite Circle. Those two forums were the only places I marketed that business before it launched. So I launched it in the dc. It was only available to people in the DC for the first week. And then I did the same thing in James's forum And I got 10, 15 customers. And they were the people that were sharing the content and reading the content and whatnot. And then I just kept getting them every week, every month, and built up a team from there. So I think at one point we experimented with paid ads. We spent $23, I think, and then we just switched it off.

I love that you remember that number.

Yeah. So we wrote a blog post about it. Of course, unfortunately, none of the content's available anymore. So I guess that's a bit of a lesson as well. But yeah, I learned very quickly that I wasn't good at paid ads. But there's another approach that worked perfectly well and we just grew it organically through content community and also investing in the brand, having a good name. We spent a lot of money on the website. It was the fastest loading website in the industry. It was the best looking website. The brand looked really sharp. And I think it stood out from the kind of sea of competitors that came after I started.

Yeah. Now I'm kind of curious because actually forum marketing is so damn good. I mean, that's where a lot of our marketing kind of started in small doses there, like Warrior Form Days was one of them. But like, how would you go about in say, James's community? Because that's a paid community, obviously. It's a no pitch kind of thing. Like, how would you approach a community, someone else's community like that, and still, you know, give value and not look like the guy that's like, hey, buy my shit kind of guy?

Yeah, well, I wouldn't. That's the thing. It didn't. It didn't ever happen in that way. And the Dynamite Circle was a paid community as well, but this was a legitimate community that I was a part of. I'd been to their first physical conference in. Well, I've been to their first physical startup event in the Philippines, and then a few months later, their first physical conference in Bangkok, which they've subsequently done every year until last year. And I was very active in the forum and all these guys knew what I was doing. We were all kind of rooting for each other. It wasn't like I was going into this forum saying, here's my business, buy my shit. It wasn't like that at all. It was like, this is what I'm doing. In that particular case, there wasn't like there is an offers section in the community, but it's not so, like the Warrior Forum, it's a paid community. It's a great group of people. And it was more like, if you think this is useful, sign up and you'll get a discount. To be honest, I've never seen forum marketing as something that's up my alley at all. It was just legitimately part of these communities and it grew organically from within them.

Yeah, it's like a. It's almost like a storytelling. And you're. Yeah, it's the value. It's. You have the first impression in design and a unique product or some kind of service you can offer. But I mean, yeah, that's in a community like that where you have paid members, people that trust the collective. I guess in that community, it's an amazing way to get something off the ground without paid traffic or some other means.

Yeah, I mean, I'm not really in. And I kind of struggle with forums, just the structure of them, that just seems so inefficient for me to get my head around. But I'm not really in any other groups anymore. But, you know, I've seen other people do it in faith. Like, I've had a Facebook group over the years, and it's. The topic is around starting businesses. So people are going in there, starting things all the time, getting feedback on those things. And as long as it's legitimately, you know, you do actually want feedback on something, I think all of that is fine. But if you're going in and just like being signed up for my service or you're just doing it because you want people to sign up for your service is probably not the way to go. People can see through that pretty easily, I think.

Yeah, I know in the WP curve part of your book it was talking about, it's essentially compounding assets and you're just the marketing in general. But I like the goal that you had from the get go, which was get profitable quickly. But really it's only just sign up one new customer per month. I think it was like grow 10% per month. Right. And then just compound that at what you're a million dollar company within. I think it was two and a half years or something like that.

Yeah. And it's funny because like back then I remember at one point in my entrepreneurial journey, I set this like goal which I thought was super aggressive, which was. I actually read that think and grow rich book and it's like, just say what you want and then you'll get it. I'm like, oh fuck yeah, I'm going to do this that easy. Yeah. And I said, and the amount I said was $100,000. So I wanted my. And I'd been in business for, I've been in business for two years and the amount I said was $100,000 revenue for my business. And it just seemed like such a large number. Like I didn't really understand how I would pull in that much money. And you know, years on our businesses doing over a million dollars a month and like the numbers just go up. That's great.

It turns from.

With grow like this, the brewery business has grown doubled every single year. So it's grown.

As fast as any business as you would want any business.

To grow, Even with COVID and pandemic type life and all that. Wow, that's cool.

And.

If you start at a million dollars revenue and you're doubling every year, these numbers get pretty bloody high.

So that's the thinking you've always had then? Yeah, all the way from WP curve days. Just slow, incremental, compounded growth. And so like on the brew business, how do you apply that thinking now to black hops and making sure that's always compounding.

Yeah, well, I mean, to some extent it's out of your hands. But.

Again, with this business, we spend way more time managing supply than we do managing demand. Like, we've got very healthy demand for our products. We don't advertise, we do no paid ads. Our marketing spend is less than 1/2 of 1% of our turnover. And most businesses we're competing with are above 10%, so they're 100 times what we're spending. And the spend that we put into marketing is not like paid ads that are optional. It's shit. We actually Need. It's like signs to go up in bottle shops and stuff like that, which you can't really avoid.

So we've got a healthy demand for what we're doing and I think we've built that because we've got a great story. We've invested a lot in the brand and I go into that in the book quite a bit. It's not just having a good logo. Like, we've done 200 different beers over six years and we do one different beer a week. A lot of those have been their own fully branded can. That looks amazing. A lot of them have had professional photos. A lot of them have gone onto Instagram and blown up because of how they look. And some of these beers only last two hours and they're gone. So, like, this investment in the brand is something that we're doing all the time.

And having a great product and being at the right time in the industry and all of that kind of stuff, being transparent about what we're doing and having a unique marketing angle, which to me is just not really a marketing angle. It's just a unique way of doing business, which is basically taking the Pat Flynn approach and applying it to a brewery.

Pretty much, yeah.

And no one had done it before, like, like, we, we. Well, actually, Brewdog were doing it very well, but no one had done it in Australia before.

Brewdog. I know that sounds. Is that in the States?

Yeah, they are. They've got. They've got. They've got 100 bars, four breweries around the world. They've got this hotel in Columbus, I think, where you can, like, have a bath with beer in it. And I love it. See this?

There's a story right there.

I'm surprised I've never heard of that.

Bre. I thought they, like the kings of.

They kind of pioneered equity crowdfunding. That a TV show that we used to watch there. They're the kind of kings of this approach in the craft beer world. But no one had done it in Australia. Brewdog are actually here now, which is cool.

Yeah.

But, like, when we, like the way I think about it was. Remember the kind of Marcus Sheridan story about his river pools and spas? That was like a story. Did you know the Sheridan?

I've heard of it, but I don't know the whole story. I mean, if you want to. It's relevant here. Yeah, I'd love to hear it.

Yeah.

So he.

He was. It was just one of these stories that kept coming up when people talked about content marketing. And his story was he was in a very traditional business selling pools. And he was just, you know, everyone's going around knocking door to door and it was just a major hustle and instead of doing. And everyone was very secretive about the information. So one perfect example was like, how much does a pool cost? Like, like even now in Australia, I'm sure if I go, and how much does the pool cost? There's no companies writing content on this. It's people discussing it in forums. And he saw that as he took what I call in another one of my books, the Leap of Faith, which is like, I'm going to give away all this information. And it is a risk to do that because you're going to empower all of your competitors, you're going to give away all your trade secrets. And that's not a no lose thing to do. But if it works, the upside is huge and you're going to get smashed with a whole bunch of leads because you're going to be the people that come up when people are researching all the buying decisions. And in his case, I think it was a lot of Google and local stuff where people were typing in, you know, how much the pool cost. And his articles would be coming up.

And we went through and I'd known that story. I think he ended up selling the business. But it was quite a kind of famous story in the online marketing, content marketing sort of sphere. And that very much resonated with me because I really like that transparent stuff and I like sharing what I'm doing. And the idea that that could be marketing was very exciting to me. Like, I would do it anyway, even if it wasn't marketing. But no one had done it in beer in Australia. So like we were researching and talking to people about how to start a brewery. We were told it would cost a million dollars. There was no content out there. So we set about. I started a podcast, we started an Instagram channel, we started a blog. I wrote a book about how to build a brewery. We actually finished the book before we'd even built the brewery. And it's still, still like spend probably 20 minutes a week signing autographed copies of this book because people are still buying it.

That's amazing.

But it was unique. Like people hadn't done that before. And now in Australia, if you Google anything to do with starting a brewery or building a portable bar or how much does craft beer cost, then our website comes up first every time. And.

We'Re kind of known as people who will generously share this stuff. And it's a Unique thing to be known for, and it builds a lot of loyalty as well. We've got a really, really loyal following online and offline that we've built up. Turn that into projects with Call of Duty and Equity, crowdfunding rounds and really active Facebook group of ambassadors and all this kind of stuff that we've just kind of kept pouring fuel on the fire.

How did the Call of Duty thing come about? Did they reach out to you? Was that something that you set the wheels in motion? How did that happen for you?

No, we've never really set any wheels in motion for anything. And that's another. Even the actual physical brewery came about because I got an email from a guy who was wanting to buy the building, hadn't even bought it yet, and.

Was like, I found this building. And I emailed a blogger to ask them who's doing something interesting. And this blogger just written about us because he'd seen all the content we'd written, and he thought we were kind of doing a proper brewery, which we weren't really. We're kind of thinking about it, but we didn't have any kind of concrete plans, and that all came from the content. And he's like, I'll come check it out. And I came and looked at him like, this place is epic. We should. We should do it here. And that's our. That's our brew. I'm here right now. Yeah, investors, like, all the investors came through that. Most of the investors came through that same approach. Call of Duty came through the same. Same thing that heard about us. A couple of guys who worked at their marketing firm that does their work. It's like, I've heard about this black ops. We should partner with them. They sent us an email, and we're like, okay, as long as you don't sue us.

As long as we can make some beer and slap your logo on it. Cool. I mean, that's the. It's interesting. There's a lot of similarities. And we kind of said this before we started recording that. Like, we've, like, we're reading your book and we're going through the four pillars of your compound marketing book, which it's basically brand, story, content, community. I'm like, man, we do so much of this. And it is interesting because when you just shout something out, like, for us, our megaphone is this podcast, but it's also the form of giving away our best stuff for free. That was the whole reason we even started this podcast. And we closed down courses, paid stuff for, like, this is all we don't want to hide behind a paywall. Like, we want to give it away and connect with other badasses that we can then give away your content if you're willing to like this. And it's interesting when we shout something out or a problem we have or something we're working towards or something, someone's going to come up and give us a solution or at least nudge us in the right direction and kind of like, what? Everything's developed for you. It sounds very similar. It's just give, give, give, and then the right thing. Just, oh, shit, that's cool.

And the good thing about it is it's not for everyone because it's traditional. Business owners don't like it at all because there's no very measurable ROI on giving shit away for free.

And it takes a lot of confidence to back yourself and take this approach because there is a downside to it. And, you know, we still have conversations about this stuff like. Like, we don't. You can't give everything away for free. So there's always, you know, how many of your secrets and things. Like, we put all of our recipes up online. We even this year we did through Covid, we did a homebrew comp where we made kits with our beer in it and the people could ferment at home with our exact recipes for our core range beer. So we're like, we're giving away everything.

I've never heard of that. That's rad.

That's really. Yeah, It's a thing that homebrew shops do. But I don't. I don't know if any breweries have.

Done it, like, not branded like that, though. Yeah, usually it's like some, you know, some guy that figured out, oh, this is kind of like, you know, Ballast.

Point may have done some stuff like that.

Maybe Ballast Point here in San Diego. Yeah.

Oh, okay. Yeah. Nice. We went there when we were there. It was pretty epic.

Beautiful, huh? Yeah. They've had some issues, though, with those buyers. Probably. They already.

They got bought out by Constellation and sort of went downhill from there.

Sold again or something for, like, nothing. Ridiculous.

Yeah. They sold for a billion dollars and then sold again for nothing.

Exactly.

But Tangent, it's a tough business. It's constantly like, we're going through it now. We're kind of just hitting profitability after five or six years, and now we need to spend $3 million on a new canning line. It's like, shit, okay, where do we get that kind of money from?

Man, we used To. Yeah, one of our, the places we rented for a while was with the brewery in San Diego here. So we were always kind of hearing the business of breweries, you know, just because we were right above them. We'd always smell it when they're brewing. We're like, oh man, the hops, so good. But yeah, because we've always, for a long time we wanted to run that. We're like, man, that's a hell of a business model though. You know, it is fun.

And I was never interested in just having a small local brew pub. I think the original, when me and Eddie were talking about it, he was sort of talking about doing a bar and I was like, I don't, I don't want to bar. That's just kind of feels like all the risk with like no upside. But when the idea of a brewery came up, it was like, well, actually you could build a brand that could be quite big. Like, there was other craft breweries that were doing. I remember an interview with Stone and Wood at the time, they were doing $50 million a year in revenue. And I was like, well, that's, that's a pretty decent sized business if we could start something that could, you know, approach any, anywhere near that kind of thing.

And yeah, and it's been, I think this approach to marketing has been really good for us because everything is so difficult. It's, you know, you've never got enough money to do anything like. Like we still were just about to put on our first marketing person and she's still not going to be full time in marketing. And that's after 59 other hires.

Wow.

And so, like, we just don't have, you know, like, we just don't have the money to be hiring shitloads of people and spending lots of money on marketing. So it helps to take this approach where you've got these things compounding behind the scenes without you necessarily having to do a whole lot. I see our competitors buying billboards and doing shitloads of paid ads and all that kind of stuff. And it's like, well, I'm glad we don't have to do that. I kind of hope we can scale this approach indefinitely because A, I'm not good at paid ads and B, it's just, it's only a short term payoff and you need someone running all of that, spending all this money. I think it also diminishes the brand a little bit. I don't know if I really have any evidence of that, but I think when I think of the Brands that I love, I don't see them doing a lot of paid ads. Like if you think of cars, I see ads for car companies all the time in Australia and all those kind of old shitty cars that I'm not interested in. And then I don't see anything paid wise for Tesla. But I see the product and I see the content and I see the technology and the brand and all of that and that just, that's the car I want. You know what I mean?

Yeah, there's that brand and story and all that. Yeah, it's all wrapped up in it.

And he's doing it at a scale that's beyond anyone ever thought was possible. But it's all the same stuff, you know, you look at like, and I talk about that in the book a little bit like the SpaceX, that's like when I got into content marketing, those stories like the Marcus Sheridan one and the Red Bull was another one that was like the big, the Red Bull space jump was the big bum gardener content marketing event. The dude just jumps out of space with all Red Bull branding.

But now if you think about what the best content marketing is, like if Red Bull were to do something like that, it would. Now it's very obvious that that's marketing. Whereas like every time Elon launches a rocket, it's just him showing up to work and doing his job and they just happen to live stream it and millions of people watch it. And I'm sure whoever is in the business of transporting stuff from Earth to wherever they transport it to, or you know, anyone who's in the, in the business of running the space station or whatever, I'm sure they're watching these launches and I'm sure they know what he's doing. And I don't know, I don't know how the business works, but I don't think he's having to take out paid ads for people Googling how do I get shit to Mars?

He's basically, it sounds just like a lot of documentation of your journey. It's your story. I mean, and this is especially if it's interesting. Yes.

And that's the other, the other thing I mentioned in the book is like you as an entrepreneur, you do have control over what you do. And there's a lot of different ways to approach being a business owner or a founder. And you know, one of them is just actively looking for interesting things to work on. Because if you've got something interesting to work on that you're going to make money with, it turns into an Asset building, free marketing thing down the line. So if you're thinking about it like that, and we do this all the time, like we have all these different beer ideas, but if that beer idea is a particularly good story, we'll go with that one because then you've got all your marketing sorted and it'll sell out within hours and you won't have to do anything other than put a post up on Instagram.

I'm kind of curious how you would build a story. Like, what's the process look like? I know in the book you break down all sorts of different story. Like you can have a, what, the brand story, product story, customer story, and there's probably even more, but those are the top three. It seemed like, how would it look like for, like, a beer as an example? I think this is pretty fascinating because most brewers probably aren't even doing this. Yeah.

One of the things we do is.

Staff beer. So after a year of service, the staff member gets their own beer. They come and brew it themselves.

We normally brand them as, like, cartoon branded with their face and everything on it, so it looks like the staff member. I haven't seen any other brewery do it, that there might be ones in America that do it. But it's always a great story because there's an opportunity to celebrate that staff member, get them involved. There's all the content from the brew day that just goes on Instagram and it doesn't take anything to do that. It's a bit to design the label and I still do a lot of that with the designers myself. And it takes up a lot of time, but once that's done, it's a bit. Those beers always sell out super quickly and the tap rooms always pack when we bring them out, because they bring their friends in and it's just like a good, fun thing to do. Like, if we could choose between that beer and just a random beer, that sounds like a good idea, that one's going to sell every time. And it's not just staff. We do investor beers. Sometimes we have ideas in our ambassador group, like, we did one, the ambassador group came. A guy came up with an idea for a beer and we brewed it, didn't tell him about it and then sent it to him. And again, it just sold out straight away because it was a cool story. And it's just a. It's no different, really, for us to chase that idea than it is to chase one of the thousands of ideas that's written in our Google Doc. But if you're Thinking about it from a story point of view and also a brand point of view. Like, we've got beers that started as brands and ended up as beers.

And even beers in the core range that were going into the core range that were like, we want to be called this. Or, I'll have a chat with my designers. We've got beers that started from a conversation with my designer, where he comes up with his phone, is like, I've got this new thing on here where we can make clouds. And I'm like, oh, yeah, that's cool. Show us. Oh, that looks cool. And it's like, can we do some kind of beer with the word cloud in it? I'm like, yeah, we can do that for sure. And then so we came up with this, like, Cloud series.

But then when we launched it, we got all these comments about how good a job we did with the design, but really it was a beer that we made for the design, not a design for the beer.

Interesting. Yeah. And that's the power of story and having everything back up. This, I mean, might start in a weird way, but it's like it's tied. The glue is this story. And what makes that part of the bigger picture, it seems like. Yeah.

And you can get a lot more leverage out of it as well, because, like, we. Then I. So we did the Cloud series, and then one of the beers we did was called Cream Cloud, which was an investor beer. So that was another story driven beer. Absolutely. Flew at the tap room. So bringing that back was another beer that was just going to sell it instantly. Then we did another one called Thundercloud, which was with our first brewer, whose surname was Cloud, who's actually from San Diego, and he's back there now, was one of his homebrew recipes. So that was the second one. And then we did Acid Cloud, which didn't have a story, but we had two out of three that did both with good branding. And then the series sold out super quickly. And then.

After that, we did an article on, you know, how we come up with beer idea names and.

How we come up with the design of cans. So then we've got articles on the site that are kind of compounding over time, getting more traffic and. Yeah, and they kind of. They go off each other.

Yeah. Well, that's what it really comes down to is story is making up the brand, really, at the end of the day. And that's what we. When we're preparing for this, we're like, man, I think that's the thing we'd like to hone in on this because a lot of folks, when you think of brands, it's like your logo, it's just the design, it's like, yeah, cool, it's part of it. But I mean, I would wager that the story is probably waiting maybe a little further. You know, it might maybe start with the design, but the brand, at the.

End of the day, I think the whole concept of brand is kind of like how people feel to me anyway, how they feel when they see it. And so it is visual but ultimately comes back to how you feel. And that's what I mean with like the excessive paid advertising. You might have a really good looking brand, but you're not going to influence how someone feels. Well, I'm not going to say you're not going to influence how someone feels, but you have to be very, very good at advertising and paid ads to positively influence how someone feels about your brand. Also have to be very, very good at design.

And you run a high risk of having the opposite effect because if you're just plastering a brand out there that people can see you're just flogging it, then it's going to reduce the trust and it's going to hurt the way people feel about the brand.

But it's the same thing with design. Like if we, I do think the visual stuff is super important and we get prompted by people for doing collabs all the time. And the first thing that comes into my mind is colabs are always a good story. So you know, they're a good thing to say yes to. They're a lot of work, but they're better than us just brewing a random beer. And then it's the branding, it's like, well, I know what our branding looks like. What does your branding look like? And can we do something really cool with this concept? And if we can, it's a tick and we'll do it. If we can't, it's kind of like, well, it might be a lot of work to do this and.

There might be other ideas out there that are just going to work better visually and might be better to do so. It's something I'm thinking about from the very early stages of even potentially doing a beer is like how it could ultimately end up looking and if there's a story that it will kind of flow with it as well. And if those two things happen and obviously the product has to be good, that probably should go without saying. But it, but it does need to be said. The product has to be good.

But, yeah, those. Those views will fly, and they won't require any marketing. That would just fly.

Yeah.

And other ones won't. Even if your main core brand, your main audience is strong, they just get lost in the sea of the millions of products that are getting released.

Yeah, no, that. That totally makes sense. I'm curious, like, what advice would you give somebody if they've got a business that's already kind of going, but they don't necessarily have a story behind it? They don't know how to tell their story of their business? Or maybe they just think their story is boring. Do you have any advice on uncovering the story that could help a business get traction?

Yeah, the first thing I'd say is what you said before about the different types of stories. You don't have to have a founding story. There's plenty of businesses out there where the story of the business being founded is not relevant at all to the brand itself. It's worked very well for my last two businesses, but that's only one type of story. And the ones we've been talking about, product stories, are available everywhere, especially if you chase them. And that's probably the first piece of advice, is if you don't have any interesting stories, then maybe you're not chasing enough interesting work and maybe not thinking about the story and how powerful it can be when you decide on things to do. So I would be looking for opportunities where stories will naturally fall into what you do. Customer stories are another one. Are you doing some interesting work, you're collaborating with interesting people.

That kind of thing I don't like the idea of. And also, like, if they think it's boring, they could be wrong. I mean.

There are ways to tell stories that are more compelling, even if the stories aren't in themselves inherently amazing. But I don't like the idea of just either making up fake stories, which I see happen, or just presenting a brand that looks like a story but actually isn't one. Like, there's a lot of that in craft beer. It's like, this is a convict that stole all this shit, and we uncovered his recipe, and it's like, yeah, I don't think that I could think of.

A wine company that does that too. There's probably all, yeah, everybody. Like, it's like, come on. Really?

I don't like that kind of stuff personally, to be honest. Maybe it works. I don't know. But that doesn't fit into what I do. And maybe there is a chance that there's absolutely zero stories Maybe the business is boring. I mean, our business that we decided to start as founders is an exciting, fun business with a great story and a great brand. And ultimately it's up to the entrepreneur to start a business that's going to work. And if you start a business and that's boring, that you can't build anything fun out of, then I wouldn't force it. I would do a better business.

True, it sucks to say that, but it is. I found a lot in business that there's a lot. There's so much power in momentum and that kind of flywheel thing that like the businesses that I've had that have worked well have been ones where you kind of feel like you're being pushed along and you're just kind of trying to navigate it or even just trying to keep up. That's the kind of business you want if you want a high growth business. And it's the same with marketing.

The marketing should be kind of pulling you along as opposed to you pushing it. And then I've tried the other approach, believe me, and it's really hard. Like what you're talking about. How do I kind of force a good story into a situation?

To me, that doesn't sound like the kind of business that I want. And what I did, which was pretty ruthless, was just shut down shitloads of ideas that didn't work. And that's something I've written about. Just this idea of giving up, being very powerful because. Just because everyone says you have to keep going and you have to persevere and all of that. I mean, if it's not working, maybe you don't, maybe you need to give up and try something else. The opportunity cost of persevering with a bad idea is picking up a good idea. And I've shut down a lot of bad stuff to really double down on. Really only two ideas I've ever had that have worked out of hundreds.

I mean that's, I think you said like two things. Really powerful is choose interesting work and then you have the flywheel. And I mean it's one in the same. It's creating this momentum for you. And if it's fun, if it's interesting for you and you're happy to show up every day you have new ideas and maybe a community that helps propel it even further too. Once you start talking about it, you can't stop it. And why would you? There's gotta be something good in there.

Well, and at the end of the day too. Go ahead.

No, you got it.

I was just gonna say, at the end of the day, every business also has their sort of behind the scenes. Right.

You can go and make content that shows how the brewery works. You can go make content that shows the. The bottling machine and how this bottling machine is, you know, pouring the beer, putting the lids on, writing the labels. And just like that kind of content could be woven into a story that can make people sort of make your brand appealing to people.

Yeah. The other two things I'd say on that point is, one is you got to do what you're good at. Like, I can tell you guys are good at what you do with this podcasting thing. Not everyone is. Like, I've listened to lots of podcasts. They're not all that good. You know, like, true.

It's not as simple. Like, if you guys are having success with this pod, it's not as simple as saying to someone else, go to a podcast because it's working for us. Like, I don't think that's what it's about with content at all. I think it's all about finding something that you're good at. And I don't think you need to be. I think you can get better at things, of course.

But because of the amount of kind of hustle involved in putting out a lot of this content, you almost need to find that medium that you really enjoy and that you're really good at early on, because. And the medium that I found was just writing and also, like, blog posts with lots of images because I really enjoyed making them look pretty. I like doing the nice images and I like writing lots of words. And to be honest, like, I've written six books. I don't think I'm particularly good at it. I just think I'm better at that than any other form of marketing. And so that's what I do.

And so I think you do need to choose something that you're good at. And if the storytelling or content writing or whatever isn't on that list, maybe you don't do it. Maybe you do something else. The other thing I'd say is it annoys me when you have these podcast interviews and someone comes on and be like, this is the exact structure you have to do. I read one of these books on storytelling, and it's like, this is the structure you have to do and you'll be successful. I don't believe that at all. There's loads of businesses out there who don't do any storytelling, who don't give a fuck about their design.

Don't really do any community stuff and don't do content. And they're doing just fine because they've found something else that they're good at. And that's perfectly fine too, if, you know, I know guys who have Amazon businesses and online businesses that just run paid ads. Some of them, you wouldn't even know what the brands are. It works for them. Don't listen to me. That's fine. It's completely fine to do what works. And that's. It's taken me a long time to find this approach, which has worked a couple of times for me, and that's why I'm sharing it. But it doesn't necessarily mean it's perfect for every person listening to this.

Well, it goes back to what you said about James Schramko and Pat Flynn. Like, you're not modeling their business models, but you're kind of plucking certain elements. And, you know, that goes for any mentor or person or business, whoever you're trying to kind of model. But there's probably. You're probably not modeling them as a whole. It's probably an aspect of it. So it's like, that's a better approach. Yeah.

And I think that's what James did. You know, he used to talk about Jay Abraham and the copywriters. Like, he'd take bits of those, but then he'd also talk about the sales, like, persuasion type stuff. And.

He was doing online marketing as well, so he was following guys like Pat Flynn and picking up little bits here and there from guys like that and just kind of building into his own little thing. And that's what I've tried to do. There's a lot of things I'd like to do that I'm not particularly good at.

But to me, it doesn't really make sense. You can get better at things over time, but you just gotta try and find something you're good at, I think. And to be honest, it's a kind of a lucky time to be around because I don't know if there's ever really been a time before where, like, a couple of lads can just sit there and talk. No kidding. Kind of build an audience and build a business as a result of doing that.

So I'm happy you said that because it feels like we're cheating half the time. We're like, what the fuck? We're literally just hanging around chatting with a guy with beer about beer marketing and just having to get like, you're in Australia. It's like, holy shit. Like this is so cool. And we do have a business behind it. But yeah, I mean, like, there's a lot of content or people out there that might be doing it for the love of it, but maybe they can't connect the two, you know.

But that's a tricky one too. Yeah. And business is hard, you know, like that was my situation for many years, I think. I started blogging in 2010 or 2009 and I'd done bits and pieces before then and it wasn't 2013 was when WP curve took off. So I'd written hundreds and hundreds of blog posts and done loads of podcasts and heaps and heaps of content that just didn't go anywhere. And I only had, I think, I think I wrote two blog posts. One or two blog posts that did well out of hundreds and hundreds. And those were the ones that kind of formed my brand. Like one of them was.

About how to validate a startup and that ended up becoming basically the story behind WP Curve. It ended up becoming a seven day startup book and brand. And I turned that into online communities and events and all kinds of stuff. And it was just, it just started as one blog post. And I've seen other people do the same thing where they've kind of put a lot of stuff out there, but one thing's gotten traction and that's the thing that they've really doubled down on. And you know, one little successful piece of content can be so much more powerful than hundreds of unsuccessful ones. And I think if you get to the point where you guys potentially are at, where you do have a good active audience, where everything you put out kind of gets devoured and people like it, that's awesome. But a lot of people aren't in that situation when you start, you just put a lot of stuff out there and you just have no idea what people want. And you're kind of paying attention to these vanity metrics where you're like, oh, well, this one got this many views or this many downloads, so therefore it's the best piece of content. But I think the more intangible things around traction are more powerful, like figuring out what people really care about. And that's what I noticed with that blog post. It was like, all the comments on that post, it was like, oh, wow, this is really interesting. This is changing my approach to doing something. Like if you can influence someone's behavior, that's more powerful than any statistic you're ever going to see on any report.

Sure. Oh yeah, that's that subconscious like, yeah, that's going to change their complete perspective in life as well, I'm assuming. Not just in business, you know. Yeah.

And I found that with Black Ops as well. We, like our stats on anything, aren't particularly good with marketing, other than social media is pretty strong. But like the podcast, we don't get a lot of downloads for the podcast. The articles don't get visited a lot unless they happen to rank well in Google or like there's one or two that go really well. Like the craft beer prices one goes really well. But what I did notice was.

When we'd go to events in person, people would come up to me and they'd talk to me about things on the podcast or articles we'd written. And it was a small group of people, but they were talking to me in a way where I knew the stuff we're putting out was actually changing their behavior. And that, to me, that's way more powerful. Like, you know, you're getting traction. Podcasts is tough because the stats are almost meaningless.

They suck. Yeah.

You know, you're getting traction. If someone's, if someone's saying, like, you know, I started a business because of you, that's more powerful than any statistic. And that's stuff we kind of try to pay attention. This particular thing was interesting. I did this as a result. Well, then it's like, oh, that's an opportunity to do more content around that topic because this is actually moving people as opposed to just getting a bunch of hints from random Google searches.

Yeah, I mean, that's where it goes to Community. And I know we're. I don't want to crack open that whole wormhole because that's probably a big one. But Community really supports you in all that. If they can connect with what you're putting out there, your product, your stories, all that. I mean, that's what it sounds like from WP Curve days. Now at Black Hops, it's your community that's propelling you on social and telling their friends, and that's your flywheel in action again.

And we've taken that to the extreme. Now.

We turned our very small Facebook group, which we put together when we wrote the book, into an ambassador group that now has two and a half thousand people in it. And not that that number is important. Important is the activity in the group. It's super, super active. In some cases, I'll put something in that group that'll get more likes on our main social media account, which has 27,000 followers. So 10 times as many, but you get more activity, often in threads or likes or whatever in the group because it's so much more meaningful, it's so much more personable. And those guys ended up investing in the business. Threat equity, crowdfunding. They promote us everywhere. They vote for us. Like we just got voted the number one craft brewery in the country. And we're quite small compared to a lot of the other craft breweries, but we've got this kind of rabid group of people who are really into what we're doing. And when we want votes for something, we ask for it and we tend to get a lot of them. So that's just turned into this big epic. And the marketing from that was amazing and it didn't cost us a cent. So it's just another example of that kind of flywheel working.

Dig it. Yeah.

I mean, I was going to make a point about something you were saying earlier about the content that you're putting out. Just like a few pieces of the content hit. But I think a key there is to keep on putting out content even if it's not always hitting, because every once in a while some of it will hit and get sort of this mass appeal. I remember.

Or maybe, maybe it won't. And that's. That's the tricky thing. I don't think it's as simple as keeping putting content out, because then you're almost saying, I'm not even going to bother trying to work out what's going to get traction. I'm just going to put out a whole bunch of shit and see what gets traction. Whereas I think it is still super important to really be in tune with what is the stuff that people care about. And even now, literally just before this meeting, this interview, I've got a guy who works me one day a week pre drafting some of my posts, and he's got a whole bunch of ideas in this document and I'm still constantly thinking about, okay, is this a good idea? Will this go well? Can we tweak this idea? Because it kind of sounds a bit boring, but can we tweak it to answer a question that we get asked all the time and therefore I know the content's going to go well. So being in tune with. And it's still a guess, I don't know if the content's going to go well, but I ranked them 1 to 5 on do I think this will crush? Do I think it won't crush? And I'm not always right, but you get more and more in tune with what's going to work. And you're right, you have to keep putting out the content, but you also have to get more and more in tune with what's going to work. Otherwise you're just going to put out a whole bunch of content and get nothing from it.

Burnout. Yeah.

Yeah.

So I'll give you the specific example, just because it's fresh in my mind and it might apply to other people. The idea he had in there was.

A day in the life of a brewer or a day in the life of a sales rep. And I was like, okay, we can write this, but it's not going to be the most intriguing thing to read. But one thing we get asked all the time is how do you become a brewer or how do you become a sales rep and how do you get into the industry? So we're just going to tweak that idea a little bit and instead of writing A day in the Life, we'll do, you know, how do you become a brewer at Black Ops? Or how do you become a sales rep at Black Ops? Go through the existing guys. Who are the guys that got a sales job at Black Ops that didn't previously have sales experience? Because that's, that's. They're the people always asking these questions. I got this long email yesterday from a guy saying, I don't have any sales experience. How do I get a job in sales? And we get that stuff all the time. So if you're getting questions, people want to know the answers, and that's a goldmine for content. So I think that idea, with a very, very minor tweak, will probably get 10, 20, 30 times the results of the other idea, which. Which might just be kind of an interesting thing to read if you're bored. But it's not really solving a specific problem, a really useful problem that no one else has solved.

Yeah, yeah. And that's the power of the community. They're giving you the kind of feeding you all the questions, all the problems that they have. As long as you're listening and capturing those and then ranking them, like you said, and maybe throwing in a little bit of your own creative spin on it too, then it's probably pretty good.

Yeah. And there is more scientific ways to do it. I think in the content machine book that I wrote, I think 2015, which is a little bit out of date now because a lot of the examples were kind of online entrepreneurs, actually, maybe it's not too out of date. It's probably. They're all probably still relevant to be Honest. But that was a. I did, I did look at a lot of ways in there to be a bit more scientific around generating content ideas by using, you know, the Google keyword tool, which has changed now, but other tools online for kind of working out what people are searching for. Like there's definitely merit to some of that and we do do some of that. Like if we're short of ideas, we'll kind of have a look at what people are searching for or you know, look at, look at what are the big problems that people have and look at the content that's been written on it and is it actually that good? And if it's not, then maybe there's an opportunity there to do something better and become that kind of pillar piece of content for that topic. So it doesn't all have to be just intuition. But I've found the, that more intuitive approach didn't come naturally to me. But that's been the one that's been the most powerful.

Yeah. Well, a good resource we just found recently. We had Rand Fishkin on the show and he has a tool called SparkToro now and yeah, 10 uses for free per month. So you could pretty much do what if you don't have enough intel from your folks and hearing from them, you can see, okay, well all this other data from these other resources, it aggregates for you. So that's maybe another scientific way you can kind of drum up some ideas or cross check a little bit or.

An easy way if you're starting from scratch and you don't necessarily have community feedback yet.

Exactly. Yeah, that's more what I was thinking because it's easy. I always used to think this when I was listening to interviews with people and they're kind of like, yeah, just ask your community. But I don't have a community to ask and it is hard. It's a kind of chicken and the egg thing. So. But, but there are ways and you know, everyone who does have a community previously didn't have one. So there are ways to kind of cross that bridge. But, but it is harder and it maybe does require a lot more of that sort of analytical side or getting out and talking to people.

And yeah, yeah, just a more experimentation I think now when we write a piece of content, I feel like I know a lot more how well it's going to go. Whereas at the start it was really like, I have no clue, I don't know what people want. We're just going to write what we're doing and we'll see what Traction we get. But, like, we've got posts on our site that will get 10,000 tens of thousands of views.

In a year that are old, posts that haven't been touched. And we'll get others that will bring out this month and get a few hundred and then disappear forever. So, like, the difference between.

And didn't take necessarily longer to create that content. They're both decent, proper blog posts with a lot of effort put into them. But the difference between an average idea and a good one is so powerful that it's really worth trying to tune yourself into what are going to be the really good ones. And I think with written content, social media, it seems to be really, really powerful. The difference between something that crushes and something that just doesn't. I've seen it with podcasting as well. I think it's probably a little bit less extent with podcasting, but I know the podcast I listen to, there's always that sort of pivotal interviews on those podcasts that get shared a lot. I don't even know how it happens, but it kind of ends up being the ones that really blow that podcast up.

We've had a few of those, too. We're like, I don't know how.

Because it's organic and it's kind of compounding without you having to do anything, which is. Which is powerful. But I'm sure the difference between, like, do you have them on your show? Do you have podcasts that have blown up compared to others?

I mean, definitely. Yeah, there's a few that we're like. And they're not even interviews that we particularly thought they would do. Well, we look back at the stats, we're like, why is that just light years ahead, this other one that we thought would crush, but.

Well, it's almost never the big names. It's almost never like the, you know, the guru that everybody knows their name. We finally got them on the podcast. Those ones are usually the underperformers of our. Of our show, to be honest, which is interesting.

Yeah. Trends all over. Who knows?

It is pretty random. I think maybe there's someone out there who can fully analyze it, but I think generally good content rises to the top. And if your approach is to create as much good content as you can and in the definition of good content needs to be. Is it meaningful for someone else? You know, it can't just be something that you think is good. It needs to be meaningful enough to move someone else. And if you commit to that.

I think that's the best approach. Eventually you're Going to fall into these interviews and these written blog posts and these social media posts that do so much better than the other ones that you kind of wonder why you even do the other ones. But that's what you're looking for is those really big pieces of traction.

Yeah, for sure. Well, I'm hearing TikTok is working pretty well for testing out some new ideas, so maybe.

No, we haven't ventured there. I just keep hearing it from others. Let's wrap it up and compound. Marketing is the book. Where's the best place for folks to go get that? I know, it's pretty much everywhere. Amazon for sure.

It's on. Yeah, it's only on. My books are only on Amazon, so I don't sell anything anymore. I've just got them up there. If you want them, you can get them on there. You can actually illegally download pretty much all of my books. You just go into Google and put PDF, because I did it myself just to check the quality of them and they're fine. So you can do that.

I love it. I mean, that's literally why in the first chapter, the first page, I was like, great. There's nothing to sell here. I mean, it's just like one of those, like, oh, as a reader, you're like, cool agenda here.

I can say with 100% confidence that you're the first guest we've ever had that told listeners to go pirate their books.

I'm not saying go do it. I don't know how dodgy these websites are, but I'm saying if you want to do it, I don't care. But not the brewery one. That one's not on there. You got to buy that one. Hell, yeah.

Well, they're also on.

I've done audiobooks. I actually, because I like. I think Amazon and Audible have done a good enough job with their product that, you know, I don't really. I don't pirate books anymore because it's not the best thing to do as a human being. I understand if you got no money.

And everything, the karmic thing that's out there.

Yeah, but it's. But the product is so good. Like, I'm listening to audiobooks on Audible and it's just, you know, it's worth it. It's worth spending a couple of dollars. So that's normally what I do. But yeah, I write the books because, A, I enjoy the process and B, I like sharing, hoping it'll help someone else. And I don't make a lot of money from them and I don't want to because I want one thing to focus on and I got my hands full with a brewery.

Yeah. And the brewery, if people want to check that out, they can go to blackhops.com au it's only available in Australia right now, but I know we do have quite a few listeners in Australia thanks to James Schramko having us on his show like five times.

It's true.

I mean, if people do, it's surprising how far the beer has spread in Australia. So if you do listen to this podcast and you do drink my beer, tag me in it and then tag these guys so they know. Because it'd be cool to see that.

I would love to see that.

Yeah.

Awesome, Dan. I appreciate you, my man. It's been fun.

Yeah. Hopefully fun.

Hopefully we can get into the same city at some point and have a.

Beer together either out there.

We're so keen to go back to America. Yeah, you got no idea. But I'm definitely keen.

We'll make it happen. I remember. Have a good one.

Cheers, guys. Bye.

I'm thirsty.

For what?

Suds.

For suds.

I wish we had some. I don't know why we weren't all drinking beers.

We really should have been, that is. I don't have beer, though.

Well, actually, I don't have any at my house. I don't know the last time I had a beer, actually. That would be bad to admit in front of Dan. Hopefully he doesn't listen to this part.

Yeah, I think anybody who's listened to us for a while probably thinks that we're like hardcore beer fans because we had Homebrew Academy.

We do things at a brewery.

We worse do work above a brewery. But the reality is I probably have a beer like once a month.

I mean, I'm pretty close to it, man. I'm more wine these days. Got some nice bourbon waiting for me at home tonight. Some rye.

Yeah, I tend to do more whiskey and diet Coke. Like the Diet Coke Whiskey. Like either Bullet rye.

Yeah, Bullet rye is what I got waiting for me right now.

Yeah, I like to mix bullet rye with Coke Zero specific. Like bullet rye plus Coke Zero is like my favorite blend I've never had.

But I would love to eat the. Join one. Join one with you. Have one with you soon.

Well, I might have some of that. I don't have beer. I know I don't have beer because I don't. We don't keep really stocked up on beer unless we're having a barbecue or something.

Forgive you, my friend, but I am.

I do pretty much always have some whiskey lying around.

Whiskey is a good touch. But. Yeah, we are not alcoholics, I promise. But it might sound like we are.

Sometimes, but we have other vices that are a little more frequent.

We'll just say, yeah, like running.

No, but Dan, I mean, we could have kept riffing with him for a long time. He's one of them folks, for sure.

We could have gone two hours with him, but, you know.

Yeah, well, I guess we have time limit.

It's also getting to be nighttime here while we're recording this, so I probably should go home.

It's close to dinner time, so. But yeah, man, I mean, I don't know what. What I felt like I was. I was. I was nerding out and didn't let you in a little bit. So. I want to hear. I want to hear you.

You want to hear me?

How you feeling about Mr. Dano and what he said here? This is.

Yeah, I mean, I really enjoyed it. I think the funny thing is we always sort of prep for these calls. Like, you and I, we sit around and we like sort of. Well, I say sort of as a filler word, but I mean, I'm seeing.

Two pages of notes here.

We prep for these calls like mofos. Right. But about 20 minutes before we jump on the podcast, you and I kind of sit around and have a discussion about like, here's. Here's where I think we should take it. Here's the sort of problem I think we should try to solve for our listeners minds. Here's the gap we're trying to close. Right. Like, that's sort of how we've sort of defined our podcast recently is the guests that we're bringing on, what sort of knowledge do they have? What have they managed to achieve? What do they know that we wish we knew? And how do we close that gap? That's kind of how we're doing it. So we always have this discussion before these interviews of. All right, what is the thing we're trying to close the gap on? And the funny thing is, I think when we actually had the conversation, it actually went in a different direction than we were sort of anticipating.

Yeah. Because the gap here is like. It was a lot of the storytelling and branding.

Storytelling and branding covered that.

A crap ton, though. A shit ton. Here it was just in maybe not the. The specific questions we would have had. Yeah, yeah.

It wasn't. It wasn't sort of the flow that I was anticipating with it, but we. We did kind of COVID it quite a bit. And I think what I really, really like about what he's doing is that it is all like the content is the marketing strategy. Right. So his, his whole strategy with like Black Hops of going and answering all these like super common questions about beer, these super common questions about how breweries work, all of these super common questions.

Getting hired as a sales rep for.

His company, how to get hired as a sale. Like all of these questions that people commonly ask. Now in Australia, if you Google any of these questions, you find his brewery. Now he's not going for the sale with that content. It's not like you read it and go, oh, I need to order this guy's beer now. But because every time you have a question about beer, he's the guy that you see, his brand is the brand that you see. His beer is probably the most top of mind beer. When you're like, I need to go get some beer.

Now he's the number one brewery and craft brewery in Australia.

Yeah.

So saying something on the back of this content.

Yeah. So that, that sort of like strategy could be applied to everything. No matter what your business model is. You can show behind the scenes content, you can ask, answer common questions, you can see what your community is talking about, enjoying the discussion in the form of blog posts. All of this, this content eventually could potentially get ranked. And when people search these questions and they find your answers, you're now that top of mind brand when it comes time for them to order whatever this product is.

Right.

He did the same thing with WP Curve. Like he, his, his blog, I think, used to answer just a shit ton of questions about WordPress.

That's what he said. Yeah, he doesn't have it anymore. He said that content. But yeah, he blogged like crazy.

So if you had questions about WordPress back in, what did he say?

2013, somewhere around there.

Yeah. So if you had questions about WordPress, you'd Google them. And his site was probably what was popping up about WordPress. You click, you read them and then you go, oh well, what is this WP Curve site that I'm looking at? And then you find out his company will do a lot of the WordPress stuff for you.

Right.

And both of his big brands, WP Curve and Black Hops Brewing, follow that exact same model. Be the people who show up when others have questions. And I really feel like you could sort of sum up his entire strategy like in that little nutshell there is be the brand that shows up when others have questions about this topic.

Yeah, yeah, I Love it. Another thing that stood out to me that. That I think fuels all of this is just. I brought it up a little bit. Is chase something interesting. Like, interesting work. So it's like, yeah, maybe. I don't know, maybe something's not super interesting, but you can make it interesting. Maybe it's through your. Or through a story you tell or a design you make. And then you make a story around that and then build content.

Yeah.

And then a community. And it all has this flywheel approach. I like the way that he said that. Is, you know, with just fun inherently, like a fun business. Like, that's why we actually wanted to start a brewery at one time, too.

It sounded fun.

It sounded fun. And then we started working in a. We didn't work in one, but we've definitely been in many breweries and worked in them. Yeah. Not for paid gig, but to brew our own beer in their system and don't share with friends. I'm telling our story, damn it. But the idea is. Yeah, I don't want to run a brewer anymore.

No.

But I wouldn't mind owning one and hanging out in one and see, because it's fun.

Yeah.

But I think having a fun thing, because I feel like that in our minds, I feel like brewing is maybe always something that's always there. Like, we didn't. I don't know if we said it on the episode. I think it was before, but our overtime parties are held in breweries. And, you know, these overtime parties are what? The last one, we had, like, 500 people there. It was during traffic and conversion. I think it was, like, two years ago now. It was the last one that was held.

Yeah. We didn't do it in 2020, so the last one would have been 2019.

So we hold it in a brewery in San Diego, downtown. It's downtown San Diego. It's Mission Brewery. And we'll have this event that we want to have for ourselves, but we just happened to brew a beer on their system a couple weeks for. And then share it with our friends. I mean, we don't pay anything. The brewery doesn't charge us for it. We just make sure. I mean, it's like $5 a brew. Like, big deal, you know? But it's this special story now that we usually name what like, we have, like, KPI ipa. I remember that. Which is total marketing lingo that, like, it's so stupid if it was outside of our Internet marketing bubble. But Dan Ryan, that was an amazing name. But, like, that's the whole thing. It was driven off of fun. You know, it wasn't like, oh, this is our. You know, this is an event that we can do to make money, which we did make some, and we covered our costs, basically, you know, but, like, we made it this cool event on the back of having fun in this beer.

I don't even know if the event came before the brewing. Like, I almost. I think, like, our first time through when we did it at Benchmark Brewing. So we've done them at Benchmark Brewing a couple times. We did it at Council Brewing. We did it at McKellar. We've done. And then RP Council and Benchmark. Yeah. We're like the touch of death to all these breweries. No, because we do it at Mission Brewery most of the time, and they're still up, and we did it at McKellar and they're still thriving.

True.

So.

But I think when we did our brewing the first time at Benchmark, we just wanted to go brew a beer on their system. And then while we were in the process of brewing the beer, we're like, we should throw a big party and invite people to drink our beer with us.

Well, here, let's break this down a little bit, because I think this is super fascinating. We were interested by beer.

Yep.

We happened to sync up and actually rent an office. Well, here's another funny story. We paid for our rent with beer.

We did.

Thank you, Dan Ryan again. But we hung out with Dan Ryan and the crew there. Eric, Ginny and all the, you know, Mike. Yeah. We had, like, everybody else kind of just piled in after that, but we rented a. An office. It was above a brewery. It was literally. The landlord was the brewery Benchmark. And just because of our interests, we would go hang out in the brewery all the time. I mean, definitely we packed on some weight because we'd have a brew, like, every day or five.

I finally just got rid of that weight, like, three years later.

But we would always ask questions to the brewers and then we'd be like. And they'd be like, yeah, just come back in the back and we'll show you around. We're like, this is rad. And then we'd see everything. We're like, can we brew a beer on your system? Yeah, why not? Can we have a party here at your brewery?

Sure.

Can we invite all of our marketing friends and talk about marketing nerd shit and take over your brewery for a night? Okay.

Yep.

And that was pretty much how it started.

Yeah. And then we did that, and we packed the house like probably like fire marshall wouldn't have approved.

Kind of packed the house numerous times, numerous events and.

And then benchmark went, you know what that little party thing that you did, you guys should do that more often, you know.

And that became over. Well, it was overtime existing whatever we called it overtime, you know.

Yeah. If we tried to explain the entire origin story, it gets very convoluted. But that's the parts that they need to know.

And the point of Megan. Yeah, we chased something interesting because it was interesting to us. We found people that would, that were knowledgeable like Eric and Dan. Way more knowledgeable in beer than us and connected in that industry and connected. Super connected. And Ginny of course, I mean, I mean they're the master.

Jenny was the one who was the most connected.

Really?

Yeah, yeah, Jenny and Eric. I mean like you guys. Hell yeah. Derose. Check them out, they're awesome. And yeah, I mean that just developed into an interesting. I mean now if you think about the Flywheel, the last 500 people on the back of Traffic and Conversion and it's like we had most of the speakers from Traffic and Conversion at our event and it was definitely competing with other parties happening. But guess what happened? A lot of those party members would come to our party after they were like.

We always started ours early too. So there's like a lot of parties that didn't even start till like 10pm so we always started ours at like 6. People would come hang out for like 2 hours and sort of pre warm up for whatever late night party they were going to.

If you've, if you've been at that party, I would love to hear from you. I know like, like Mike Rhodes, you know, he's, he's been on the show here and I don't know, he just popped in my mind for some reason. Cause he's Australian, he's probably knows black hops too. I mean maybe even knows Dan. But like he came out and he was like this is the coolest thing. And James Schramko came to our last Schramko. I mean we've had countless number of people that have yeah, flown for an event but because we have created this thing alongside that, it's an interesting fun thing. It's ours. We, I don't know, it's just like.

We created a place for people to go. We just like during these, these events, I think in the evening time when all the speaking is over, people are kind of going, ah, what should we go do tonight? Where should we go? Should we all Meet for dinner. Well, we're giving them that place to go hang out where, you know your crew is gonna be. But it's sort of a change of subject. But like, thinking of like, what he was mapping out here, a lot of times I think about, okay, how can I apply this to my business? Which, you know, we know is the podcast affiliate marketing, info marketing business. But then I also think, okay, what I was just learning here, how would I apply that to like a shutter company, for instance? Right? So I've, I've. Random example, random example. You and I have both sort of dealt with, with like fun businesses, like talking to people and drinking beer and making beer and all the cool shit that somehow is how we make money these days. But we've also dealt with this like, shutter company type business, which when I say like a boring business, I mean, shutters aren't that freaking manufacturing company.

I mean, you can just say that, yeah, it's not that exciting sounding.

So, like, based on what he was saying, I would go, okay, well, how would I apply this to like a shutter company? Well, if we built a blog for my dad's shutter company, right? If we built a blog, I can start making things about like, you know, what size windows can shutters go on, you know, what colors can you paint shutters, Crazy shutters.

Basically, I would do all the keyword research, find all of the common questions that people are asking about shutters, and I would make sure that my website, our shutter company website, is the website that shows up for like every possible question. You can think about shutters. And what's that gonna do? Well, they may not be ready to buy shutters the moment they find the content, but when they are ready to buy shutters, who's gonna be there waiting?

You're top of mind. Yeah. You might not be making the sale from the get go, but at least you're in their minds. Cause you're the only one showing up doing that kind of thing.

Yeah, And I mean like, like the sort of unsexy businesses like that, most of them put no effort, zero, none whatsoever into content marketing.

Here's another one, is like, what if you built a community on the back of a shutter company, but not branded as a shutter company. Branded as like, you know, shutter custom cooler name. But basically it'd be a group of people who own shutters already in their home. So it's like, I don't know, it's just this community where it's like, I don't know, there's probably some weird shit with Shutters.

I don't know.

I'm looking at them. You have them installed right in front of me here.

But like, I just don't know. I don't know if I have too many people bonding over shutters.

Maybe that's a dumb idea. But there's probably some community element that again, staying top of mind. But I think at the end of the day, like what Dan was saying, it's stories, it's your brand. Yeah. So however you plant that into people's minds.

Well, just thinking about shutters, right. Like you've been in the fat, like the shutter factories, right. Like it seems like a pretty boring industry. But when you get back into the factory, there's like really kind of cool machinery and equipment and like automations that are happening that like most people have no idea that's what goes into making this stuff. If you just like show them your world, people will be interested in it.

The interesting thing, and this is where it relates to brewery as well. The interesting thing is the making of the shutters, the making of the beer. And also for shutters. I remember going out and installing some shutters or at least like I would observe and kind of help out. And I'm like, this is actually really cool because now it's kind of like this woodworking has been done, but now you have to customize it to this unique thing in someone's house that's probably like a mansion because there were some baller homes. What if you had behind the scene videos for all that stuff? Yeah, it's just like breweries, like, you know, you have the brewing thing, which actually our first overtime. I remember filming a video and editing one behind the scenes video. And we use that as a sales material to get people to our event. Yeah, you could do the same damn thing with shutters.

I shot a time lapse of the entire brewing process too.

We've done multiple and like we always document it and there's a reason we live stream all that stuff. But shutters, like, what's to say you can't do the same damn thing? Just document the whole thing.

Abc Always be continent.

Continentin.

Contenting. Always be contenting.

A, B, C. I think that's gonna catch on.

It's totally because contenting is an easy word to say.

Contenting. Contenting.

It almost sounds like incontinence.

It does. I know.

Incontinence.

Maybe not.

No, I'm gonna pass.

That's just Joe's daily life.

Always be contenting. I guess you could always say always be creating. That might Flow better.

But too many people have said that, though. Oh, you're not unique. Oh, your USP is contenting.

Okay.

I like contenting better just because it's so stupid.

Hashtag, always be contenting.

Always be contenting.

All right, let's wrap this thing up. Dan was amazing. You need to get his book. It's on Amazon. It's very inexpensive. I don't know. It's actually on the. I mean, just get the dang thing. Because here's the thing, it's.

I'm just laughing because he literally told people to Google it, Download it if you find it.

Yeah, don't do that. But if you come across it, I guess there's good quality versions out there. He's checked. But I love it because it distills everything we just talked about. But in a very linear process, Compound marketing is the title. And literally on page one, he was like, I ain't got anything to sell you. I don't need to.

Well, that's what's great about.

And it lets your. I think it puts the reader's guard down because you're like, oh, I get the full picture of this thing. So if you like this interview, get that book.

My favorite guests are the ones that come on and be. Before we hit record. They're like, I don't have anything to sell.

Perfect.

Because whenever we know they have nothing to sell, we know that they will literally open up about any question we ask. And Dan was like that. He's like, I got nothing to sell. You know, like, you can point them at my brewery, point them at my book. But shit, he even said, google it and you might even find the PDF support the dude. I mean, me personally, I don't even like digital books. I prefer print, but yeah, well, hey.

I mean, get that. Also, if you're in Australia, go check out Black Hops, or at least order their stuff online. I think they ship in Australia. And I know a lot of y' all are in Australia, so I would love, love, love to hear if you guys.

Talking to you, Chris.

Yeah.

Chris talking to you.

James.

Hey.

And Mike.

Mike.

And Charlie.

Uh huh. Ilana.

Alana.

Yep. Charlie. Salome.

Is Gert in Australia?

No, he is not. He is on the opposite side of the world.

Okay.

He's in Europe, so you can't get it.

Gert.

So we can go down the list of all of our customers in Australia. I'm sorry we forgot some of your.

Names, but I was just thinking of guests from Australia.

That's true. We have a lot. But Tag us. Tag us. And them. I'm super curious because I want to. I really just want to know what that tastes like, because I've never tasted any of it. So for some reason, when I picture.

Black hops, I always assume it's going to be like a stout or like a porter, like a black beer. But I know that's not true.

I think he started with something. I don't know. I forget what their first beer was, but I thought it was maybe.

I don't know.

I'm not going to butcher that.

I will tell you that next time we're in Australia, we're going to stop by.

Yeah. All right. Well, I want to see y' all stopping by there and let it just guilt us, because we will. It'll force us to get out to Australia a little faster.

Yeah. And when you get to the brewery, tell the people behind the counter, oh, I heard about this on Hustle and Flowchart.

Dan was some cool stuff out there on the Hustle Flowchart podcast.

Yeah.

All right, cool. So, yeah, give us some FOMO and post that. So also get the notes. We have action guides on this whole episode here, of course. So two weeks of this going live. It is free, but after that, it goes into our paid vault area. It's not that expensive to get in there, but if you go to flowchart group.com you will actually get access to our Facebook group and the notes, the action guide to this episode. So make sure to plug in your email address@flowchartgroup.com and also, we are sponsored by our wonderful buddies, our friends, the webinar friends of ours. Who are they again? Tell me about.

They're called.

Wheezy Ebonar.

Wheezy Ebonar. We say Wheezy. No, we're easy. Easy Webinar is the tool. So everything webinar that you can possibly think of, of doing in webinar formats and things that you've never thought of, that webinars are capable of doing, they can do except for one platform.

Except for what you're thinking, don't go there.

Yeah, that's not worth pursuing. I would scratch that idea. So stick with Easy. Webinar will give you enough ideas.

Keep your clothes on is what we're saying.

Well, at least keep the camera a little higher than it is now.

I guess it depends on your model. There's a lot of people making a lot of money taking their clothes off.

I'm not gonna tell you what to do and not to do. You know, that's your decision. So unless Easy Webinar is gonna slap. I haven't read the terms on that side.

Yeah, well, Easy Webinar, they're hooking you up anyway. They're going to give you a discount because you listen to Hustle and Flowchart. So if you go to EasyWebinar.com hustle, that's where the hookup is happening. So EasyWebinar.com hustole it's what we use when we use webinars. It's what you should use when you do webinars.

Easywebinar.com hustle and if you've enjoyed this episode and if you've hung out 20 minutes during this banter section, go share this with some folks and go subscribe, rate and review. Tell us if you love this episode and tell a friend.

And don't forget abc, always be content.

Bye.

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