Massimo Chieruzzi - The Content Marketing That Made AdEspresso Successful

I think one of the biggest success of adespresso was really the branding. I've always cared a lot about building a brand, but it really comes down to being unique. What can you do to stand out of the crowd? Nowadays, 90% of the SaaS company use these very stylized illustration, very long ends and legs, and they all look the same. So it's really about what can we do that is different, but it's unique to us. And then just be consistent. Stick to it.

This is an intro. Intro, intro, intro.

Hustle and Float Shark with your boy.

My boy, Matt Wolf and Joe Fear.

Hey, welcome back to the Hustle and Flowchart podcast.

What's happening?

Hey, not much.

Your name is Matt Wolf.

It is Matt Wolf.

My name is Joe Fear.

It is. We just said that in the beatboxing part.

Oh, do we?

Yeah, I just went with your boys, remember?

That's right.

I just said that.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

You beatbox behind. Just happened a second ago.

God, my memory is just like a gnat. I apologize.

All right.

But today. Today, this session is a good one.

It is. Yeah.

Massimo.

Massimo Garuzzi from.

He is the founder of Ad Espresso. He is not currently working at Ad Espresso, but we will tell the tale. He will tell the tale.

He will tell the tale. And what a tale. A tall tale.

It is a tall tale. Indeed it is. And it's a tale that continues on after this episode.

A tale that stands the test of time.

Yeah, it does.

I just feel like I'm saying cliches for the beginning of movies.

Keep going.

I don't know anymore.

Massimo is freaking amazing. Fortunately, I mean, we didn't. I don't. Did you know that he was a listener of the podcast before we connected and not before.

Before today's episode. Yes, yes. Not.

Not that long ago.

Not that long ago.

Yeah. It's really cool. And yeah, so I thought that was super fascinating. But, you know, we heard that and we're like, oh, my God. You know, Ad Espresso. We used to use it. Used to read all of the content.

Yeah.

For a really good reason. We'll get into why later in the banter section.

Yeah. He explains their content marketing philosophy, and I think adespresso was a company that did it better than any other company. So I'm excited to dive in there with him for sure.

Yeah. So we don't really have to give much backstory because you're going to go through his journey from starting at 14 doing some cyber crime stuff as the title probably Says all the way to an exit of Ad espresso for eight figures to hootsuite. Using Hootsuite or someone has here. Yeah.

And you're going to get that entire timeline there. And it's a really good story with a lot of actionable tactical takeaways that are sort of interwoven throughout the story. So you're really going to enjoy it. He is in Italy. He does have a, you know, a thicker Italian accent, so just fair warning. But once we get into the flow of it, he is so engaging and his stories are so good that I think you'll forget about the accent pretty quickly.

Yeah. So get ready for taking notes or, you know, if you just want to grab the notes, you could be lazy and we're hooking you up. So if you're quick, within two weeks of this episode going live, go over to flowchart group.com, that's flowchartgroup.com and plug in your email address. It's going to be our Facebook group. So you'll find the box and we will email the notes of this episode, the action guides of what you'll learn here.

True story.

There is a lot in this one.

Yep.

So anything else, Mr. Matt?

Nope, that's it. Go to flowchartgroup.com join the thingama whatsit and let's go talk to Massimo.

All right, Massimo, we are live. How are you doing, my man?

Hello.

Doing great. Except, you know, I'm in Milan, so one year and a half in lockdown with a three year old kid. Pretty much like, I need a shrink. But overall, pretty exciting time.

I think a lot of people relate. I know I relate. I'm sure Matt does too. He was homeschooling. Is homeschooling kids here? Two kids. So, I mean, it's a wild time.

I'm totally doing all the homeschooling.

Well, I know. Why am I giving you credit for that shit? It's all your wife. Well, it's fun to have you here. It's great to have you here. I mean, we actually didn't know this for a long time, but I know you've been listening to our podcast. You joined Podhacker, some of our programs. I was like, hold on. And Matt's like, I know him. I've read a lot of his work in the at Espresso Days and. And we're like, we got to have you on the show and see what's totally.

I love the show, guys. It's one of a very few podcasts which is always High energy, interesting content. Except for this session probably, but actually love it. That's why actually I joined Pod Hacker was looking into doing a bit of podcasting and I sucks at personal branding. I'm always like listening to your episode and listening to all these people that tell you, okay, you should pitch. All these guys send out email and like 90% of a podcast or events have been. It was just because I signed up for something and someone recognized my name. Oh, you are the guy from AT Espresso. Would you love to join the podcast? They never pitched anyone.

It's working for you, man. It's working.

Yeah, it's working. Back at the at Espresso time, I was always wearing an espresso T shirt because I suck at selling stuff. So I will just wear the T shirt. And the branding of the company was so strong, I just would walk into, I don't know, Traffic and Conversion summit there in San Diego, which was one of my favorite event. And I will stand there and people will stop me. Hey, do you work in at the.

No, I just got this free shirt. I just like to wear it around.

Well, you have a business partner. I know. So it shores up some of the tactical stuff. I mean, we could probably get into some partnership stuff. This ad espresso story, content marketing, I know drove a lot of that. And then you're doing some cool stuff and I think you wrote this manifesto that I really enjoyed. So maybe we'll pick some of that stuff. It kind of shows the lessons from your journey. But take us back.

Sure thing.

I mean you started young man, at what, 14 years old. You were doing some interesting things with computers and.

Yeah, I've always been kind of a nerd. So when I was 14 year old, I was the youngest evicted for cyber crimes in Italy. And yeah, actually I had like, what is bbs? This was pre Internet. I'm old. So people were still dialing in with their modem and downloading video games. So I had this BBS with any kind of curated software which I had to download somehow. So I was doing a lot of carding, sorry American people at&t cars doing Intercontinental Coal back then when it was probably thousands of dollars, probably Intercontinental Col. And always been in. I'm very curious. So I've always been in that kind of gray space. Acker Ward always enjoyed it being like indicted two extra time when I was a bit older for always being related to cybercrime. But I've always got out of it with nothing, just a slap on the end. So I've Been lucky.

Good for you. But I mean, what led after that? So I know you started some businesses, but it's always the tech stuff then, huh?

Yeah, sure. So I moved to Milan, which is like the center of technology here in Italy. And I was doing university, but I really hated studying, so I was looking for excuses to drop off. Kinda irc. I don't know if you ever heard of it. It was like chat back then. Got to know a girl that randomly was the editor in chief of a top scientific magazine here in Italy. So I got a job as a journalist, started writing technology, which was amazing because it was 2000 full dot com. Boom.

I was 18, no wife, nothing. So I was flying all around the world for free business class. It was a really fun period. At the same time, I knew that I would never make a meaningful amount of money out of journalists. So I had this crazy idea when I was like 19 of doing a clone of slash dot, which was TechCrunch back then. It was like news for nerds, stuff that matter. And so I did it and it was dot com. It was crazy. I was just looking for someone to give me free hosting. And people were like, oh no, let's do a business plan. Let's raise a couple of millions of dollars. And back then it all sounded crazy. So I just say, okay, I'll do it myself with my money. And pretty much realized that back then, no one had an idea of a business model. You could talk with Yahoo, all those lycos, all those big companies that no longer exist, but everyone was exchanging something, yes, give us banner, we'll exchange it with content. Or everyone was exchanging, but no one was buying. So I was like, okay, let's do website for brick and mortar store. Let's see if someone will give you $500 for a website which we don't need. And so people did the business into an agency. No idea what I was doing. For probably three years, I was paying payroll out of credit card because there were no money in the bank for the company. And really I didn't know how to sell. But something that it's still true nowadays. Over time, I got smarter. Over time, that's probably one of the biggest things that I've learned in the last 10 years. I started to understand that whatever you want to achieve, there are different ways to get there. And there is like no right or wrong. I, you know, that kind of very.

Strong conversation like raising venture capital is bad. You need to be bootstrapped. If you like Russell Brands and all these podcasts, Start with companies that didn't cheat. Taking venture capital, it works. For building a tribe, for building a community. Basecamp. Other people very opinionated. It's this way or you are dead wrong. There are hundreds of different ways to achieve every goal and there is no wrong or right way. I think the easiest path to get whatever you want is really to understand what are your strengths and what are your weaknesses. And then, yeah, you can do self improvement. You can read a lot of book. If you are an introvert, you'll always be an introvert. If you suck at selling, you can get better for sure, but it's never going to be your bread and butter. So I started studying what were my weaknesses and try to work around that. And my weaknesses was talking to people. Basically do it.

All right.

Yeah, I hated people. So basically the way we solved the problem with the agency was, okay, let's just focus on something and become the best at something so that people will just call us and tell us, hey, do you want this work? Rather than us pitching them.

So no other options. You just wanted to be the only option and be like, okay, you got to come to me. Cool, I like it.

Reduce the option pool. So we pivoted the agency from doing websites and this kind of stuff to be very on the front end of very hard technology. So building very complex stuff where it was not like, oh, my cousin can do the website, but it was more like, okay, there are three companies in Italy that can build a portal, but scale to 3,5 million visits per day. And that was the pivotal moment. That's when we started working with ebay across the world would build a lot of stuff with Bay. It was great moment. And that was also another great learning. Like, don't get a customer, but it's 98% of your revenue because at some point they can get rid of you.

And you're back to credit cards.

Yeah, yeah, you're back to credit cards. But now with 10 people to pay out of credit cards and a big office, I think it was the Meg Whitman time. When Meg Whitman resigned from CEO. They and the new CEO was like, where is Europe? What the fuck do we do with Europe? So, like, they fired 50 people in eBay Italy, and suddenly we were without our biggest contract.

Luckily, all the people there moved in different companies.

And we kept growing. So that was a fun period.

So what'd you do? You had to pivot then, right? Because that was 98% of your business.

Yeah, but not really because everyone that they fired in ebay had to find Another job. So I let them do the dirty work for me. They found another job and then called us back because it was great working. So actually we increased the number of customers and we scaled the revenue just sitting there waiting, living out of like yearly contracts that we had with ebay anyway. And they had to honor without us doing anything because they didn't care anymore. So that was fun. But we still had the underlying problem that I hated people and most of our customers as an agency. And ebay was fun. Ebay was more like, okay, let's, let's do a usability testing. Let's pick people on the street, get them here and test the product. And then suddenly you start working with Heinz, but not Heinz on the ketchup, Heinz on their baby food company. And which was nice work, but we were developers and we will get the brief like, okay, this mini website should be 37% nature, 43% moms and 12% branding. Like, okay. And all of these while respecting our brand identity, which we had to respect, like make sure everything was organic and their brand color was orange and violet. So we had to do all this website that was always sunset to use somewhere. Yeah, we don't need a call to action above the fold. It just ruined the aesthetic of the website. Let's put the call to action in the footer.

Oh God, yeah.

Not fun.

So basically you're getting direction from clients and you're just like, this is all wrong, but shit, I have no other option.

The few work that actually became interesting, like we built insurance comparison, kind of GEICO here. And it's a very nice project, but you were the contractor. When the project would become big enough, they would just internalize the team. If you were lucky, they would not steal your engineering, otherwise they would do. And you were never in control. Whenever something gets fun, usually the customer internalized it because things were going well. So we tried multiple times to build a product. It was probably 2008, between 2010 when subscription businesses were becoming a thing, SaaS businesses, etc. We tried a couple of times, but we were not really passionate. And that's always the big problem when you're running an agency that you have people that are paying the bill, you want to build something else. But then there is always an urgency. There is always someone that, okay, I'll cover your money if you do this in two months instead of four months. And whenever we tried something that we were not passionate about, we would revert back to the agency work and never get there.

This sounds very familiar. Like we've done this same exact thing where you kind of go in waves and you can beat yourself up in the process. I know it's like, oh, man, I want to do this, but this is good money. Or, you know, and then it kind of bounces back and forth and. Yeah, I think, yeah.

And then we were in Italy, not in Silicon Valley, so it was like always a question mark. Can we market it here in Italy? Could we raise funding? Even if there are no engine investors or anything here in Italy back then. So, yeah, we had a lifestyle business. It was paying the bills, I buy the apartment. It was a pretty good life. And never managed to get out of the comfort zone and really risk anything. But I did start the same business because having started as a journalist, I had this passion for content and I wanted to find a way to make money writing content and not talking with customers. So that was my obsession, not working with people. So we built a blog network. We say, okay, let's do it. We know about SEO. Let's do this. And we failed miserably. It was not bad. I'm still probably one of them. We built a series of blog network. We had one blog around books, one blog around how to do stuff, et cetera. I think I'm still one of the most viewed video on how to make a tie knot.

Really? I probably learned from you. Or I probably reference your video every single time I have to tie a tie.

You probably wish me death. I never watch that video again. And like, after five years, I went back there. It was like 2 million views. Wow. And the comments were like, full of people like, you should die immediately. Why are you doing it so fast? I cannot fall. It was shocking how brutal people were wishing me deaf or out make them a lot of it.

For teaching you something. Yeah. To making you how to look good.

Just because it was too fat. Anyway, that was a pivotal moment because we learned something that changed my life. We learned that men, like males, are dumb.

True.

It was a huge discovery. That's our stress. Is really bored covering the mailer dumb.

Because I'm surprised it took you that long to figure it out.

Actually, I was gonna say the same.

I knew it immediately. She didn't. She could have told me earlier before.

All the women listening right now are just shaking their heads. They're just like, huh, yeah, Big win for you.

And as I told you, one of the blog was about books. And we were just like reviewing any kind of book. And it was 2010. So the big moment. Organic reach at 20% on Facebook. Better than a newsletter. You can acquire like likes for one cent. So we started advertising and spending a lot of money and I don't know how we made the first split test on our site. So. And we tested male versus female on a blog about books. And not surprisingly, getting a like from a man talking about books was like $0.50 from a women was $0.01 to get a like. Wow. So I was like, oh wow, this thing of split testing really works. So we should do it at scale. Which was impossible because the interface of the ads manager back then was ugly. And if you wanted to test five images, five audiences, it was like hundreds of different ads. So we just went on the market for a solution and there was no solution because usually new market what you do, you go enterprise, you hire five sets people. It's predictable. You know that if you make 100 phone calls, you get 100 customers. And for advertising networks, usually at the beginning you get two kind of people, like the smart people, affiliate marketer. But are always looking for the last opportunity, the cheapest opportunity and unexploited market to make money. And you get the large enterprises which can throw money at Facebook. Yeah, let's do half a million advertising. Let's see if it works. Otherwise we don't care about half million. The mid market. It's a late adopter. Usually we don't go there immediately. So we found only one player. It didn't work for us. It was expensive because it was enterprise. It was always very sophisticated product because it was catered to people with data scientists, a lot of marketers. And that's when we said, okay, let's do this, let's build it ourselves. It could work actually. And we sold the blog network. Luckily we found a guy that was in printed advertising. He was like, oh yes, digital is the new media. I'm going to sell advertising on on your blogs. I was like, sure. I have been losing money on this business for the last year and I know about SEO. Good luck moving from printed businesses. Anyway, that was basically our seed investment for adespresso. We sold the blog network.

That's really cool.

Started building ad espresso. And even there it was crazy because we reached out to Facebook Italy, which was like one sales guy. I was like, yeah, you have no idea what our API is or how to give you access. But let's do this. Why don't you introduce me all your agency customers so I can sell the Facebook ads?

Okay, can I get a percentage for you?

But luckily, through the connection with ebay, we found One guy that from ebay had become VP in Facebook. And for him, we managed to talk with the right people in Menlo park and we got access to the API team in Facebook. Back then it was getting access to API for Facebook advertising was huge barrier of entry because they were closed. You need to get approval from Facebook betting. We had to check the product, which was great until it lasted. At Sava, Espresso got started.

Wow, I love that. It's kind of like this. You just have this big zigzag approach and you know you're avoiding people at all costs, which I think is brilliant. I know. Matt said this a lot to me. He's like, I hate people.

Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, trying to avoid people at all costs is not the best strategy for somebody who has a podcast.

That is true.

But I mean, I love the fact. Go ahead.

It works.

It does work.

No, see, it works. And Ben at time the same big success. But Espresso was me avoiding people. Because when we said, okay, let's do a Facebook ad stool, we were like, okay, work around your weaknesses. I don't like enterprise. I don't like six months in cycle, and I don't know how to sell to this kind of customer. So let's do something for the small medium businesses and how do we acquire them at scale through content marketing. So actually, all the marketing strategy of Adespresso and the fact that it was scattered toward small medium businesses really started from me not being able to sell to enterprise customer. And so finding a way around the problem and saying, okay, let's do something at scale where we don't have to talk with customers. It's a service. You don't like it unsubscribe.

Yeah, there's more people out there.

I'm curious. When you decided you wanted to do Espresso, you noticed there's a gap in the market. You decided you're going to push forward with it. What did you do at that point? Do you know, development yourself? Did you get in and start coding some stuff up? Did you go hire somebody? What did it look like after that? Once you made the decision, what happened next?

So we were really lucky on my side, which is my biggest weakness and my biggest strength, probably. If you go on my blog, the homepage says, jack of all trades, master of none. So I'm a developer. I'm a terrible developer. I didn't write a single line of Elspresso code. But I know how to code and I know how to talk with developers. I know if they are telling me like bullshit. When they tell me it's five months development, I can understand maybe not if it's 10 days or 11 days, but I know if it's five days or one month.

I'm not good at anything specific in marketing, but I kind of know everything all the area of marketing, so. But I think for a founder that's extremely good. Then you have to find other co founder that can cover all the bases, a CTO that can really manage the team, et cetera. But for the CEO, for the founder, I think it's quite good to have a broad vision of all the market. And the other big luck is that we already had developers, we had the agency. So we just moved couple of people to start working on Espresso and we were like, okay, let's build it, let's build it, let's build it. We have built it. And the day after like newsletter from Facebook or we just move from 2 kind of ads to 12 kind of ads and we change our bidding work, we introduce Adsense, et cetera. Okay, maybe we need another six months.

Well, that's the beauty and the curse. It's more the curse of Facebook. They're always changing things. And I'm sure you being tied into so close to Facebook, you have to pay attention to everything they're doing and pray that they're not going to screw something up. Did you ever? Yeah, go ahead.

We knew how to build the product. We still didn't know really how to build a company around it. And that's when I partner with Armando, my co founder who was on the other side is an amazing CEO because he's super like into financing, operation, managing the business, et cetera. And I would have really never made it without Armando. And Carlo was the CTO who's been amazing.

So Armando came in like at the beginning of Ad Espresso then, right?

Armando basically came in at the beginning of at Espresso when we kind of had a product but we had no idea where to go from there. And back then I was terrified of like rejection. So I would not do a lot of stuff like applying to an accelerator because we're like, oh, we have this little toy that we love and we don't want to apply to an accelerator because if they say no, our life would be ruined. It will be the truth.

It was all time wasted. While Armando was like, apply to 500 startups. Apply to 500 startups. Apply to 500 Startups. And we got into 500 startups within two weeks. We had to Basically pack everything, move from Milan to San Francisco knowing that the agency would like bankrupt in six months just because I didn't know how to build the sales team. So all the relationship where like me and my network and people knew me, it was not a repeatable thing without me. And that's exactly what happened.

That's exactly. I mean it obviously panned out well.

Moving to San Francisco I'm sure you were you single? I mean you didn't have any obviously you said you have a three year old so that was moons ago. You were able to just uproot and go move across the world basically.

I did have a girlfriend and a dog but yeah, it was very challenging and that relationship didn't last. I think like having a startup especially, especially if you're doing it in the Silicon Valley. So very competitive space like move fast. Having a startup is really very tough to consign with having a family, having a life. I think the batch of 500 startup, most of the people that the relationship ended there.

Oh yeah, well we had. I know you mentioned this I think in a previous talk or something but Rand Fishkin, he was on our show and, and Lost and Founder, like that's a true story of a startup type person. I mean it's just the journey's crazy.

That's the best book and I love Randy, he's a great, really a great guy. And I think Lost and Founder is the only book that really describe how it really is to run a startup without all, you know that Silicon Valley fairy tales that been arrayed like on the big rounds, big exit. No one talks about the 95% of companies that fail. Unicorn, shitting, ice cream, etc.

It's probably what I didn't like of San Francisco. I mean it's a unique place. It was the best place to do at Espresso really to do most of the startups on the other side. It's really transactional and even Starbucks barman will ask you how much did you raise? How fast are you growing?

Wow.

And you always have to be yes, it's awesome. Maybe you have 1000 problem but you don't know how to solve. But you always have to look confident. We are growing, we are doing amazing because you have to raise more money, you have to close deal. And yeah, yeah it was a lot of fun but it was not really my lifestyle.

Yeah, that makes sense. Well, I mean obviously part of the story here is Ad Espresso grew quite a bit and ended up selling as well to a company that most of Us have probably used their products hootsuite. So I mean that was. Yeah, that was a big deal.

That was a big deal. And really at Espresso was a rocket I think. I think one of the biggest success of adspresso was really the branding. I've always cared a lot about building a brand and both affiliate marketers but broader marketers nowadays are over obsessed with anything that is measurable.

And anything that is not measurable seems to be less important. And brand is usually something that you cannot measure. But even nowadays when I sign up or like people recognize my name because of adespresso, not because of me or what I personally done but I think the brand perception of Adespresso was of a company way bigger than it actually was. It was a crazy ride. We went from three people to 50 people in less than three years from zero to six million revenue which was an incredible accomplishment. But if I compare it to other companies but probably were doing like five times our revenue at the Espresso had a way stronger brand recognition. Anyone in the marketing space, even if they didn't try it, recognized via the Espresso brand and that's a huge asset. Just because your advertising is going to be cheaper. Because people are more willing to click on Viet because they recognize the brand and people will churn less because they love a brand. Like I love Renfishkin. I love mods. I've been subscriber for mods for 10 years. Even if I was using Ahref Daily, it just felt bad to unsubscribe from mods because they were such a nice guy.

And even from a conversion rate, from an activation standpoint.

If you listen to I don't know, Pat Flynn says to tell you to use that kind of tool. Ren Fishkin tell you to use that kind of tool if you go on that tool. And maybe it sucks and you don't get any result out of it but psychologically you feel ashamed. You feel like, okay, I must be the dumb best but don't know how to use this tool because all these amazing people are recommending me to use the tool. And that's really the power of brand. If I go and that was like.

Our big luck was our top competitor was named Kwaia Q W A Y A How do you build a brand around Kwaia?

Yeah, nobody knows how to spell it when you say it.

How do you get to the website?

Go on the website, you don't even know how to spell it. And I think that was a huge accomplishment. And people nowadays really Undervalue the importance of building a very strong brand brand. That's really a long lasting value and it doesn't take a lot of time.

Yeah.

In the end, like what are, what.

Are a couple things that you see as the foundations of a good solid brand? Like if you, I know you're starting a, you know, you have a new company called Breadcrumbs. So like with that you have a beautiful website. You have these, like it looks very custom, it's unique, but I'm sure that's just part of it.

Yeah, but it really comes down to being unique. Like everything comes down to being unique. What can you do to stand out of the crowd? Like, you know, nowadays 90% of the SaaS company use these very stylized illustration, very long hands and legs and they all look the same. So it's really about what can we do? But it's different, but it's unique to us. And then just be consistent, stick to it. So without Espresso, we had the mascot. We had the mascot with the mustaches which was called Walter. No one knows that it was called Walter. And fun story, like our designer was also the designer for Breadcrumbs was a co founder of Espresso is Spanish. So he only wanted to write waiter for the mascot because he was the waiter at the cafe. But he wrote Walter because it's English. It's just so bad. And that's why he was named Walter, because he was the waiter. I like it. So that was it for this present then being consistent. Like every illustration, even if we literally had to hire one people, one guy just to do the illustration for a blog post, which most of the blog would never hire someone or spend 100, $200 just for illustration. They take stock photos, but that's what really made the difference. If you see an ad or a blog post from a despresso, you recognize it immediately because it always had that unique styling. It always has the mascot and immediately you say, okay, this content is from Alespresso. It's actually good.

And with Breadcrumbs we are doing the same with. We didn't want to go with a mascot. We kind of got stuck in the middle. If you see in the logo, we have this like, I don't know what it is. It's probably a chicken.

Probably a chicken.

It's a chicken. It's quite controversial. Jesus. The designer came out with it. We loved it and we were like, what it is. Because like my co founder were like, oh, it needs to be something important like an eagle. I Was like, no, it doesn't look like an eagle. I'm not even sure if it knows how to fly. It's like a circle.

I've had chickens. They're dumb animals.

Yeah.

They're like men.

And it's eating breadcrumbs. An eagle would eat a chicken or a rabbit, not breadcrumbs. You don't see an eagle, like, starving for breadcrumbs.

Well, I love the fact that on your manifesto page, which everyone. We'll link to it in the show notes, I like how on the hood of this car, it looks like a Rolls Royce on the front and you have a chicken as the emblem.

Eating breadcrumbs.

It's like, yeah, usually you have this stoic eagle, this huge, majestic thing. Nope, the chicken. I love it.

Yeah. But on the other side, we are not sure yet if that's gonna be the mascot. But I was, like, looking at Batman cartoons from the 90s, the good ones, but at the dark theme, I was like, hey, let's try to use that style. So Jesus again. And it's great to have Jesus in your team anyway. I mean, it's always come handy. And I started working around it. And so he came out with this style, a bit vintage. A mix between cartoons, comics, Batman and. And it's pretty unique, which in the end, it's what really matter. I mean, even if we don't have a mascot, when people will look at the. At any illustration, they immediately realize, and nowadays I'm doing something, but I'm not usually comfortable with it because I'm not a people guy. Like doing outreach with LinkedIn because breadcrumbs is a bit more upmarket. Everyone's like, look, I totally don't care about the. About your product. Actually, I've done outreach to you, and you told me to go hug myself, so I'm not gonna look at your product. But by the way, the style of your website is really amazing. So the branding is really something that starts so really happy about it.

I like that you get attention that way. Yeah. Without having to do the people thing.

Yeah. And then you have to be consistent. So I'm, like, obsessed with it. So you don't really use a video that is not exactly but yellow. If you go at a conference, you wear the T shirt of a company, et cetera. And over time, if you're doing something variable, the brand.

Will be recognized.

Which is, I think, another important topic for the success of Adespresso, which is value. I don't have a name for it. You can Figure it out. Value based marketing.

I've googled it. And actually people, when you talk about value based things, more about moral value. But in the end, I think business marketing, it's always an exchange of value. You have to think about it. Okay, I'm giving you value and I'm getting value, which very often is what a lot of people are not doing. We are doing content marketing for getting traffic. Tricking Google into sending traffic to a page that doesn't add any value. The reality is that there are probably, I don't know, 3 million blog posts about published every day. Most of them are just a bunch of shit and you shouldn't. Sorry guys, I swear a lot.

Go for it.

That's part of the Italian part of me.

I like it.

Which is 100% because I'm Italian.

I would hope so.

I didn't do a premise on this podcast, this recording. I forgot the premise. Sorry about my Italy English. Even if in San Francisco I still speak shitty English.

It's perfect.

Keep going though. Yeah, the value exchange, which is another.

Part of the branding I discover like at the Espresso, it's the brand we wanted. Something that recalled the fact that we are Italian. And also me speaking bad English tied with a brand which was Italian. It was okay like as long as I told people, hey guys, sorry, I'm Italian and my English is not perfect. It became part of a brand and people actually enjoyed it rather than saying, okay, I'm not listening to this guy just because I don't understand one out of every five words that he says. That was fun. But the approach with At Espresso was again, how do we stand out with content? Which was important in 2011. It's even more important nowadays where even inbound is really challenging because it's getting very expensive, very competitive. Brian Dean and his then skyrocket technique. Everyone is writing 5000 words blog post even if they have nothing interesting to say. But to outrank you have to write something that is even more boring and longer. So you have to write 7,000 word content, which we have no idea.

Well, how about this? You now have AI copywriting tools so you could just, just keep hitting the refresh button and get more blog post written.

That's actually true. That's something that is going to be very interesting to see how it plays out. I got access to GPT3 just last week. Blew my mind. What it writes in way better than.

But yeah, that's going to be another area where it's going to be even more important to Think, how do I stand out? Because this content and AI can do it in 3 seconds.

And without espresso. We really start thinking how, okay, let's produce content. But how do we produce content that actually has value for people? What I Hate is.

10 tips for social media Marketing, but only the pros not. And the first one is be open and transparent. What the fuck? Of course. Social media. What should it be like? Spooky and creepy. If I'm doing social media like 10 WordPress plugins no one told you you cannot live without. And the first one is a kismet, which is the spam filter that comes by default with any WordPress installation. You are just wasting my time. You are not giving me that, Ben, you want to do the roundup post, that's fine. That's a form of value. I don't spend five hours researching 20 different articles. You read all of them and you give me the roundup. That's an amazing way to deliver value. With adespresso, we had data, it was full of Facebook ads. Guru, but never created a campaign in their life. We actually leveraged them because we wrote better content than them, because we were actually testing things. We had the unique data, but no one else could do an article analyzing $300 million in advertising. So we will produce something that was true and useful for our customer. And the advantage was that then all the gurus that never created a Facebook ad campaign in their life, to be credible, they had to show some kind of data so they will link back to our article.

Which were among the very few.

That had unique content. So we created this snowball effect. SEO is really a snowball. When it started, it's really small, not driving traffic. But as you gain domain authority in that space, as you gain links, then it's really a snowball to a point which admittedly in the last period, I could get the janitor of the company to write the content on the blog and it would rank first no matter what was written there.

Wow.

Yeah, no, that's so smart to be so data driven because you become everybody's source, so everybody else that's blogging around the same topics, you're the source they point to to actually prove the data. Did you do any sort of like cold outreach or anything like that to like prime the pump to get people aware of the new content?

Never asked for, never did any outreach, never did link building? It's really, you need to be masochist to do link building outreach because you will get so many no's and like People saying no. But I got a tip from Ross at Siege Media, which is go after elder people because no one care about elder nowadays. And if you find blog about like I don't know, retirement, how to live after 60s, a great life, et cetera, if you can find an angle which is like Facebook ads for old people or something like that, when you do outreach to those kind of blog, they are so excited that someone cared about them and reach out to them proposing an article that they will link to you immediately.

Good point. Well, yeah. So basically you're finding an audience who probably needs some of you some data to back up their story or their narrative. So they're almost obligated to link to you to make themselves almost more credible or boost the value there.

If you can become a data source. I think data driven articles are the best kind of content because they are really magnet for links. Again, same as for the agency. We work around the problem. How can we do something that is so amazing that people will just link to us and come without us chasing them? And another thing that worked great with adespresso is the concept of code as content. So content doesn't strictly need to be an article. Our most successful thing in the espresso that really doubled the traffic, probably triple the traffic, was our ads gallery which was a piece of code just like to have examples for my content. I was just taking screenshots of ads when I saw them on Facebook and then I had 1000. I just said, okay, let's make a search engine out of these 1,000 screenshots. And we released the first ads gallery which was like go there, search for ebook and see all the ads around ebooks. And that became huge. Like we had 1 million ads on just on that page. And it was super linkable because even people like John Loomer, which I really like, but his business is selling courses. He will never tell you hey, use at Espresso just because it's a small audience. His business is selling hey, this is how you use ads manager. So directly would have never pitched or promoted at Espresso. But with that gallery was a fantastic thing that he could pitch in all his webinar, all his blog post because it was like spy on your competitor. This is the best tool to do it. So just being what you can do to be unique so that people will have to come your way.

Yeah, that's super smart.

I like that.

I like that a lot. So basically you have a giant swipe file to just get inspiration and everybody links to that.

Yeah, People are like oh my God, it's so valuable. I got a link to this thing. Even if I'm not saying go buy their stuff, at least you're getting some love.

$50 WordPress plugin. You just customize it, you gather the content, you can get a VA to do it for anything like landing page, pricing page examples, whatever you can think of. That's fairly simple. Chrome extension that works extremely well. It gives you direct access on the user browser. That's great as well. But really there is a ton of things like Visual Website Optimizer which was company for split testing before optimizing they had a page with probably five lines of JavaScript. It was like how to calculate statistical significance of an A B test. I think that page took them 30 minutes to code and it was ranking number one and they were the first to do it. I think it generated millions of visitors just with that page. So Codas content is another tactic that I love for bring especially for link building. Yeah, free tools are extremely dinkable.

Yeah, that's super smart. The sort of last thing I want to get in before we wrap up here is to talk about the exit a little bit. I'm curious, how did you approach hootsuite? Did hootsuite approach you? How did the exit play out there for adespresso?

Sure.

So now we didn't approach them with adespresso even. I mean we were the San Francisco startup. We were, were funded but like we were like homeless. By San Francisco standard we had raised 1.5 million, which San Francisco is like.

No Wonder it's like one month's rent in 5 million.

Yeah, kind of like that.

And we were profitable. So whenever we raised money, we raised money on our terms, not because we had to. And that was the same for selling the company. We didn't have to sell the company. The business was growing aggressively. We were first approached by hootsuite on the other side. They recognized the decline of organic reach, which something. Nowadays no one even talk about organic reach. You are not reaching anyone. It's meaningless to if it's 0.0005 or it went down to 0.003, it's nothing. And so they recognize they knew that they needed an advertising angle to keep growing aggressively and like server customer in the best way possible. What was even better for us is that they had tried and they had failed at building the right product. So they knew that they needed something and they also knew that they couldn't. It was not the best way to Build internally. They needed something but had the expertise around Facebook advertising. So we were approached like we didn't really like the offer we partner. We built an integration into hootsuite and after five months they came back and said, okay, we really want to buy you. Here is the good offer now. And we liked it. I think they hated us during that period because we were like, no, we thought about it now we are not going to sell you a company. But we really like hootsuite. It was the same kind of the same approach like agency that became a tool, huge self service footprint, very SEO and content driven. On the other side, they had built that enterprise sales engine that we knew at some point we would have to build, but we didn't know how to approach it. So it was much made in heaven. Very similar company culture. So there was a lot of negotiation, lot of thinking. And on the other side, Facebook was really becoming more and more aggressive in eating up all the differentiating features about Espresso. They were implementing a B, testing a lot of stuff. So we knew that again it was a snowball of a content, but this one was a snowball that became an avalanche. And you had to every day run faster than Facebook or find a way to move on beside and that the avalanche Gova in that period we were starting to look into Google which we started to really saw adding more network as the only way to differentiate from Facebook. And so we evaluated the advantages of being within a bigger organization, the advantages of being alone ourselves, but with all the risk associated to Facebook, which from day zero everyone invested was like, why just Facebook?

Yeah.

And, and so in the end we decided to sell the company which given the direction Facebook has gone after that with Cambridge Analytica really change. Facebook really changed a lot after Cambridge Analytica. It was really an amazing company. Great people, the great people stayed. But really there was a lot more bureaucracy, like more white collar people controlling everything that happened within the ecosystem. So it was really the right choice to set up Espresso.

It seems like the point in time.

Perfect timing.

After all the negotiation. Like woods with board really wanted to close it before Christmas. It was like 23rd December 10pm I was out drunk in a pub here in Milan and we were like, okay, let's get it done. Cool with the lawyers. Okay, let's sign everything and enjoy them.

So how do you feel initially when you're like, okay, it's done. And also maybe because you sound like a creator, you always want to create, obviously you moved on to another project. Did you get like bored after a while or was there anything that happened?

Yes, I got bored. But you know, it's not. Utsuit is a great company. It's just a company of 1,000 people. And I understood that they really enjoy that zero to $10 million fees. When you are in a 1,000 people company, everything is different. And you know, there is an org chart and somehow you need to fit in a square of the org chart. And I'm just like jack of all trades, master of none. It was very challenging. It was like, okay, where do you go? Product marketing. And I was like, okay, I want to come back to Italy. All the development team is there, so I'll pick the product square. But on the other side, I had the vision of a product. I was not really a project manager, which they quickly realize and send a great guy from Vancouver in Italy to help me cover.

So you actually stayed on, you actually stayed on it for a while?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I stayed on Hootsuite until actually until November last year. I really enjoyed it. I wanted to see variety, but I was not emotional about it, which was surprising for me as well.

I was like, okay, it's business. You bought the company. Let's do whatever it's like. Even in the first conversation, you want to give the espresso brand and call it oats with ads, let's just look at the number. If it doubles the revenue cares about via espresso. I mean, it was a fun ride, but in the end, business is business, so let's do what makes more sense. I was surprised.

That's the part of me that was very influenced by America before, like with the agency, it was like, okay, it's my baby. I'll leave it to my kids when I get older.

Legacy.

And yeah, with America staying in us, I got more used to this thing. It's just business when at the espresso is 18, okay, he needs to get out of. Get out of your room and he needs to get out and get a job, do his journey by himself. Yeah, get a job, get a life.

It's no longer your problem.

That is a good point. Yeah. They could be transactional as well.

Yeah.

Interesting. Yeah, that's good insight, man. Thanks for being so open. Really quick before we wrap up with breadcrumbs. I know it's a little higher level, but is there anything that maybe our audience of digital marketers and entrepreneurs who are looking to grow. I know it's all about lead scoring and really paying attention to the data in a different way. Are there Some yeah.

I think the overall idea behind Breadcrumbs is this concept of revenue acceleration which is like the definition of rev ops but it's more about. It's something that I learned at utsuite. In all the company that have a marketing team and sales team there is this friction where like marketing blame sales for not increasing revenue and sales is more like oh no, it's all marketing's fault because we are not generating enough leads or the quality is very bad. So we really wrote down this manifesto of revenue acceleration as a way of breaking down silos, aligning your whole organization, having revenue as your North Star metrics which also lead to a concept then of revenue marketing. I hate these things. In every big company, salespeople are compensated and have a lot of bonuses based on how much pay generates in revenue. Like marketing is like this is your salary, that's it. You have gold but you are not compensated because you are not touching revenue unless you are self service, which drives me crazy. And nowadays with attribution, et cetera, it really should be a single team working together, having common goals, which should be revenue and working closely. And so the long term vision is to really empower people to implement this revenue acceleration which has a lot of different declination. Below I can include the problem that we are solving in the short term is lead scoring, which is I get 10,000 leads in and I have two salespeople. They can only call 100 of them out of the 1,000 that we gathered. I really want to call the 100 that really matters. And lead scoring has been around for a long time, but incredibly still a huge problem for most of the companies because most of the people look at its coding just from a.

Fit perspective. So demographic, okay, you are Joe, you are Matt. You work in a 50 people company. You work in a 100 people company. So I'll call MET because it's more similar to my buyer person, which is correct. It's a part of lead scoring and also a part of breadcrumbs. But in breadcrumbs we are adding another component which is frequency and recency. So what are these people doing? Because Meta is 100 people company. But the last time he visited my website is three months ago and he never visited the pricing page and never interacted. While Joe on the other side, smaller company, yes, but on the other side he has checked the pricing page, he has converted to all this form, he attended all the webinars, he's engaging with a free trial and also a BM site. So account Based marketing and also other five people in Joe's company are actually looking at the website. So your salespeople tomorrow morning the first thing should be calling Joe. While Matt right now can only receive an automated email workflow that will do it automatically without saving people wasting their time. So breadcrumbs really will connect all your data sources, analyze them, help you may build a model that will score your leads. And the other interesting thing is that we like to be machine assisted, not machine driven. So we are using machine learning to give you advices to explain you how to build your prediction model, what's best for you, but it doesn't do it for you. It's not this black box where you just for a number and it and it spit out joy is 95. But salespeople doesn't understand why joy is 95. They don't trust the black box and they will never call Joe. So it's really important to create this alignment between marketing and sales where they trust each other and they trust the scoring model because they have built it together and they know why Joe is 95. So that's the approach.

That's a great. I love the mission and the approach.

I know right now your HubSpot level and all of that. So if you're listening and if you're like that, go check out breadcrumbs. But definitely check out the manifesto because I think that's brilliant and you said you might make it more actionable pretty soon. So maybe check back or something when that happens.

We'll move from the manifesto to the implementation framework at some point.

I like it.

Very cool.

Is there anywhere else you want people to go after listening to this episode?

Sure, they can go. On my blog Divby0io I try to write at least one post per month. It's more like my consideration on marketing. A lot of Books review, etc. Go there. Signing up for the newsletter. Actually, I'm not actionable, so I've not sent a single newsletter yet. At some point I will send you an email, but yeah, right on the list.

Dividebyzero IO get on the list. Maybe he'll email you someday.

One day.

All right, Max. It was a good time, my friend.

Thank you guys. Really enjoy.

Have a good one.

Starting this episode with you. Bye bye.

Bye bye.

Hey.

Hey. Hey.

Hey.

Hey.

Hey. I was waiting for you to say a word.

Yeah, I was waiting for you to say a word. I was going to see how long we take the silence.

Yeah, hopefully.

Yeah. Jacob, I'm sure edited out the silence. So it just sounds like Joe going, hey, hey, hey. Right after Massimo was done talking, like.

Three minutes of silence. It's crazy. He cut out a lot of time. I'm happy, Jacob. Thank you.

It was actually more like four seconds, probably.

Come on. It's not BTS behind the scenes time, Matt.

Isn't that part of what this is?

Behind the scenes of behind the scenes.

Behind the scenes of bts, the boy.

Band that was your favorite group?

I actually don't know. I don't think I've ever even heard a song by bts. I just know there is a band called bts.

I actually did not know that.

So I think they're like Korea. I think they're like K Pop.

Okay. Okay. If we could play some legally, I would say let's do it, but I don't think we should.

Yeah, probably.

Let's not do that. You can look it up. BTS Massimo, though, this was a fun conversation. I had a good time. And I know we say that a lot, but, like, he reminds us of some of our other friends and, you know, in a great way. And, I mean, this is the first time we've actually chatted together.

And, yeah, his personality reminds me. It's like the type of personality that.

We hang out with.

Like our. Our inner circle of people we hang out with. We talk with them in the same way we talked with Massimo just now.

Yeah, man, I had a good time. So we covered a lot too. Yeah, I like the fact that, yeah, we took the whole storyline, but we were plucking out these kind of actionable things.

Yeah.

You know, little principles, I guess, through his journey.

Yeah. Well, Massimo, before we hit record, I think he was a little, like, in his head about, like, am I gonna be able to provide value? Is this gonna be good content? And, like, as we were going through the episode, by the time we wrapped it up, we were actually like. That was actually like a perfect episode because he kind of told his story throughout the entire episode. So you had this kind of linear timeline throughout the episode. But then as he was telling his story, we were kind of pulling out lessons, right? Like, we were pulling out lessons about content marketing. We were pulling out lessons about lead scoring. We were pulling out, you know, all along his story. We were kind of pulling out and diving deep for a moment on the various tactics and then backing up to his story. I kind of liked that flow, to be honest.

I mean, let's be honest. We were talking about to what we were telling him after we stopped recording. Like, we want to Start doing a little bit more of that, you know, with this podcast. And maybe we don't go deep about that now, but get more of the background in the kind of the come up phases, you know, and then maybe the, the pinnacle, obviously it's not the pinnacle, but of that storyline and then, and then like, what's happening after? How do you stay sane, happy and, you know, some principles that we can pass on to others too.

Yeah.

Through that whole process.

Yeah, that was good fun. I liked it.

Anything. What are, what are some, some takeaways from it for you?

I mean, when, you know, before we were recording, I think the thing that I wanted to kind of dive in the most was sort of his content marketing strategies. And he talked about them that like, at some point I was about to ask the question and then he just kind of went there on his own, so I didn't really need to. But the content marketing stuff was some of the stuff that I was like, really interested in. Because at Espresso is probably the company that I referenced the most as doing content marketing the right way.

Yeah, right.

Like, their content was just always good. I read a lot of their blog posts. I linked to a lot of their blog posts from our content. Back when we were doing the weekly profit, like weekly newsletter a lot I was linking to cool articles that I was finding around the web. Pretty much every single weekly profit. I was linking to an ad Espresso article because they had really, really good stuff in there.

What was that? Because of the data primarily and all the different tests they were doing.

Yeah, they were just doing a lot of tests. They had a lot of just like very actionable. I mean, it was anecdotal, but it was actionable information. Right. It was like, you know, here we ran these 10 different split tests. We tested these different colors of images. We did that. We, you know, we tested all of these things and then they were just sharing the data of what they found. And it was always very actionable, insightful data. They would find out that, you know, using this call to action button on your Facebook ads was more effective than these calls to actions. So, you know, maybe test this, you know, so it was just really good, actionable, tactical. Here's what we tested. Here's what you could take away from our testing.

And I love the fact that he had a whole strategy around that and how he got a lot of people linking to content like that, like we did.

Yeah.

And, you know, he had all the data in the world, you know, or, you know, this, this very specialized Data too, that people really wanted to hear. Obviously, you're not gonna get it from Facebook directly, but you can get it from him. And then all the split tests and then, like, what they found, what the best results are. So you could try this.

Well, yeah, think about it. If you're writing a blog post and you're trying to argue a point, right? You're trying to argue a point that, you know, let's say you're trying to argue a point that, like, podcasts are the next big thing.

Right?

And this is why you should be paying attention to podcasts. Well, when you're writing that article, you're gonna wanna share data. Look, podcast crew, by this much and this many people listen to podcasts on a daily basis. And here's the growth rate in the UK of podcasts. And you want to share this data to sort of prove your hypothesis or your thesis of the article, right? Well, as you're doing this, you got to source the data from somewhere. So adespresso's concept was, we're going to be that source of data for everybody who's writing all these articles. Podcasting was maybe not the best example because they were more on the Facebook ad side, but, like, they were going to be the source for all the data. So that when people started writing articles to prove a point, the source data, they were always linking back to them. And that was what spiked their growth. And then they had the sort of code that they wrote. Like where?

Well, the library.

Yeah, like the ad library. Like, it was a giant swipe file where, hey, I'm writing, you know, I'm doing a free plus shipping offer. Like, that was the example he gave. Show me all the ads of other free plus shipping offers. Now you have a big old bank of inspiration on free plus shipping ads.

I remember that. And that was one of my favorite things about the site. I mean, that's like any swipe file. But like he was saying, anyone can make a swipe file for their own audience. Yeah, I don't know which WordPress plugin, but he's like, $50 WordPress plugin. You can just populate that thing, puts it on your website. Now you have a page on your site that's very attractive.

Well, he's probably using something like that facet WP1 that we use, where you can kind of click on different topics and it'll narrow it down. Right, because you're gonna need some sort of faceted navigation on that kind of thing. If you have like a billion ads in there and you Want to see just free plus shipping? You want to check a box and have it narrow it down? I know of a plugin that we use called Facet WP which will let you do that. So it's probably something like that. And that's probably about a $50 plugin. So it could even be that plugin. Maybe. I don't know.

There you go.

We didn't ask the whole.

Yeah, the concept of it, I think, is brilliant. You're just aggregating stuff that probably people haven't thought about, and you become extremely attractive. So you can get all these backlinks and, you know, he was mentioning how SEO is. Was such a big driver for that business. Yeah. I mean, there's all these different strategies. It's not like you have to create the 5,000, you know, word blog posts.

Yeah.

Like the Brian Dean style. They obviously work. But there's a lot of other things that you could try, too.

Yeah. Well, I mean, just like, thinking out loud for, like, Pod Hacker. Like, the content marketing plan for Pod Hacker that we kind of have envisioned is sort of similar to what adespresso was doing. We're going to have a pod hacker blog. And the blog is going to share data on. We'll probably have some articles on. Here's why you should start a podcast in 2021 and kind of prove why you should have a podcast and talk about the. Maybe analyze the different genres of podcasts and which are the most popular genres. And you could do stuff like that and you now become a source that other people can link off to for sure.

You know, so unique data and. Yeah, and graphs, all that. I mean, that's why I think those sites. It could be a data source or you can be an aggregator of other place. Which we'd probably be like a mix.

Yeah, we'd probably do a little bit of both. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I just like the idea of, like, you can approach content marketing or, you know, SEO, I guess, in this sense, with some different angles. You're almost like you become attractive with whatever you choose or.

Yeah.

And as a software company, I mean, how brilliant is that, too? It's like you don't even have to directly market your thing. You just put out all the data that your software does gives to the world, and you just package it up nicely with some cool, actionable steps and like, hey, guess what? Call to action.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean, they're doing a ton of split tests and showing all this data, and then people look at the data and they go, oh, man, I wish I could split test at that level with my ads. Oh, wait, this is literally the tool that does that.

Bingo.

You know, so I think that marketing roadmap worked well for him. I think the other thing that's really interesting to me is I love when people have big exits. Now he didn't tell us how much the exit was for. He did say it was eight figures, but that was all he was able to say. But I always love hearing the stories of the exit because I think so many people have this idea that when you build up a company and then you exit the company, you get a nice payday. Then it's just kind of like, cool. I'm retired now. It's easy street, I'm on vacation. Life gets, you know, fun from here on out. But it never seems to be the case with anybody we've ever talked to that has exited a company.

Right. That's why I asked him. I'm like, did you get bored? Did something happen? And then obviously he said he spent time there at the company. I'm sure that was in the contract or something.

Well, one thing that so for me, so, you know, I started the WordPress classroom. We rebranded as Learn to Blog. I started in 2009 and I sold that in 2015. Right. So that was like six years of my life. I was that business. And when I sold that business, I did create a decent income where I didn't have to work for quite a while after that if I didn't want to. The thing that I found was I didn't necessarily get bored so much, but I almost felt like there was this weird loss of identity. For six years, everybody knew me as the WordPress guy, the blogging guy. Oh, you're starting a blog. You need to go talk to Matt. He's the guy to talk to about blogging. That was like baked into my identity. Blogging guy, Matt, everybody knew, go check out Matt. He knows the shit when it comes to WordPress. And when I didn't have that anymore and I wasn't out there promoting that product and I wasn't out there talking about that product, I wasn't involved in it. And I literally had to non compete, so I couldn't go create another product in that space. There was this profound loss of an identity. This was who I was for so long. This is what everybody kind of knew me as. And that was kind of like yanked away. I'm still known, but people are kind of like, well, what do you do now? And I'm like, I don't know, I collect checks. I don't know.

I mean, it's not a bad thing, but. Yeah, I mean, as a loss of identity, I could see that happening. And then you want to create as entrepreneurs, you know, there's always something that you want to do, but especially if it's. Yeah, if you're into an NDA or, you know, not compete. I mean, obviously you got to get a little creative or. Yeah. Do something a little lateral, but I don't know. That's a good problem. I like. I like hearing the stories because, yeah, everyone's different and what's. What's really cool. I know we mentioned it, but the manifesto that he wrote, which I have it on my computer, basically it's all about revenue, but also, you know, approaching it in a way to grow revenue in a. Using these principles that he's picked up over the years. So definitely go check out the link in the show notes, but it's at Breadcrumbs IO, I think it's like in the footer. But that manifesto, I read it a few times. Very short, you know, but I mean, there's a lot of principles in there. I wouldn't say it's the most actionable thing, and even Mossimo said that, but reading that, I feel like that kind of. It pulls out a lot of the nuggets of the story you just heard from him. And. And he referenced a few of them, like the value exchange or the, you know, kind of leading with value in a unique way to boost revenue. So check out that, because I think it'll be a good compliment to this.

Yeah, it should be linked up in the show notes.

Cool.

Yeah. And his website, actually, I'm realizing now that at the end when I shouted it out, I actually shouted it out wrong. It's not dividebyzero IO it's divbyzero IO. So D I V B Y Z E R O dot IO divbyzero.com, or.

IO IO yeah, and sign up for his email list that you won't hear him from for a couple years, but you will eventually.

Eventually.

Mossimo is amazing. So, yeah, check out all of his stuff and keep an eye on breadcrumbs. Right now, it's a little higher level for marketing, but maybe that fits your biz. That's cool. Other than that, get the notes. Probably told you about that already, but Massimo is a little concerned that it wasn't actionable enough. Well, that's why we got the notes here. So Sue's hooking you up. If you go to flowchart group.com and plug your email address in there, you'll get the notes. Just be quick. And what else we got, we got Easy Webinar.

Easy Webinar on the docket. Yeah. Easy Webinar is a great webinar platform. It does all the webinars. It does them all. It does live automated hybrids, live streams. Does all the webinars.

And the ones that we're making up on the fly, too, which we did not make up any of those. This one.

So we should. It does zipper webinars, Zipper webinars, garbage can webinars, guitar webinars. Only fans webinars.

That's jokers.

Yeah.

So Podcast Joe Kurds got us really, like, making only fans jokes on, like, every other episode now.

I mean, he brings it up a lot.

So, I mean, we know where his passions lie.

He has a secret he wants to share. Maybe we'll invite him on the podcast and we can talk all about it.

He'll have to give us his. We've asked him to be on the podcast and he said he's not ready yet, so he needs to boost his.

Account a little bit more.

No, no, he needs to come on the podcast so he can give us his rebuttal to all of his only fans jokes.

He does need to do that. We'll get him on there. But back to Easy Webinar.

Oh, yeah, that's what we were talking about.

A little distracted there. Everything, Webinars, if you're. If you're doing webinars or thinking about webinars, I mean, that is the suite. That is the all in one tool that you want to use. It just makes it easy. They live up to the name. Yeah, we've. They've been living that game for a long time.

10 years or something like that. I don't know. Probably close to it. Casey Zieman and his crew. Yeah, they've been building this for a while.

So I didn't know when Easy Webinar was founded.

Who knows? But it has been a long time.

I think it was founded back in the 1800s.

That's poss. Pretty sure webinars were just a thing then. Just starting the back of your buggy.

Yeah. Casey rode across country with a oxen and. What do you call the wagon wheel, cart thing? Wagon, I guess just a wagon. Wagon, yeah, Wagon and oxen. And he rode across and risked his life eat some of his family members on the way through Donner Pass.

He did. He did not get dysentery. Thanks. Thank God. Yeah.

He did not die of dysentery.

So because of all of that, we now he presents Easy Webinar to you.

He didn't drown fording any rivers.

That's right.

Fording.

Is it forging?

Fording.

Fording, yeah.

Is it fording? Pretty sure. Ford, F, O, R, D, I, N.

G. Yeah, I thought so. I don't know. I don't know if that's the spelling, but I thought it was fording the river.

I think it's forging, but maybe I'm wrong, too.

I think you're wrong. We're gonna look this up after this.

Now someone write in and who's right? Who's wrong? Call us out. No, I want to wait until someone calls us out. Don't look at it.

So anyway, Casey, thank you for your sacrifice.

Thank you.

In making Easy Webinar and bringing it.

To the west coast.

And then eventually into the world, you know, once the Internet kind of came around. But you brought it by wagon first to the West Coast. So luckily we now have the Internet because this podcast lives everywhere, probably on Mars, too. Thank you, Elon. So go get Easy Webinar. He's hooking me up@easywebinar.com hustle. And because you are a listener and you've made it this far, you get presented a nice discount for Easy Webinar. So go get it. Easywebinar.com hustle.

Go do it.

All right, Share this episode around if you think this is fascinating.

I was about to say let's go talk to Massimo, but we just got done talking to Massimo.

We record the intro after we record the outro.

We do. That is true story.

All right. Yeah, Share this around. Go subscribe. Like it, love it, wherever. Go check us out in YouTube too. Hustleandflowchart TV.

Yes, do that.

See a video with Mossimo on there, probably. So it's only gonna get better there. Go subscribe.

Good. All right.

Thank you. Bye.

Thanks, everybody, for listening to this episode of the Hustle and Flowchart podcast, for taking the time to listen. We want to give you something a little bit special. Every single episode that we do, we actually, actually have somebody on our team take notes. We basically have a Cliff's Notes version of every episode where you can go and find all of the tips and tactics that they laid out, all of the resources that they laid out, all the good stuff from this episode. We actually have a nice, simple notes version that you can find on our website. So go to evergreenprofits.com. find this episode that you just listened to and give us your email address and we'll send you the notes.

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