Fresh Brewed Tech Live: April 26th Marketing Night

We just need to take our time. We just need to take our time. We just need to take our time. Sacos wait. We're gonna get started. And welcome everyone. So good to see you. We are recording this so that we can turn it into a tacos and tech podcast so you can go back and listen to this later. So if you're listening now or later. Welcome. Thanks for joining us. Welcome to Marketing Night, the first ever.

Woo.

My name's Neil Bloom. I am the founder of Fresh Brew Tech. We're we're a San Diego focused tech blog and media company and I'm also an angel investor in town here and still entrepreneur and I'm joined by so many friends on the panel and in the audience and it's just a pleasure to have you all here. We are here at the brand new like so new that the public isn't here yet. UCSD park and Market Campus. So hope you're enjoying it. This space is really designed to bring the community in and c UCSD and vice versa. Who's UCSD alum? Oh yeah, got a bunch. And the point of Marketing night is to bring senior and junior marketers together. Peer relationships, mentor, mentee. If you move a step forward, turn around and bring someone with you. And so we hope to start this quarterly. Please contribute and bring others with you as well. In the future, give us feedback from for how we can do better and grow. But really we want to learn together as a group and if we learn together, our companies will grow and do well together and we all will prosper because we're going to build great companies here in San Diego. So thanks so much for being here. I'm really excited to have a phenomenal panel here. You're noticing that we have four on the panel but one's missing. Well, true to his industry, Travis lost a tooth recently. I don't think he took a soccer ball to the mouth but that would be on brand if he did since he works for the San Diego oil. So Travis wishes he could be here. I really thought he would just show up with a big gaping hole. So Travis, you're listening to this. We'll get you next time and very much appreciate you to enjoy this panel. Some housekeeping rules. We are going to do the panel for a bit. We'll take questions, we're going to do a mic for questions or what's the best way we should do it. Ok. When we get there, wait for a mic to come to you and then after the panel we'll do a little more networking we actually have tables with different topics on it. So if there's something specific, whether it's career related or specific, tactical marketing kind of stuff, we will have some tables where you can come and ask those questions and you can keep enjoying food and drink as well too. So without further ado, I'd love to introduce you to this panel. Katie, would you like to go first?

Absolutely. Hello everyone, I am Katie Falenz. I am a startup marketer advisor and actually an investor with Interlock. I am currently the head of marketing at Trust and Will. We are a VC backed startup here in San Diego, fully remote now since March of 2020 and we provide online estate planning to Americans, helping every family leave their legacy and really just changing the industry that's 500 plus years old and helping people build multi generational wealth.

So awesome. Thank you. Katie. Corey.

Hey, I'm Corey, San Diego born and raised. Started actually just down the street at company called Cordial as a marketing intern and now I've consulted with over a dozen B2B SaaS companies. Founder of Swipe Files where I teach SaaS marketing and everything I've learned since then. Previously head of growth at Barometrics all around. Just B2B SaaS. Nerd, pretty much.

Awesome. And Tristan.

Hi, I'm Tristan Barna. I am the Chief Marketing officer at Wildfire Systems, a startup here in San Diego. We recently raised our Series A and I have been in the startup space for a while. I've built and sold off companies. I'm just a serial entrepreneur here and sit on the San Diego Small Business Association's board for the mayor, so advising him on issues that are relevant to the city. And as far as Wildfire is concerned, we provide a platform that is essentially a white label version of Honey. If you guys are familiar with Honey or Capital One Shopping, you can imagine that your bank is probably scrambling to get you to use their rewards. You probably get a bunch of emails that are like, hey, click here to activate Hilton Cash back and you've got to jump through a thousand hoops and then you've got to book your travel and remember to use your card. We think that's an unnatural way to shop. And so we provide a white label version of browser extensions that are for mobile, for desktop, that banks and other companies can use to roll out similar services to things like Honey and Capital One Shopping.

That's great, thank you. We were just talking about honey just a little bit ago. We've got some honey people in connections in our group here, but we're going to talk a little bit of career. We're going to also talk about marketing, the tactics and what the world is like now. So we're going to kind of weave that through people's career. First question to the group and not in any order but you know, looking back on kind of where you all started. Is this where you plan you'd be or what have been the twists and turns that have made you've had to make decisions that said. Oh, that was not planned at all.

I can go. I was an environmental science major so obviously in my industry, molecular biology major.

Hi.

I actually the honey connection. I went to school in Santa Barbara at UC Santa Barbara. So UC system, not San Diego, but close. And I thought that I was gonna go save the world after graduating but that was during the recession in 08 and in Santa Barbara at the time you could either work in affiliate marketing with Commission Junction or you could be a professional volleyball player. I'm only 55 so I went the marketing route and I, I, that was kind of a leap of faith. I wanted to stay in Santa Barbara and my parents, I graduated early and my parents were like we're not paying for you to live in Santa Barbara so get a job. And I ended up taking a job at an affiliate marketing company working in publishing several online content sites. Loved it. It was also in women's fashion footwear which I also loved. So that made it convenient for me. I moved to LA and then I ended up getting a job at my first VC backed startup which gave me the bug for, for building and long story short, I worked for a VC backed startup that was backed by Dave McClure, 500 Startups, Google Ventures, Eric Schmidt. It crashed and burned. It was really exciting. We learned a lot in the process and I ended up doing a hiatus and worked on the agency side. So I went from building and startups to agency for about eight years and was actually the marketing director for a digital marketing agency. So I was marketing the marketing company which was a unique role and ran an agency for about four years doing SEO and content which also wasn't part of the plan. And then I ended up at Trust and well wanted to get back in as part of a startup. I joined the day we closed our series A when they could afford to hire someone to do marketing and and at the time I was actually, I'm the conservator for my grandmother and was going, you know, deep into her estate plan and helping make healthcare decisions for her and I was like everybody needs an estate plan. And then I met Cody Barbo, who is the CEO of Trust and Will, and I said, I'm gonna, I wanna help you solve that problem. And so I basically just followed my curiosity and my passion for helping people. And here I am today.

Here you are. We love it. And now how many people at Trust and Will? When you started?

I was employee number seven, the first marketing hire. We are now, I think at 90 in two and a half years.

Amazing.

I can go next. I was just telling Jordan that I was an accounting major until. So I went to Grossmore College for two years. I was planning on going down the financial advisory route. I was planning on going to Sesuke and then got an opportunity for a scholarship to San Diego Christian College, a really small private college out in C and T. And so I showed up and they asked me, well, what do you want to major in? I said, marketing. I'm sorry? I said accounting. I said, we don't have an accounting degree. It's either marketing or global business. So I chose marketing. But turns out that that was basically what I was interested in all along anyways because I wanted to be an entrepreneur. I wanted to get into business. I just thought that accounting was kind of the traditional way to get there. But I think it was actually a blessing in disguise because these days everything is digital and very marketing driven anyways. And so the other part of the story is that I needed to get my now sort of basically needed to get my now wife's parents blessing from marriage. And they said, well, what are you going to do for work? I said, I don't know, I'll figure it out. They said, well, you need to figure it out right now. You need to have a job lined up when you graduate. So I got an internship here at Startup here in San Diego and fell in love with B2B SaaS. And the rest is history.

Cool. Yeah, I guess I can go. I got my start. Again, not in my major field at all. I was a couple years into college when the dot com bubble was blowing up into the most big and beautiful thing ever in San Diego. And I had some friends that were very early employees@mp3.com. MP3.com was a place where I could go and do my homework with my buddies in the very cold server room with a very fast Internet connection. So I just sort of sit on the floor between the server racks and the CEO kept tripping over me because he was like walking investors through. And Michael Robertson didn't really like tripping over me. So he said, can you just work here already. And I said, I think my parents would kill me. He's like, just drop out. We're about to go ipo. And I did and my parents almost killed me. And then we went ipo. And then everything was pretty much okay for a little while. I got my start doing ux. I'm a pretty creative person and was doing multimedia work and doing user experience design for mp3.com and started in that engineering path. And MP3 grew from the few people that it was when I started to about 400 people when we finally got sued out of existence by the music industry. I have a patent on the thing that killed us. It's super cool. And after that, what happened is MP3 sort of spawned a bunch of entrepreneurs. We all sort of caught the bug. That software was really fun. You, you could make something out of nothing. It was really exciting. And so a bunch of us spun out a bunch of little startups. I had three co founders. We started a digital PBX company. So back when Vonage was a thing and voice over IP was new and I had no idea what a phone system was, I designed a phone system which turned out to be a really cool thing because when you put a brain onto a problem that it is unfamiliar with, you come up with really creative solutions. So we ended up having a really, really neat piece of software that was built on an open source design that eventually got acquired. My company is still. My little company that I founded is still running along beautifully without me today, like 15 years later. And so occasionally I'll call up a company, call up a business and I'll hear the voice that I recognize that is my phone system and a lot of pride in that. That's really cool when that happens. And ever since then I've been sort of chasing that entrepreneur bug again. I've started another startup and that sort of fizzled out with some timing issues. Any of us that have started a business know that timing is kind of everything. The IoT wave did not quite crash when we expected it to. We were not in the right place at the right time. But some other friends from MIP3.com back in the day called me up. We sort of grew up together. Like I started that job when I was 19 years old and these guys called me kind of out of the blue, recruited me to work at Wildfire Systems. The founder was someone I didn't know in the startup space, which is weird if you've been in San Diego for any amount of time. It's very weird that we don't know each other. It's a small, small team here. But he ended up being a wonderful person that I love working with and joined up immediately and we're doing beautifully. The team is growing. I have some of my team here today and I'm just loving it. I feel a lot of ownership towards that company even though I didn't start it. So I feel like I'm getting that entrepreneur itch scratched through being at Wildfire.

That's awesome. Just back to you. Just because of the history you've seen in San Diego, there's actually a lot of analytics tech that have grown up here. Google Analytics was started in San Diego. If anyone knows that. Urchin. Anyone? Anyone in your go see your Google Analytics page, see your UA and your number alongside it. That's Urchin analytics found in San Diego. Acquired by in 2004 by Google, I think. But a lot of other analytics companies, what else have you seen kind of grow up? Some of the densities that have grown up especially maybe in the marketing world as well too.

Yeah. So I do see a lot in the financial industry right now. I think it might be just because the circles I'm running in with Wildfire, but we've seen a lot of little digital banks come out of San Diego and get acquired. That's been a really interesting space. Obviously biotech has been just amazing. But in fact the company that I founded after SwitchVox was an IoT analytics company. So a lot of analytics coming out of here as well. Qualcomm's seen a lot of spinoffs as well, so we get quite a bit.

There and a few other analytics companies, I think. What was the other mafia that kind of formed around the same time as mp3.com, which Adobe eventually acquired and the company became Tealium. I'm forgetting the name of it something. It's on the tip of my tongue.

Don't do this to me on stage.

Okay, all good. We're moving along here. So let's talk through kind of the current state of marketing and specific to San Diego but also not because we have obviously gone fully remote traffic during COVID is the state of marketing. Take us through I guess what it means cause you're at very different. You've been through very different stage companies. What do you think it means from both a team, how you're building a team around it for expertise and how you're leaning into different and new tools that exist. Big question.

I can take the team side. So we have raced through a series B at this Point and then we recently had a top off by UBS as well. We built the team with my agency background, I am basically building an internal agency. So when I started, I was the first marketing hire. We had a bunch of agency partners that were super inefficient and they were all kind of competing with one another. And so identifying the way that I've built the marketing team at Trust and Will is identifying where's the area of opportunity. I kind of being a marketing generalist, I've been able to kind of scratch and see whether or not there's opportunity for us to expand in that area, then bring on a contractor or someone in the agency world to help us prove out whether or not it's going to be fruitful for us. And then once we reach a certain point, that's where we bring it in. House, Trust and will. We have 12 people on the marketing team. We operate in dozens of channels from, you know, event marketing to national television, linear campaigns, massive audio shout out to Rapify. We've done some car wraps with them. They're here. And, and then obviously of course, huge massive acquisition campaigns from the paid. And my background being in SEO and content, we also focus heavily there. So we've kind of built out specialties in each of those areas and then we use contractors and agencies to kind of support since we are still very much in growth mode.

Yeah, I've seen. So when I was the head of growth at Barometrics, it was like a basically financial analytics tool for B2B SaaS companies mainly all subscription based. And so I got kind of the privilege of getting an inside peek into all their dashboards. And they're constantly asking questions around what are other people doing? What are you seeing and how do you think about this and that? Just based on my experience looking at everyone else's and just talking to all of our other customers. One of the big ones for everyone was rising customer acquisition costs. Felt like maybe there was like a renaissance in, you know, before my time really. But like the early 2010s where it was like, you know, a click was a dime and you could acquire a customer for a couple bucks and there's really only a few channels. And it was basically everything was the wild west between Google Analytics to Facebook ads. And I think even now, if you look back a lot of the kind of companies who grew up in that era, there was like a single growth hack, a single channel, a single thing that really scaled them, you know, to hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue. That's not really the case today, from what I've seen and a lot of companies that I talk to, because the costs have gone up so much, I think the pendulum has kind of swung. Whereas before it was, it was very brand marketing driven to then there was like this performance marketing renaissance and everything's very quantitative and measurable and analytical. And I think maybe marketers got a little bit spoiled in that era where it was just, you know, I put in $2, come back out and now customer acquisition costs have gone up, everyone's become more savvy, there's a lot more competitors, a lot more people vying for the same attention and it just doesn't work as well. But of course you can't just do nothing and you can't just turn it off. Right. And so I think instead of, really, instead of the pendulum swinging back to the brand marketing, it's how do we take a performance marketing approach to brand marketing and really just kind of mix them both and get the best of both worlds. A lot of the companies I work with today are, are thinking about how do I do all the same channels, advertise in the same avenues, write the same content, but do it in a much better way that's very conversion focused. So the bar has just gone like way, way up where now basically I've been kind of being this drum of marketing, like a media company really. If you want to do top notch marketing, if you want to build a differentiator for the company that is marketing driven, not just product driven, you have to build a brand from the ground up. You have to build content that is a product in and of itself. You have to be a destination where people really want to come to you. Not just for like, oh, I have this problem I need to solve, but I have a question I need to answer or I need an opinion I need on something really want to be something sought after. So today that's what I think about when I think of like, what is the state of marketing today? It's really, really hard. It's expensive, it's competitive. We have amazing technology like we've never seen ever before. But I think that the stakes are just so much higher that you have to keep reaching for every extra inch of advantage that you can get.

Yeah, people are better at it. Right? You're competing with everybody in your industry that has also had experience in marketing. Whereas 10, 15 years ago, if you were doing great content marketing, you could shoot to the top of Google search results pages for 100 keywords in a month with concerted Effort, and you can't do that anymore. It's really hard to do. It's hard to break through. And so to develop that authoritative voice means, to your point, building a team that understands we've grown in a similar way that it sounds like you have as well, where you're trying to prove out where we should be spending money, where we should be building out the team. And we're using contractors for the same reason. Shout out to my friends at Beacons Point, which is a local shop here in San Diego, who've done great work for us because we needed essentially a marketing team in a box. As soon as we raised our round, it was like, great. Spin up a marketing team. Well, shit, I can't figure out how to educate someone on our business in a week. Like, that's not going to happen. You're not going to be writing authoritative articles that give you a real voice that stands out in the industry. And so you've got to find shortcuts. You've got to find contractors that understand what you need and can throw a lot of bodies and brains at the problem to get up to speed more quickly than if you had onboarded someone that may or may not work out. So we've done a lot of growth in that way as well, because it is important to develop content that is attracting the right people for all kinds of reasons. It's not just solving problems.

To your point, I feel like with marketing now, you also have like the typical sales Rolodex. You have it with marketing now, I have every role I've been in. I have my list of contractors that I know, I have my list of agencies I know.

And.

And it's the people who've proven that they can get up and running and they can make a difference quickly. And so it's almost like, let me start a role, let me talk to a company. And as an advisor with startups as well, I do this a lot. It's like everyone wants to know who is helping you.

It's your extended team.

It's absolutely your extended team.

So speaking of team, Covid obviously changed a little bit around the hybrid kind of work environment. Talent pool kind of opened up.

Right.

If you were hiring only local before, what's that like now? Do you feel like you can pick from anywhere or is it harder because everyone is everywhere?

It depends on the level of hire. If you're, if you're at a point where you're looking, I think for, you know, entry mid, it's really, in my opinion, difficult to Hire remote. Because if people don't have a lot of experience, you obviously need to be available to provide that mentorship and that guidance for them. We still have 45% of our workforce, at least in San Diego. We also have the other. Whatever the math is, 35% in about 15 states dispersed throughout the U.S. but I find that those are more so on the engineering development side or more senior hires who are used to working remotely and are very autonomous. So marketing wise, most of our hires are actually in the San Diego area because we don't have a very senior team at this point.

So I run a marketing job board, so I get kind of an inside peek all the time. From my perspective, just in my experience, senior marketers are really hard to come by right now, and they're getting lots of offers. And it's a great time to be a senior marketer because you've got people left and right, just desperate for that level of talent and expertise. And just someone who, like, has been in the seat before and done the job before. And you can say, I've, you know, I can do this with confidence. I think one of the things that Covid changed and working remotely has changed has been obviously the global talent pool. But I've seen some really amazing global talent get opportunities that they really wouldn't have been able to before. And I talked to people where I don't really even care or ask what country they're in now. But I'm pleasantly surprised when I do find out that they're from Ukraine or Argentina or. And they're better than some of the other people that I've known for 10 years doing the same exact thing because they have more hunger and drive and they're generally curious about it. It's not just kind of a career for them or some way to make money. So I think, I mean, there's. If you have an advantage working from your network or locally, that's amazing. I think everyone else is forced to look globally and then it's just about like, how do you find that right person? And how do you prove that they know what they're talking about, that they can do the work? That, to me is the hardest part. It's like, I can only vouch the people that I know and I've worked with before. Yeah, there's amazing talent, and once you see it and spot it, you want to, like, write their name down and note them. But I think that today you have to really run marketers through a difficult kind of interview process and a difficult hiring process. Where you want to really know, like, does this person know how to run a Facebook ad? Or do they know what they're talking about with SEO? Or are they just kind of BSing me? Are they just trying to talk the talk and make it seem like they know what they're talking about so they can get a U.S. salary? Right. So I've seen a lot of innovation in the hiring process and the way that they run candidates through process. A lot of async stuff where they're asking people to record a 90 second or three minute little, hey, here's who I am, here's what I like to do. Not even about marketing at all, but just trying to get to know the person without having to hop on a call and line up time zones. And it's a very different process now. There's amazing talent, but it's just anyway, it's a new playbook.

And you can roll this into that question too. A lot of distractions right now, globally and just being remote and hybrid.

So.

And then just obviously marketing tools changing too. What are you prepping your teams for for the next year? Like short term, one year out, kind of. What are you saying? Here's how to stay focused and here's what to do internally at our company.

I can take that one. We're staying surprisingly focused. It's been an interesting change for us to be 100% remote. We were about to sign a lease when the pandemic hit into a new office. So we were moving from one space to another, had all of our offices like boxed up and packed and in our trunks and just decided not to sign the next set of paperwork to see what would happen. And we've never looked back. I don't think we're ever going back to the office. I think that making sure that our employees, whether they're marketing employees or anyone else knows that, like, we all expect that you all have a life, that you're all adults. When we are hiring, trying to get to the bottom of like, is this person really going to be awesome and do what they say they can do? We try not to get too wrapped around the axle on that. There's only so much you can prove out until you put them in the role. So our philosophy on that is fail fast. If it's not gonna work out, set everybody free, it's okay. There's plenty of jobs out there as far as I can see, because I'm having a hard time hiring. It's tricky right in this space. In marketing in particular, looking for someone Senior is hard. Looking for someone, junior is hard. And so we want to bring someone in, see if they can prove themselves, coach them as best we can. One of the things we're looking for is grit, is that tenacity to learn and to not allow themselves to fail. Up to a point. Right up to a point where it makes sense. And so if you're showing that and you're showing progress, cool, great. If not, maybe this isn't a cultural fit. And so maintaining culture in our company has been a really important thing theme. So as we're preparing for like the next year and our hiring that we're doing, a lot of it is about a culture fit. And we have a pretty diverse culture. Like, I'm really proud of what we've built. We have an incredible team and they're global. We have people all over the place. And we're not looking specifically at San Diego. But it does help when you tap into your network and find people that are great, that you know, that you've worked with. They're already proven, they're already like sort of through that gauntlet and you know that they're going to perform. But we have no problem giving anyone a chance to give it a try and to seek help and to work on the team. It doesn't mean you need to come out of the gate super successful, but it does mean you need to come out of the gate super able to learn and to improve.

Anyone else? If not, we can go to the last question. You're okay?

Yeah, go ahead.

Okay, well, the last question is our favorite question on the podcast. Do you have a favorite taco spot?

I'm vegan, so limited options. I would say it's king and queen, but I've never been to the one in San Diego. I've only been to the one in Valle de Guadalupe and they have an avocado taco that is just so good. I'll eat like six of them because they're tiny, but they're delicious.

There's no wrong answer.

Taco stand right down the street here. Ate there every other day when I worked at Cordial Startup. Specifically the El Pastor taco is my favorite.

Lola55 is around the corner. We were just there. And if you're vegan, they have two amazing vegan options. A squash blossom and soyrizo and also a rainbow cauliflower that you should try. But they have meat eater tacos as well and a lot of great food. So good cocktails too.

The tacos here were pretty good.

Yeah. Shout out to Our tacos here tonight as well too. Thank you guys. Thank you to our panel. Please give them a round of applause. I think we got time for a question or two and then after just one or two questions. But then the panels are going to be up at these tables so come ask some questions there just because I think to make sure that staff here tonight can get home at the right time. But anyone got a question for the panel, they want to jump on the mic please.

Hello, thank you for. Is this on? Okay. What advice or tips do you have for someone marketing an online marketplace, like where there's a range of products?

Is it a two sided marketplace?

Yes, a two sided marketplace and we're just facilitating transactions. So like an Etsy, but for purpose driven brands only.

I think, I think it depends on where you're starting from a growth perspective. Do you already have people on the platform who are selling?

So we're launching soon in August, September. So we're just doing a lot of like soft launch pre marketing. We have like 650 sellers already waiting. So we have like the seller marketing but we're entering the buyer marketing. So we need the buyers to come. So we're starting Instagram, Facebook. But we want people to trust us.

That's my world. So I'm much more on the buyer side. So D2C. That's what trust n wool is. I would say you're looking at the right place you want to start with. I have a framework that I use and I will be happy to share if you want to talk afterwards. Looking at channel evaluation of who your ideal customer is. Do you already have an ideal customer who you're trying to bring to the site? Looking and evaluating what channels they potentially live on, where are they looking to consume the type of, you know, products that your sellers are potentially focusing on. But it's really a matter of like balancing those two sides From a marketplace. You probably want to talk because she runs a marketplace two sided.

I'm sorry, you see me all excited. Activating the sellers that you have to bring their target markets is going to be a really, I would say a fast shortcut to doing that. So if you can incentivize that to bring the traffic to you, they know who their market is and finding a model that works so that they can bring traffic to the site that's going to activate not just in their shops and their brands, but for everyone on the site is going to provide you the fastest sort of way to do that. Network effect to get people the right audience to your Site that will buy those brands. So incentivize those guys.

Yeah. What are your growth loops? How can you build it into the product that you're building where people are inviting, they're sharing, they're giving referrals? That creates the network effect.

Okay, thank you so much.

Awesome. We got time for one more. If not, we can. There we go. Got cam right here.

Thank you guys for the insightful panel. My question, we talked a little bit about SEO content strategy. We what's the best way? And speaking from a startup perspective, you have this great list of keywords. You've done all your research, now you have to go create the content. What is the best way to talk a little bit about contractors, agencies, or a full hire? What have you guys found when you're starting from ground zero, building out your content strategy to get that content to be good and effective?

So when I joined Trust and will, we had four pages on the website and we got about 200 visits organically a month. Because our name is Trust and Will, we now have about 1100 pages on the site and we get about 200,000 organic visits a month. The way we did it was we honed in on the very specific, like, head terms essentially, that we wanted to rank for. We built out very robust, what we call, like, yeah, kind of like a hub page, essentially, that are really in depth, high quality content. I wrote them myself because I didn't have anybody else to write them. And it was kind of a proof of concept. And I chose, you know, here are five topics that we want to rank for. It took about a month and a half. We got on page one. I was like, look, guys, here it is. Started building a couple links to them. And then I went to my Rolodex of writers who I have that are relatively cheap. But we still to this day do all of our briefs in house. So we have three people on our content team. One does the research, one puts together the brief, and one manages the process. And then we outsource the actual writing. But all keyword research structure of the article is all done in house. And then we just have someone basically fill it in.

Yeah, I would. Plus one that I think it's easy to want to completely delegate and be like, all right, marketing agency or a freelancer or consultant, I'll just hand this off to you. But I think it's really, really important to own all the strategy at the end of the day, especially for content. You already have the keyword list, but, like, own the briefs, own the content promotion, own like the approval stamp. At the end of the day, one of the things that's helped me kind of scale it up is just to figure out the level of kind of expertise and authority you need on the writer side of things. If it's fairly easy content to write for that you can kind of armchair expert yourself. That's a great way to get started, I think, for a lot of people, you'll find is that you kind of can't, and maybe you're working in a more technical or complex field. In that case, you have to get creative about a couple different ways. You can have a freelancer who might have that kind of expertise, and they might just want another writing gig. And there's a lot of people out there that are really, really smart, really great writers. You can usually find them because they're writing for other blogs or competitors or magazines or publications in the space. Agencies are normally pretty good at this because they will basically get primary sources and they'll go directly to someone who is an expert or has authority on it, and then they'll interview that person, distill everything they say into something more marketable and optimized for SEO and all that jazz. But they'll actually go through the whole process of, you know, matching a writer to an expert, and then they'll handle a lot of the production side of things. Or you can work in house and either you or a writer, a content marketer that you hire, if you have someone maybe like the CTO or a founder or someone in leadership who really knows what they're talking about and are willing to sit down for a couple hours a week to just kind of brain dump, then you can turn that into content and kind of just repurpose, repackage form, whatever that is that they're brain dumping onto you into written articles, podcasts, video series, whatever they're comfortable with or whatever your strategy kind of dictates.

Awesome. Thank you. Thank you again to the panel. And like we said, we're going to move over to the breakout area. If you want, grab another drink. I think there might still be tacos as well, but this will kind of end the programming here. I'll ask the panelists, each one take a different table if you can, and we've got some other people who will fill in some other tables as well, too. There are some topics at the table if you need, but, you know, feel free to make sure that this is your time, get some answers that, that you want, and thanks again for coming.

Out and we'll do this. Thank you.

Thank you.

Cheers.

Great.