If We Started a Business Today, Here's How We'd Get 100k Leads/Month

On today's show, we're breaking down what we do. If we started all over again. If we were building a marketing engine to get 100,000 leads today in 2024, what would we do? We're going to break down the channels. We'd use some of the tactics, how we think about building a brand today, how we partner with influencers. You're going to want to stick around. We're going deep today. I'm your co host, Kip Bodnar, CMO at HubSpot. I'm joined by my co host, Kieran Flanagan, who's the CMO over at Zapier. And this is marking against the grain. Let's get into today's. On today's show, we're gonna have some fun today. HubSpot generates hundreds of thousands of leads and signups every month. Kieran and I did a lot of work to build that. But today we're gonna go through what we would do if we were starting it all from scratch today. How would we build a lead generation signup engine that could get 100,000 leads a month or more? What would we do in 2024? Kieran, it's been a little while, my friend. I'm glad to be back on the pod with you. I had some travel, you've had some baby taken care of, parenting duties happening. But we're going to talk a little legion today on the show, right?

We are going to go back in time or we're actually going to go forward in time and say, if we had to do it all again today, how would we build a marketing strategy that's kind of yielded the kind of results that HubSpot have had or Zapier had or these kind of SaaS brands. So it really broke the mold for the amount of, like, demand that they generate. Like, HubSpot was one of the trailblaz Trailblazers.

If you wanted to be a breakout company, what would you do today? Is what we're going to tell you. Because we, we get a lot of the. Oh, but it's easy for you guys. You did this a long time ago. It's much harder today. It's much different today. Let's say, hey, if we were going to build a breakout technology software business today that was predicated on getting a lot of scale distribution, which, hey, they all are like, you can't have a great technology business without distribution. What would we do? And so, Kieran, my biggest question to you is, in the early days of HubSpot, we're building that the core Strategy. The core thing we relied on was organic search optimization. Basically how we could rank and get traffic from Google. Would you do that today? Would that be your number one place you would start in 2024.

So here's some fun things, right? So I actually jotted some notes that you and I went back and forth on WhatsApp. I think there's actually some questions I have that we can answer live for the audience and what's the same and different? Because I wrote that, that was the very first thing I wrote out. Right. So typically we covered this on a. On a recent, a recent show, right? What, what you do is you kind of build out a search total addressable market, probably big break your keywords into informational, transactional. Transactional are the ones that are closer to a conversion, usually lower in traffic, higher in conversion, harder to rank for. And then you have informational further up the funnel, educational in nature, higher traffic, lower conversion. Right? You break. You break those two things apart. You look to say how much potential traffic is in each one that I can acquire each and every month. And then you start there and you answer like, is this something I should even do? Right. Is like search something I should even invest in? Because a lot of brands, it might not make Sense, especially in B2B. I think then the question is like HubSpot. The way HubSpot approached this, which was very different from other B2B companies. I think when HubSpot really started breaking the mold and how companies did marketing, typically what a B2B company would do is just do transactional keywords and they wouldn't even do a search time that was not even a thing. But like, okay, like my, my product is this. I'll rank for those words, right?

Yeah. There's 50 keywords related to my product and I'm going to go out and try to rank on the first page for all of them. And, and once I've done that, I'm done here and I move on to the next thing, right?

And then. And so HubSpot did the opposite, right? HubSpot were like, hey, we're gonna be educational first we wanna actually create value and then over time have that person extract. Extract value from that person by having them become a customer or a certain percentage and become a customer. I thi. I. And I think I would still, I would start with this until we have like come to the point where it's pretty clear that AI has eroded the opportunity because the opportunity still exists.

Right?

If you look at. It's hard to get data on this. But if you look at kind of the monthly users that Google has, or the amount of search queries you can actually look at, like how much search is actually being done on Google, it's still pretty, it's still pretty steady, right? So the opportunity is still there. I think what's different is the way you attack this is very different today, right? Back then, there's a real, there's some real things that we figured out in HubSpot that probably is not that commonplace even today, right. One of the things we figured out is we could build this model to say, you know, how much content could a content creator create? How much average traffic would each piece of content they create get? How much, how many conversions would we get from. How many average conversions would we get from that? So how many average customers over the course of a month is each writer going to bring us? And the reason we did that is because we got to the point where we knew we could grow. All we needed to do is add headcount, right? So like, you could extrapolate. If I want to be here in two years, I'm going to need to add this amount of headcount because this is how much we get from each individual writer that is very different today. Because what AI is really good at is not writing stories or emotive content or anything like that. It's really good at informational content, right? So one writer, the ability to create content that is educational in nature, informational in nature, they can probably write much more content. In fact, I can see a world where you actually have AI creating a lot of the informational content and you actually hire really great editors, right? And, and so your model looks different in terms of how you grow that. And the other thing I'll just add in that I think is different is. And then I want to see, get your thoughts. And I have one question for you is I think you start to do this, you do multimodal far, far sooner, right? Because AI is going to allow us to create blog posts with embeddable videos where the AI tool is able to take the blog post and create a two minute educational video from that blog post. And we can actually embed that in from the start and you can actually add audio, right? There's audio AI tools that take the blog post, can summarize it. So you can have like a full multimodal blog post from the start, right? Add audio, add image and add video. And we over time at HubSpot perfected that. But you can do that much, much quicker. So I think the answer is yes, but how you do it is much more, will be much more efficient and you will be multimodal much more, much faster. There's one question I have for us to kind of riff on, but what do you think is that you think that one other thing, I think you can verticalize content much sooner again, because the cost to create this content is maybe, maybe so. I think you could verticalize much quicker, right? Because you can. The cost of content is going down because AI tools do a lot of this. So even if the vertical verticalized content doesn't have a ton of upside, but it still might be worth doing that. The unit economics for content come way down. And the last thing I'll add is you can go multi language much, much sooner. Right? So again, you would usually build all this engine in English and then we at HubSpot we kind of went Spanish, German, French, like the typical languages, but we perfected the system in English first. I don't think you need to do that. I actually think you can go multi language much quicker again because AI tools allow you to do it at such a low cost.

There's a lot to react to on that. Karen, I have some thoughts. First thought is the number one thing I would do today that we didn't do back then that I wish we would have is I would write down and I would say, all right, I want a hundred thousand leads a month. Where are those hundred thousand leads a month going to come from? And I would just be like. And I would just do the math of like, hey, I'm going to get 25 from here, 25,000 from here, 10,000 from here, whatever that may be. And I'd have a very clear plan of how I was going to get there and how long I thought it was going to take me to get there. In the early days of HubSpot, we didn't have to do that because the second generation Web 2.0 was so new that you could kind of like just do it and get stuff. Like there was such little competition. You could really go and crank and kind of do be very tactical and make a bunch of progress in a way that I don't think you can today. And I think what you have to do is first you have to say is, all right, I want to get to a hundred thousand new people coming in and interacting with my company every month. Where are those people going to come from? What does that look like? So once you have understood like where you want those a hundred thousand leads to come from the second thing is you need to check, Karen, that your strategy is very different from your competitors, right? Like if where I see most companies today fail is that like, oh, my competitor spends x percent of their budget on paid media, so I'm gonna spend the same amount of money on paid media. My competitor does trade shows, so I'm gonna do trade shows. Right? What you actually want is your budget and time to look as opposite as possible from your competition, right? Cause you wanna play where they're not playing and you wan different tactics and strategies, they're going to be very highly differentiated. And so if your competition is doing a ton of product marketing and events, you don't want to do those things. You maybe you do a little bit of them, but you don't want to do a ton of them. Right. And so being counter to all those things, I think matters a ton. The question I have for you, Kieran, in all of this is you remember our former colleague Dave Falarme who worked for us in APAC. He lives in New York now. He's working for Owner.com, and he sent me a question and he was like, look, we're seeing really good results from YouTube and we're doubling down there, but I kind of am worried that we're not focused enough on traditional search. Should I stay focused and double down on YouTube because it's working so well or should I diversify more into text based search? And I thought that was a pretty interesting and compelling question for like the state of legion in the world today.

Yeah, I've never heard that before.

How would you address that?

I haven't heard someone trying to figure out if they should continue to invest in text based search for a B2B company because YouTube is working so well. I think if I was faced with that dilemma, I would double down on YouTube because it's a more defensible platform and actually it's a harder one to make.

Harder to get right.

It's harder to get right. So if I'm like, you actually have a far bigger moat on YouTube against your competitors because it's just really hard to do. It's a total grind and you can always come back to search, right? I think if you, if the question is like, I only have a span amount of resources so I can do one or the other. And I, and again, it's not just like the amount of views I'm getting, it's actually driving real business outcomes. I would definitely Double down on YouTube. More defensible, bigger moat, far harder to Replicate for your, for your customers to your point, like do the opposite. I think most of their competitors are probably trying to make paid search and organic search work. And so YouTube, if you have figured it out, is the thing I would invest in.

Yeah, 100%. And so I think, Kieran, if we were like the pretext of today's show is like, what would we do now if we were starting it all over? If you and I were co founders of a startup and we needed to get 100,000 signups or leads a month for our software, what would we actually do? I think one of the first things we would do is just master video search and algorithmic distribution. Right, right. It'd be YouTube plus short form video reels, TikTok and YouTube shorts. Right. Like I think that would be number one because it has both high scale in terms of you can reach a ton of people effectively high defensibility. It's going to be harder to disrupt by AI. It's going to be less disrupted than traditional search engines because it's more personality driven than information driven. Right, right. That is the number one place we would start, I think.

Isn't the other thing that we would do which would be very different from most businesses and could be totally incorrect. Right. But wouldn't we choose the product based upon how we think we can distribute it? Right. Like actually that is a very good point.

Tell people I agree with you. Tell people what you mean I would choose.

So if we feel that, hey, the thing we really want to perfect in terms of our distribution strategy is short from video and YouTube and these kind of channels, I would look at the product idea we have and ask do we think it would work within those channels and if it didn't work within those channels, not do it. Right. So actually have distribution veto the idea. Because trying to fit a product that doesn't fit in those channels just doesn't work.

Right.

Like the channels are built with rules. You have to adhere to those rules. You can't bend the rules to how you want them to act for your product. And I think it makes it so much easier if you just build with distribution at the forefront. Actually like this is my distribution plan. What product would fit into my distribution plan? Like actually write the distribution plan and then actually say, okay, like well, what product can I build that will actually fit within those distribution mechanisms?

Well, I think this is a very critical point for everybody watching the show today because it's a point we've made a few times on the show over the years. But you've said it in a more interesting way which is like hey, I would let distribution dictate it. The reason is there are no shortage of product ideas. There's way more an abundance of product ideas than there are distribution avenues. Right. And so you have to be picky about distribution and your product has to just foot with however you're going to distribute it. Right? Right. And if it doesn't then it's just going to be grind and it's already a grind. Like even when you make the right choices, it's a grind like years and years of hard work. And so if you make like if you're just like hey, I'm in love with this product and I want to make it work, man, that is going to be a really, really hard slog if it does not match up with the right ways to distribute it. Right. All right.

And it's coming back to your point. Like HubSpot in the early years didn't think too much about like how to how to distribute the content because just creating the content, the type of content that HubSpot was creating was totally unique. And so people found their way. It ranked in Google. There wasn't much competition. Like HubSpot didn't hire their first SEO until it was Matt. So like 214, 215. Correct. That is, that is not the world we live in today. Like people are really good at their jobs in digital. Like they. In a way that I don't think they were 10 years ago. And one of the articles you sent me, I read it today was like this, you know, this kind of new way of thinking around VC funds or finding your co creator. Like find a creator with distribution and then figure out how to build a product for them. And I know you have a kind of a tweet, I think it was Atomic Habits or something did that over the weekend where I think was Andrew Wilson built the app or for. For their audience maybe you can get into that. But that, that the reason that is even considered is because it starts with that. That's the perfect examples of this. It's starting with distribution which the creator have and then figure how to, how to build a product to eat into that distribution.

Yeah, I can, I can explain explain here. Right. Which is James Clear wrote a book called Atomic Habits. It was best selling book, hugely popular. I think he has a newsletter and other things all around like how do you build habits and how do you use habits to change your life? Very powerful, very universal concept. And he partnered with Andrew Wilkinson who runs a holding company Called Tiny and friend of friend of my first million friend of the HubSpot podcast network. And James has a 60% ownership stake, I think Andrew has a 40% ownership stake in this new app. An app that helps facilitate people's ability to build habits and basically productizes a lot of the learnings and advice that James has shared in his book and shared in his online content. Right. And that is a perfect example of it was in the top 10 in the app store for productivity on the day it launched because it had a built in audience for launch and that's pretty fricking incredible like that is. But which Kieran goes back to the point. One of the first things I would do if I was running a business right now is I would be partnering with creators who had audience. Right. Right. Like if we want to, if we want to break this down because I know if we don't do this we're going to get a ton of YouTube comments because people are going to be like well, well tell me the exact percentages and all right, I'm going to give you my percentages Kieran, of my hundred thousand leads a month how I would get there and you tell me if you agree disagree with any of this. You ready? I'm going to say 45,000 leads a month needs to come from YouTube slash shortform video. So I have to make it my dominant player. I've got to figure out how to kill the YouTube short form video game and I've got to get to at scale 45,000 leads a month. Right. Like that is just no hope holds bar like has to happen. I think I have to get another 20,000 leads a month through influencer partnerships and affiliate marketing. I've got it. I've got a, I've got to basically go to people who have really successful newsletters, YouTube channels, TikTok accounts and partner with them for sponsored content or embedding my product into their content and using that month over month to drive to drive demand at a reasonable cost per lead. And that is going to be the majority of of my paid budget is going to go to paying affiliate commissions and influencer sponsorship fees. And so that's, those two things combined are going to get me to 65,000 leads a month, which is pretty good. Then I'm probably going to get another 10,000 leads a month from very traditional paid channels, Google Meta like programmatic paid. That's gonna get me to 75,000 leads a month. And this is, this is obviously at scale. This is probably, this is probably gonna Take you depending on how good you are, what do you think? 14 to 24 months if you're like amazing to get there.

If you're amazing, two years if you're.

Amazing, two years if you're good, three years. Right. If you're okay, five years. Right. Like it's gonna, it's gonna take you a real period of time to get there and then that leaves the last 25,000 leads a month. Karen and I think the last bits are always the hardest and I think you probably have some type of email newsletter that is generating 5 to 10,000 leads a month at scale that you're building off of all that video audience and you're moving some of those folks to a newsletter and then that newsletter's getting forwarded, getting more organic subscriptions and you're able to generate 5 to 10,000 leads a month there. And then I think the last like 10 to 15,000 leads are just going to come from actually just one off campaigns. Just you know, hey, I've got this idea this month and I'm going to run a big content push or some type of big stunt or some free app that I'm launching that I think is going to get me a little bit of boost this quarter. It's going to be kind of just like I'm going to plug the gaps to get to my number with kind of in month campaigns. That is how I would break down where they would likely need to come from. If we, if you and I were just going to go start a startup, we got a solid SaaS app and we're trying to turn it into $100 million business. Which I think if you get 100,000 leads a month, you're well on the way to 100 to $100 million business. You know, as long as you have a decent acv, you know, as long as you have, you know, a multi thousand dollar ACV and contract value, you're going to get there.

That this is a, a bad week for Google. Not, not only didn't, not only did they have to pull their image generation tool, but Kip didn't give them any place for, for traditional search in your, in your, in your hundred thousand.

I looked, I looked at it as I was all in on YouTube. I looked at, I was all you're migrating to YouTube.

I think that, I think, I agree that, So I think 55% in the kind of YouTube traditional, I would probably still put traditional search in that book. You, you would, you would take, you.

Would go hey, I'm going to go from 50, 45,000 leads to 55,000 leads a month.

And I would put some.

It's going to come. Yeah, that's probably right. Yeah, yeah, that's probably right.

And on the creator program, like one of the things that I've been thinking through is a lot of, in a lot of B2B niches, they would not be creators, right? Because creators just not incentivized to create content in certain, in certain spaces, wouldn't attack certain spaces. One of the interesting things you could do from the outset is make creators part of your marketing strategy by having a creator program for people who want to have that lifestyle, really great at content, want to be like a solopreneur, want to just own a niche and have a small number of creators that you work from from the outset and give them an incredible rev share and make your product their like their that they feel like that's some sort of ownership over your product and have them as part of your marketing strategy from day one, right? Like, hey, you're going to be the podcast person that's going to own this niche for us. You're going to be the YouTube person. So that's one way you can work with them where you're like, well, there's not really established creators in my, in my niche. There will be in all, I think, marketing sectors and niches. So why not try to give the opportunity for really great people to create those audiences as part of your team? And you, you'll have to just work out the union economics because it will have to be some sort of rev share like most creators would want to. In most creator deals like the one Even you described, 60, 40, they would want to own some sort of like ownership rights. But in this one they would own less. So you'd have to get people who are okay with that. But I think that's one way of doing it. But I think everything else you said totally makes sense. And again, the 55% the YouTube is short from video traditional shirt less so is really a moat because it is not easy to make that work.

That is so hard to make scale.

To make that work.

Right.

The, the other one I was thinking through is, and maybe it's in there some, maybe we put it in there somewhere is what is AI going to do right? For marketers, it's going to reduce the cost of code to next to near zero. So like we, we've always, you and I for the most part have always had tool ideas, right? Like you know, sitting around at Denver's thinking About tools and HubSpot have done many, many tools, but the cost to do those tools is so high in terms of like an engineering cost to create a tool that really is freemium and it should create some sort of demand for the core product. Right. So there's still like the bridge you have to create from freemium app to core product. Well, if the cost of code goes to 00. The other thing that I thought would be really interesting is to start a fundamental for creators to build apps for your ecosystem, free new apps for your ecosystem and to fund the best ideas and to give them a rev share and to make like the best ideas for me are the ones that have a clear bridge into your core product and to get these kind of solopreneurs who can now build Incredible tools with AIs as a one person, two person team, like have those be your kind of freemium tool there. Right. All these incredible point solutions that easily plug into your core tool. I would probably really look into that because I think I could pro. I think for like there's an 1824 month period where the cost of code comes down and I could just create this incentive for have people to have people who really want to get into that space to create apps in my ecosystem and start to generate me some really great demand.

I felt like we were like a year away from that, which is why I didn't kind of include it on my original list. Like we're still quite not there on the cost of code quite quite yet. It's getting there, but it's not there. But you're bringing up a very important idea that I think everybody needs to keep in mind is that your success is directly correlated to the number of people who want you to be successful. And like a lot of your strategies are like, oh, how do I get a lot of folks out there working on my behalf and shared incentives with me? Because if I can do that, I'm likely going to build a bigger audience, bigger business, have, have more opportunity because we're all working together instead of just a couple of us in our startup trying to, to get this off the ground.

Yeah, it's the ecosystem, right? Like the quicker you can build that ecosystem, the more defensible your business is, the more ways you have to grow demand for your business. The other one that is in there, I think that is your 10k marketing campaigns is there's also the other thing that transformative and we'll have a window to be transformative is is the ability to just create an incredible prospecting engine from AI, whether that's prospecting into your cold leads, your contacts that are not qualified for sales, or even just outbound. Right. Like I think outbound is having its moment where it's like brought back into the light because you can do it so much better now. We did a whole episode on Gmail bringing out new spam rules that will make this much, much harder. But there is like, I think that that's the other thing that I would really look at if I'm building a company today is like, wow, I can build, I can get an engineer who really knows how to code a couple of engineers and pair them with like a really great growth marketer and build an incredible prospecting engine through these kind of AI tooling. And I would love that.

Did you see the new Superhuman feature?

Yeah. The instant replies.

Yeah. So for folks who haven't seen Superhuman, which is like an email client did instant replies, they essentially have an autopilot instead of a copilot, an autopilot, an AI agent that is proactively writing responses that you just review and send to your email anytime you log in. Which is amazing. Which is the forerunner to what you're talking about, Kieran. Right. Where you've got an agent basically doing these proactive tasks for prospecting for you or even through instant engagement of people who are coming in inbound through your video and other campaigns that you're working.

Right? Yeah, I think it's the, yeah, exactly like this, this, this agent is creating demand for your sales team whilst you kind of sleep. Right. It's, it's able to do all the kind of prospecting, the kind of follow up, all of those different things. Again, I think there's a window for all of this because I suspect in a couple of years time all brands have this. So then it loses its real impact. It just normalizes to average results. The other one that I think we agree on is doing something today I would have a AIOps team, right. The, the quicker I can integrate 100 rules into how I do everything, the more efficient I can be across my entire marketing team. And that seems like a no brainer in terms of something we would do today that's different that we, you know, because it didn't exist, that would make my marketing strategy, if I can like create a marketing strategy that is just 10 times more efficient than my competitors than that I can just out execute them.

Right.

I can execute them, out spend them.

Here's the way to think about it. What the percentage pie chart that I basically gave you the verbal pie chart around where I would go and get those hundred thousand leads from. The better or and more effective your AIOPS team is, the higher your conversion rate is going to be. So the less work you're going to have to go do across all those channels because you're going to convert that traffic at a much higher rate. Right? So like, oh, maybe I only need, you know, 200,000 visits from YouTube instead of 400,000 visits from YouTube every month to my website, right? Like those are the things that change dramatically with AI. Like again, we've got a show coming up soon, Kieran, with Emmy from my team around, some of the work that we're doing, we're seeing real conversion rate increases through AI and that is the value and why I think you and I both would have an AI OPS person early, early on in our market, early stage marketing team, right?

Yeah, yeah. The really cool thing about this point in time is you can actually there's real leverage to gain if you're willing.

To change things, right?

Like, and that leverage just dissipates and disappears over time as that industry matures. We've seen it time and time again. And so I would like think about like where for me are the points of leverage that I can just unfairly invest in so I can actually suck up that advantage before anyone else does. The one other fun thing I put down was it's not actually related to AI, but I was starting again, right? On the brand side of things, I would love to get your thought. I think your brand. Here's the problem with brand campaigns, right?

Wow, should I get the coffee and lay back? I don't drink coffee, so I can't, but go ahead, right?

So most brand campaigns are like, okay, we do this large campaign, we introduce these characters, we have a small little plot line and a little outcome and we try to make you care, right? And then you do that for the quarter or six months, then you move on to your next one, you do that for the quarter or six months and you move on to your next one, right? So you're constantly introducing like some characters and themes and plot lines, whatever it may be. I think brands should be treated like each year at least should be treated like a mini kind of TV series, right? Where you actually have real characters that are themed across the entirety of the years. You get to care about those characters and you bring them to life through a multi. You bring them to life through a multi kind of media format. Like a multitude of different content, right? Like short form, video, long form video, whatever they may be. But you can actually start to ingratiate with these characters. You can start to, like, really, you know, get to know them, right? And I think you should have some, like, really cool plot lines, like, really clever writing, right? Most brand campaigns are not clever writing. They are really stagnant. Like, they just sound like another. Any other kind of B2B brand, right? Even to me, I think one of the outlandish things that you could do is hire a comedic writer and have that person write your brand campaigns, right? And be very, very differentiated to your point. Like, do the opposite what everyone else is doing, take some real risks, and really introduce entertainment and humor. So when you sit down and you're like, okay, what's happening across the year for the brand campaign? It's like, why will people care about these characters, what kind of personality they have? What are the kind of the plot lines, the twists that happen across the entirety of the year? And how do we integrate our. How do we integrate our product into that plot line and make people, like, really care about that plot line? That is one thing that I think I would take a run up because most brand marketing is born and sucks.

Well, yeah, so, you know, in the early days of HubSpot, I think one of the things we would do over again, like, most of the things I wouldn't do over again, right? But one of the things I think I would do over is we kind of just had this phrase, we've talked about it on the show before, of how do you win the marketing Internet for the week? Or how do you win your little corner of the Internet for the week? And how do you do that then every week for a year and then every week for two years and three years, right? Like, that's actually what matters here is, like, you have to win the, like, mind share and the cool factor. And for, like, you can do that for a few months and it won't seem like it matters. You do that for a year and you wake up and like, wow, the whole world is different. Consistently, people think about us in a completely different way. And brand has lots of strengths and lots of benefits. And it's hard in early stage companies when you don't have a ton of money to spend. What you have to do is manufacture ideas and stories that are going to, you know, spread interesting and be interesting, which means you have to have a really strong point of view. Reminds me of, I think, what I think a top five founders podcast episode for me is episode 300, the James Dyson episode. And just like, man, that guy grinded for decades to get those products out. But one of the things he said is, like, different in every way. Different for the sake of it. Like, everything had to be different, right? The design had to be different. How they went to market had to be different. Pricing had to be different. Everything had to be different. And when you're trying to build a brand, you're trying to win your little corner of the Internet for that week, you only do it by being different. You only do it by standing out. You know, the classic Seth Godin book Purple Cow is, like, all about this, right? And I feel the need to, like, go back and reread that book, like, once every year or two, because you can. As I get older and as I do this, more and more differentiation only becomes more important, not less important, right?

Especially as markets get more saturated. One of the things I've gone down a rabbit hole of over the past month or so, and this is going to be related. I'm going to manage to go all the way back and make a point about marketing here, is like, I got obsessed with Napoleon. Oh, yeah. Julius Caesar and Alexander the Great. Because actually, what's unbelievable about these three people are they have such similar characteristics and such similar stories. You start to think maybe this is assimilation every 100 years as, like, we just repeat the same cycle. Because, like, how can these three people be so similar? And so I started on the Founders podcast. That's where I kind of got introduced to their stories. And then I actually have gone way off that and just consumed everything I could about how those three people lived their life and, you know, the kind of battles that they won. But you know what? The really interesting thing about those three people that they hold in common, that they control their own narrative. So they actually were really conscious about having people follow them around and write their stories in the way they wanted them told. And that was huge for Napoleon, actually. He was really skilled at being able to tell a narrative that he wanted told to the masses of people, which is, like, why he was managed to rise to the ranks of Empire with no kind of, I think, not much, like, noble history behind him. Right. Like, didn't come through nepotism or the family, and it just did remind me, like, at the heart of storytelling is really the core skill to learn and the hardest skill to learn. But to your point, like, if you can tell a differentiated story, it has proven throughout time, all the way back to, like, Julius Caesar and Alexander the Great, that being able to control your narrative and Tell a differentiated story to make people believe what you want them to believe in a positive way. Right. There's ways you can do it in a negative way is still timeless, Right? It is like the most important skill to learn. And I think.

Why? Why do you think it's the most difficult?

Because if you don't tell your story. So there's two parts to that, right? If you don't tell your story and you tell it in a differentiate away, then everyone else will decide who you are. And for the most part we're not that.

But that's not why it's hard. But that's not why it's hard.

Why is why it's hard.

Why is it hard.

Why is. That's a really good question. It's just super hard to get people to care.

No, I disagree.

You don't think it's hard to get people to care? Why can't everyone do it then?

My controversial take here is that telling stories is really hard because you fail for one of two reasons. You either tell people the story you think they want to hear, not the story that's authentic to you, or you tell the story that's authentic to you, but in a way that is so self centered that nobody else can understand it. And like the reason storytelling, when it's magical works is because it is so sharp, it is so focused, it is like singular to one person's mind that it is so clear. And that clarity also makes it universal. But the word choice and how that story is brought to life is so universal that it can appeal to everyone versus just being in some like weird, clunky jargon, colloquialistic language of that one person. Right. And like getting those two things to juxtapose. Right. Is actually very, very, very hard.

Yeah, well, it gets people to you articulate something for someone that they kind of, they kind of think but can't articulate themselves. Or they've always kind of thought but have never been able to articulate what that thought is. But it's hard to be interesting. Right. Like, I think that third part is they, they do those things, but then the story is just not that interesting. Right. And you are, you are competing against. The world we live in. Today has an array of people who are very interested. Like there's just so much content that you could. I.

There's just so much you can make an argument. We've never been this interesting as a society, or at least not in a long time.

So the competition to break through that, that noise or to like Stand out has never been greater. But I do think a lot of what happens in marketing is people have not invested or just have not took heed that. I think writing is a more important skill to learn than coding for the future that we are learning. And that's not controversial. If you look through history, writing has been the most important skill to learn. I think that is going to continue. And I think a lot of marketers do not have not believed that and have not put in the time and effort to learn what great writing is.

I think most people believe it. It turns out it's just hard. And it is easy to distract yourself by saying, hey, I need to go learn this new app and I don't need to learn writing. I'll learn writing later.

It's the marketing has become more technology data focused than you call marketing arts and craft. I think people have thought of marketing as data and science, and so it's hard to go back.

I truly believe in my heart of hearts marketing is a craft.

Yeah, I don't think that's how.

It's something that takes patience. It's something that takes deep skill and expertise and empathy, but at the same time, like, deep opinion and perspective and belief. And without that, it's, you know, it's nothing. Right. Like, you can have a whole bunch of types of tables in the world, but, like, there are very few, like, remarkable tables. You know, like the design of an IKEA table, it stands out because it's highly functional and very inexpensive. Right. Like they're. And it's because they have a strong perspective on what a table needs to look like. Marketing is the same type of craft.

It's actually, I think, brought market into a place it was not thought of 15, 20 years ago. It's given a lot more respect. But here we were, we have been in and we, we are kind of stolen. As if you sat 10 founders down and you said, and they're all looking for a marketing leader and you brought two people to them and you said, this person is the best person I've ever met in terms of the craft of marketing. This person is the best person I've ever met in terms of the science of marketing. I think nine founders pick the science of marketing and one person picks a craft. And then that one person who picks a craft sees the kind of reports that the marketer does on the kind of work they're doing and says, oh, actually I go for the science because I understand that $3, the $1 and the $3 back, you know, so it's it's hard. I actually think it's really hard. The craft part has become really hard because it's become so blurred with all of the data we want around the work we, we do. And again, I think that has been a great thing, right?

Like, hugely great thing.

It's given all of us much in marketing, much more respect, I think, in terms of the work we do. But I do think, like, we are, we are entering a period of time where the craft is going to be critical to being a great marketer, to be a successful marketer. And so it's a little bit getting back to basics.

AI is going to give us access to the data, the instrumentation, and AI will turn the knobs.

Right?

You know, and that's what's going to be, going to be great about AI. But if you're a knob turner, AI is going to take your role, right?

You are a knob turner.

You know, if you're a knob turner, if you like, hey, I'm on this path and I'm trying to make this thing 5, 10, 12% better, then AI is going to be able to do that really well. If you are, if you can rethink something, if you can drastically simplify something, if you could chart a new course.