Travis Ketchum — How To Get More Of Your Marketing Emails In The Inbox
16 Jul 2023 · 67 min
Travis Ketchum built Campaign Refinery to help marketers get emails past spam filters. He splits sends across providers like Amazon SES and SendGrid to test which routes get better opens, removes inactive subscribers after 60-90 days, and uses countdowns and scarcity tactics to drive engagement. The platform now sends 100 million emails monthly.
Questions this episode answers
July 16, 2023.
About 100 million emails per month (stated) with expectation to grow ~10× over the next six months.
If someone hasn't opened or clicked in 60–90 days, consider automatically unsubscribing them.
Send 10% of the list to each SMTP provider (examples: Amazon SES, SendGrid, SparkPost); after two hours compare opens or clicks and pick the winner to send the remainder.
campaignrefinery.com; contestdomination.com; ahrefs (promotion: seven-day $7 trial).
Chapters
This is an intro. Intro, intro, intro.
Hustle and Float, Shark with your boy. My boy, Matt Wolf.
Hey, Record Matt.
I did hit record. Are you sure about that?
That's why I said, what's up? Right as you said, hit record.
Hit record.
I'm ready.
Oh, man. How are you?
I'm doing good. I'm doing just as good as the last intro.
Where?
You asked me that about 10 minutes ago.
Just checking in on you, man. That's kind of a cadence, you know. I'm just worried about you.
You're worried about me? You're sitting right next to me.
Oh, yeah.
I didn't see you for a second there.
Am I on something?
I don't know.
Are you?
I don't think so.
You don't think so? But there's no clear confirmation.
What do you say?
What do I say? I say no comment.
Wow.
Okay.
No comment about whether or not Joe's on something.
I'm on Oxygen and life.
Hey, nice.
Carrying on into the episode now. So we're del.
It's the end of the day. We're very delirious.
This is how we roll. We just. We just don't stop until our minds give out.
Like that one song by that one lady who can't stop, won't stop.
Miley Cyrus.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah. Sing it.
I don't know how it goes.
Good. Because we'll probably be sued if he tried.
I know.
We don't have the money for that shit.
We can't pay our Miley bills this month.
Not her rates.
It's been increasing.
Oh. Alrighty.
So on to Travis Ketchum.
Travis, our guest of the day. Did you just, like, act like you were clutching him as you said, Ketchum.
I thought he was figuratively being thrown my direction.
Ketchum.
Okay.
You just, like, made this head where you went. Travis, Ketchum. And you, like.
Clasped your hands.
I did.
You're right. That was subconscious.
I promise. We're not drunk.
No.
We have water from jugs in front of us.
Oh, man.
All right. Yes. It's Ketchum. That's really funny. You caught that? That's so true.
Wonder if he gets that often.
Probably not.
All right, so tell the folks about Travis.
All right, so Travis, he. He created a really cool tool called Campaign Refinery. This is actually his second time on the show. Last time he was on to talk about his other tool contest, Domination, which is a really cool contest, tool style. Brown still around. Still a great tool. Great to build contests and shit like that. Campaign Refinery is more of an email marketing platform that allows you to actually split test the email sending server. So if you use like Amazon S3 or SendGrid or he's making his own, it sounds like he's working on his own. So it's an email sending service and a lot of people go, oh, my email sender sucks. The deliverability sucks. Well, his tool lets you actually test the deliverability between multiple email senders. So really cool piece of technology.
Without switching like all the crazy backend without switching from like one server to another. It's crazy.
Yeah.
So it's like hassle free in that sense. You're always going to get the best email deliverably. Yeah.
And a lot of cool concepts because he's developing all sorts of cool stuff into this tool. And one of the things we talked about quite a bit was scarcity campaigns and using things like countdowns and having those countdowns, you know, be on your email and then also be on your landing page. And the countdowns, like if I looked at a website on my computer and then a day later looked at it on my phone, the countdown would actually still match from when it, you know.
So it's not like scary, like fake scarcity.
Not fake scarcity. It's real scarcity where when the countdown ends, the stuff goes away.
Not douchebag scarcity.
Yeah.
So we talk a lot about scarcity campaigns. But also. So we went on Travis's podcast, I believe it's not released yet still. But he's coming out with a podcast called Addicted to MRR Monthly Recurring Revenue. Not like MRR isn't like a street drug or anything.
I mean if you're addicted to Monthly.
Recurring revenue, I am actually hit that vein, Matt.
Money vein.
But on his podcast, at the end of his podcast, he likes to ask guests about things like stress and anxiety and like the real stuff that entrepreneurs deal with. And it led to a really good discussion on his show. So we circled back around to that same discussion on our show and we talked about things like anxiety and depression and the stress of running a business and some of the techniques that we use and some of the techniques he uses to get past those things and you know, went off on some really cool tangents in that realm that I think are really interesting but also really need to be said because not enough entrepreneurs are talking about it.
Yeah, yeah, he, I think he ends his episodes on his podcast with a specific question which he actually asked on this podcast. I prompt him for that. So that's where it kicks off. And yeah, like we were saying, I think it's a. We've said it before on previous shows too. Our episodes is like, people need to talk more about just the stressors of being an entrepreneur and the ups and downs and how to deal with mainly the downs or, you know, dealing with the ups, but when it crashes hard and vice versa. Yeah, it's like all this mental stuff that needs to be chatted about.
You know, one of the ways that I deal with stress and actually minimize a lot of stress in my life is I use a tool called ahrefs.
Wow.
For my SEO.
That was your segue?
That was my segue.
That was interesting.
So, all right, so how are we using hrefs? Well, how do you like if you think of Ahrefs and you're.
So if you're trying to help a website out, like someone's asking a question like, hey, how can I get more organic traffic to my website? Is there a first approach you would.
Take with Ahrefs or strategy inside of Ahrefs? Yeah. I mean you would go in and you would plug in your URL and find out exactly how many sites are linking back to your website and who's linking back and what keywords are. What keywords are you currently ranking for? Right. You just kind of, you can go in there and just start collecting all this data. One of my favorite things to do is what we call the low hanging fruit strategy. I think we've talked about it in past episodes, but that's probably phase one. Right. As you go in and you plug in your URL, you click on the keywords and find out all the keywords that you're ranking for in Google.
And.
And then I like to sort it by what keywords get. More than a hundred searches a month are on page two or three. Right. You could set those filters and make it so it's only showing keywords that meet those criteria. And then I would go and do a little bit of a campaign to try to get those keywords onto page one. So I would go internally on my website and try to cross link blog posts using those anchor keywords to try to get them to rank. I might outreach to a couple blogs that talk about the similar stuff, get.
A link back and try to get.
Link backs to those artists articles using similar keywords. And I'll just, you know, we'll try to shore up those keywords and see if we can't nudge them up onto page one.
Nice.
That's usually the first step that we follow when we're kind of analyzing a Website.
Yeah, no, that's true.
So sweet.
Yeah, you could do that with Ahrefs.
It's totally stress free.
Is it?
Yeah, totally stress free.
Am I supposed to get a reference?
Yeah, because we were talking about stress and I told you. What takes the stress off of me is using Ahrefs.
Joe, it was that segue that I just wanted to burn in my brain.
I was trying to make this segue sound as awkward as possible. Did I succeed?
You did. Front and back, all around.
Well, you can grab Ahrefs over@a hrefs.com. they have a seven day, $7 trial. It's killer. You're going to want to keep using it.
Good job. That is the end of the Ahrefs sponsorship segment of the show.
What's the next segment?
I wasn't paid to say that part, but no. Amazing tool and second part is not a sponsor. It is our own cool stuff that I think you'll love. And let's just say all the Epic people are doing it. Don't you want to be epic?
Yeah, I want to be epic.
Yeah.
An evergreen profits insider club member Epic. Yeah.
So to get a little smidgen, little bite sized chunks of what Epic members get, you can actually get the free companion to this episode you're listening to right here. It's a little cheat sheet and we're taking notes for you so you don't have to. If you go to hustleandflowchart.com comp, c.
O m P. Limited time. They do go away after a couple weeks.
Be quicks.
So when this episode comes out, you have about a week or two to go and grab the companion to this and then it disappears. Gets locked into our vault and then Epic members get access to it.
Ooh, they're so epic and cool. So go to hustleandfluechart.com comp go get them free notes. You're going to love them. And now let's go catch Travis. Catch them.
Catch them. Catch them.
Caught him.
Travis. Welcome back to round two.
Oh, yeah, my pleasure. Number two has got to be better than the first. It's a big, big bar to live up to.
Well, that one was in person at tnc, a traffic conversion. But that was what, two years ago now, I think.
Yeah, almost. It was. Yeah. It would have been early 2018, I guess.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. In that time. Well, we were talking a lot about contests and all the stuff you were doing back in the dark ages.
We still do a lot of contest stuff, but, you know, we've. We've had our sights set on some even bigger milestones. So that's what we've been tackling over the last few years.
Which is interesting because when we had you on the show last time, we sort of ended the show. The last five minutes of the show was kind of a teaser of what you had in the works. It wasn't sort of public yet. You hadn't really launched it yet. And so you kind of teased out that you were working on the, you know, like an email platform. But we didn't really get into too much depth. So I feel like this conversation is going to be a little bit of picking up where we left off in that last conversation.
Yeah, you just go to listen to the last episode and then let's put this right at the end and it'll be perfect. It'll be like a great two hour long episode.
There you go.
Now you still own and run contest domination too, right?
Correct. Yeah. The nice thing about having a platform like that, we spent a ridiculous amount of hours into it and really refined the process and got things really dialed in. And it's at a nice stable state now where it doesn't take an obscene amount of effort to. To keep it going. There's still improvements and there's still things that are being done, but it's sort of at a nice stable release at this point that, you know, don't break it. It's not broken.
So what's the, what's your. Like how does that look for operationally? Like what's your day to day in that? Or is there no day to day for you? And is it like a team running everything at this point?
For me, it's relatively hands off on the contest side because a lot of my brain power gets sucked into the email automation side because there's just a lot of of micro decisions that have to be made for that. I talked to someone who has worked for some major tech companies and she has a lot of really smart questions and she's like, are you where you thought you'd be when you started this project? And things like that. And one of the realizations I had is that I do about three to five micro course corrections every day with the team on our new tool. And so they're not significant. And even though they're micro, it's not really micromanaging. It's just little nudges to keep the developer mindset going towards the marketing side. That's kind of the bridge. And if you didn't make a bunch of small adjustments when you start looking at it over a long period of time of one year, two years, three years, you end up with a widely incorrect product. It's kind of like if your compass was 1/10 of 1 degree off, it's not a big deal for the first mile, but you do that path forever and you end up in a wildly different spot. So it takes a lot of those kind of small micro adjustments to keep it going where we needed to go for sure.
Now, just to give the listeners some context, can you give the quick rundown of what the new product is that you're selling? Campaign Refinery. Can you give the overview of what it does and why you created that?
Yeah. So, I mean, Campaign Refinery stemmed for me personally out of a frustration with infusionsoft just being plain and simple. Infusionsoft opened my eyes quite a few years ago in a lot of ways to moving away from lists and going to tags and the promise of automations and all the things that you could do. That's what got me to convert back in the day from AWeber to Infusionsoft. But the reality and struggle I ran into is that as you started to try to flex it to do what it was supposedly meant to do, there was a lot of cracks in the foundation as to how it was built. And we didn't find that support was very helpful in getting it to do what it was supposed to do. Even when we went to a Frank Kern event that had infusionsoft employees double check our work. So it's not like we were doing things wrong, it wasn't working. And they were basically saying, they literally said at one point, this is what broke my back on it. They literally said, good luck finding anything better. And I was like, as a software guy. Yeah, as software guy, can only hear that kind of response so many times before. I'm like, you know what, Fine, I'll go build something better.
Well, I mean, that's why it got its name. What, confusionsoft for so many years back in the day, now it's called something else.
Yeah. Now they rebranded as Keep because probably they built a reputation that they didn't want attached to their brand anymore. So they rebranded.
Yeah, Confusion Keep doesn't sound as good.
FusionSoft by Keep, but Keep is spelled funny. Anyway, I'm not really here to dog on them. Just the point is we came to a breaking point where it wasn't doing what it said it was supposed to do. And even when I used to go to their conference, which they don't do anymore, you Go to the advanced track. And the guy literally stood up there and said, well, don't do advanced because it doesn't work. Just do a basic autoresponder sequence. I'm like, well, then what's the point of this entire tool?
So my frustration was there and I also was looking at the concept of deliverability. And now there's some ways to augment some different platforms by allowing you to send mail over methods and avenues that you control using what's called SMTP. So using services like SendGrid or Amazon SES or Spark, post or there's a whole bunch. And basically giving you an outlet where you could actually swap out the way that your email is delivered without having to rewrite all of your business logic, rewrite all of your emails, redo all your forms, do all the stuff that's the brain of the operation. Just to test to see if there was a better way of getting your email into the inbox. We wanted to level the playing field and remove that from the equation. Because when you talk to people that are on platforms, everyone kind of says, oh, my, deliverability isn't what I think it should be. But I don't have a way to definitively test that without switching five times, without rewriting my emails five times, without switching out my forms five times. Right. Which is a lot of cost, a lot of opportunity costs, a lot of headache. And even when you do it, you aren't guaranteed in a clear cut way that it's going to be better results.
Yeah, yeah.
And just to clarify, for folks listening, what you guys have created is interesting because you have this almost like a user interface where you can swap out the sending service on the back end. Like you were saying S3 or SendGrid and things like that. And so it's really unique how you actually have this interface and you're attaching that other service kind of on the back end so you could save all the switching costs.
Precisely. Yeah. I like to give the analogy that we're trying to be like the iPhone in the way that. Imagine if you walked around with your smartphone and it tested every carrier and you only paid for the carrier that gave you the best service at the best price in your exact scenario.
That's a good analogy. Yeah.
Because there's no way for us to forecast, based on your sending habits, the kind of copy you send, the offers you send, the frequency you send to know with 100% certainty which service is gonna deliver the best results for each customer. And that can vary even depending on the life cycle. Of your business. That can change sometimes. So we wanted to give people a really clear cut way to get that information in a, you know, in the same timeframe, et cetera. So like, you know, most people have split testing for subject lines. Like we have split testing for deliverability. You can hook up Amazon, Sendgrid and Spark Post or a couple others and say send 10% of my list to each service and after two hours, whichever one has the most opens or the most clicks, pick them as the winner and send all remaining emails on the winning service.
Oh, that's cool.
I like that. Now I know there's so many factors in deliverability, but has there been any sort of service that you've noticed across the board tends to perform better deliverability wise?
You know, it's funny if you look at sort of the groupings and how the results are playing out, I more notice what services are below average as opposed to which ones necessarily stick out because it's hard to tell sometimes. Even with like we have pretty good scale for only having been around for a short while. You know, we're sending right now about 100 million emails a month and we actually expect that to grow about tenfold over the next six months. Oh wow. With our new enterprise plan rolling out, so we have a fair amount of scale and when you look at that, it's more obvious which ones are underperformers as opposed to over performers. And we're actually looking at cutting one of our integrations because of that. So it's help nurture our customers into the right path. If someone is repeatedly underperforming, then there's no reason for them to be in the mix.
So is that something that you don't want to say which company it is or you open to telling us they're.
Gonna, they'll, they'll be falling off the list in the next two months.
So yeah, just go check out campaign, campaign refinery and whatever disappears next.
Yeah, yeah, I will say it's only, it's only one service that has repeatedly underperformed and so but overall, you know, it's really interesting. It's sort of depends on your niche and like I said, your sending habits and there's so many variables but the easiest way, you know, everyone always says, oh, just test. Right, just test, just test, you know, which ad should I use? Just test. What headlines should I use? Just test. Well, that hasn't been easy for deliverability up until now, but that was kind of one of our big goals there. And the interface that we give you is something that regular marketers should be able to understand. You just write your email and put in the link like you expect and send. You don't have to be a brain surgeon to figure out everything that we do.
Yeah, it's interesting because I've sent a lot of emails over the years and I've always assumed that deliverability, the biggest factor was who I was using to send it. I've since found out that's not typically the case. But you know, like I used AWeber, I used GetResponse, I used Mailchimp, I used ActiveCampaign. Currently we're on Drip and every time I kind of felt like our click and open numbers were dropping off, I just assumed, oh, this platform's shit, let's move to the next one. And I would move to a different platform. And I kind of repeated that process for like, I don't know, seven years or so. And what I noticed was moving from one platform to another almost never increase deliverability. I might have like a short term spike where the first like two emails I send have a little bit higher of a spike in opens and clicks. But then it kind of goes right back to the baseline. And that was like a real interesting phenomenon that I found. And it sounds like what you're, you're building is something that's going to kind of really help people optimize that at a, you know, a very high level.
Yeah, I mean the other two main thing, the people, the things that people overlook is if we're being honest with ourselves, it's ego and vanity that makes us overlook them. So those two things are doing list validation. Right. So taking your list running against a good cleaning service, which we'll be offering one here soon as well. But that's not my point of bringing it up. It's a very important process to making sure that you have a clean list. Because emails don't stay valid forever. You get role based email accounts. Right. Like admin at. Right. As an example. Those aren't very good because people change jobs and the person who is now receiving that email may not be the person who signed up. So removing role based stuff, there's spam traps, there's dead emails, there's typos. So there's things that you can definitely clean up. And I think most people would find that they could probably cut 20% of their emails right off the top if they have a lister.
There's those burner email things too that people are using now too where it's like this email address works for 24 hours. And then that email is just dead after that so that people can opt in, get a freebie, and then that email address just dies. And there's tons of services that do that now.
Yeah. And so you really do yourself a huge disservice if you continually try to pound an email that doesn't work anymore.
Right, right.
You know, or let's say somebody stopped checking their email and it was some Yahoo email or something, and they hadn't even logged into it for, you know, six months, a year, or whatever Yahoo decided was the time to renew that. Occasionally Yahoo will then reactivate that just to try to catch people that might have an old email list and aren't paying attention. And then you get penalized if it hits an inbox of someone who originally, maybe two, three years ago was a legitimate person that signed up legitimately to download an ebook, to maybe even bought something, but then they stopped using that email address and now Yahoo is using that, trying to catch spammers. And even though you got it legitimately, it doesn't look good on your reputation because it should have known, because it should have been hard bouncing for a certain number of months.
Yeah.
What would you recommend as like a timeframe to clean your list and use a service? Obviously you'll have yours, but any service. Have you found a good frequency for folks?
I mean, anytime you're switching platforms is a good time to consider a hygiene reset, for sure. There's a number of services even that allow you to do sort of real time authentication on that so that as people are subscribing and stuff, it can actually run it against the validation service. So, you know, that at least passed a certain threshold of quality coming in. You can recheck annually is probably a good cadence for that. The big thing for timeframe really has to do with the second factor that ego and whatnot drives us to ignore, which is engagement rates. If someone isn't opening or clicking over a certain period of time, you should really be cutting them if they don't care about your message anymore. Cut the dead weight. You know, if someone hasn't opened or clicked an email from you in 60 days, 90 days, like I would seriously consider setting up a rule to automatically unsubscribe them.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, it is really just a big ego thing for why people don't. I mean, at one time our mailing list was up over 100,000 subscribers. And to be honest, we kept that spreadsheet. We still have the spreadsheet of all, you know, 100,000 plus names, like on our hard drive somewhere. But the amount of people that we actually mail to these days is significantly less. Like we're not even mailing to a five figure number these days. We're mailing to about 7,000 people every time we mail. But it's 7,000 super responsive people because we clean our list about once every three months or so and just clear off the dead weight. And just over years and years and years of doing that, we've just, you know, we've just shaved off so many that we're down to like, you know, 7% of what we used to have.
Yeah. But if you think about it rationally, if you're looking at your click volume, it's not like you're getting, you know, 1/7 of the clicks that you had before necessarily. You look at, you know, Justin Brooke or Andre Chaperone, people that manage your list really well and every time they switch, they make people re opt in. So it's back in the day it was like the clickers list, Right. So people might have one account that would be the main broadcast, but every time someone would click, they'd actually get subscribed to a different account. And so when you're really firing a hot offer, they just fire it to clickers and it would actually get more clicks than when they sent to the greater list that included the clickers.
Because it would come through and it would look really good on all the engagement scores for all the services you're mailing to gmail, Yahoo, Microsoft, etc. It was be labeled as, hey, this is really good content. This audience cares about it. We should make sure this hits the inbox.
Yeah. Another approach is Justin Goff. We had him on the podcast. Well, it's not released quite yet at the time of this recording, but he actually requires folks to sign up for his email list and agree that they'll actually open every single one of his emails. And it's like a Google form, so you have to be accepted to even see his emails. Which, yeah, I mean, that's obviously a totally different approach. But it's interesting how people like, you know, they'll play this engagement rate and you know, and like he was saying you don't. I think he has like 1,000 people on there or less is what he said. But the engagement's through the roof.
Yeah, you actually have to apply to be on his list. And one of the questions is, do you promise to open and read every email I send?
That's awesome. Well, one thing that Justin Brook does Which we're actually working at making this campaign added to our campaign library because we have to add a little bit more features to make it possible. Which we should actually talk about the campaign library here in a little bit. But Justin Brooks concept is he tries to gamify it. So he'll say, hey, open this email and you get 10 points. Right. Click a link this email and you get 20 points. Right. And when you get a certain number of points, I'm going to send you a free gift.
That's cool.
That gift ends up actually being a discount on one of his products.
Makes sense.
Not only does he jack up the engagement rate and pretty much guarantee good deliverability, but then what's your reward? Well, he makes some money.
Well, hey, anyone listening? And they're on Justin's list. His products are amazing, so you should buy it anyway for sure.
But it's.
There is an incentive there, like you want to get a discount because he does have good, high quality products. Everyone wins in this process.
In a sequence of you increasing his ability to reach the inbox of all of his customers. Because each customer, one by one, it all starts to have a compounding effect.
Yeah, I love that idea. It's something I'm kind of interested in testing now.
Gamifying anything. I mean, it's just if you make it fun, incentivize and kind of bribe with something that's kind of cool for everybody involved. I mean, there's no losing there.
Yeah. I mean, we're constantly testing that just with our podcast, but we never really do it with our email list. Much like with our podcast, we're constantly saying, hey, we're doing a giveaway. We're going to give away this, this cool prize. All you got to do is go and subscribe and review and then leave a comment here and you know, we're going to pick our favorite and give you the prize. So we're constantly doing that sort of simple gamification process to grow the podcast, but we've never really focused on it for our email list. But it's, it's a cool concept.
Yeah.
Well, if you think about the gamification angle, I mean, it just flat out works. Right? So obviously my ears perked up when I heard about this from Justin, given my contest stuff. Right. Gamification gets me excited. And then I think about on the contest side, that sequence where you say, yeah, and the winner is Da da. Right. And it's all those gamifications getting 50, 60% open rates, 98% click rates. I mean Duh, like, come on, it's been sitting there the whole time. Travis program, you were the man for this.
Well, you brought up your campaign library. Are there any other campaigns you found that are just like, holy shit, that's cool, let's talk about it?
Yeah, actually, so the whole concept of the campaign library, I mean, other platforms have had campaigns you could clone in of varying degrees, but for lack of a better description, they were all kind of lame, like super basic. Right? It was like, here's a three email sequence to welcome somebody to your newsletter. And admittedly we have some of those too, but one that ties in some of the best of what we have to offer is the concept of an evergreen Flash sale. It's this concept where you can basically deliver true scarcity just in time based on the journey of that specific prospect and the engagement they took in the beginning. For example, let's say you're sending out a regular broadcast about new blog post about Facebook ads. You could tag everyone who clicked to that blog post or that podcast episode or whatever and add them to an evergreen Flash sale so that only the people who clicked would be queued up that the following Tuesday based on whatever they clicked. Whether it was today, tomorrow, next week, next month, next year, it doesn't matter. Whenever they click, it will queue them up for the following Tuesday to run a three day flash sale on your Facebook ad training that gives them real scarcity and actually.
Hides the real sales page URL. Put embeds countdown timers in the email, has countdown timers in an iframe similar to some other tools and then at the end of that actually removes their access to the offer based on their journey. That's a way to one click, swap out a couple links and edit a few emails. Have an on demand pipeline for an offer, you know, works, has real authentic scarcity based on that, that customer's timeframe and you can deploy that at any time, whether that's tying it into other automated follow ups, tying it into broadcast. Like I spoke before, anything can be a trigger for that. And it's basically like printing money on demand because as you guys probably know, adding real scarcity to something can be a 3 to 4x increase in conversions.
Yeah, yeah. Now is that something that works.
Across devices as well? Because I mean, you know, like I might, I'm sure it's a pretty typical thing to happen. Somebody goes to a webpage, they see a cool like freebie that they want to opt in for, they opt in for that, the follow up email comes to their Email. They're sitting on their couch at home later browsing through their email. They finally get around, read the email on their phone, you know, click over on the link on their phone and then maybe two days later they're at their computer looking at their inbox at their computer and they click on it. Does it work like, like that where if they get triggered on one day so that Tuesday is the competition, then it doesn't matter what device they're looking on?
Exactly, yeah. Because the beauty of being at the infrastructure level of your marketing as opposed to being an add on service is we can actually tie it to a real contact id. So when they're opening their email, it's actually querying our system in real time for where they should be specific in that campaign and loads a GIF basically that has the accurate countdown timer based on when the offer expires. When they click through, it's actually using an iframe. So the URL structure is not, it's not like it just redirects them to the page. It actually loads the page under a link that we have. We can actually force refresh that to your offer expired page or whatever. Your next stage of people who missed out.
Regardless of what device they're on, when they click where they click. If they go back to an old email and try to click, it doesn't matter because it always checks, hey, should they have access to this offer or not? And then decides where they should be sent.
Yeah, speaking of that, you brought up a good point as far as like where you send them when the countdown's over. What do you typically recommend? Because to me it seems like kind of a missed opportunity if somebody finally clicks over to something something and they just see a page that says this offers expired. But it seems like at that point they're kind of a hotter prospect because they clicked over with interest. So where do you actually recommend they. What do you recommend happens after a countdown ends?
I treat it like a downsell. So you know, you want to offer them something but you don't want even though they're, you know, warm prospect because they clicked, they clicked late, they're not that hot. Right.
That's true.
Yeah.
So for us, you know, let's say we're doing like an extended trial with all these bonuses. Maybe it says hey you missed the offer but like you can still get the trial and like one of the bonuses, you know, it's so it's like a down sell in a lot of ways. I agree. You know, just saying, hey, oops, you missed the offer. Like that's kind of crappy, right? That's just as useless as when someone opts in for something and it doesn't go anywhere to continue the story. Right. So like, thanks for subscribing to the newsletter. You know.
Countdown'S over. You're no longer allowed to send me money.
Sorry, give me money.
Yeah, it's kind of like, you know, referencing back to our experience with the contest world, you know, when your contest ends, because that has a limited time deal, we would frequently set the contest over redirect to go to an evergreen lead magnet. You know, so like if people are hitting a contest, you know, to. You could be about fitness. Right. And maybe the fitness thing is over, but it redirects to, hey, sorry you missed out. We'd set up a static page that would take one of our existing lead magnets that worked. And we'd add a little bit of extra text at the top that says like, you know, looks like you missed the contest. But download our ebook about five ways you can still get some form of results of what the grand prize would have gotten you that you clicked here in the first place. And you'd be surprised how many leads will still opt in for that because it seems crazy to just not accept leads anymore, you know.
Sure, yeah.
And that can go into your normal trip, wire up, sell funnel, whatever. And so we've actually tracked back, you know, thousands of dollars of revenue of just people hitting the contest over page.
Yeah, I could see that. And something like we're playing around with for our newsletter growth are these, this idea of premiums where it's like a packaged special offer of like, hey, here's all the topics of what you know, we've talked about, say video marketing or email marketing. And that's maybe we don't have a price on it yet, but you know, 15 bucks to get that one issue as kind of like that. It could be just a mini offer that gets them and you know, continues the story later on to a higher priced offer.
Yeah, I mean it's the, it's the football phone concept of selling subscriptions, right? Like, what was it Sports Illustrated used to do? The whole football phone thing where it's like, hey, subscribe to Sports Illustrated this month and we'll throw in a free football shaped phone. Right. So with our subscription we're planning on doing that same concept, but instead of a football phone, it's like, hey, get our, our strategy guide for SEO where it's kind of like all of the curated content around SEO that we put together in a single strategy guide. So yeah, we've been experimenting a lot with that kind of thing and it works really, really well.
Yeah, I mean, like I said, I think if you just come into it and approach it as a downsell opportunity from whatever your core offer is, I think that will actually work very well for a lot of people. So for us that just reminding people about our 14 day free trial, for instance, with Campaign Refinery, that's a great downside. We still get a good number of trials on offers that might have been better than that, that expire and people say, okay, fine, I get it, I missed out on the thing. But hey, 14 day free trial, that's pretty good still.
Yeah, I know I'm sort of risking making this sound like a Campaign Refinery pitch episode, but I'm curious what, what sort of other just like ninja sort of stuff? I hate the word ninja. I don't know why I use it. You're such a ninja. What other cool tactical stuff is just kind of built into the platform?
I mean the kind of standard table stakes that you would expect from an automation tool. Right. Like the idea of keying off of goals and you can get it pretty much as advanced as you want with if then this that kind of statements for who should be going into what bucket based on the criteria of the data on their profile. We've got a number of other cool things in the pipeline, but you'd be surprised how much work it takes just to be table stakes with tools these days. Because I started working this several years ago and as you can imagine, the landscape has changed dramatically over the last few years. But the built in Evergreen Flash sale is the coolest thing that we have publicly available today. But you can really use a lot of the other things that a lot of other tools have. But when you use it in conjunction with Navigreen Flash Sale or deliverability split testing, et cetera, that really can get you the polished results that a lot of people are looking for.
Yeah, and I don't want to downplay that deliverability split testing, that's pretty huge as well.
I mean that's as far as I know. We're the only people that offer that. There are people that definitely let you integrate with more than one smtp. But as far as I know, I've tried to look pretty deep, but I'm sure there's always something hiding somewhere. Right. But as far as I know, I think we're the only one that can do a deliverability split test and pick the winner and automatically send the rest of your emails based on the winner.
Well, I like what you have just because it's like you said, it's extremely unique in the fact that you're allowing users to essentially decide where they should go. With that Evergreen, the Flash sale concept, you're seeing more and more companies and just technology in general. It's like choose your own adventure. And with that gamification is part of that. Any of these things that you can kind of layer in that just makes it more of a journey and experience. And the fact on the back end now you have this ability to switch stuff, the email senders, it just seems like the level needed to raise at some point for email and it really hasn't. And the fact that you're actually doing this is really cool. And it seems like the undertaking, like you said you were building it for years. I don't know how the hell you pulled it off.
It's not been easy, I'll be honest, it's been a kind of a backbreaking journey.
But we have a lot of confidence going forward. And you look at the deliverability split testing, keep in mind we're going to be offering our own first party sending here in the next few weeks, even starting with Enterprise and then rolling down. But we're keeping that deliverability split testing in place and so you can come in with your SMTP and split test it against our service that has our deliverability and compliance people working on it in our team. And if we can't beat it, then cool, use Sendgrid or whatever and that'll be a huge lost revenue for us. But the data is the data. We want you to have the best experience at the end of the day but we want to be able to compete on that playing field and make it a no brainer switch.
Now does that split testing concept, does that, does that work in other things other than just like split testing deliverability? Like can I, can I use two subject lines on an email? Send both subject lines to 15% and then the platform will send, you know, the best performing subject line to the rest of the list.
So that's something that's probably about 60 days, 60, 90 days away hopefully.
Well by the time this is released it's probably only about 30 days away. So yeah, hopefully.
Like because our in game is basically I want people to be able to do what I call like the Perry Belcher test, right. Which is they were, they he's talked about several times at Traffic and Conversion where you know, they'll, they'll basically, you know, rank and yank of body copy subject line. But I want to also add deliverability to that mix. And I want you to be able to set up cascading split tests so you can start, you know, hey, pick the automatic, you know, winner of the subject line, but then split test the body copy and then split test deliverability and then send the winner. So that's not as useful for someone with 10,000 subscribers, but we have some customers already sending 40 million emails a month and we have a number of prospects interested in our enterprise plan that are sending that or double that every month. We start talking about that kind of scale. Being able to programmatically set up a cascading set of tests to automatically optimize every time is kind of a big deal.
I was actually going to mention the Perry Belcher thing because at tnc, Matt and I have stood into one of the. Or listened in on one of the sessions and I think we were like, holy crap, this is such a genius concept, but dear God, that's a lot of work. If you wanted to use something like aweber or drip or whatever. And we're like, yeah, it's great in theory, but I'm going to be there all damn day.
Oh, no. At the same event, I think, Travis, you came out the overtime event that we held and you and I were talking about it and you're like, you know, I'm going to put those features.
In there for sure. It's definitely high on the list. But, you know, our first goal was to get Enterprise launch, which should be out by the time this episode is out. And that's for anyone who sends a million or more emails a month just because that's a whole different ball of wax. But once that's out, I've been like chomping at the bit to set up this idea of the stack and cascading test so that people that send a lot of freaking email have an ability to really juice the most out of it. I think that's going to be massively, massively valuable because, you know, Perry's able to do that because he has a, you know, a team of people that are setting alarms on their phones and stuff and going in and like setting the next, you know, test to run. So yeah, yeah, these are like, this is what automation was built to solve in my eyes.
Yeah, for sure. Someone had to do it.
Now, a little bit of a shift in subjects. Unless. Joe, did you have anything else?
No, you're good.
So you've got, you've got A new podcast. I don't know if it's out yet or it's coming soon or what the plan is with it. But the Addicted to MRR podcast, what was your game plan behind that and why did you decide to start podcasting?
Yeah, well, I've been wanting to do a podcast for quite a while. It's been in the back of my mind. I enjoy talking about marketing and technology and various aspects of sort of the business in general with other people in the industry. And I find that to be some of the most fulfilling conversations when I go to conferences or whatever. And I toyed around different ideas and the idea of Addicted to mrr, I was like, you know, that subscription has its own unique set of challenges, so I want to talk to people that are doing subscription based stuff. And then I also thought about my own journey as an entrepreneur and how that has had ebbs and flows. So it was also a good platform and opportunity in my eyes to talk about the businessy stuff and the non businessy stuff being the internal struggle that a lot of us go through, whether especially around small teams or independent people, and the feast or famine that can come with some of this. Even if you do have a subscription business that gives you recurring revenue that you feel like you can count on, there's going to be ups and downs in your businesses. And I wanted to have a platform that made sense to talk about that. And podcast seemed like the perfect fit.
Yeah, no, I love that you're talking about that kind of stuff. In fact, after we went on your show, we recorded that, we talked about our newsletter business and then we also talked about a lot of the mindset and the mental struggles that we've gone through and that led us on this whole path of. We actually recorded a whole on episode for our show about those same topics. And so I love that you're talking about it and I love that more entrepreneurs are bringing it to the forefront. In fact, the day that we are recording this, like two days ago, Mike Dillard actually released like a new podcast episode about all of his sort of like mental struggles that he went through and how he got beyond those struggles. And I feel like there's like this sort of new wave of entrepreneurs that are kind of open to talking about this and sort of becoming more transparent about the struggles of entrepreneurship instead of all the, you know, the Ferraris and mansions and hot girls that come with being a rock star entrepreneur.
God, fine, I guess I'll stop all that.
Yeah.
But before we go down that, that path, I was Curious with the addicted mrr. So is that podcast, is it live now? Can people go find it or is it, is it like a coming soon podcast and you're kind of front loading a bunch of episodes?
So I've been front loading. I have enough now that I'm going to release a batch of them.
I realized from a marketing standpoint it would be ideal and way better results, whatever, if I could consistently get one out every single week if I was rock stars like you guys. But at the end of the day, even though condos domination is less headache and brain power than it used to be, there's a whole lot going into Campion Refinery and I still am running two different software companies and doing a bunch of other team management, et cetera, et cetera. So what I'm finding is, do you.
Ever leave your office?
No.
Sometimes, yeah. But what I'm finding is it's a challenge to get enough of the right people pinned down on a regular basis because that's the other. I'm sure you guys know the kind of people you want to talk to. They're also really busy, right? So it's not impossible. We now have 10 episodes done, edited, recorded, cleaned up. So I think what I'm probably going to end up doing is driven them out in 10 episode seasons and basically get 10 banked up. And when I have 10 ready to go and I know I can do it, trip Those out over 10 weeks, well, you know, try to bank up more again. And if the seasons are tied together, then great. But if they're spread out apart, then that's just kind of how it goes. But I think that can be an expectation that I can set for our audience that, hey, you know, when we start dripping these, you're going to get 10 of them at a time. And that's something that I think is something that I can continue to do. It's like Tim Ferriss said in the four Hour Body, right? The mediocre diet you stick to is better than the perfect diet you never do. Always. Yeah. So that, that's kind of my goal. So it's, it's not out there today. But you know, about the domain, I got all the graphics work done for it. It's all record. I just need to get a few things off my plate and then we'll start dripping out episodes. Hopefully by the time this episode even drops on on your podcast.
No, I love, I love that concept of podcasting. I think a lot of people don't get into podcasts because they, they think, okay, this is something I've got to do every week now. This is going to be, you know, if I'm going to stick with it, it's like every week for the rest of my life, I'm going to be dropping an episode. But I love the concept now that a lot of podcasts are doing of, okay, we're going to release 10 episodes. That'll be season one. And then if I want to take a year break, I'll take a year break and then we'll release 10 more episodes and call it season two. Like, there's nothing wrong with that. And I think that's. That's a great way to approach it, go into it thinking, you know, I'm just going to release a handful of episodes, and if I dig it and I want to stay really consistent with it, I will. If it turns out to be a little more strain on my business and the opportunity cost is too high, then, you know, I'll take a break on it, put it on hiatus, and then maybe circle back around to it. And either way is good.
Yeah, I mean, probably for me, the end game would be, you know, if it does start getting traction and, you know, I'm willing to stick with it much longer than just one season, but if it does start getting traction, then I can, you know, hire a few people to help me start to get the scheduling book down and all that kind of stuff and, you know, batch record like you guys do, and other podcasts to make that easier from a scheduling standpoint, there's things I can do to certainly get to the point of every week, but, you know, you never know what people are going to think about the content. I tend to think that the interviews are decent and we got guys like you on there that give good content. So I think there's a lot of value to be gleaned. The sort of ironic part is now that more people are talking about the mental health side of business, it'll feel like I'm kind of probably copying other people, even though I've been recording it for months. But that's fine as long as there are more of us talking about it. That's all I really care about.
Yeah, no, I think that's a. It's a smart move. And the seasons approach is great for, you know, folks listening who are thinking about getting their feet wet. Like you said, it's a testing grant. It's also a way to even, like, pre sell if you wanted to get sponsorships to pay for, you know, production and all the help that you might not want to do yourself. There's a lot of different ways to kind of structure that.
So let's talk about the whole. Like the question that you bring up, I think it was at the end of your podcast, right?
What is that question? I'm just curious what it was.
Well, what I asked people at the end of the podcast is we live in this world of high demands and high stress and sort of like fronting our best selves. But as someone, myself who has dealt with anxiety and panic attacks and some people deal with depression and overwhelm and it manifests different ways. But it seems like when you really get down to it, a lot of people in our community suffer from some portion of those, maybe all of them or different parts in their life. They have different issues with that that they maybe get over and then maybe relapse or whatever. But what I want to know is who has struggled with what and what they do to deal with it. Because I think if we can talk about the truth, the real truth of what people have gone through and how they've overcome it and how they still succeed in spite of it, it can be pretty inspiring and helpful for those who are in the same situation. Because the biggest thing when I started having issues with anxiety is I felt like I was going crazy and I was the only person in the world that had that issue. And when it really came down to it, turns out there's a lot of us that have this kind of brain wiring and mindset and lifestyle and the choices we make. We seem to be a self selecting crowd that takes on more stress, more overwhelm, more anxiety than maybe an average sampling of the American population.
Yeah, it's interesting because in the video that Matt was saying, the interview that Mike Dillard put out a couple days ago, and maybe we'll link that in the show notes here if people are interested in it is he said all these folks you mentioned, folks, entrepreneur friends that have cancer, stressful or suicidal, or I believe some did commit suicide, it's like none of these people are reaching out for help. And like you mentioned, you feel like you're the only one dealing with this. Whereas like, let's be honest, entrepreneurs, it's like one of the most stressful things to put on yourself and feeling like you are the only person that you know that can feel this or understand what you're going through. But it's completely false. So it's.
Especially with social media, right, because we're seeing everyone's curated version of their life. We're not it's like, you know, there's this big, long bar graph of, like, what's actually going on in someone's life, and then there's a tiny little bar paragraph of what we know about their life.
Oh, man. If you, if you like, I recommend anybody try this to take, like a social media, like, you know, abstain from social media for like a month and just see how much better you feel over that month. I. I abstained from social media probably for the first time, like, a year and a half ago. And to this day, I only get on, like, any of my social media accounts maybe once a week at the most. And it's like, for 20 minutes because I just. I don't really care about other people's Ferraris or, you know, great shit that they feel like sharing right now. Right. It's like you said, everybody's, you know, everybody's trying to compare their, their real life to everybody else's highlights. Right? Like, I don't know who that's a quote from, but somebody said that, you.
Know, we're all Jay Shetty, probably.
Wow, going there.
All right, but we're all.
Yeah, it was a timely thing, at least when this was recorded.
No, but, you know, everybody's like, really doing that, right? That's what you're doing. Even if you're not consciously doing that subconsciously, when you're flipping through social media on Instagram or Facebook, you're. You're making comparisons subconsciously to what appears to be everybody else's real life, but really it's just their highlights.
Yeah, well, the Mess up part two is even if even knowing that information, it's still impossible to not be shaded that way. You know, even when you're scrolling through and being like, you know, oh, like they're. They're posting about traveling, maybe their home life sucks. You know, like, even. Even knowing, you know, that it's curated and that it's not the full picture, it's hard for your brain to not think. It kind of is. You know, even. Even if you go in armed with the information, you put it in front of you and, you know, we trick ourselves pretty easily.
Yeah, well, there's. There's like this meme that was going around not too long ago, and it had a picture of a guy and he was like, taking a selfie and he was like, oh, man, loving my life. Look at this amazing scenery. And, like, the original shot was like a close up of his face and, like the scenic background. And then there was a second shot that was like a Zoomed out shot and he was in like a 1980s crappy beat up car. He like, wasn't wearing any pants. He was like living out of his car and like. But he was getting this beautiful picture of him in this scenic environment, you know, like basically saying that you're not seeing the whole picture. Typically.
Yeah, that's. It's a tricky thing where I feel like at the end of the day we're all the same kind of people that are just dealing with life and entrepreneurship. We're all dealing with similar struggles, obviously different. But at the same time, if we can just remember, oh no, I'm feeling the same, or I have felt the same as that guy or that guy or gal has felt, been in my shoes before. I think it just loosens everything, at least for me to think that way. It's like, oh no, whatever. It doesn't matter that much in the grand scheme. It doesn't matter what the perception of me is or what I feel like others are thinking about. If I post this thing, if I ask for help, for instance, I think.
The biggest shift that I had mentally was when I stopped looking at wealth and things as a measuring stick for success. And as soon as you stop seeing other people's wealth, other people's travel journeys as other people's stuff that they show, as soon as you stop comparing what they have to what you don't have, then I feel like a lot of that sort of fades away. And I feel like social media really sort of prolificates that I don't want to, you know, but social media really puts a magnifying glass on what other people have that maybe you don't have. And there's been studies, there's been studies that have shown like correlations between suicide rates and depression and the rise of these social media platforms. So there is, I mean, they are.
Part of the problem. Yeah, it's rewiring us in a lot of ways. Sort of like two things do stick out to me. One is especially being an entrepreneur circle, the hedonic treadmill is just like juiced up on steroids, right? Because it's like, well.
They got to have a bigger house or whatever car. Even if you don't really care about that or necessarily think you care about that, you're not immune to it. Knowing that, like recognizing it, right. And if you really think about it, you're like, well, I've sold millions of dollars of product. Why haven't I sold $5 million of product? $10 million, 20 million? Like, why isn't the number bigger. And if you think about it, if you take a step back, like I don't have any student loans. Like I've got a good family, I've got great friends, I live in a good part of the country. I'm never like starving. Like shit's pretty good, you know, if you really think about it. And then the second part of that is I think as entrepreneurs it's really easy to catastrophize things. And so when you start thinking about, oh God, if I don't get this launch out, everyone's going to know that I'm a big joke or I'm going to totally fail at this business or whatever. And you take a step back and just say okay. And then what?
Okay, so it doesn't work out. Big deal. People recover from failed launches, he'll recover from failed businesses. You know, so what? So what if it doesn't work out? You know, like there's always next time. Yeah.
And that's what I think.
It's easy to try to get worked up in your brain about how bad things are going to be. In reality, a lot of us have more safety mechanisms and more people that care about us and want to see you succeed. That it's really hard for you to like completely, totally and utterly like destroy your life to get to that extreme is pretty rare.
Yeah, it's a good point. You brought up a thought that this is something I've journaled a lot on, meditated a lot on, and Matt and I have even chatted about it. Is this like if you're just always pedal to the metal like you said, this launch has to work. It's all or nothing. Or this email has to work. This promo I'm doing, even if it's a minor thing, I feel like I would run a lot on that. I know Matt and I kind of would. In our own personality is it's like we want to get the result, you know, and we feel like we should have it now we're good enough. I should have this right now. But it's like, no, just chill the fuck out. Like it's okay. Just make consistent progress. Incremental progress amounts to so much more compounds over time.
Yeah, yeah, but diet you stick to, right?
Totally. Oh my God.
Yeah. I think the most toxic thought that I have that still like comes into my brain fairly consistently is, man, I've been at this thing for frickin 12 years now. How come I'm not further along then I than I am, you know. But if you look at where I was 12 years ago. 12 years ago I was still working in a day job, making 30 grand a year, living with my parents.
So yeah, and ask yourself, what does further along even really mean? You know, like if I look at how hard it's been to get Campaign refinery even to the stages at today, right, where we have hundreds of customers, we're sending hundreds of millions of emails, we're just tipping around that cash flow neutral point, some profitable months, some where I spend more on dev, whatever it has been backbreaking, it has bled me dry to get to this point. But if I look back and if I had asked Travis from five years ago, hey, what would you do to have a marketing automation tool that can completely replace your use of infusionsoft, do all these unique things that no one else in the marketplace does and has a really bright future, what would you do? I'd probably kill for it. As frustrating as my worst days are right now, I have to think like, okay, what would Travis five years ago have said 10 years ago? What would Travis at the end of college have said if he knew he could have two reasonably successful or.
Bright future pieces of software and you know, thousands of tens of thousands of customers that have loved one and closing in on, you know, a thousand customers on the new one, like that sounds like an ideal scenario to a 10 year old, you know, 10 years ago, Travis, but today I'm like, dude, why isn't it 5,000 already on the new app? Why isn't it 10,000? We're really hard on ourselves on our, on our short term goals, but if you can put yourself in old version of you, you're probably actually pretty happy with where you are. You take that every time.
That's actually, that's another thing Matt and I have talked about is, is almost timelining the past and showing, okay, what did I accomplish last year or five years ago up until this point where I'm at now and really look back and exactly what you said, it almost humbles you or it just settles everything, you're like, holy shit, I did a lot of stuff. And in this short period of time where from the outside perspective people are probably like, holy crap, how did you do that? How did you pull that off? Where personally you're just like, but looking, seeing it drawn out on paper as a timeline really allows our brains, I think, to solidify like, okay, no, this is the right path. As long as that path is, you.
Know, kind of, I mean, it really is hard to see yourself how other people see you as well, you know, like, I think from the outside perspective, there's a lot of people that would look at us and look at our podcasts and go, holy shit, that came out of nowhere. Their podcast got really big. They're all over Facebook now.
We've been doing a lot of speaking and stuff, so there's a lot of cool stuff that's happened. But in our minds, it felt like the longest time in the world to finally get to this place that we're at now.
Well, an overnight success takes years of hard work.
Always.
Travis, what are some outrageous things? Or maybe not outrageous, but some unique things you do to keep your head in a good plays.
No, I want to hear the outrageous ones first.
Yeah, start with the outrageous one if you have any. I'm sure you do.
I don't know if I have anything that's really outrageous. I think the. The. The first thing is I just sort of did an internal audit to figure out what levers helped me and which ones don't help me. Um, so for me, it was understanding that, you know, caffeine and alcohol were negative levers over the long term for how I felt on a consistent basis, and then understanding that cardio, meditation, sleep were positive levers and sort of rebalancing, I guess, what I prioritized my life about how I wanted to feel, how I wanted to operate on a more regular basis, and letting that stack rank what activities and things I decided to do. So for me, getting. I guess it's sort of trendy, but I got a peloton bike at the end of last year and, like, that's been great. Now it removes all excuses about, oh, we're in the Northwest, not every day is great weather, maybe traffic is bad, maybe you don't feel like you have a bunch of time. There's literally no excuse. I can hop on there and literally in 20 minutes, blast out a high intensity interval thing, and it's just like, I'm done. It's over with. It only took 20 minutes. You can do anything for 20 minutes. And I just feel way better in the day. So just finding ways to work the positive levers into my routine and remove as many excuses as possible that was stopping me from doing them in the first place. Has really been sort of like a tectonic plate shift. You know, it's just like, we're just going this way now. This is how we're going to be.
I like that.
That's been huge, I think, for. For me overall and, and on the, you know, as far as what's done for the anxiety and panic, like nothing is going to be a silver bullet. In my experience, it's a series of compounding small choices that can, over time, at least from my experience, lead to a better state of being. And as long as you understand and commit to that, it's like going on a diet. You don't lose five pounds the first day and the next day, and then whatever it takes time, you lose a few pounds a week or whatever the goal is. All of a sudden you look back, you're like, wow, my joints feel better. My back feels better. Whatever the thing is, is you don't realize how much stress and pressure you were under due to your choices before until all of a sudden that that weight, whether literally or not literally, is lifted from your shoulders and you can kind of feel how you should be.
Yeah, no, you're right.
It's.
It's. It's not. Even if there are seemingly silver bullets, there's still work to be done after that thing, whatever it might be. And it could just be like an aha realization, like you said, and doing a little map out of what are these levers that are toxic and things that are great and then stacking on habits on top. And those habits are really what bring out the real change for sure.
I mean, there's no judgment. I mean, I love how beer tastes and I desperately miss a good caramel macchiato. So if anything, there might be a little bit of jealousy. There's no judgment. There may be a little bit of jealousy, but, you know, I mean, you just got to pick what's right for you. It's kind of like you do you and do what makes you feel happiest and lightest and feel best in life and have the best relationships and whatever that is for you, then great, then pick it. As long as it's not adversely affecting anyone else. That's kind of how I feel about most things in life, to be honest.
Yeah, I think that's a fair point. We would agree. Sweet, dude. Well, I love this topic and I love that you're bringing this up on your show. So when the show goes live, let us know and we're going to link it up in these show notes.
And I have a feeling at some point there's going to be around three, because we just, you know, we all enjoy talking to each other so much. So, you know, it's bound to happen eventually. But one of the questions we always ask is for book recommendations. I'm sure we asked it last time we talked to you, but I'm curious if there's any new, any new recent books that you've just really sort of hit you that, that you're in love with or movies, documentaries, any cool resource you can share?
Yeah, I mean I really try to make a point of like trying to read more books and I just have not been able to that. That's one goal that I've fallen short on for sure in the last, you know, six to 12 months. Probably one of the related to our topic though for a documentary that I think would be interesting. It's. I believe it's on hbo. It's called One Nation Under Stress.
Yes.
I don't know if you've seen it or not, but yes, I have.
Not yet because of you. You recommended that when you're on our podcast and I immediately watched that when.
We were on his podcast.
Yes, that one. Yeah, it's really good. It's scary as shit, but yeah, it's really good.
Yeah, it's probably the best 90 minutes you can watch in my opinion to kind of understand what we all sort of feel but can't really put our finger on, in my, in my opinion of just like the sort of sense of unease.
You know, whether it's political angst or socioeconomic or whatever. But I think that's a really important thing for anyone to watch whether you are suffering from anxiety or not. Because I also think a lot of people are suffering that maybe can't quite put their finger on that that's what's happening is the case. But anyway, it's on hbo. But even if you don't have hbo, just Google One Nation Under Stress and there's probably a high likelihood you can find it on YouTube.
Yeah, I was actually able to find it on YouTube really quickly.
So yeah.
Either way, however, we'll link it up. We'll probably link the YouTube one.
Why not if it's live, but it's really great. They talk about deaths of despair, which is.
The numbers are kind of startling. But I think the point isn't to be fear mongering. I think if people can just assess where they're at and find their levers and find the things that can improve their quality of life, I think as a whole we'll all be better off.
Yeah, man. And you can understand others too and help them, empathize with them, help them through whatever it might be.
Empathy is a beautiful thing once you can really dial into it.
Oh my God, it's like the most powerful thing you can put it everywhere.
So you've got campaignrefinery.com that's the marketing automation software we spent a lot of this conversation talking about. You've got contestdomination dot com. That's what we spent a lot of last time you were on the show talking about anywhere else that you'd want to send people after listening to this show?
Well, we're about to drop our marketing automation blueprint, which talks about essentially the five shifts that we try to think of whenever we're trying to systemize or create an automation system around a new business or a new category. And so I'll give you guys a link to that, but it's going to be a campaign refinery link and it's just called the automation blueprint. But I think people will find it interesting.
Cool. We'll link that up in the show notes once it's ready. And thanks so much for spending the time with us today.
Thank you, guys. It was such a pleasure.
Yeah, man. Have a good day. See you, man.
Thanks, everybody, for listening to this episode of the Hustle and Flowchart podcast. Before taking the time to listen, we want to give you something a little bit special. Every single episode that we do, we actually have somebody on our team take notes. We basically have a Cliffs 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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