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hubspot makes impossible growth impossibly easy for their customers and here's the perfect example mo college need to reach new students with fresh and engaging content but with a massive nine hundred page website even the tiniest update took like thirty minutes to actually publish breeze hubspot collection of ai tools helped them write and optimize their content in a fraction of the time the results thirty percent more page views and visitors now spend twenty site than percent more time on their site ready for the impossible growth like this visit hubspot dot com in b2b sales and marketing most companies are shooting louder chasing more channels and burning through budgets just to get their prospects attention brad young however has decided to flip the script for the second time around as the c founder and ceo of slash expert and the original cofounder of s he's built a model on connecting prospects directly with your happiest customers so they can hear real stories ask real questions and make confident in buying decisions faster directly through slash exports he's spent nearly a decade c founding and scaling one of the companies that redefine the way the corporate gifting and direct mail is done and through launched six three nine ventures he's backed some of the most creative and unconventional brands in the market today we're talking about how to get through the noise how to design gt strategies that work in twenty twenty five of course the rise of ai and the impact that that has not only on business but also society and we dive deep into one of the most important things that you can have in your life to do it well if you're playing the long game you're in the right place this is the ross simmons show and this is my interview with brady brandon thank you so much for making the time i've gotta start with a question that i didn't plan to ask you and that is one surrounding something that we just stood talked about we talked about going to restaurants we talked about dad life and i wanna start by asking a question around how you juggle it all with the the ambition the ongoing launch of new businesses being a dad still making time to go to dinners with other dads like all of that stuff how do you manage it all today yeah ross it's it's good to be here thanks for the invite i so i think as as you get older i think you got better perspective which is one of those things where when i started s ten years ago i think my balance was off like i was in my days and it was like just everything but worked all the time and as you get older there that you're like wow like it's cool like to have successes but like that's not the end all be all like you right it's good and i i think was successful so i think that grain should need the opportunity to make a little more time for things is that our more personal like hanging out with my four year old and do centers and stuff like that and yeah i think but one thing we always did like my my buddy who's my founder at sand who's the ceo now is we always made time for like the things that are important like what are you working towards like like like what do you like and right there's always experiences a family and activities and so we all work to be able to afford to do those things lot i think most of us were work do most of those things some don't some just love the idea of just working time not not me so i think like as as you put the time at the front and then the gains you the advantage or the time to be able to just spend more time with your family would have balanced it yeah but even if you don't like if your mental head is in a good space and i think your work is better and true as i've gotten older work smarter too like i don't need to work until eleven pm like that means i'm not working smart because i did something dumb right so i to to be able to yeah like yeah no i just think that like that's crazy sometimes and there's a lot of tools that can help you work faster now too so you love i love this week if you could go back in time and to talk to you twenty year old you who's in it going hard sometimes working those fifteen to sixteen hour would you still say keep going do what you're doing it's going to work out or would you told you not yeah yeah no yeah i feel like yeah there's there's like there's there's part me that says like think anyone that says like hey like i'm all about like balance is cool but i think it gives like it it also like you worked at some point so be able to be able to say that and so i think like that's like i'm i'm almost forty and like as was most things were like i've been working for you know ever since college and have saved and like i think that in order to be able to go for a hike sometimes in the middle of the day it's because i've worked to be able to have that advantage and i think that if i went back in time i'd tell myself to keep working because i love it like yeah i think that anyone that says the work balanced thing is is i think it's important but also like you to put yourself in the position for that for sure i agree so you're clearly are somebody who's passionate about the game you love business you've been in it for a long time you've c founded two companies send do and now slash experts when you think of both of those like what is the scratch the itch that you were trying to scratch with those that made you really think like once send mendoza at that time like why did you pursue that and then now like why are you pursuing the slash expert side and and didn't take the hat off and say i'm done with this entrepreneurship thing like you can't go through again love i'm starting from sierra over again the so like forced and like we saw a big issue in the market because it we so we built that company like twenty fifteen right and that was when like every single like sales automation tool was coming out and so like everyone had so many emails and phone calls and like it just wasn't work people were like and i think maybe response rates were better back than for emails but still like was one of those things where it's just it wasn't and like the resurgence of account based marketing was happening everyone was like you gotta be you know very unique and you're all your outreach and we were like okay i get that but like how can i do that at scale and i remember like the startup i was with like we would write like handwritten notes and it was great so they'd always get a response right really there's no way to do this scale and so we launched it and we started with coffee gift cards like starbucks books coffee gift cards like that was and it wasn't originally even called s coffee like coffee centers the original name right and it was a way to send coffee gift cards out and it was great so we we pushed that thing out to all our sales friends and like it took off people would send emails were like hey like have a coffee on us and yeah or on me and like let's connect so it was different it yeah made it personal it used the power of reciprocity and it grew pretty quickly to have more than just coffee and we renamed it and mendoza and we grew that business we had product market fit very early on because that world of gifting has always been in business but no one had ever scaled it right nor tracked it so pushing that into your crm was massive so right and then we hit the market at the right time i mean some those things were like i think any newer like it kinda it's a lot of it is about hard work sure but it's also like we were growing at a pretty good rate with power market fit from like twenty fifteen to twenty twenty right covid happened and covid was phenomenal for price because like no one was your people in the person yeah yeah and like we just exploded during the schools you know two or three years and because everyone was trying to send impacted and just not only prospects but employees and to customers and true we happen to have the network for it cool well that was there what we saw it was like a lot of the traditional what twenty year old process of like hey come take a demo right was just broken people were like they go reviews they talk to their peers they back channel you and i was like that's not like i don't i think that dies eventually like they go and talk to a sales rep and he walks through a deck and yep you're like oh like do you wanna buy it and then you're like more talk about but like that pro i i still think it's like it's being adapted and changed but mh we saw that we're like people wanna talk to existing users right people don't wanna case studies and i think they're great i think it's cool with a case study but people will wanna be able to know their the right tool true so like we're like let's connect our prospects with our customers who love us mh and i mean like it's the same playbook that like salesforce does with their trail blades community right you go in there and you can read about all the people that have used their tool for amazing things awesome so why can't we allow that exact exact same motion with smaller companies and make it easy for a prospect to connect with the customer so build that out just launched it i had five months ago now so that's cool that's gone quick cool so now it's like alright and it's working i mean people like that's converting faster than the book of down lot of dealers that's so very cool that's for the two stories i think it's been funded but the the second time around of you know not making the same errors the first time because you've very that's the first that hundred percent no that makes complete sense with slash experts as you like look ahead what's kind of the the priority driver for scratching this stitch again like are you like what's making you say alright right now wanna jump back in jump back into the saddle start from zero to one all over again i love zero to like five zero like in like that was really the most fun as is like chaos it's like you're you're setting up tools you're talking to customers that like get to buy you and then this isn't a fit me and you're liking it's not fit for you right and so like like you try figure out what you who what your best is you're trying to figure out like how your financials work i like all that stuff that i enjoy yeah i like that much much more than working strategy at a company i think there's amazing people who could take a company from ten to a hundred million mila work first those so they're great they're very good at it the zero to ten the chaos the is testing that's where i enjoy so i wanted to do it again yeah is i wanted to scratch that itch i think that like really times are my absolute favorite that's awesome you you learn like it's a lot of i would say is kind of ed game too because like no one's checking in to make sure you're working at true just like you're solo low so you had a bunch of engineers and like maybe a cofounder and you're like alright like right but you don't have to show up to your writing like you're the one who's scheduling those like give your investors to answer to yes but they made a bet on you too right and so i like that that's cool chaos that building i think if you don't enjoy that part of it then yeah she's about company yeah a hundred percent i love the chaos too it's definitely where i i thrive when you're going through it i always have like a handful of different mantra and stuff that i use to stay grounded and be able to kinda persist through the chaos how do you keep yourself going through it like as much as i love the chaos there's gotta be moments where you're like this is a lot do you have do you have a way to get through like what's your mechanisms do you have a mechanism do you have a mental model do you have like a go to thing that you do to to break through that struggle when it hits or do you just push through all the time to say no i i have to have a balance there i think an easy one is like when i'm overloaded with stuff i'll i mean it's simple like i'll go for a walk i think that like there's my my wife so we have this for each other we have these two like speeches like like like cool if i ask for feedback from like i'm my wife like struggling with something she's like do you want me to play the card of like suck it up and like make it happen core join through the card of like hey like you're right like you should take time you should go for hike or go exercise and come back so like you you i tell her which one i want yeah but usually it's the hey suck it up like you're you're you're getting to build a company like that's amazing so freaking suck it up and like go sit down and make it happen so like i i usually ask for that one that's the so like i think like your partner your friend whoever is is that becomes like your your yeah i would say rock to something that's so it's it's i i hike i i think it's good to keep exercise going right you don't keep that going and i think you're gonna follow apart yeah i hear that you know when i'm not moving it's you can feel it like it's just like i need to go i need to go do a five k run i gotta do something right i think that like then i mean i work out in the morning which helps i think yeah and then like have having having a kid also helps you because that they he's can keep you moving yeah what your playground aaron and let's play tech i like it very cool when it comes to like the actual expertise around direct mail and communication like over your this time you've learned a lot and there's a lot of marketers who listen to this who are constantly thinking about using zen so using these tools how do you think of differentiation when you're trying to make a message that actually resonates with people what does that have to look like like how do you make stories and messages or a message or a gift stand out from everything else that people are getting like you get hundreds of emails these days yeah i i mean so i think usually the is and insanely important i think they're like there's there's even through ten years of growing some those so i can probably count on a couple hands like how many actual gifts i've gotten when you say mailbox you're not talking about digital you're talking about physical mail like using like like send like a physical like message to somebody whether it's an office or home you can confirm addresses and get there so like i think i'll give you two examples the first one is using the is immensely important i only think it's gonna become more important as digital gets even more overloaded with the volume of ai addresses out there like and personalized emails and linkedin messages and phone calls i'm like i think i don't know how many cool calls you get i got a ton and i'm like like i'm gonna answer don't even answer my phone anymore great yeah right it's crazy like text me so like i think that so i the mailbox is important i think the the and what do you wanna stand out i don't think it's the gift as much as it is the timing so a good example is if you do a demo with somebody and they decide like hey like i'm not gonna move forward i'm gonna you know i'm gonna maybe talk to in a couple months right it's a good trigger for a handwritten note it's send a handwritten note or even if like someone's hey i'm take the time send a handwritten note with some information handwritten knows are the most powerful thing ever that people rarely use because still think do i great down people handling when was the last time you got handwritten it note from somebody been long term right too but i think that i think that's one of those things we're like if you lose a deal if someone say hey i we're going with the competitor or hey we're something like versus on the back picture like why not send like a case study in a handwritten note that's hey like i thought you might like this like right if you want include like a a physical gift card to starbucks or something like that's one of those things were like i think that that makes you stand out so strongly about the timing when you wanna send it mh i think if you're working like more top of funnel like demand i think that there's lots of things marketing can send for air cover whether it is simple things like the yeti mug been done but the way you can do all i i think people still use them hats or what i send because cool never throw a hat and they had somewhere and we'll wear at some point so the next simple air cover from marketing is important to get your brain name out there and the salesperson doing things like handwritten notes and things like that are important before you do a demo or a phone call sending an e gift for starbucks is great cool i think you get that same reciprocity right as you would have physical more expensive mailer that's interesting a hot take which is one that i can say that because i'm i don't work do anymore yeah is i think that gifts i don't think a gift needs to be three hundred dollars i think that i guess something simple still works very well okay i think a pair of socks is still a very cool scent if it's sent in the winter not the summer right i think i think an umbrella is a cool scent if it's sent there's a storm on the way yeah i think that like you have to know what the right timing is like i don't send an e gift for starbucks at four o'clock in the afternoon sure people do that i don't so yeah makes sense i i think that's my example if i was testing gifting i would yeah try to figure out timing that's cool how are you thinking about gifting in your world now with slash experts we do a ton of go market essence did you share some of the ways that you're thinking about it for for you all or yeah yeah so like we do hats again so like if i do a demo i i i typically was like i thanks so much for the time and like they get like a hat sent to them after a demo it's like thing to do if i lose a deal i sent handwritten notes saying hey like and i do usually a week later saying hey i'm sorry that you didn't go my direction like would love to chat down the road handwritten note if someone's approaching a renewal there's an automated gift there too of like hey like looking forward to working together again in for another year it could be fine it could be pay could be sweatshirt so think like and like the nice person is you can automate most of this yeah i do i do sense for things that people have celebrations like for example you're getting be married they're having kid cool they're switching jobs those are all very good trigger moments almost to send something just take care of ask like there's have to be an ask in every gift it can be very simple like hey it's just your top of mind yeah i love that that's cool when you send these handwritten notes like i don't wanna get to personal with it but like what are you saying to these people in the handwritten note like it's such a personal thing with your yeah i know it's just it's old fashioned right but it's so intimate because it's like this person's brain transferred to their hand which transferred to this paper it was in their physical presence and then now it's with me well i kinda kind of i know yeah feel that way it isn't really but we all but we believe supposed to right supposed to the robot my make errors exactly yeah exactly yeah so where are you what the message in the so like tip it's it's the first one is like i can send one after a call just saying thanks for the time cool look forward working together if you wanna attach something there you can right if i try to lose a deal let's hey i'm sorry to in my direction whether a shot down the road that typically that can that can save deals too because someone might be with the middle of onboarding yeah and they might be like i'm man with the wrong company like this person sent me a classroom no true true you can send it with a book yeah yeah like at this relevant into the space right and i thought you might like you know this book that's you know the marketing space i think that's an important one too so like those three that's cool anchor and like people like i i think that there's what's written in the note is important right but i don't know if i could like the last hand and note i got was like probably for like my grandma like i don't know what i said yeah but i but i remember got it yeah i know i got it and so i think that's what you're aiming for as we company too that's cool i like it what's one of the mistakes that you think most marketers go to market leaders etcetera are making today when it comes to driving roi i think there's very cool ai tools and there's a lot of them and i know every marketer that's out there has like probably lost folks on their team and so bandwidth is very low and i know that they're getting pushed by their ceos to look at all these ai tools but like we should hire more ai stuff and i i think that that that's a hard spot to be in right but i also so like i would say one of the errors is spending too much time looking at all those i ai tools i would say better your time is spending time talking to your peers right maybe people that are at bigger companies who have added a lot of this stuff yeah i think being in a in a in a community is really important right now with there's a new tool every day true and so like the goal is like if someone finds when that's working well cool yeah like kinda have that discussion as to why it's working well i think that's very important i would say enough end enough marketers are living in a silo right now which is tough i think that's because they're being asked internally look all these tools to help solve marketing so kind they're being asked to like their team needs to be smaller right at the same time they're like hey also like can you not stop building pipeline right well i need to do all three and i i think that's tough for marketer to live in those three four spots and so i i would say they like the that your community becomes of sure that was interesting so community your peers your network yep what does that look like in reality like what's that look like for you even for me it's a lot of linkedin if people would have i've talked through through the years that i know have the same title is me people are typically pretty responsive still on linkedin if you reach out the right way like hey like here's you know here's why i'm reaching out i think that there's groups that are great like pavilion of great for marketers yeah that's good to be in i think and in your career have you been in these types of groups in the past absolutely cool the pavilion the marketing groups of the world the sales groups of the world cool i have enough like there's a lot of founders groups to you that are important it's it's important to be able to i have a call yeah like like once a month with a couple founders where all we do is kind of just like it's not like a i knew is like kind of a like a like a crap talk an hour it's like hey like here here's what i'm going gone through this on yeah yeah no but not it's not always problem it's more just like it's like no one like like this more complaining but you're you're complaining to complain and you're like why am i this so i of you're like okay not a alone i think it's like like like kinda helpful yeah and is that formally set up or informally set up like is it informal yeah it's there's some i there's some form ones too i all the other day someone was building another one there's cool i think sometimes they get too big so sometimes it's just to have like a handful of founders or that you trust that you can share whatever yeah yeah right and it doesn't need to be public stuff there's so many public linkedin channels that advertisers are cool but i don't know i think they like yeah the transparency always happens behind closed doors like the real conversations come when no one's looking and it's you and a whatsapp group with a few friends who are similar sized growing struggling trying to figure it all out and talk talking through the things yeah and that makes complete sense did you always have like take me back before sand mendoza like did you have were you in tech right away like did you jump right to the first first job was insurance actually we for that left college and like two thousand eight thousand nine great time to graduate no and everything was everything was in a recession perfect time yeah yeah and so like it went to work for an insurance company which was awesome learned sales i could've spent my career there because you was like a carrier rep build the book of business but it was like we didn't have it was a big company we didn't have a salesforce we were a crm we i spent all my time on the road i learned how sales those was when banks were shutting down and like yeah but sure it was booming it was through higher salespeople people was great and so like yeah done a couple years there like learned sales and then i just didn't feel that we were innovating and like i was in the bay area which was like i saw like all these companies spinning up at of nowhere and like right i remember i left and i had two offers to leave at a at a offer at this that it's gonna go demand for us which was when took i learned how to do transactional sales there were so small start at the time and the second one was a company called z ride that i said no to and z right changed their name to lyft and they were zero five tests later sorry of those guys so missed that one yeah but like it was i think those are the fun stories of the bay area and tech startups ups but right went there a couple of years learned how to do transactional sales other than relationship sales ad insurance companies loved it then jump to another tech company like two or three tech companies from there and then finally it was like i could do i can this and like yeah my parents own their own like they're my my dad owns like a landscaping business almost like a flu shops and so i knew entrepreneurship in the dna on yeah like i i knew at some point i had to take my shop at it to see if it was possible and that's cool my wife was at facebook at the time so that i gave me an opportunity to be like alright i'm gonna go on your benefits that's just got married yeah and so that helped that for sure helps yeah that's huge so now i wanna go another path because that's fascinating same wife as back then all that so partners seem like it also plays a role in like to growth in massive like i had doctor julie garner on a few months back and she was talking about how important she would tell people who were in their twenties spend more time thinking about who you're going to be partnered with than who what business and job you're gonna take when you look back like how instrumental was that partnership in you guys relationship and now four year olds and all that like mask you guys got yeah yeah i'm intrigued to like it wouldn't have happened without her being like you should go that's because like you've always talked about it should go and see like yes we can afford you know but there the difference was there was a clock so she's like you've six months and if you're not making money at six months then you have to go to work you right at salesforce i love something now like i think partners on the other side so i so my c cofounder who's last so chris was i think that's this so i have three people that i call the most my wife my mother and chris that's cool like like like those like my three relationships that important because your c cofounder founder i knew in college and so i was health i i knew like him and i had you know done stupid college things together so you kinda see everybody like all the lights be like okay like i know right you're like and that helped yeah i would say with building a company and i trusted him true and he trusted me and so those are of those things where you sort and that trust was really important yeah because i wasn't worried if he was working or not right or if he was like hey i'm gonna go take thursday off because i'm gonna go do x cool go like i was there's some question that so i think that need to have that and then dos became successful mh and there's he was focused on things because i was focused on other things so i think that really important to have that like he's a big adviser now this new so i think that without that he also he's an extra neighbor so i like i like like it's like good to right full life immersion yeah yeah now we have kids the same age or wives or friends so love you i i guess it's important to have that to too it's like life optimization everyone's always talking about seo search optimization you're optimizing the whole life factors like if you've got your c founder best friend advisor and live in next doors and your kids are the same age you're doing it right that's awesome i think it helps it helps like and i i think that there's there's a weird distinction when it comes to founders where if you can hang out and not only talk about work like that's a good thing but i would say a lot of vendors don't get to that point that's fair which was important because yeah you're always talking about work then like you know the star a work friend that's fair hundred percent hustle daily show hosted by juliet bennett r robert litter ben berkeley and martin is brought to you by the hubspot podcast network the audio destination for business professionals the hustle daily brings you a healthy dose of air aaron off beaten and informative takes on business and tech moves most recently it broke down the news ahead everybody talking that is meta complete blitz on recruitment and hiring all across many industry poaching people left right and center from every big ai company you can think of and how their acquisition of scale ai might have been one of the best chess places chess pieces to move in recent history folks if you haven't listened to recent hustle daily episodes you definitely wanna check it out listen to the hustle daily show wherever you get your podcast when you're looking at slash experts in your in this new age like when send first launch ai wasn't what it is today yeah but you're doing it again you're launching a new company but ai is here it's automations everywhere how are you thinking about what should be automated leveraging ai versus which be done by the finger on keyboards so the the the the company as a whole looks like a company where we help people prospects and customers connected to chat to talk about why they use a tool but on the back end we also all those phone calls are also recorded so and like though that's first party data from like a customer talking about a product they're using which is gold for marketers and so we give our customers all of that recording data and we can we or we can plug it into an and be like hey here's some insights from that phone call like this person is calling a product that you call x on your website something totally different right and so like like that's information there that's insanely valuable so we've spent a lot of time on the ai side cool trying to make it really easy for these insights as first party call data to be able to be used by marketers and so right that piece that's where i start to compete against companies like gl g and alpha site and all these like big companies that do this for for vc for or for right in investment banks and yeah we're basically just making it happen for b2b so like that's that that's pretty cool for i'm excited about it i mean so certain them there for hiring we're we'll we have a rule in internally like if there's a problem that we have we'll look and see hey i can do it first if i can't do it then we'll outsource it someone who can for a cheaper price not in the typically right and then if we can't do one of those then we'll hire somebody there's number thing i to do so we we we hired right off bat but even look right outsiders or ai makes sense or when you think about the future of like slash experts is the plan to try to build a massive organization like are you going for the no what's the what's the play the goal is to get this to a point where like we're we're at enough companies placing enough data for them where and then if if we can scale that out and use ai to make one person you wanna to manage more account to make sales being able to manage more deals then i think i i think a really cool stat these days is like revenue per employee it's always been around but i i really like that stat for founders right now especially if ai companies are extremes like if you're like a cursor crushing it awesome crushing so but i i think like adapting that like the b to b right type saas tools too is important because you don't need a sales team of four hundred people sure but if you had a sales team you know five or six who were doing tire revenue and they're using their day properly using ai to make it to to match everything out awesome which think would be is true for sure pretty sweet yeah more profit it's more commission for everybody everybody wins yeah it's it's good commissioned for everybody i think that i think the traditional sales of sdr disco phone call to ae to s to am to cs i think it i don't think it dies anytime soon but i think that it just gets more efficient with tools i think we're rather than hiring you know ten sdr higher too which right is interesting because i think like that has its own lay type of stuff with it but i think i think that's where we're moving towards right when do you think the the culture within b to b saas tech around that is going to change is it next fiscal is it two years out three is it are we in it and is yeah i think i mean yesterday there was a big announcement it like you know cla and lost that one and so like you you you have consolidation happening which is interesting because consolidation happens so now one ae on three products true and so and i think this only i think it's a compound over the next like six months i just think that like it's gonna get while through there and there's there's more ai get built and they can do a lot of the way like they can help people are around roles i think there's gonna be a separation really quickly from your aes that are crushing it right tools like this to ones that aren't right like that's gonna be interesting like over the i say i think we're in i think we're yeah i think what happens to the mediocre what happens to the i think i think they gotta find a different way to they're yeah not maybe a different job it made different structure internally like right but i don't think you need teams of twenty thirty anymore especially if you're a mid market company it's true yeah it's changing you it's definitely changed and i think sdr are too i think that like i even seen like there's i mean there's if you take any role like hr is another one like all like phone screens are done by ai now right i think there's she's like alright so like that's a a ton of jobs sure i think i think what gets hurt in this i think i think experience is important people that have experience are important companies but i think the interesting group of folks that i'm nervous about or entry level if people come about right out of college because i don't know the only path they have to build is you they learn ai and often maybe they get they go to meta make seven hundred billion dollars a year vendor your and look get retire go or they don't go into tech like i it's that's right i that's an interesting one and like i don't have an answer for that that the people right at a college yeah they would typically go into an sdr str training program yeah salesforce like i didn't never be doing that anymore would no it's i was thinking about this a lot recently like even with my own little ones i'm like okay what path will they be able to actually take into the careers like so much is going to be automated so much is going to be able to be done by ai and it's already there so it's like what's gonna be left and if you evaporate all of the entry level skills needs because ai and agents can do arguably even if though it's on record like better than most of the kids fresh to school like ai is better than them what's gonna happen like it's gonna be a very interesting dynamic for the market yeah i i mean there's i think there's jobs that aren't going anywhere like for long term but are like the trades true i think agree hvac if you're in the hvac system world well yeah right i just great hvac here like yeah there's like here you go i have no clue what i'm doing yeah exactly here's my money yeah takes some money oh it's dripping here's more money yeah it's grades are interesting i i don't think the like if you're in tech and like you learn how a lot of these ai tools work i i think ai might be like the final blow to the generation that's still working mh like who's like who's like all the guys that are in like you know like that are like the ceos right now it might be the final blow of those those where they're like okay like right i don't understand this or if you're like a cro and you've been doing it for a long time might be time yeah that you're like i don't like i've you're so reliant on like your rev some marketing ops teams to like put reports together for you like you become like middle management is unnecessary with the volume much worse that are out there which you can be and if you really wanted to be great now is the best time to do it like if i i oftentimes think i would crush it in real estate right now because i know all of these things that people in real estate don't know like you could absolutely crush as a realtor send a message to thousands of people it's it's wild it's absolutely wild yeah we're like the trays just be like be able to true like have like an actual follow through right follow ups in proper he got the phone yeah there was like i was i was saying there day to somebody i was like i think i think it was hvac like be i'll be at your house in the hours of like ten and five and right okay like could you imagine demos like like four like like let's do a demo like i'll call you between ten and five yeah i never would work you never work it's so well so looking back at your time mendoza you're a founder again launching slash experts bringing this to life what are some of the lessons that you learned that you will apply here that are that second founder superpower like everyone always talks about how first time founder you make a bunch of mistakes second time founder you learn from those mistakes and you crush what's the lessons that you're going to apply here that you did you wish you at back then yeah i mean if you look like a simple thing was like finances like i i didn't when the first time around i didn't understand p and l's ls and finances like as properly as i could there's so many tools that are out there that help with that now like knowing exactly what your burn is things like that you don't have to look at your financials like once a month when your account comes over right you can do it in real time so then i think that's a big one knowing exactly how much you're burning exactly if you can make big bets on things so like well how will this impact my numbers for the month isn't brain right secondly is it taking advantage of the people that like offer it up like if you take money from a vc if you have friends that are in your space that people are always yeah let me know i can help ask them right it was to hey let i can help cool hey i'm looking for customers so you the only anyone who wants to use this awesome like send that and follow up i think like people are typically most of the time go end a conversations with hey mean i can help you and like if you push it you're like yeah actually i'd i'll tell you exactly what i need right i think like you learn really quickly like who's legit and who's not yeah and the people that are the legit that are helping awesome give equity right like give them a piece of the company that's good i think like those are pieces that we learned at sand dos and like i think we're doing that right now is like people that are willing to help is you take care of them yeah and do you give them some skin of the game and you grow with them so i think those are the two biggest ones simple back office stuff understand it better and secondly like you know use the people that offer help right sure and then don't build an a silo like what's that mean like don't build something that you think your customers will want but they don't know they want mh like i just don't that works because right right you need to go and talk to your customers and figure out what they need and didn't go build go and build it but but i don't think you need to build the thing go and sell like there's so many amazing product people that build an amazing beautiful product mh once it's done then they go and sell it and right that's not the way to do it the way to do it is like build half of it and have a conversation with a customer be like hey like what do you on something right should i keep going how do i pivot this yeah is this close to you fitting your needs that type of thing or including your contract like if if you're trying to sell somebody and they're like i really need this feature like cool i'll build it for you just sign a contract for me give green until i build it right right that's cool that's smart when it comes to the first point you said you use tools now to get that visibility the listeners love hearing exactly what tools they should use is there anything that in particular that stands out on the finance side that you've been using or thinking about user yeah i mean finance said i mean we use simple things like like i didn't have quickbooks the last company until so like quickbooks sales ton right that like there's there's outsource change yeah there's outsource accounting firms like punch that we use rate cool there's gonna be call get parallel that helps us with like what our burn looks like nice then like from internal like tools that are back office i think that we use click up like crazy people account organize spot shop i think yeah there's there's a lot of really good early on startup up tools that got come out that you can look at and like you can tell if you wanna add or not but right the ones that are like a less expensive burn i i think it's most helpful that's fair i like it so slash experts send so kinda different what would you say is the common link between the two so is one so so sand all involve like you're you're sending gifts to people you're using reciprocity right and with slash experts if we're also connecting people so same sort of thing and if a customer does a phone call they're thanked so there's a glitch there as well right okay thanks so much so for doing the phone call so gifting is intertwined between the two yeah people to people connection i think i still think people buy from people and especially deals like larger than ten k i still think they're there has to be a conversation there unless you're like aws yeah right like awesome but i don't think everyone is so i think that people typically are gonna talk to people for sure are you doing a lot of the sales right now for all of that yeah it's all me so like it's all me and then i we're sales and cx and then mostly engineering were you doing sales at the end or at sand mendoza or the end no no my job like going back like this is a big shift wild like the yeah it's changed a lot you know it's like fighting for bandwidth more than budget which is just right right the yeah so i i did send so i said closest to the sales side there because i enjoyed the sales side so i think that that's that's always from my background i like the community side a lot in the partnership side a lot so i imagine like the first role i'll hire for will be a founding ae cool come and run sales and then i'll go focus on community and cx which is where i have more fun and what's what are you looking for in this age for your first sales it's higher like do they already even have to be using like what are you saying is these are the things that i need for somebody who's gonna be great for founding a yeah found so founding a one who's hungry one who definitely knows like like they want to learn i think it's easy to say you want to learn but the prove to me you wanna learn like maybe you a small company in college awesome cool like like something like that is great yeah someone else wants to come in and be like hey like just because like the way that i manage is probably wish most founders managers way is like hey great they'll spend a couple days going through everything cool you got it awesome luck limited rooms and like and like maybe you jump on the first call or so i can call with like the first time demo but you don't maybe it was too recording later yeah so i think like the if someone who's wants that like there's not a lot of like i don't like you know the job we got hit numbers you know like your deals are becoming andy you gotta do some prospecting so you gotta get hands dirty right and so i think like someone who's willing to do that and that's a hard find because yeah and usually it's somebody who is maybe they've been in a a company they they keep getting in trouble for breaking process that's the person i want right because like like they're like i don't understand why this is the process here cool come here and build the process you build this yeah think like that's that's that's the fun part and that's we had like a really early on aes and mendoza that really made the company and like okay my favorite thing is is he came in and he was like hey whether you guys are building i get it if i had a million in sales in a year i want one percent of the company right and we're like done let's go yeah and like so someone who gets motivated by that yeah like he hit it and he got it that's like which is awesome so i think like that's that that is true that's the kind of person that needs to be like an early that's the hunger somebody who's like setting in their own target and pursuing it yeah yeah can't go away there yeah like that's that's the dream advocate right there that's the dream mapping i mean like it's basically like someone who i know at some point will go build their own company right but like maybe i can you know train them in sales for a while from old trade stuff but they're also throwing skin in the game they're like i'm gonna give you twelve months of my life and i'm gonna hit this number and if i don't hit it you don't have to give me one percent but if i do then i want one percent that's yeah exactly fair that's absolutely i mean apps i think that should be asked for more if like if you're coming out as grounding anything at a startup up like you should pick a pie in this sky number metric and if i hit this then put something attached to it hundred percent i i just and like i think the equity is not as valuable as at once was i think that's i think another play if you're an early start person is like you should try to negotiate hey like when we do around of funding like i want the option of secondary right i think like that's i think those are important a clay who just raise a another crazy around like they they did a great job with that like they offer secondary it's like i think they're first like one hundred and two awesome yeah right and i think that like like celebrate the wins together especially with the founding team and i don't think equities as valuable as it once was so i think it's important to have other exit pass yeah that makes sense that's fair let's go beyond the curtain a bit so what are some of those habits that you use to kinda stay focused i know you talked about staying in shape trying to go to the gym all that kind of stuff like what are the things that you use to stay focused on this path and like commit yourself to to entrepreneurship like and do it again yeah so i i mean like the the getting in shape one and the talking like your partner and i'm having like like having a motivational speech that you know right need yeah i think some of it i mean they it's it's important to know whatever you're building you need have passion behind you like having to experience that problem right is important to have a founder who pushes you is that is a big one and like knows your ins and now knows when you give you feedback we're not to give you feedback right you're gonna have days where like you just pissed off and everything and like you need to know how you how you're gonna click back in like whatever it might be it might be like you just take the day and then you check the next day so i think that it's important to understand and like i didn't have that i would say the first time around like i know now like their days right just some not feeling it right and like you do and you go into the motions it's not helpful point and so that you you need to know when you need to check out and then check that again is really important and then to know your escapes whatever it might be if it's vacation if it's a weekend away if it's shut prime rib you never know right yeah whatever whatever whatever it might be i i think it's important to have that yeah i love that that's awesome when it comes to success in how you define that like what did it look like when you started s and watches does it look like no man so s we started that we were like we should make this a lifestyle business like this is like four kids so you'll like we're like we're like we should build with in bali and this had this thing real on its own right and this like then were like oh we're raise a little money and then we raise a lot of money right out went away quickly and so probably yeah yeah success there i would say was to build a company that was lasting like that made a made a profit and help people like solving problems but i think a lot of it was able as a successful business that helps you know people solve problems and build something that like you know like made it we're like we could pay ourselves like guess sorry to you i think it was important right now i would say it's there's a lot of like the data piece is so important we're building so it's making it easy for companies to just market better and it'd be really cool ways where they can hear our customers have to say yep i think is important right and then i think it's about to business that can scale i think right this one my plan is not to raise as much money this time around i wanna about a business that is easy to use and makes it easier for people to get information they're looking for i think reviews online are great i just don't think that i think they're gonna die i think you wanna have like face face conversations yeah so and hopefully we're at the beginning that make it easier people that's cool i like it it's a big bet this is like would would you say this is entire new category like i'm not familiar with many it is yeah it's which is tough i think they're like trying to figure out i it's a new way of selling because we're you're taking the reference of being at the end of the sales cycle to yeah beginning where the role right right that's about different people aren't used to doing that at all but the thing is people are used to doing it because a back channel true or they buy anything and so it's just taking that and making it more transparent yeah yeah that's fair and is the belief that at the end of the day if you folks can get this right in b to b in this world that brands will kind of be encouraging their customers to use go through slash experts to kind of facilitate that dialogue i think it should be a term in the contract hey i we'll give you a discount on your contract and that's cool you can be an expert for us i think that's that's that's go that's the goal right i think yeah there's so many different ways to use a lot of the tools that are out there and talking to peers that are already doing it i think it's helpful i think it not only helps the deal close but it also helps a customer more successful because no one wants sell shelf for these days so true i think it's important to be able to have that for people fast four ten years everything with slash experts has gone well things that and what's the what's the world look like then we have so much data like most people like i i think at that point like there's when you're thinking about buying a product like you're looking for there's like next to the book of demo button there's also a talk to a customer talk to an expert button on right most b2b sites should be great but i i think that's in the next couple years so my goal is if i look ten years out i would say that there's so much data that we've collected from these companies that you don't have to talk to somebody there's also a chatbot that's just learned that's everything from these phone calls that can just live there and answer any phone any question you might have or right to ten years so they actually just they know you already need this as sprouts starts that's it's as you code to a page it's like hey like you're looking for x because you've x right right i think like that's gonna be that's wild that's the vision of like have that much data in first party data on companies which should be the goal that would be awesome or we all might just be robots and all just working at hr hvac companies hey that's another and that's another possibility anyway that's fair getting served up by the the robots in the the restaurants all of that gets up it's gonna be a wild time when you look back at the last decade plus of your career and you look at the next wave of entrepreneurs i know you've seen a lot of early founders you are in those circles etcetera what's the advice going ahead like you've seen the social media arise you saw the immersion of that if you go way back you've seen the immersion of iphones and what that did for mobile etcetera this is that new thing with ai as somebody who's gone through some transformational moments in business what's the advice that you would give to somebody who's getting started at first time first time founder they're ready to build they want to create the next dos they want to be essentially you but they're just getting started they might not even have money yet mh how do they or how should they think about the next decade for their career to to come out of this thing winning yeah i mean i i think that a lot of us think have done to like how fast you can build and i think that that's because there's so many tools that help you build quickly so something that you used to take a week now takes an hour and so i think it's important to whatever your concept idea is that you're thinking about or think that there's a problem that you wanna sell bounce it off of like every friend league person and i'd be like do you think this is a real problem yeah they start reaching out the people that are in the space already and pitching the concept be careful about end day and all that stuff but i think like i think most most people is like like most founders love talking about new ideas right that aren't built yet and most will help you point in the right direction i like find those people or ask for those intros and like your idea like crazy if you and like i think that most founders will like are pretty cynical and they'll be like oh this is a bad idea right so or like which and if you get enough of those like maybe it's not great but you you get a lot of nose as a founder a lot like this isn't gonna work or his a feature it's not a platform right i think if you are truly believe in it as a founder and like you bounce around if you gotten something like maybe then like then go and build it and then get really good at the basics get really good at wire wire framing you can do easily now but you need to get great that you need to get good at how you track what your engineers are doing and you need to find a team of people and peers that you trust to help to build it with you right i think like that's i don't building a company on your own is cool i just don't think it works i think it's able to have peers to build it with i think it's easier so i think like like have a team that you trust to go and build it with too it makes complete sense brandon i've got one last question and it's a bit fast forwarding as well but as a a dad and you have a little one what's the message that you let's pretend they find this podcast someday let's pretend they are listening and they wanna hear something from debt what's the message that you would want to leave your little ones with for them to hear from you i think this so there was there's always the one that i was told as a kid that was you know follow your dreams so the yep you know the money will follow and all that jazz i don't know right i felt like right like i think that like that works i can you followed by yeah follow i think that would work if you had like success wear it then you wanna go follow your dreams right right i would say like to constantly improve cool would be like my one is like if there's something that you're like whatever form of business you choose mh and like be one of the best at that form of business and constantly improve to make sure that like you know whatever is you're working on you're getting better and better at which i think is important yeah and like you can do that easily there's ai that are out there there's all kinds of tools that you can use and if it's the future matters even more stuff so i think that's important yeah so whatever industry you're in that'd be the best at it or least strive you the best for it and then i think like the other one would like if you're miserable right you're making a lot of money that's cool but like there's a lot more like make a little bit bank little bit and then and they and think do something money you wanna yeah i think you don't have to stand a job because you're making a lot of money yeah say it for a while like right to the point where you're open the bag take care yeah exactly your yeah but like i imagine like loyalty is gonna be a really interesting thing with companies is like as companies like go through this next iteration of ai and yeah i don't know when when my daughter's is old enough to look at like is are we back to spending thirty years of the company any probably not i imagine there's more everyone's probably more like a consultant yeah so just be really good at the industry you choose i that's fair brad thank you so much for the tech really appreciate you jumping on this has been an absolute pleasure where can folks find more about you about slash experts to what you're doing yeah mean you check out slash experts dot com for sure then i'm only brad and young on all linkedin my name is spelled weirdly so your o d n so find me on there and i'll include some links so folks can find it as well again brad thank you so much have a great one and appreciate you jumping on thanks gotta hustle with the business hustle with the business

you don't become the world's most valuable woman sports franchise by accident angel city football club did it with a little help from hubspot when they started data was housed across multiple systems hubspot unified their website email marketing and fan experience to make it all in one platform this allowed their small team of three to build an entire website in just a matter of three days the results nearly three hundred and fifty new sign ups a week and three hundred percent database growth in over two years visit hubspot dot com to hear how hubspot can help you grow better let's zoom the launch of chat bt five is not just an upgrade it's a leap we're not just talking about a few tweaks here and there we're talking about a fundamental evolution in how humans and machines collaborate this version holds longer conversation handles much more complex tasks i've been looking into it and i've seen that it's the most advanced ai for health ever it can code design diagnose build you can use it as a tool it can reason there's even a demo that i saw where it builds a fully functioning game from scratch with one prompt no dev no meeting no designers no mock ups one prompt long gay now imagine what this does for a solo founder for a student a small business a marketer for you it shorten your timelines it eliminates bottlenecks and it should multiply productivity folks this is a tool that thinks with you this is a technology that is fundamentally changing the way we should operate as professionals especially in the white collar world today we're gonna talk with something that just happened something game changing folks chat pt five is here and if you are playing the long game you are in the right place let's talk so chat five has just dropped and this is an a marginal upgrade folks it's faster and smarter it's more useful it can hold contacts longer respond more naturally reason better and even build games like let's be very blunt anyone who thinks that ai is a had is absolutely being silly it's ridiculous to think that that is a idea worth holding on two folks we're so far gone whether you love it or haiti it's all secondary at this point right this is where things are getting really interesting i've seen a few case studies over the last little bit that are showing the power of chat five designers are creating full brand kits in the matter of seconds developers are qa their code founders are creating entire landing pages and go to market plans i don't know if they go to market plans they're that good but hey they're decent right i think the power is in the prompt students are using it to prep for interviews right i even seen someone use it for customer support like they are literally using it for everything folks let me say this loud for the people in the back this is the new baseline right this is why i've been getting into debates and arguments on the internet with so many people because i don't think that if you are a mediocre anything you have a foot to stand on mediocrity is no longer going to be allowed if you are mediocre at your job if you are mediocre in your craft you will be replaced and if you want to establish mediocrity the bare minimum is to use ai because ai does everything mediocre right it does it at the average level and kind of with the roll to chat five it might have got a little bit better than that right here's what blows my mind still so many people are skeptical still clinging onto to that idea that chat l le the ai can't write content can't create a good story while i'll tell you this you can put up a post right now today using a tool like distribution dot ai you can use this to take your podcast take your youtube videos and it can write a few linkedin posts for you and they will be written fast in your voice faster and better than most marketers could it's really like a lot of these folks who are nay saying it's just hype are kinda like someone standing on a beach watching a sun tsunami come in and if me has just a big wave folks this is an optional avoiding ai in twenty twenty five is like avoiding the internet back in two thousand and five you don't have to go full doom right you don't have to completely pivot your life i don't want you if you have a successful career if you're two years away from retirement hustle daily show hosted by juliet bennett r robert litter ben berkeley and martin is brought to you by the hubspot podcast the audio destination for business the hustle daily brings you a healthy dose of aaron off beaten informative takes on business and tech groups most recently it broke down the news ahead everybody talking that is meta complete blitz on recruitment and hiring all across many industries poaching people left right and center from every big ai company you can think of and how their acquisition of scale ai might have been one of the best chess places chess pieces to move in recent history folks if you haven't listened to recent hustle daily episodes you definitely wanna check it out listen to the hustle daily show wherever you get your podcast you don't need to change everything but you should pay attention because this is the biggest shift i think in social media and the people who embrace it they're going to build faster think bigger and execute matter with fewer people fewer resources than ever before profitability should be easier for everyone because you now have tools that can do things they used to take people they used to cost hundreds of dollars now can be done for pennies on pennies with a prompt so here's the move folks here's the move that i'm playing not only am i building ai tools like distribution dot ai i'm encouraging every foundation i'd have foundation to embrace technology like this if you are writing an email ask the ai that we created internally that talks about our best practices for follow ups and communications that is clear that we trained and ask it is this a good email before you send it upload your fathom recording which is one of the ai tools that we use to kinda keep track of our sales calls and then use our l tool to analyze your pitch understand if you made a right proposal get feedback for yourself on how you communicated it all of this creates a a flywheel a feedback through ai and if the ai is trained on best practices on principles that we believe that we think are true then the only thing that can happen is improvement so i encourage all of you to play with it explore it learn it build with it when you see chat five go live don't say i'll try that later try it now this technology is game changing i have seen firsthand people who are willing to take into consideration the fact that they are in control of their own growth and learn things be able to end up with a whole new trajectory of their career in their life and i'm living proof of it i've done a time and time again i geek out about something i go deep something i become excellent at it i learn it well and then it opens up new opportunities and i want you to do the same if you are just getting started you can't get your foot in the door if you are trying to figure out how you're going to thrive in this world don't play the game of woe with me in the world is against me play the game as holy smokes look the technology that's at my fingertips i'm gonna use this to become great folks were at the edge edges something massive and with five i'm telling you i'm telling you i've been using this tool for the last couple hours this is just the beginning and the same way that the internet mobile changed everything ai is changing at all too the folks who win are gonna be the ones who know most the folks who win are gonna be the ones who experiment the most who tinker the most who ship the most folks if you're a marketer a ceo a creator developer just get involved just play with it just try something build something while you can and if you're playing the long game you need to start playing with this now gotta hustle with the business hustle with the business

you don't become the world's most valuable woman sports franchise by accident angel city football club did it with a little help from hubspot when they started data was housed across multiple systems hubspot unified their website email marketing and fan experience to make it all in one platform this allowed their small team of three to build an entire website in just a matter of three days the results nearly three hundred and fifty new sign ups a week and three hundred percent database growth in over two years visit hubspot dot com to hear how hubspot can help you grow better make money while you sleep sounds like a dream right depending on who you ask it's either the ultimate goal or an absolute complete total scam today i'm gonna separate the myths from the truth when it comes from making money twenty four seven online without trading your time your energy and your effort for every single dollar spoiler alert though it's not as said it and forget it as a lot of the guru on the internet are gonna tell you and have you believe but yeah no question it is achievable if you approach it like a strategist and not like this lottery ticket that you happen to stumble upon that gives you paycheck after paycheck after paycheck in this episode i'm gonna break down internet money what actually works what absolutely doesn't and how you can build income streams that continue to work for you while you're not folks if you're playing the long game then you're in the right place welcome to the ross simmons show alright let's start with what passive income is not it's not going on and finding a forty nine ninety nine drop shipping course and watching six figures magically appear into your bank account it's not just sending off handful of tweets about all of these different products that you see on amazon with affiliate links and calling it a business it's not as simple as publishing a single ebook online and expecting generational wealth to come out of it the idea that you could push a button and let the internet do the rest is in absolute fantasy the idea that you can make money while you sleep with a work without investment without infrastructure without time and energy upfront to build the thing that is going to provide that is an absolute myth but here's the truth you absolutely can earn money while you sleep but you have to build the machine first and that machine takes three simple things one time two strategy three systems let's talk about what actually works today i'm gonna dive into five real paths to scalable income while you sleep these are five real ways that you can earn an income earn money even if it's just like side hustle cash which is how i started i just wanted to work my nine to five but make enough money on the side that i could use to invest that i could use to travel and experiment and try new things with that cash if you wanna do that here are five real paths that you can tap into the first one is the first taste that i got into this world which was digital products think ebooks online courses templates notion dashboards back in the day slide decks and swipe files course materials series of training programs you make this thing once and you can sell it over and over and over but you have to make sure that these things solve real problems and you need to make sure that these things are actually in demand one of the biggest mistakes that people make myself included are creating things that they think are valuable without actually validating whether or not it is valuable i created a guide to help people get un stock because i thought people were stuck and thought and that they knew that they were stuck because of their own mental roadblocks the things sold like forty five dollars worth of sales it was a disaster however when i created a resource that was essentially an ultimate guide to side hustle with over a hundred different side hustle that you can start for relatively low money it was like wild and that is what you want to find you want to find something that sells successfully right the key is really rooted in the idea of finding something that's solves a problem and the tools out there today to make this happen is is so much more easier and readily available than it used to be you can use things like gum pod k all of these tools make it very simple to sell products right i would encourage you to think about how you could set up an information product that is valuable that people would want and sell them i see people selling these things on sites like etsy now and they're making a killing if you go to etsy and you type in templates you'll find a ton of templates that people are selling for t shirt printing for birthday wishes birthday cakes birthday candles birthday card designs all of these things you could take this a step further right like there are certain platforms that actually empower their creators to create templates that are then sold through their market place for example shopify if you go on shopify if you know how to build a shopify website design and you create something that's beautiful and that people want and is new and innovative people might buy your shopify design the shopify is gonna distribute through their store to e commerce companies that they pay you to get access to your template same thing with wordpress you can go on some of the sites like ps templates and sell photoshop templates you can design your own brushes and sell those there are so many things folks that you can sell today online if i was to go back in a time right i'm just getting started i have no idea where to start i'm looking at my hobbies i'm looking at my interest and i'm gonna ask myself what am i really good at what am i pretty good at and let's pretend that i am really good at fantasy football i'm probably going to start to invest time and energy and creating a draft guide for fantasy football players now let's say you don't even know what i'm talking about let's switch this up let's say i'm in the world of golf i'm good i'm scratch really good right i'm going to create a guide for improving your backs swing i'm going to create a guide to pudding i'm going to sell these things but you have to do work to be good enough to sell them you also have to do work to be able to promote them so they get in front of the right eyeballs yes you can take shortcuts with paid media to distribute them and amplify them but you have to put in the work to make sure that there's a landing page and that there's that landing page is speaking to the pains that people have when they are golfing when they are playing fantasy sports or here's a brilliant one that i came across just a few years ago i have this i found this facebook group that is dedicated to helping parents early parents teach their kids how to like eat solid foods because everybody gives them baby food and there's this whole movement around solid foods i think it's called baby led weeding or something like that and in this group there's like hundreds of thousands of parents who had a baby paid this person for course and the course is just delivered over and over and over again and this person is running webinars in the group talking about baby love eating and how to give the babies avocados and how to give the baby sweet potatoes and they have done this for like six years straight selling hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of product to every time every single time there's a new wave of parents which is every day people buying this stuff alright that's one path here's another path evergreen content with affiliate monetization this is something that i wish i did better throughout my career we've i've done it well me and the team have executed it well but i think it could be a much bigger piece of the pie as it relates to our revenue and it's the idea that you create in assets blog posts youtube videos even podcast episodes like this where you create high intent content that gets shared and talks about things that people buy right so if i'm a blogger maybe i write a blog post both the ten tops social media tools that you need to use in twenty twenty eight twenty twenty nine twenty thirty blah blah blah blah blah and throughout that i have links going back to a bunch of different websites that i have affiliate relationships with so if somebody book clicks on that link buys i get a kickback i see this on instagram right now with some of the top influencers and they are absolutely crushing it i seen this one person they put up an instagram post it was them talking about a t shirt and they said click this link and if you if you want this t click this link and it took you to a shop and if you add that to your cart as well as anything else to your cart that that person just told you to go order and then new check they get a kickback a percentage of that transaction sent right to them it's brilliant right they can do like literally thousands of dollars a day by simply putting up a post and telling people to buy a thing i know this because i've done this i know this because i've seen this when we were early with instagram household grunt i could put up a single post on our story and say folks i want you to buy this thing and i would see immediately multiple transactions start to take place right now imagine a world where you want this to happen but is not connected to your time how do you do that how can you make it happen you create evergreen assets assets that people will consume while you're sleeping while you're sleeping people can watch a youtube video while you're sleeping people can watch a youtube a youtube short while you're sleeping people can read a blog post people can listen to a podcast all of these things happen while you're sleeping and if they're clicking on your affiliate links and then checking out of their cart you win you get paid right that is how you can make money in your sleep here's the third way saas or membership subscriptions you build these experience that get people to give you their credit card alongside a monthly subscription or annual and you will get predictable recurring revenue every single time make no mistake this is a lot of work right i've built saas products i'm running saas products distribution dot ai i've ran membership subscriptions our newsletter for foundation was once a paid subscription and with this comes a requirement and necessity as a brand and as an organization to ensure that you are delivering value through your offering and that you were staying up to date with the expectations of your subscribers hustle daily show hosted by juliet bennett r robert litter ben berkeley and martin is brought to you by the hubspot podcast network the audio destination for business the hustle daily brings you a healthy dose of e aaron off beaten informative takes on business and tech moves most recently it broke down the news ahead everybody talking that is meta complete blitz on recruitment and hiring all across many poaching people left right and center from every big ai company you can think of and how their acquisition of scale ai might have been one of the best chess places chess pieces to move in recent history folks if you haven't listened to recent hustle daily episodes you definitely wanna check it out listen to the hustle daily show wherever you get your podcast people are paying monthly for continued access to a software or they are paying monthly for continued access to data through your memberships or access to other members within your communities this is where that whole philosophy that is starting to show up more more online around like can you run your own school can you run your own membership group like micro versions of like the eos the y pos of the world are starting to show up and at a smaller scale if you can make a lot of money doing that right i have some friends who run these chat groups on whatsapp and in discord where people just pay like three four five dollars a month and all they have to do to manage this community is to share their ideas to share insights to provide tips on things that they care about and it's working it works really well the fourth thing is content licensing this is something that i over the last i'd say two years have really started to lean more into and i think there's a world where i do more in this lane but i have yet to it's the licensing of content so if you create content for a specific niche frameworks decks videos etcetera you can license that content the ability to use that content to platforms to schools to start to agencies to organizations that want to use that information in those resources to educate their teams so instead of trading your time for one off deliverables you're getting repeat revenue from intellectual property so for example over the last few years i've created content and some of that content has been licensed by organizations who want it to be used internally to educate their teams and they will pay me annually who can keep teaching new people who walk through their doors who use their websites to use their platforms access to that information or they have paid me to create an asset that they wanna run ads on and promote and amplify and they can pay me a licensing fee to use that asset right alright now the fifth one is the one that i have him actually talked about too publicly but it's one that i love and this is investing in income producing assets right this is a very real form of passive income especially if you do dividend stocks but there's other ways that you can do it too such as rental properties reits all of these things can drive income through an asset you can build a profitable niche site not as easy as it used to be i had one that was in the world of plant based food it did well but the google algorithm killed it this path requires capital right like you need money to make money in some of these situations like you can't it's always cool to hear people talking about oh you should just get an airbnb you should just buy some rental properties but you need money to do those things so before you go down that path of course secure the bag and do the other things alright so let's say you're convinced that you're willing to work you're willing to put in the time you're willing to build the systems and you are willing to do what is necessary to actually make money while you sleep say you're sold what's next what here's what you wanna do the first thing that you have to do is take a step back and realize that again this needs to solve a problem no matter what you're selling digital products affiliate links courses it doesn't matter it has to solve a problem what problem are you solving for people and i get it not all problems are created equal it doesn't have to be this grand problem don't get into this idea that it has to i have to save the world no the problem for some people is they don't know what to wear so you can teach them what to wear the problem for some people is they don't know what type of glasses would go well with their shirts the problem for some people is they they don't know how to maintain their beard some people's problem might be that they don't know whether or not they should drink electrolytes in the morning or in the evenings folks problems are plentiful you just have to figure out where you believe you can be seen as an expert and be an authority and then communicate that to your audience and then the second step the second step is to build a system a system that allows this to drive revenue while you sleep what does that mean it means you might wanna consider asking yourself like can we optimize this site for search can we tap into tools like hubspot and maybe like use that as our crm to build a site around this platform so we can send you emails and automate that can we create evergreen social funnels can we incorporate chatbot bots into our experience that are rooted with ai so i can sleep but my ai bot is communicated this is what you want to think about and then the third thing you wanna do is test experiment please please please please please don't spend months building a twelve hour course don't spend twelve months building a hundred and fifty page book go small start with a little pilot a little project that might take you an afternoon or a weekend to create and then send it out to as many people as possible let's see if you can sell ten copies if you sell ten reach out to the next hundred people the next fifty people next twenty people see if you can sell an additional twenty and then after you have them bought in get feedback and if that feedback is positive go big go big make that thing great create a full course create something that is going to be so good that you know that when these people get their hands on that they're gonna have no choice but to think to themselves that they got value right and then validate this validate this by making sure that after you create something great you distribute it relentlessly every single piece of content that you create needs to be spread folks you do not wanna make the mistake of assuming that people will find your content you have to distribute it like wildfire right that is key you're gonna amplify it on x you're gonna amplify it on linkedin you're gonna do all of those things i wanna share with you another example of something that i did with that side hustle guy that i had built for foundation we built this digital product and we use gum road to promote it and we had this model that was very unique it was a pay what you want model some people paid five some people paid too some people paid twenty dollars one person paid two hundred and fifty dollars one product one instagram post real cash every single time it went live right but the account took time to work time to build we had to build it into an account with over a hundred and fifty thousand people that's not a snap your fingers and it happens but we put in that work and then we can monetize that audience right this is the power distribution here's what i need you all to understand passive income is real but it's not free it's not instant and it's probably not gonna be easy at the beginning if you've already built up a following of real fans of real people who care about what you say great you might be able to get the returns now but if you don't you have to put in the time now to build your audience build connections and add value to the world so people will be okay with giving you value back later and guess what even passive income does require a little bit of upkeep right you've got update links you gotta change data you gotta respond to customers issues you gotta deal with refunds you have to evolve with your niche your industry but it's still a ridiculously powerful form of leverage you're not directly trading hours for dollars you're building an asset an asset that compounds with time i have blog post today that will make me money next week i have content that i'm sure will sell over the course of the next twenty four hours and help put more money in my bank account folks you are building assets that compound and that is how you unlock freedom that's how you scale beyond your calendar and that's how you can do the things that you want on the side thank you so much for checking with this episode as always i hope i was able to provide some insights against the hype of this world of passive income and if you have somebody on your team on your that's your friend right your colleagues your peers one of your family members who are really struggling and stuck in this hustle harder or hustle harder mindset which i'm off where i love hustle don't give me wrong but i'm not like i don't want people to burn themselves out i want them to understand that intention is real and value can be extracted by just doing things differently and online payments is a real thing if they're in that send us to them please let them know there's another way but it takes attention you don't need twenty income streams start with one make it useful make it scale distribute it forever and make it lost thanks are listening see you on the internet gotta hustle with the business hustle with the business

so you wanna know the simplest principle that'll change your relationships your life your team and probably your career potential be the first to reach out it sounds small but it's hard it's not easy it's a great starting point for trust progress in building real connection but it is not easy it's easy to get caught up in your own head to talk yourself out being the first to reach out talk yourself out of being the person who responds and reaches out to somebody when you see that they just announced that they have a new job a new career that they've shifted things in their life it takes a lot of courage to reach out because you have all of these ideas in your head around what are they gonna think are they gonna think i an motive are they expecting me to really like am i committing to a conversation after this right and because of all of this because of all this so many people so many people just struggle with it we wait for someone else to go first to check it to ask a hard question to we wait to see if they're going to happen to give us feedback on this thing that we want feedback on and in waiting growth opportunities connection bond relationship and all starts to slip by whether you're leading a company managing a team or building a partnership or relationship waiting on others to make the first move kills your momentum it can negatively impact your culture and it can slow down your ability to operate as a leader with excellence today we're gonna talk about the importance of regional first whether we're talking about conflict or collaboration or just everyday connection folks being the first to communicate can reshape the way that everyone feels the way that everyone interacts and the way people respond to you i hope to share a few stories with you around how by pursuing that first touch that first calms that first email that that first follow up in doing it with less fear fundamentally change my career my life and even some relationships folks this is in about grand gestures or performative leadership it's just about showing up early clearly and consistently for your folks for your people for your team and what happens when you do folks if you're playing the long game you're in the right place welcome to the ross simmons show i wanna start by diving into why this matters you see most people wait most people wait for someone else to start a conversation most people wait for someone else to share whether or not they have a problem most people wait for a mentor to reach out to them to get support most people will wait for a direct report to actually ask them for feedback instead of prompting it even they even though they know that they had a challenge most people will wait for a colleague to apologize most people will wait for a partner to fix something that they did most people will wait for somebody to read their mind and somehow be able to have an electric transition between their mind and someone else so they can figure it out in that waiting the potential the trust the relationship the connection the feedback dies tension investors assumptions are made bridges never get built and trust erode you sit there and you think to yourself over and over again about this problem that you might have with someone that you never actually articulated to them you sit there and you faster and you wait and you wonder why they're not reaching out to you to give you some advice they said that they would be your mentor but they're not reaching out to you for advice why aren't your direct reports asking you for feedback why why aren't you getting a response from somebody who you've reached out to a few weeks ago but never got anything back why are are they ignoring you what's going on well maybe they're busy maybe they're living life or maybe they think that you are so busy and there's a vicious loop of expectations happening silence is one of those things that gets misinterpreted time and time again in most times when it does get interpreted it gets misinterpreted negatively so when do you step up when do you go first as many times as you can folks when you make the decision that you're gonna go first you create movement you create momentum you build trust faster you shift the room you own the room you own the dialogue you own the relationship and you own your life people take cues from those who act first the person who is willing to act is the person who i believe will win i've never met somebody in my entire life who is ridiculously successful that does not know the importance of taking the first move when they see a problem they act when they see a challenge they act when they see an issue they act they are action oriented and reaching out first is in action that you need to embody every single day don't step away from challenges don't step away from the messi of a project the messi of a relationship the messi of feedback be the first person to reach out requesting it be the first person to reach out and give it people take their cues from those who act first and that queue of action becomes contagious leaders don't wait for perfect timing oh i can't give this person in this feedback right now because i know they're stressed i know i listen listen i i have all full empathy for everybody i know that there can be stressful moments you can have a bad call you can have a bad day but why would i allow someone who is having a rough time continue with that rough time for the next week because they don't know how i felt about them doing something that was off that's horrible that's a bad thing to do you're going to make this person suffering confusion and in silence for multiple days simply because you do not wanna address the problem be the person who reaches oh but it doesn't end there some of this is internal folks right like some of this is an internal issue that you are willing to suffer instead of just be the person that reaches up what i mean by that is very often do we have relationships we have connections we have people we care about people that we work with people who we just are no friends family whoever that are in our lives and then something happens and we think we think and tell ourselves that because this thing has happened that person might not want to talk to me that person might be ignoring my message that person might be avoiding me because of stories then i'm going to tell myself when in reality they're just busy they've got a lot on their plate they didn't see your first mail they missed your text they actually wrote you back a massive message in the text but they didn't hit send they wrote you a massive email and it's sitting in their drafts and they forgot to hit send they actually poured out their heart to you on a voice mail but it didn't save on your phone or some variation right just reach joe just do the things that you want to right remember you can't wait for perfect timing and you can't just sit there and suffer because you're unwilling to be the person who reaches out first leaders don't wait for perfect timing they created it they shape it and they own it so let's talk about what this looks like in real life not dairy practice let's talk about the micro check if you notice you jump on a call with someone and they crush it they give a talk they are presenting to a client they're thriving they're winning they're they are doing everything right most leaders will allow that greatness to happen and not say a word it's just like a flat straight up expectation what i like to do is a micro checking and it's typically publicly if you crush something if you do well i want to praise you i wanna celebrate you and i wanna give you your father's in front of the team i want people to know that that that what you did is what i want everyone to be able to do i want everyone to embody that but it doesn't just go with the good folks sometimes that micro check is when things aren't right if you notice that somebody's energy is off if you notice that somebody didn't perform as well as you know they could i'm not afraid checking in i'm not afraid to check in i don't think any should be afraid to check in if you've built up the connection with somebody if you've built up the trust the report the the connection is there just reach out to them you got a second i want i wanna know are you good that that didn't seem like you what's going on how can i help i noticed that this happened on that call you did it this way the last time what happened here right you'd be shocked by how much of a connection you can build by simply showing people that you see them by simply checking in to hear whether or not they're good or if they need help or if they need support to show that you're there those simple things can have a massive massive impact a few months back i had a call again they were presenting to a client and they didn't say much but they were the the host and i was like this is fascinating to me like on one call they owned the room then on this call they were kinda passive and just like sitting in the the corner not really saying much so i checked in with them and i was like look you're you're the host of these meetings you run these meetings you need to own that room just like you would as if i was walking into your home and you were like hosting me the next call i seen an entire different side of that person they showed up with great energy great fives own the room better than i could asking questions sharing personal stories looking at the camera as if it was like a human sitting in front of them this was all done virtually and i was like that is why you do the micro check that is why you be the first to reach out you don't sit i could have sat for a week or month thinking myself this person never shows up this person is never like showing up with the energy and host mentality what's going on i could have sat there with that in my brain not realizing that by just sharing it with them we would have a three sixty shift in behavior that would ultimately lead to that person crushing it time and time and time again folks that's what it's all about don't be afraid to reach you alright second one conflict resolution reach first and react less look this one is tough this one is tough if you're in a disagreement with someone you might be in a very tense moment and instead of just waiting for it to smooth it over i personally hate going into weekends with like said problems listen we need to talk i need to we need to crack this we need to figure out we need to make sure that we're on the same page around where we're going from here i just wanna have a quick check can we can we discuss it and then you get it on the phone you jump on the phone whether this is a partner whether this is a client whether this is your own relationship with somebody that you love like you need to embrace this idea of making space for an honest conversation where you can share transparent how you feel you wanna hear how they feel and then come to an agreement around what the next steps are to ensure that this relationship can still move in a positive way again be the person that reaches out to make sure that this happens and prompt it have the discussion have the discussion okay i just wanted to jump on because i know things got tense earlier this morning we had that conversation i'm feeling okay about it but i wanna feel great about it and the best way that i could feel great about this is if me and you can leave this call today with clarity and alignment on where we go from here and that's where you go you figure it out you work together to figure that out alright now here's another thing that i would say is an actual real life exercise on reaching out first if you want someone's input this is in the lane of like mentorship and growth if you want someone's input don't wait to be the chosen one just tell them tell them hey i love what you have done on this this and this i'd love your advice on this situation and then break it down for them if this is someone that you already have a connection with just ask the question prompt the question if you need to if it's a short question ask them on x ask them on linkedin just ask them publicly so they can respond to the rest of the world so everybody can get the free advice but if it's somebody on a personal level that's in your emails that's in your inbox or a mentor that you meet up with regularly don't wait for them to send you a text with all of the answers if you've got their phone number ask the question there's a few folks who will send me a question via text and i love getting the messages i never feel like they're annoying ever if if someone is looking for mentorship i'm working with them i'm talking to them i've taken them and i'm said okay i'm willing to invest in you my time and energy because i want you to win i think you can win and they text me and sure sometimes they'll write me an essay and i won't get back to them for another day or two but when i do get the time to get back to them i try to add as much value as possible because they know that they need to be specific with the request and the questions and they can't just be like waiting i'm gonna wait for roster to give me insight no high level operators high level professionals high level people want you to take the initiative to reach out every connection starts with the reach right i am saying this out loud to you and i am okay saying this publicly i need to do this a little bit better i've got a few people in my book phone book right now i can think of like four who have given me some ridiculously great valuable advice over the last half of the year that i have acted on and have gotten some great results from and i should check in with them and i'm going to i'm going to make the commitment and i'm saying it loud that i'm going to connect with those individuals over the next few weeks by sending them an update on how business is going how many changes i've made what those changes have looked like based off of their feedback their suggestions and then ask them some questions but what they would do with certain situations that i too am facing and see how they come back talking too loud hosted by chris evans just brought to you by the hubspot podcast network the audio destination for professionals on this podcast chris savage w as ceo and lattice talk takes you inside the minds of entrepreneurs as they share informative hilarious and some of the most challenging aspects of building more human brands most recently he had my friend grand on to talk about what the end of traffic means for you this is an episode that i strongly recommend that you check out in particular it's episode off from may twenty seventh strongly encourage you to give it a listen listen to talking to loud wherever you get your podcast every connection starts with you making the decision that you're gonna send the message first so do it and then we have partnerships right partnerships are in my opinion one of those things that you don't know will translate into something if you would leverage this concept of being the first one to reach out if you are the person that reaches out first you reach out without expectations and karma comes back to you good things come back to you you will create your own lock by doing this if you're building things a blog a youtube channel a podcast if you have an instagram account that's targeting a certain audience don't wait until you have a hundred and fifty thousand followers to start building relationships with other creators other businesses or other organizations to send them a note i love what you're building i see you i respect it if we can ever collab i'd love to you'll get a message back you might get ignored right like you might a hundred percent get left on red that's okay that's okay but you're never gonna get traction by not writing them so you might as well try and you know what you can do in a few weeks when your growth goods up when your followers gets up and your credibility goes up checking again but make it specific one of the worst things that ai has created in the industry is bag outreach to people that doesn't actually add value to their life and shows that you haven't done the real research i get so many messages from people who are just saying things like hey ross simmons like first of all no one says hey ross simmons you never would reached to out to someone with both their first and last name in a outreach it's clearly ai i i'm wondering how things are as the ceo and founder of foundation marketing inc services blah blah like what are we talking about they're throwing in the ink no one would say that right so these are little things that you can see in the email over that people are providing that demonstrates like you're not even trying so what i encourage you to do folks is build the relationships see them put up a post send that post to them and say this one resonated with me see them put up a story send them a message to it and if you have multiple over time i know it might feel like oh i'm a bit of a fan i'm a fan i'm grouping no no no you're building a relationship because eventually you're gonna break through that door and they're gonna say oh wow this person and i have a connection they've been talking to me a few times they've been a fan for a while they've been supporting my content they bought my book they bought my guide this is somebody i'm gonna give attention to right start to do outreach with without expectation internally if you are running your own company you need to be the person communicating regularly your role is the chief communication officer you have to communicate all the time communicate what's going on in the organization relentlessly all the time one of the hardest things about being a ceo is knowing that there are stories and messages and ideas out there amongst people that i have no control over and some of those stories are not always true sometimes people are saying things and talking about things that have absolutely no connection back to reality and that as the leader is your fault because you haven't articulated clearly what is actually going on within your walls you haven't clearly shown the information that people are looking for and as such they are trying to interpret all of the different things that are happening around them and use it to inform a decision on whether or not they should think one thing or the next this is dangerous territory i think back probably about three years ago when i was running foundation and there was a lot of conversations internally around what was going on within new york i stepped back big time on the communication side and let a lot of the leaders run the comps and the comps was good i'm not saying it wasn't but the team didn't know what i was thinking and i assumed that they would understand what i was thinking through everyone else not true people want to know directly from me what i am thinking what is the vision of the company where are we going who are we focused on what is our north star where is our what is our objectives that is important being vulnerable is powerful talking and creating space for others to show up fully is important sets the stone the tone for the organization and i believe it's true i believe you have to as the leader talk about it the challenges talk about the issues talk about the problems talk about where you need help and it can help you win alright so this principle be the first to reach out is something that i picked up from my grandmother way back in the day i can remember my grandmother picking up her phone and calling all the people in the neighborhood every day like just daily picking up the phone checking it with people she would pull out her phone book can she would just call people to check with them and it was wild right she had some amazing relationships with people all through at the neighborhood and it was because she was always the first person to reach out people love her for it right and as a leader that type of culture is what i tried to create and there's a few reasons why one communication is faster people don't hesitate people don't spiral they just reach out they hop on that quick call they drop that quick i might be wrong but no right like the feedback loops tighten and mis alignment gets caught way faster communication at a rapid speed and a consistent flow is so so important right and when you lead with this type of openness where you're sharing your being transparent about everything you're feeling everything you're thinking your team will marry it right i've seen this time and time again when i show exactly what i'm thinking and i share that with everyone i get it back right you need to do this trust compounds folks another thing is that you create a culture that is truly focused on problem solving you don't want people in your organizations to hide from problems right they raise them early they show up with solutions and they know they won't be punished for speaking up we do this survey at foundation now that just asks people like what are we doing that is absolutely stupid and i think the survey actually uses those words because we want that unfiltered feedback directly from the team and we get it we get it and the great thing about that is when we hear things in those surveys we can address them and articulate what is actually happening or we can use and say yeah we are kinda being silly on this one let's fix that right let's change that let's improve that here's how we're gonna solve that problem that culture of being focused on problem solving starts at the top you need to lean into problems and try to solve them and be the person that reaches out to get the insights to solve the problems and help you when and ultimately if you do this my hope and my goal with a lot of this is to realize within my company that i'm going to attract the right type of people i'm going to attract people who take initiative who want to take autonomous ownership over problems and they are going to thrive in a culture where it is good to pursue the problem pursue the challenge pursue the difficult conversation so you can win as a leader as a person in your career those are the people you want those are the people i want i don't want people who just sit on the sidelines and wait for someone to give them feedback i want people who crave feedback who crave direction who crave space for them to ask questions to address conversations and to reach out and to be the model for what it means to lead from a spot where you are reaching o first folks the best leaders that i've ever worked with and i've worked with some of the largest companies in the world some of the top ceos in the world some of the top marketing executives in the world people who run multi billion dollar market cap companies people who have had multi million dollar exits whether it's a saas company a startup up an agency owner or whatever the best ones the best leaders they have no patients for waiting they reach out first to offer support they own the hard conversations early they check in even when it's uncomfortable they'll follow up without being prompted they say i was wrong without waiting to be blamed they lead with care empathy while focusing on high performance in not ego and they don't do it just to win points they do it because they understand a core truth of business and life that not a lot of people realize yes infrastructure around us the tools the technologies the buildings the roads the streets all of that infrastructure is important but in real life when it comes down to it the most important infrastructure that a human can build and establish is the relationships that we have with other people and the experiences we go through together whether we're talking about your teams your partners your customers your relationships your families your friends your colleagues your peers all of these things are held together by relationships you can have strategy you can have talent you can have capital but if the relationships aren't rooted in trust they're not strong then it will be very easy for nothing to hold tight so you have a choice you can wait you can watch or you can lead you can be the one who reaches out first so here's the challenge that i wanna leave you with on the roster show we like to play the long game the roi of reaching out today might pay you dividends five years from now ten years from now twenty years from now where are you waiting when you could be reaching up is there a direct report who's disengaged a partner relationship that is kinda cool but you don't really know why is there a mentor that you haven't thanked a teammate that you need to recognize or a customer you need to hear from or a partner in your real life that you need to maybe spend some time with be the first don't wait for permission don't wait for perfection don't wait for crystal clear alignment timing or the right words to be said or the perfect feelings that you need to have to do it just reach out and it starts with you it's simple it's powerful but i'm telling you it can change everything thank you so much for checking out the ross simmons show i hope you'll take my advice seriously and reach out to somebody that is in your life that you need to have a conversation with vote something good or bad doesn't matter but i hope you are the first to reach out thank you again for checking out the episode i hope you enjoyed to feel free to share it with somebody maybe that person that you need to connect with you can send them a link this is the ross simon show and i will see you on the internet later gotta hustle with the business hustle with the business

it's never been easier to create a blog post it's never been easier to create a interactive calculator it's never been easier to create a youtube video it's never been easier to create a podcast but it has also never been harder to get any of those things in front of the right people at the right time that's because of the power of noise we are surrounded by noise there's more blog posts written there's more tweets sent there's more linkedin posts there's more instagram stories that more grand rails there's more tiktok rails there's more questions on core where replies on reddit more posts on pinterest more shares on youtube there's more more more more content than ever before now i would never look myself in the mirror and say hey roger the king of distribution but the fine folks over at unconventional mindset called me that when they press publish on an interview where we dove in deep to discuss how you can get your story seen by the right people and that's exactly where i'm gonna plug you into i'm gonna plug you into a conversation that i had with my friends over at the young unconventional mindset and if you haven't checked them out on youtube i strongly encourage you to do so they awesome of what they do they produce great content they tell great stories and in this episode we're gonna dive into distribution about repurposing about creating content versus distributing content and a whole lot more talk about overcoming anecdotes talk about striving for excellence investing in startups and what's next for me let's dive in ross yeah thank you so much for being here with the podcast you know this more than than most people i'm sure like gets a lot of work like others you have to get prepared i have to get guests if you have guests you have to do the editing then after the you gotta do the show flows the notes you gotta make maybe blog posts then you gotta put it up on social media so there's so much work that needs to be done and when i was first starting this podcast i was online and i was like i need to i need help this is too much stuff right and i came across your video of how to like distribute and repurpose your content that's awesome and i saw that i'm like this is exactly what i this is amazing and then i'm like was this guy right so so then i look at i'm like oh my goodness this guy it's got a marketing company oh he he's running that that business yeah just distribution yeah you're running out i'm like this guy i gotta talk to this guy yeah yeah so you know fast forward a few months here you are we are but yeah i'm so happy to have you grab me behalf thanks for having me do your thing on youtube you're crushing and i love love the work you've been putting known and happy to be here oh i appreciate that's amazing okay so like i know you in my sec we got your book here this sounds amazing i'm sure we'll get into it but for people that don't know who you are you just describe a little bit about who you are and what you do yeah so my name is ross simmons and i'm the founder and entrepreneur i've been creating businesses since pretty much when i was like fifteen i started so i've been an entrepreneur in my whole life i run a company called foundation so we do content mark getting for a lot of wide ranging companies everything from your canvas and mailchimp of the world all the way through to up and coming startups and scrappy companies helping in them scale their content marketing engines we do it with higher ed as well as well as like a few b2c industries and stuff like that so that's the main bread and butter in addition to that i run a company called distribution dot ai which is a software helping marketers distribute podcast blog post youtube videos all of those things and i'm a entrepreneur who's zen at in a bunch of startups ups i've got a bunch of different companies i'm the author of create wants distribute forever i'm a dad of three i enjoy kombucha but i don't know that's it that's me i do a lot of different things yeah so many things are that's amazing that that's crazy i could i could take this in so many different directions then why don't we just focus a little bit on this entrepreneur lens i cool start let's do it when like i was doing research on you and you had started a fantasy football i think it's say logger one and from there i think you end up making like thousands of dollars on post or whatever kind of discovering this talent for for marketing distribution right but did that gene for entrepreneurship start there or was it something that was always like you always kind of had i always wanted to work for myself i'm one of those guys who doesn't like get being told what to do it like really frustrate me to be told what to do so i always wanted to work for myself and my grandfather ran a paving company and i had a front seat at being able to see like the flexibility and control that he had over his life and that always resonated with me i was like man grande is doing it right when he wakes up he goes to bed at and night he can do whatever he wants in between and i was like that type of control is what i want in my life so that's gonna be what i eventually lead down towards so in high school i ran a do company into my like locker where i was selling du reg i've always had little side hustle i had one point where he's using the fantasy football blog to make money i've sold christmas reits at christmas time door to door sales i like i've done all the things so i've always loved entrepreneurship it's always been something that i've been passionate about and i've been hooked ever since you that's amazing i wish where were you when i was in the high school for selling to i was i was in summary and it was kinda like right but hair like i did yeah yeah i had huge ja ro and the diets and everything yeah and but nothing to cover and i was love to cover it up with ninety percent yeah that's awesome there that's great though that little that hustle of just understanding where you can find an need market like just been go to store find something this it's not in my neighborhood i could just buy this that's it and then i could just distribute it and double my profit that's exactly there we go yeah it was wild it was a it was definitely a key mind like mind opening moment where you could just be like okay i buy this for two fifty i sell it for five dollars but people get value because they don't have access like this is the way that the capitalism game works and then i fell in love with it fast forward a little bit soon now you have your company in foundation insurance and and i read online you guys do like mad volume like i think read that you you do over like you made your clients over a hundred million dollars in revenue which is like that's just mind way amazing congratulations for that because that's just that's just phenomenal shit but building that business were there any doubts when you're first starting like oh you know like you're talking about you're working with mailchimp can like these are big big brands whatever were were you like too small like what were the doubts that you were having i think the biggest doubt that i had front was limiting simply because of my own location like because i'm in nova scotia i'm in halifax and i started there stayed here i always had this perspective where i was like okay how do i attract these big companies when i'm here like it's impossible and i just had to kinda overcome that and i got to a point where through my experience writing content fantasy sports and reaching people all through at the us and them being intrigued by my stories and recommendations on these are the players that you should start even in your fantasy football even though i was like a eighteen nineteen year old kid my parents basement with no money like they were believing me i realized that it doesn't matter where you are and if i can start to create enough value in enough in like interest on the internet that people in other regions will start to knock on my door so not i didn't really have doubt that it would ever happen i had doubt that it would happen quickly so what i started to do was ramp up in my production in the output of content that i was creating online so i started to write about what i was learning what i was hearing what i was seeing my observations about marketing where it was going and i got an email from the folks down in miami this company called bi maturity and they were like hey we just read this blog post that you created about how to do marketing to jim why and i was like cool or gen z and they were like can we chat i was like sure we can chat and then the next thing you know they were like we fly you down to meet our c suite and talk to us about like how we should do marketing to your generations because that was when our generation still young and cool so they wanted to run ads to us and like do marketing so i go down there and i'm teaching them and i'm like okay this is the unlock if i continue to produce valuable content even if i live in my paris basement even if i am in nova scotia if the content is valuable people will share it they'll reach out and i'll have opportunities so i just put my foot on the gas and i went aggressive with doing that and the world has responded very very positively ever since it's kinda like the opposite of what you're hearing nowadays where it's like if you wanna get famous for or do you wanna get big in your your business it's like you gotta go to silicone valley you gotta go to dubai and i'm like no you don't have to anymore yeah i don't think you do that's i think there is a cheat code to be closer because you can go to a local event you'll meet some people and some of those people will open up doors i definitely think that there's a cheat code to being in the location but if you are very intentional with your time and you are very intentional with adding value through the internet this scale is just unmatched to like you can i could put up a post right now and i'll reach like ten fifteen twenty thousand people that's why right right like i can't go to an event today and guarantee that i can reach twenty thousand people but i can definitely guarantee that if i needed to in the next hour to reach a hundred thousand people i can reach a hundred thousand people in the next hour if i wanted to so that's the power of the internet you nailed it when you said value like you have to deliver value to people because if you're just gonna post content and it doesn't bring value to anybody right it doesn't matter how much you distributor or whatever so sounds crazy okay so so back to foundation so when you're building this this company and you're developing your own i guess playbook for marketing you to grow that do you use the same tools that you used to grow your business with how you help other business grow their businesses yeah one hundred percent so there's definitely very much similarities like i'm a big believer in if you are going to try to be positioned as great at something then you have to be great at as well so in the early days a lot of the services that we provided were exclusively around blog writing so we would write blog content for our clients and the best way to show a client that we know how to write a good blog post was to write a blog post that they would find interesting and valuable and then they would come to us and they say can you do this but for us in our industry yeah and it just started to happen so if you can deliver things that are of value and people consume it and they're like oh i like that can you do it for me it just becomes an easy pathway to success blogging now is that still as popular as was back then in some industries one hundred percent with my world of b b where we're talking to cio cto cmo c suite executives folks that are typically like forty plus they still love a good blog post they'll read that content they'll consume it they'll share it they'll sit down and they'll read it on a ipad and they'll they'll get a lot of value out of bit but when i'm talking to a up and coming digital marketer someone who's scrappy and just getting into their industry and in their niche they're probably not reading a blog post they're probably looking for a youtube video they're probably listening to a podcast they might even be watching a tiktok or something like that and they wanna quick and snappy they're not looking to like sit down and digest it and this isn't like to discredit that shift happening but it's a real shift that you can see in human behavior where we went from a time where written word was the primary format but as battery costs got lower as device costs got lower video creation and production costs have gotten lower people's taste have evolved to wanting a more passive consumption because when you're reading it takes a lot of brain energy and power versus a passive let me just watch this video and hear somebody read it for me that's a way smoother transition so yes we're seeing a shift i don't think it's gonna change like i don't think that shift is gonna go back like i don't think that reading is going to be the next big thing like video is where people wanna go i love the written word i love i that's how i built my career it's also how i love to consume information i find that the level of depth and expertise that comes from writing versus watching is significant and then i think more people need to re books but that's a whole different story right right yeah i'm absolutely i think you nailed something that was pretty important here and that as a marketer it's probably really important to be aware of trends and seeing where things are going because yeah like back one team was a big thing what you would do is you purchase ads on tv it i don't think anybody's doing that much of that anymore right you have to be aware of what's going on yeah you have to that's the that's the job of a marketer like it's arguably the job of any creator any entrepreneur period like if you're not staying up on the trends then you are setting yourself up for failure and to be replaced in terms of mind and some people that's okay if you're at the end of your career you're ready to retire soon cool chill don't worry about the trends don't worry about what's coming just be okay with the fact that your career is almost edits it's in that's okay but if you view yourself as somebody who wants to be around in the next five ten years you have no choice but to be on top of what is the thing that is coming and what are the next wave of entrepreneurs who are coming for your lunch going to be doing to take it because if you don't you're just gonna lose in i don't play the game just to play i agree to win away yeah so that's what why you have to stay on top of those trends yeah we're gonna talk about that a little bit here too in terms of what you're seeing coming up in trends because there's obviously there's stuff with ai and some of the crew you no you're you're involved in it too so a lot of new entrepreneurs and new owners are aspiring entrepreneurs kinda of listen to this podcast and i'd like to know from you what advice would you give them if they're starting out and they're trying to feel what they need to do i'd like to fill it out for starting their own agency or your own creative an agency yeah so if you're in the agency game the first thing you have to do is just get your customers and you just need like one or two get one or two customers that are very happy with your deliverables your service the things that you've done and then you need to be relentless at talking about the success that you got from them like that is the first step in all of this and you might be even earlier than that where you don't have your first two customers and you're like okay by how do i get those that's where i would go and focus on okay who is it that we are trying to reach let's say let's for pretend and act like you are an agency owner who wants to target hvac owners like who are installing hvac all over the the city i'm going to find a local facebook group that is dedicated to hvac i'm going to go to instagram and i'm gonna type in hvac and i'm gonna find everybody who's local you know and i'm going to literally be dm those people and ask trying to add value i'm not asking for business i'm going to add value how can i add value it could be simple as saying hey i created this video that i think your folks on instagram i might like about you check this out are you interested in having a conversation i can create two to three of these each month for x amount of dollars is this something that you're interested in or maybe you're in the world of like creating a jingle so you create jingle and you send them a little snippet and be like if wanna buy this let's have a conversation or if you're on web design same thing it's like you mock up a hvac website you send it to all these people and you're like hey would you like me to build something like this for you and you're sending those over as dms and saying hey i i think you could do a lot better with your current website that kind of thing so outreach and building the first two is key once you have some revenue and once you have validated that these people are willing to talk about you now you have to do brand building and you have to build a brand world around yourself as a provider of excellence to your niche that means you're gonna start creating content about this subject you're gonna talk about how hvac professionals should show up on the job and be great you're gonna talk about how hvac professionals should send emails and what those emails should look like you're gonna create content about how their branding should be done you're going to talk about how they should do podcasts you're gonna do all of those things even their operations on their day to day how they interact with their customers all of that stuff you break it all down and you are creating value for that industry so everyone in the industry goes to you when they're thinking about the problem associated with their industry and then over time what's gonna happen is simple i have a big belief in this idea that if you give the value to the internet the internet gives it back so you have to have that commitment to say for the next twelve months all i'm going to do is try to give i'm gonna give everything i've got free information free ideas free strategies free concepts and eventually you're gonna start seeing people dm you and like can you do that for me hey i see that you broke down all of this thing that i should do with my emails we're not doing any of that can you can help us and then you say yes and that becomes the playground in the the play that you start to run yeah because even if you've given them the information for free it's still hard still takes time i was like well why yeah that's really great but just do it for me you fit them up nobody wants to do it yeah none of them wanna do it what they want to do is find someone who they can trust that can do it so you should feel no type of way around oh we're giving away our secret sauce there's no more secrets just share it all give all the information share how you do it how you would do it how you would think about it they're gonna read that and they're gonna be like yeah i don't i don't know how to do this i'm not even interested in opening up a hubspot account i'm not interested in learning about mailchimp i'm not interested in a subscription to a cam what what is this isn't that something our kids use in school like what are we talking about they they don't wanna do it and that's okay but they will see that you wrote it and that you know what you're talking about but and they'll be like can you do this for me how much do you have to pay pay you three grand a month two grand a month ten grand a like what's the cost is and then you go from there but i know there's gonna be some skeptics i gonna say but i'm not the best hvac person in the world right how much does imp syndrome yeah like you that's a zero that's not even a question like you don't have to be the best right now you are striving to be the best eventually when i first got into b b marketing i didn't have a b b client but i went on stage spoke at an event talked about how you could apply this to b to b and then b b brands start to wanna talk so i think you do have to get over that impostor syndrome piece but just recognize that while you might not be the best you are probably better at it than the person who runs that company in that field so you are a better marketer you're probably a better web designer you're probably a better graphic designer you're probably better at that in hvac right and because you are better at your job the thing that you are an expert in you immediately have more credibility so the impostor syndrome thing is real but you really have to get over that super quick like life's gonna go by if you keep talking yourself out of jobs and out of opportunities you're just gonna die with not realizing anything that you wanted so for me that's the one thing you really have to like step away from as fast as possible yeah hundred percent all entrepreneurs all creators like at the top of the list should be to remove that concept of impostor syndrome remove it as quickly as possible do as many read as many books as you can to break it like you have to find a way out of it yeah i remember so many times when i was really young and i look at a job posting as an example and i kinda had the qualifications but like right oh no i'm not as good as this guy whatever right and i would just talk myself out of you applying yeah so i you're already you lose already i don't even try to play the game there's a great book called the courage to be disliked which i would encourage everyone read every everyone every year it's a great book i could just tell a little bit of a story of what i'm doing yes because for me in this podcast here yeah even put it out there on social media or at on my youtube where it's like i'm trying to build myself up to be the number one podcast host in canada so like that's kind of my goal my dream and i'm like oh you a big goal but i'm putting it out there yeah and at least well i know that i could probably outperform a lot of other people that have never started a podcast before so at least i can put out content mh to showcase what i've learned and what i've done so far to build a studio to get my own guests and all that kind of stuff and put that information out there yeah i'm not joe rogan or whatever i'm not number one yeah but that's okay i won't have to let that stop me from getting there now you have to said big ambitious goal like being number one in can is a huge task like big get it let's do it that's that's awesome we'll see how things go but y'all we'll see you're gonna get there yeah no know hundred yeah trying to give a modest too not be like oh yeah together yeah okay so let's just shift gears here i'm gonna talk about content and distribution cool people that are new to business can you maybe describe what content marketing is and how that's important to business yeah so content marketing is essentially the idea that there's a bunch of different multimedia assets that you can produce whether it's video audio blog posts etcetera and all of these things that you produce want to capture attention of an ideal customer so out there are your ideal customers and they are browsing through social media channels they're browsing through the internet they're going to google and typing in words and you wanna produce content that attracts them stops them from scrolling that they consume and then they associate the value that they've just received either educational engaging empowering or entertaining content whatever it might be with your brand in your business and then when they are ready to buy they buy from you and that's essentially content marketing in nutshell so that's the content piece but then there's the act of getting it out there and distributing it so how important is distribution in that yeah so distribution is the one thing that i'd say over the last few years we've made a massive mistake underestimating as marketers as creators as brands so many of us have listened to guru and i would say i fell to the track back in like two thousand fourteen i would go on stage and i would tell entire rooms full of real estate agents tourism operators i'd be like folks all you gotta do is create content if you create content online you'll be successful you will win the world will be yours so content is king casey said was exactly yeah and they were like cool i'm gonna do it and they listened and they've done it and they've created a ton of content but they still got no results and i was like what's going on well the issue is that they didn't do anything with that content after they press publish nobody sought it and that is the key problem people are pressing publish on tons of great work people will have youtube channels that are producing amazing content but they don't know how to get that content in front of the right people they're not willing to distribute their content into forums into communities and they're not willing to spend distribute that content and repurpose it and rep repurchase it they're not willing to email it to people like they don't do any of the things to market the content that they're producing and that has been the biggest problem of the last few years i have an idea as so why i think that that is a problem but why what what do you have to say about why people underestimate this whole thing like why people were pushing content is king but like forgetting about the fact that you actually have to get that content yeah and eyeballs i think there's a lot of key things that go into it some of them are personal some of them are macro so on the personal scale i think that some people don't distribute their content because they're scared i think they are literally afraid of how the market will respond so they have a facebook page and on that facebook page there's probably five thousand people but they're not willing to share their youtube video on their facebook page because they don't wanna be judged by their friends and their families saying oh look how hard you're trying you're sharing your youtube video on facebook like this is just for your friends like we wanna see your kids that's big reason why a lot of people don't do it another reason is i think that people are afraid not of just being judged but of being validated or dis or dis validated and whether or not their content is actually good so they don't wanna share the content because if they share it in nobody comments nobody likes it nobody engages they might realize that their content wasn't as good as they thought it was and that hurts i poured my soul into this piece and i shared it and nobody liked it it's met with crickets like i'm failing here that's another reason and i'll acknowledge i get both of these fears like i was in those shoes before when i first got started in business i wrote a blog post ray university that was ml formatted like it was very bad and it was a blog post on ross simmons dot com press publish and i was like okay i have to share this on my facebook sure i shared it on my facebook after like talking myself into it and i got mel met with crickets people but friends were in a group chat roasting me i was like nasty comments on facebook like what is this like you're sharing business content like what are you doing like supposed to be sharing pictures of c stands like it was crazy and i was like oh i can't do that anymore but i realized over time that like you have to just use your channels and make that commitment that this is how you're gonna use so those are two of the personal things on the other side the reason why i think a lot of brands and a lot of entrepreneurs and creators just focused on the creation side is because creation is linear it's a very linear process i start i come up with the idea i create an asset i press publish up the bubble i have achieved success but if you have to distribute that thing when a success when you reach ten thousand views a thousand views a million views the success never comes so you don't get the dopamine rush that you would get if you just press publish when you just press publish everybody feels like they've achieved something like pop the champagne yeah it's ready to go but in reality that's when the job starts the job starts after you press publish creating is is a great part of the process very important don't get me wrong but it's when the job begins and that's but a lot of people aren't willing to kinda go through yeah because it's just never ending one thing that that was easy in my mind is that it's just really hard like it's just hard to do right i guess maybe you're i think you're articulate probably a whole lot more is like these are the reasons why it's hard because yeah fear your failure rejection and i don't want i feel insecure but it's also very difficult to put yourself out there at me like and and then also i gotta find the channels i gotta find where i'm gonna post this how am i gonna i gotta re remix everything yeah i got it you know i get it like like the work part of it makes a lot of people not wanna do it because they'd rather feel like an artist than somebody who's working to reach people like there's only a few celebrities who are like true artist musicians who can just release something and everybody listens rest of the world rest of the musicians like everybody else has to work to get their albums in front of people to get their songs heard to get them listen to they build up a a base and even then like their concerts they'll have like fifty people there and they they're happy so you there everyone else has to do distribution like it it makes sense so that's kinda in the game yeah and it's so true because i i'm looking back at the early businesses that i started way back i in two thousand nine i started this business was called giving it away cool and what i did was it was basically like a giveaway thing where you come onto to the website and you would wash our video and you would leave a comment for like a point you would tweeted out for a point you what's something on facebook all these things and we would just scrape the the the websites and then it got pretty big and we were giving away like big between tv you wanted to and my kinda all this stuff cool and the whole idea was to get ad revenue and then from the ad revenue we would just make more videos more giveaways and we ended up running out of money and went kind of bust but right i i looked back at it i think the reason why it didn't work was because i never did anything out side of the things that i knew how to do because i was like oh we're not getting enough people to watch the videos maybe i'll tweak the website i'm like i know how to design i know i'll do this and then i'd spend two months redesigning and then meanwhile the money is just going on and they'll yeah and the thing was it just wasn't spreading as much as it needed to to get that that capacity so i hearing that i'm like yeah it's so important and now hopefully for me in my business now yeah yeah i'm gonna keep this you know right into my heart and be like this needs to i need to do this yeah so going back to what you were saying earlier about your on stage and you're telling people how content as can keep making making content and people weren't getting those results do they kinda come tuned and be like hey what are were you talking about yeah hundred percent and and that's when the epiphany when the came it was like oh right you i'm saying create content because i have a newsletter list that has like forty thousand people so every time i create content i reach people but they don't have that shortcut they don't have the cheat code that i've already established i've got x thousands of followers on linkedin on on x on then twitter like instagram all these channels i've got a baked cheat code which is distribution these people don't if you do not have the distribution channels then creating things and having no one read it is for nothing so you have to build the distribution channels so you can actually spread your content distribution is important but you also said content is important how do you recommend people to find that balance between creating the content and distribution i think there's no world that exists for any content creator any entrepreneur anyone online today to be producing content that's not good there's too much great content being creative for you to be mediocre today you have to strive for the best you're gotta be great you there's no more room for average commit for a few months to be excellent at creating content you have to and then after you've hit excellence everything is about distribution like if you can create good content you have done the job good content is what you need to do bare minimum minimum that's this there you have to do good if you can do great awesome excellent jeff's kiss but you have to be able to create good content otherwise you're gonna fail period so it's table stakes now to be able to create good content the next step is to have that distribution engine and that's where all the focus goes so step one become good at creating content then start thinking about distribution if you're not good at creating content do not start distributing it until you are good you'll have to be good first one of the shows that i loved when i a kid was the fresh principal of about air yes and yeah one of the great episodes were when they would do like these flashbacks of previous episodes mh so they would basically repurpose the other episodes that makes a new episode so is that one of the things that people can do in order to get better at distribution is kind of like remix those old greatest hits in a sense yeah you put that through like a big fan of the greatest hits i think like there's a lot of lessons that you can take from remix the old and turning them into something new for two key use cases one if you've created an inventory of content over the years go back and look at what you've created in the past and ask yourself can we make this better can i improve this i have learned so much over the last year how do i take this old thing and turn it into something new talk about do a clip where i'm listening to myself and then you respond to what you're hearing in the youtube video all of that type of content is really really well but in addition to that let's take a step out of your entire content world that you've created and go to the macro level i think the next layer to that is to take your inspiration from others and remix their old content that was great and turn it into something for yourself if you look at things like disney you look at some of the top movies of all time these are all remix of old things like the number of movies that disney has that were actually just shakespeare plays is wild right and what brands and marketers need to do is just take a step back let's go and look at what were the last thirty forty videos that mister beast is produced and what were the top ten now let's study the trends around these top ten and then ask ourselves okay if i was trying to reach hvac professionals and i was taking in an approach like mister beast would what kind of videos would i create what type of content could i create and then use that for inspiration around you're going to give two thousand dollar gift card to the first hvac professional that agrees to do something crazy who knows right like mh and you're gonna record it you're gonna do it maybe you're doing street interviews i don't know but like you're going to reverse engineer success in other lanes apply it to yours and that is a remix and you're going to find that that content will perform well as long as you apply your own unique spin to it yeah and then you could almost like mister bi i think he's really good at understanding exactly what works in a video right but if you're gonna do that approach reverse engineer then you might not even really understand at first why it's working but at least you're putting in the habits of how to create content and way that's effective and then you could learn kind of as you go exactly i wanna get done on onto this game of actually creating content and how do you know if content is good right and excellent right because especially if you're starting you're at zero and you you you got nothing you got no information yeah so is your content not getting any views because it sucks right because if you have a distribution problem right so how do you how do you yeah kinda square that it's all about increasing your sample size of reach and you have to then look at things like engagement rate you're trying to see like okay if ten thousand people looked at this video how many people made it through fifty percent in the way what's the watch through time how many people click the like button what was our subscription rate after people watched it like those are the things that you're gonna look at how many people were in the comments saying i love this thank you thank you this was great if you're seeing those types of signals then it's a good asset you're onto to something or if it's on instagram and you see that the reaches there like you're getting that viral spread then there's something there like you are starting to get this to be sent to people are you seeing more shares are you seeing more comments more bookmarks on your content you look for signals from the market that indicate whether or not something is good or not if you press publish on a piece you've distributed it and you have confidence that your sample size is sufficient let's say you've reached five hundred people and you have gotten zero likes zero comments zero shares zero emails zero responses you looked at the analytics there's a very low consistency in terms of view count and like watch time don't do those anymore right that needs to change so that was a flop right out so let's try something new the next time and see what happens and then you start to again look for those signals and then once you find that hit you start to get very specific you say okay what was it about this type of asset that works let me take you back in a time a bit with an example for me okay i wrote a blog post called ten last business lessons that you can learn from j z i wrote this and like two thousand and fourteen maybe two thousand twelve like early on and i pressed publish on this piece within the matter of probably fifteen twenty minutes i had an email from forbes and that they wanted to feature my piece and the one will write it yep signal people like these types of stories so i was like okay i'm gonna do this again but instead of writing about j z i'm gonna do lessons from grand theft auto because grand theft auto was just coming with the old yep so i wrote ten business lessons that you can learn from rockstar and grand theft auto twenty minutes later forbes reaches out i'm on to something if i can combine business with pop culture people are going to eat it up every single time so i double down i wrote a blog post vote fifteen blog post headlines that are shorter of work work work work work because that was when that's on game yeah went nuts they went absolutely nuts so i kept doing it over and over and over again in every single time it was a hit and that was just from like again look at the data if you see that the market wants something don't get creative just give the market what they want yeah and keep giving them what they want yeah do you ever struggle with feeling like if you're just giving the market what they want but yet you may are going away from your own creative vision like as well there's nothing okay not if no i'm very much in this for like i'm trying to achieve a certain goal which is associated with like my vision of business and like being able to right impact my community impact my family and friends and like do that so there's nothing there's no emotional connection there it's not an emotional decision it's the market wants this american gonna pay me i'm gonna get clients let's go that's a lesson that i think i need to learn i've been doing web design for like twenty years so i'm very probably as sn sn when it comes to what websites look and oftentimes i would be like no i'm not gonna make that because i don't like that right but then maybe obviously that's probably the wrong way to go because that's not what the market wants so i think it's up to you right like everybody's ambitions are gonna be different like if you want to die knowing that you stuck your guns and you'd it limited your growth and limited revenue and limited your profits your capabilities do your thing that's okay with that yeah do it if you want no limits you wanna be able to retire go to italy and do whatever you want in your life and that stuff is secondary and say yes i'll fix your website and won't look out i wanted to load it out but you're gonna pay and have the client's happy content that's perfect that's yeah all that i in the results work like if the results work like i would never allow a client to be like okay this is the type of blog post that we want and then i look at it and be like this is not going to work i'm gonna do it anyway that's just like malpractice like you have to treat it like a doctor you know i think i'm not going to if you walked into your doctor and you were like yeah i think my ears falling off but i think that i just need vitamins they're not gonna say okay here's some vitamins right they're gonna picture them or they'll lose their license in marketing the creative industry i think we need our own like hypo oath be able to say yes this is what you want but here's my professional advice on what i want to deliver for you and this is what i'm gonna do and then ideally they trust you and they'll say yes go do that thing that works for me or you give them options you always do what's right don't give me wrong but when it comes to like your own stuff i try to navigate more towards like what can i give the market that the market wants less so what do i think the market want and not do it because my internal feeling yeah and all that makes perfect sense just reminds me of a project that i work with with ibm and we were making this data platform for all these sensors in these instruments and a couple of people were like i wanted it to look like this make it happen and i was like we can't have that because the actual usability for the users that are gonna be looking at the data it's not gonna work for them right so we can't do that so that's where it's like yeah listen this is my experience yeah like i know this ui you can't do this put the foot down even though that's what they want so your persistence for the greater good of that of the project so so that makes sense going back to numbers and stats because that this is where i'm starting to try to figure the game out mh and so on this podcast as an example i have a bunch of youtube shorts and i've started a youtube channel just completely separate yeah to put them out there to kinda see and look at the data and everything's all over the place some of them get you know hundred views some of them get fifteen hundred views and then you'll ten likes some comments some no likes and i'm trying to figure out what's what so in terms of trying to look at the signal there what is it that i should be looking for because i think youtube the way they do with their shorts is they show to certain more people and if it doesn't break some kind of threshold they just shut it off and then they'll go up and then nothing for like forever basically so but i'm just kinda looking okay how long did they watch for what did i say what was the swipe away rate how much how many likes and then maybe try to figure out why they they liked it and then maybe reverse engineer from there that's what i'm trying to do but yeah is there anything else i could do i think that's the main thing like you've reverse engineer it but i wouldn't spend so much i would try not to spend too much time on that like i would try to spend more of my time on focused on like what is the best content that i can produce period if your goal is to be like the best in canada the best podcast or number one podcast then i'm looking at i'm taking time to analyze who are the best who's winning we're the best interviewers how are they growing how are they like structuring their shorts and how are they deduct their stuff and then i'm just learning and then applying it because you're the early stages of just like create your own style create your efforts like bring it all to the market you're playing a bit of a volume game where you just have to be like catching up mh and then apply your lessons as you continue to grow but i wouldn't spend too much time analytics focus and data focus at this point i'd focus on ridiculously valuable content let's learn from the best so i can become the best and then i'm going to just completely crush and do things my way just one other question here on that you know last steven bartlett that ceo yeah so on his at the beginning of his episodes he has that mini trailer or whatever super hot hooking and engaging and i'm not a big fan of that i'm like i just like to kind of have my things flow and let the conversation and let the guests kind of take over the the show and deliver that value yeah am i wrong into thinking that i shouldn't do that like you're saying learn from the best well that's what they do yep should i be what one does i would look at fairs i would look at rogan i'd look at every other person i'd get a sample size of ten and then i'd look at ten of them and see like what do they do at the beginning in the first three minutes what do each of them do and i'd write it down and i'd like get crystal clear on it i'd probably even download the transcripts from each of their top ten episodes and videos downloaded the transcript i'm gonna upload all of the transcripts directly to chat and say identify like what are the intros for each of these what's their hook was their style etcetera and then i'm gonna digest it if not in o of ten do it that way then you're making mistake right nine out of ten that way you're probably making in mistake okay if two out of ten keep switch it up yeah maybe though you'll notice that eight out of ten do something completely different right maybe eight trip of ten aren't doing that type of a intro they're just like punching people in the face with the first quote or something like that right so that's where i would look for because there are best practices in almost all forms of media right like there's a reason why certain types of come go a certain way if you listen to a great stand up and like when i went into public speaking i studied stand ups because i want to be informed by their flow for my flow in the way that a stand up delivers their stick mh if they are great is kinda similar every single time they'll start with a cool story they end with the exact same store and then they'll have little callbacks within it and it feels like magic to the person watching it and that's the formula so you might have a formula that you have to follow and the formula can be broken but it's making it harder for yourself to get where you wanna go yeah so in some cases don't follow the formula but in others you might have to just do could it even be that once you get so good at understanding the formula and you know the rules then you know where to break it and when to do your things like you have two point five million subscribers the rules go through into yeah do whatever you wanna do in your world in the marketing world what big innovations what do you see happening over the next five to ten years that that you're excited about excited about is different than what i'm thinking of okay so i'm excited about ai but i'm very concerned about ai okay and i don't think a lot of people understand what's coming if you go on facebook today you're gonna see ads and a lot of these ads look very real where someone will literally be looking into the camera and they'll be like hey i was a nanny for some of the most wealthiest people in the world and there's a certain things that they always made us do with our kit their kids to make sure that their kids would be the top of their class and be brilliant and stuff like that and then they'll ramble off on a bunch of different things that they would do like oh we always gave them this for breakfast blah blah blah and then they'll mention oh we always made sure that they downloaded this app and we also always made sure that they would take this beet root t before bedtime both of those things were plugged by someone who has access to a tool called h that allows you to create def fake versions of people and then take those fakes and turn them into like an image of someone that look super real where it looks like this person actually lives with bill gates but they don't they have no eyed bill gates doesn't know this person exists it's all ai and i'm seeing some of these videos get like a hundred thousand views thousands of comments people saying i can't wait to get this and try this tea with my kid i can't wait to try this for my child it's wild and that is just one lane that i have seen i would say right now there is probably every hour more than two point five million views happening on this ai generated content that people don't even know is fake reviews of products that are just being promoted by marketers in their basement that's insane it's gonna drive it's already driving crazy amounts of transactions but the impact is going to be horrific because it's not real can you maybe elaborate on how you think that impact is gonna be horrific like what is you're thinking of what it's gonna be i think it's gonna be horrific because people are believing that this tea powder will make my child smart right or it's some of the videos are like by a doctor they were there's a doctor that is in a doctor's of if fit say i have found the keys to preventing cancer and they're telling people they need to drink a beet root routine or some other tea and it's like wait what like i see it looks like a doctor sounds like a doctor even as a picture of him as a doctor with a famous person it must be legit that it's gonna be complete chaos so and i think the cats to the bag that's the scary part i don't know what governments can do i don't know what the platforms can do i don't know what anyone can do to solve it besides like you just need to be more aware people of what you're trusting on the internet that's one thing so it's but let's get a little positive too so the positive of this is i think for creators and like for creators even like myself we can have this interview and we can have a ton of conversation and dialogue but at one moment let's say i have a slip of the tongue and i said six instead of ten i can now with ai go and edit that so it sounds just like me with my voice changing the word to whatever i wanted to that's unreal because before i would have gotten home you would texted me it was said ross can we res shoot this little parent can you come back and do this and i would have said yes and i would have had to drive back wasted gas lost time for hours time and now i have to restate this thing just one word not anymore it's beautiful like i can remember a few years ago where i had to res shoot an entire like video because i said the wrong word once and now it's like let me go into des scripts let me like change this a little connected to a tool called eleven labs which has a synthetic version of my voice and i'm laughing and it's like i don't have to get out to do this it's it's gold so there's little things like that that i think are going to have a a better impact and make marketing a lot better and you see yourself using that in your business then to do that now you do that now i use that now i use eleven labs now i've launched actual podcast episodes with an ai voice of ross going to talking about things and i had an interview with myself where i had like an ai version of me asking me questions really like you interviewed myself myself it's gonna i've been like all that kind of stuff it's a it's a wild time but i think the it also from a creative lens right like i personally if i wasn't so busy i would have so much fun with this stuff like you can create a movie you can create a film you can create your own comics like you can do so much right now with ai there's amazing there's no there's no excuses for people like there's literally no excuses besides like i don't wanna do it and that's okay if you don't want to put in the time if you don't wanna touch it if you're you have concerns about all of the ethics and stuff like that i get a hundred percent i'm i'm with you i feel you there but if you are somebody who wants to like ride this wave and find opportunities to do cool stuff never been a better time never do you think as creative we pretty much have to embrace the ai revolution or right we're just gonna let get left i don't think anyone has to do anything in life like i'd i am a very non black and white kinda guy i don't think anyone has to but i think that it's a strategic disadvantage right if you say i'm not gonna touch ai you can do so much more if you are a designer and you're sleeping on ai and you're sitting there still cutting out the background removing the background from a photo yourself instead of using the ai tools holy smoke like that kills me kills me to know that somebody might be doing that go embrace ai i had a family photos shoot a few years back when we were in italy there's this guy who's sitting on a a log and he had like the cigar had his shorts on he had scars like he was just like looking rough and i got home and i uploaded photoshop i had this beta version with the b and i was like alright i wanna turn him into a tree and to turned him into a tree now that picture is like in my family living room took a second to get rid of him and they don't know they forgot that there was a guy there no that amazing yeah it's wild so entrepreneurship yeah i feel it's always about experimentation and it's it's almost like it's in our dna to just kind of experiment with things so if someone's new to business how important do you think it is for them to experiment whether it is even just figuring out what it is that they want to do or figuring out how it is that they wanna serve their their clients all of life is an experiment and the moment that you stop experimenting is in my opinion in the moment you start dying you have to embrace experimentation all through life that's my belief experiments are the one thing that has allowed humanity to continue to move forward in a positive way and if you are a creator an entrepreneur and you wanna move forward in a positive way have to be willing to experiment experiment with the things that push you outside of your comfort zone experiment with new technologies experiment to try things and nobody else that you know are doing all of those things should get you excited i love to experiment i have this philosophy build ship learn decide which is like four simple words but they've been rooted in me since i was a kid when as was a kid i ran this experiment when i one i was confused about worms worms are here in the winter we get a lot of snow and then they're still here in the spring what in the world how does that work so i took a bunch of worms i put them in the iced tray but them in my freezer they died did some more research realize that they have seeds or eggs and all this stuff and they're all new worms every year so i was like okay cool experiment from a very young age i got a lot of trouble for having worms by by pizza pockets but that's a different different story either way the the point there is i build a contraption i ship it out to the market i learn from that experiment and then i decide how to do things differently and that's the the essence that i think any good entrepreneur has and has to embrace and as you get bigger and as you grow the experiments have to be bigger the experiments have to be a little bit more risky you can't just do the small little experiments you have to increase the risk level of your experiment as you increase your risk levels or of your overall success so when you are more successful you have to take bigger swings you have to take bigger swings to get to the next level so when you're early on in your career if it's if you're a small business my first experiment was i'm going to put my hand in the ring to speak at these local events my nickname in high school with s ross but i'm gonna try to speak at these events and i went in i was sweaty i was a mess i was stuttering it was horrible horrible horrible but i learned from that how to do it better than next time and i kept signing up kept signing up and now i can speak front of like two thousand people and not bat and eye it's nothing to that comes from embracing a small experiment back then now a bigger experiment to me would be like okay i'm going to buy everyone in my company a subscription to chat plus five grand blah blah blah something like that cool even that's still kind of a smaller experiment but let's use that as an example those types of things become the experiment you stacked around yeah do you you said you have to take excuse me you have to take bigger experiments and bigger risks as you get bigger as a company yeah how comfortable are you taking those risks because now that you have a company like as an not sole entrepreneur it's just you yeah you go bust whatever not a big deal yeah but you got employees you got people that depend on your business yeah there's gotta be a little bit of hesitation oh i don't maybe believe there's not well no there's always hesitation i think it comes down to having a great team around you and then making doing a bit of a risk analysis so if i'm making those type of investments i have a great group around me to be able to say okay this is what i'm thinking like even distribution dot ai that was a risky bet we've invested lots of money to create a software to bring on salaries to have a team built to create a software and we are a service first company so i'm going to carve about real dollars real money to go into a software that i'm going to build that is nothing more than a vision and an idea and i'm gonna hire developers and engineers and designers to bring this thing to life massive risk did i have back a hundred percent but as i talked about the vision talked about the idea had a little bit of a a friction conversation which is necessary to turn that experiment into one that can work it comes to life so yes there's no question that there is like hesitation still for even me to like make these bets but you have to get comfortable with the idea of being uncomfortable and taking on those risk which is not easy like there's gonna be moments where you're gonna lose sleep there's gonna be moments where you're gonna be like don't know if this is gonna work but you have to again have the courage to be able to say i know where i'm going to have a vision i have a path and have to pursue it what are the skills that you learned from pursuing this other direction where you're obviously very talented in marketing but now you're building a software and run a software company that's a completely different skill set i would imagine for skill what what what did you learn going through that process it's a fascinating shift because in the marketing world it's all about relationships it's all about working with other people in this it's like you're you're building a widget you're building an actual asset in a it's not a physical good but you're creating a good in some ways and the production cycle is a real thing like how fast to actually deploy code and ship on time and scrum all that stuff like that's a whole different beast and then even to be able to manage expectations amongst engineers and developers is different being able to think in systems around development is a big shift i'd have always known enough to be deadly with codes like i've created websites have done that i've been in that world for a long time but doing it for our product has been very fascinating and one thing that i would say was has been my biggest observation that is the hardest but coolest thing to see is that customers and users can see things before you do and in the marketing world that i live in and i think it's because i'm not a software expert to the level i am on the marketing side yet so like i can look at a blog post and tell you that it's great or not i can't look at a user interface in an experience her user experience that's my designer brings to me and be like that's flawless i know exactly how somebody could use this so i'm working new muscles mike i used to be so deep in this world like if i was to go back like fifteen years ago i wrote one of the top answers on quo about how to create a great user experience onboarding and i used while balsamic back in day i even know if that's still a company and i designed this whole thing and i talked about like how to create and design a good user experience but i haven't worked that muscle for like fifteen years yeah so i'm going in and i'm still applying old philosophies and i'm like okay i just need to bring in the experts so i just have experts now do it and even now those i would say like the biggest gap is i know that i'm still not in the top one percent in my marketing world i'm in top one percent i can crush every single day doing what i do in this world i'm not there yet and that has been tough mh just to know i'm not where i want to be but i'll get there yeah so you wanna get there always yeah i am a very ambitious person yeah so when you get there and you're at the like at the top one percent of software yeah yeah and product do you are you gonna leave marketing behind and almost no i love having both both yeah i am i'll just start to pursue something else maybe i'll make a board game maybe i'll create a camp maybe i'll do video games maybe i'll just being one percent dead like i don't know i just always want to like if i pursue something my pursuit is with the intention of being as best as i going for excellence yeah do you yeah that that's amazing oh my what was my question i have question here no worries oh yeah when you're going for things do always have to strive for being the best in excellence is it like i'm not gonna even try to do this unless i yeah unless you know that you're gonna be the best like i yeah it's a great question and it's one that i think i should talk to a therapist about but it's it's true i always will strive to be the best at it like i taking something on with serious intent in the back of my mind i'm striving to be the peak or at least in the top percentage percentile off for me and it might not be it might not be immediate so like i picked up running i've recently even picked up golf in my mind i need to be in the top percentile off from my age am i there yet no yeah but eventually i am going to get there and that can be just a pure aspiration and i might just look at it and keep saying i'm not there but even just saying i'm not there yet is enough for me to keep going to always be pushing to be better and that's okay with me and it can be bad because the other day i was thinking about like wine and i was like i like one do i wanna be a somalia and then i watched this movie about like the top one percent of sam and i was like no no that is not for me so not always not always like not always do i do it because like i looked at them i was like master small you have to know every single region and even so yeah how our girl or whatever i wanna be above average for this one so yeah so i think long answer to a short question would be sometimes yes strive for excellence other times just above average but in that should suffice for me yeah i feel like it's like the way you're talking now is you know your product and then you're marketing and then you're you're the best it's almost like i see like elon musk and you see a guy like him forget about his politics forever whatever but you know he's got tesla he's got spacex right now he's x he's got all of these different things and it's like how does one person manage to be at the top of the game true for all this stuff and it's just it's not easy it's phenomenal but i mean i guess i'm only at the top from one right now yeah for one you're gonna hear awful lots i i know maybe a part of that is what you're were saying earlier about the experimentation and having that feedback loop yeah and i imagine people like him and people like you you've developed this habit of being able to go through these loops much faster than other people like you can probably go through these learn develop loops yeah and like five of them a day whereas for me maybe it might take me a week to get through that one and then you just compound that knowledge and that growth yeah into propelling yourself faster into that one percent and then i'm just gonna use what i've learned if lot to get there yeah and just approach it to something else yeah i know how to get there it doesn't even matter what the topic is and i'm obsessed with it like i get obsessed like when it comes to the business like on my way here i had a podcast running that wasn't like a normal podcast i created a deep research thing where i was talking to chat and i was like here's what's going on in my business here's what i'm thinking about please do some research and then break breakdown from me how i should solve this problem i control see that whole response that chat gave me i uploaded it to eleven labs and then on my drive over here i listened to that with pure joy just listening to ai describe to me my problem and i'll do that all the time i'll just like listen to things about my business about problems and and just study the game i just love learning all the time yeah there's there's been quite a few people that have i've come on the podcast and say they use sheet chat in a way that you just mentioned whereas they'll dump in the information about their business or whatever they're doing yeah and then they'll just get information back from it and then kinda use that to problem them for the forward do you recommend that for a lot of people to do that just you know people that wanna use ai just say hey yeah use that as a sounding board so that you can iterate really quickly on on your ideas it's the most cost efficient assistant that we've ever had like there there's no question you don't have to take everything that did take gives you as an advice but you can use it for inspiration and you can ask it to do so many different areas of your life like if you're thinking about real estate and trying to build wealth in that regard you can have conversations with it about that where you can start to upload directly like your finances your mortgage and say like this is where i'm at this how many kids i've got this is where you wanna be this is what i wanna do is there any like savings or tax approaches that i should be considering right now it'll give you that you can say the same thing with your business i'm an early entrepreneur i've got a studio i'm trying to grow it what are something that i can do every single day to get me to a customer or to get me to a goal you wanna give it your goal upload a pdf that breaks down everything that you wanna achieve in the next few years and then tell it to give you a plan and if the plan is not good say i don't like your plan give me a new one and guess what it's going to do give you a new one and guess what it's not going to do have any emotional feelings about it and that is the best part of both not that employee not like forget that yeah doing that way it's not it's not gonna be mad at you and that's like yeah tap into it i would i would definitely recommend people do it so you've obviously you've built an incredible amount of skills and you know what it takes to create something that's successful thank you and you said you're also an angel investor so you're investing in other companies what do you look for when you're looking at who to invest in are you looking at the people are you looking at the idea because like i said you know what it takes to be a good entrepreneur are you looking for that in in the people you're investing in hundred percent yeah i look for the founder the entrepreneur to have vision to be someone who's okay with a few nose to like have thick skin and is able to like persist that like relentless that drive to the ambition the hunger all of those things are super important and then the second thing after the entrepreneur is the market itself so what is the market that this person is in and is it dying or is it growing and thriving and going to be something that's around in the next fifteen ten years and if it is then okay there's probably some longevity i've made some mistakes where i've gotten away from my my hypothesis around those two things and i've been like founders great but the market sucks either way i gotta put a bet on this person never has worked out whenever it founders and the market that are great it has been a a locked in success but if i if i discount the market it it always messes up about the idea at what level is the idea important to you the best founders will change their idea they'll be okay to change their idea they'll go down a path they'll see something they'll be hungry they'll pursue it but then they'll learn something and then they'll shift the idea a bit so the idea doesn't matter that much as long as they're directional towards a huge market and then if they stay in that market and they move a little bit that's okay that's fine because they might see a bigger opportunity within the same market and that's that's okay that's going spot to what we're saying earlier about just whatever the market wants you don't happy to give it right that means you're gonna like ten seconds we'll just do it hundred percent that makes that makes a whole lot of sense yeah so for for you this is you've had a an a huge amount of success like we're talking about you built foundation top fifty ceos in what else i have here sorry atlantic canada and yeah got this book right here it guys gotta grab this is amazing book thank you like what's next for you yeah so right now then the next chapter is focused on growing what i've got distribution dot ai foundation great teams build those teams and empower those teams and i've been telling everybody like this chapter of my life is about building more leaders like i want to invest in people to help those people be the best version of themselves so they can then trickle that down to new people we then continue to lead and drive growth for folks i'm very deeply very deeply focused on this game for myself as being when i take my last breath i need to look back and be like how many people did i impact how many people are better off because i existed and if there's a lot of them then i'm happy and i will be able to die very very happy and i'm pursuing that through business through charity nonprofit stuff like that as well and for me it's like really focused on growing foundation building leaders within it distribution on ai building leaders within it growing these org and then continuing down the path of just being a good dad and putting some cool companies along the way so when you say you wanna you know build these new leaders you're talking specifically like within your own company or is there anything else that's i don't care if stay within my company or if they're outside of the company i want to build leaders in my companies with a hundred percent that's operation one but operation two is outside like i don't create content online just for the sake of it i created to impact people so when i'm writing a blog post when i'm bringing a youtube video if i'm creating assured if i'm on instagram and i'm on my stories if i'm coming on a podcast like this my goal is to reach somebody who might have been the kit the nineteen year old ross who was sitting in his parents basement was like yeah there's no top fifty ceos that looked like me in this place i really wish that there was oh there's no top fifty ceos that like wanna talk to me like where what am i going to do i want people to see me and then see themselves and be able say i can go win and if that happens then let's go like i want people who feel like they're the underdog anyone who feels discounted underrated underestimated to just be like alright i can do it like you're i'm in nova scotia and i can win on a global scale yes let's go that's what i wanna see yeah that's an amazing message so you some summarize that pretty well here but i wanna ask you this maybe in a little bit of different way yeah for the new entrepreneur that's listening here what kind of advice would you give them to just you know what take the plunge forget about yourself out whatever all that stuff you might have what do you tell them so that they can just let it go and just take the plunge just know that like everywhere that you go there's going to be someone that's a little bit better than you and there's gonna be a whole bunch of people who aren't already even been close and because of that you should be relentless at pursuing whatever it is that you want to to chase and i wish i could say like just deal with the doubt thing but that's the biggest thing that's the biggest thing stop doubting yourself recognize that you don't need anyone else's permission to go be great so just go be great and do a time and time again until you are undeniable and then the world will be yours ross i wanna leave you with the final word is there anything else that you wanna say that we haven't touched on we've touched on a lot thanks for having me on really appreciate it i appreciate the journey i appreciate the work that you've been putting in and the value that you add to the internet and i'm excited to see what the internet gives you back oh thank you so much really appreciate that and again i appreciate you coming on here taking the time to come on my podcast podcast podcasts this has been truly special and i really really appreciate you taking the time so thank you thank you gotta hustle with the business hustle with the business

when the economy goes south guess who's usually on the chopping block marketing campaigns get pause budgets get slashed head count frozen or worse let go and yet expectations don't disappear you still better generate those leads build more pipeline drive more growth increase our traffic get more clicks get more share voice get all the things but with fewer resources and less budget yeah and more pressure sounds unfair right maybe but here's the twist that most people think downturn are kind of a hidden opportunity for marketers who know how to move who understand how to play the longing game right in this episode i'm gonna show you how to thrive when everybody else is retreating when the markets go south from zero budget growth strategies to loyalty loops and ass repurposing we're gonna flip the script a little bit because while everybody else is complaining about oh there's blood in the water there's chaos oh everybody's failing this is struggling this is not a great time to be a marketer yeah that's fine but this is the world we sign up for this is the world that we've got chaos creates opportunity for the bold and if you're playing the long game you're in the right place welcome to the ross simmons show here's what separates some winners from the ones who just survive mindset when a downturn hits the default reaction is panic cut the spend cancel the campaigns no more seo play defense but the best marketers the marketers that i actually look up to the marketers that i want surrounding me the ones that i would want on my team if i was a client or just a regular old cmo they're the marketers that stay calm they get focused but they are ruthless about value they're relentless about results because while your competitors are getting quiet and they're turning off all of their ads these are the people the marketers the calm ones the ones who are like truly have things under control they recognize that they have a chance to own attention this isn't fake optimism folks i'm not blowing smoke because i want you to say marketing should continue no no this is a true economic reality recognize that budget constraints can create clarity you start to figure out exactly what's driving results your your partners can stop hiding behind bloated metrics hopefully your team gets creative you get scrappy and that's when marketing performs at its best when we're not spending millions of dollars on consultants who are just going to tell us that all of our content is great but we should add more value wait what yeah i literally was reading through a deck that a client got the other day from one of the top consulting firms in the world and they did this audit and they literally took a screenshot of the client's linkedin post and they said we need to add more value we need to educate people we need to add value we need to add value with our content over and over again they just kept saying add value add more value like what are we talking about right folks downturn can be great for differentiating the bad from the good and that's when marketing becomes powerful but before we talk about what to do let's talk about what you shouldn't do because i've seen a lot of good marketers some of the top leaders in the world completely tanked their own momentum by making these silly mistakes and the first one the first mistake that i see happen way too often is that they cut brand investment completely because performance is where it's at i get it it's very tempting it's very tempting to kill off top of funnel awareness when things get tight who needs press we need sales who needs buzz we need sales who needs traffic we need sales who needs to have conversations with prospects we need sales but when you go dark folks when you're no longer even in the vicinity of your audience when you're not at those events when you're not showing up in front of them but your competitors are who do you think are they're gonna remember they remember who stayed visible they remember the brand that showed up time and time again on x on linkedin on facebook in their inbox that's who they remember the brand that still showed up when they were issuing rfp right you need to double down on remembering that your audience has short memory spans but if you can create content that is valuable you're more likely to stick with them even during a downtime so don't cut the investment in brand just because it doesn't translate into roi so quickly maximize all your performance spend you can but remember that brand is still important the second mistake is doubling down on like high cost low yield channels if paid is getting expensive nobody's buying because there's a crisis stop forcing it folks hello you know your unit economics what are we doing right now is the time to lean into earned now is the time to lean into owned i hope that you've already done the work to build your own email list i hope that you've already done the work to build your own community to have people who follow and subscribe to you so when you do have to decline and reduce the cost of ppc you can invest in your community and into the channels that you own and that you've earned to drive change and the third mistake but a very common one is that when things are chaotic when the market is down we've all got to play it safe let's do what everybody else has done let's do what we've done for the last few months let's not change anything right if everyone else is slowing down we should too no downturn turns reward the bold downturn rewards those who are willing to do things and no one else will do now is the time when everyone is quiet when everyone is playing scared now is the time for you to tell a story that is going to stand out amongst the noise now is a time for you to do something that will make your competitor scratch their heads thinking how in the world did they get that approved how in the world did they get the budget to do that how in the world did they think that they could go to market with this type of an asset with this type of a story with this type of a video this type of a message amidst downturn launch something surprising talking to loud hosted by chris savage is brought to you by the hubspot podcast number the audio destination for business professionals on this podcast chris savage w ceo and loudest talker takes you inside the minds of entrepreneurs as they share informative hilarious and some of the most challenging aspects of building more human brands most recently he had my friend brand fishing on to talk about what the end of traffic means for you this is an episode that i strongly recommend that you check out in particular it's episode off from may twenty seventh strongly encourage you to give it a listen listen to talking to loud wherever you get your because you don't win in a downturn by hiding and being scared just like everyone else you win by showing up differently because that is what no one is seeing and that is what stands out amongst the normalcy right so let's get into the meat of it because we're almost there already folks like what actually works when your budgets are tight like this i've gone through two major major economic downturn in my career the first one was right when i graduated from university and it was a bad one it was a great recession and then most recently during the pandemic that was another bad one and i've seen up upfront up close and personal what you can do to win and one of those things is that you start with what you have you repurpose your best performing stories that have historically drove results if you don't have budget you might not have the ability to invest in creating more so let's look back into the archives over the last two years what have you produced that was actually generating the most leads generated the most roi got people talking left right in center now take that and turn it into a linkedin carousel take that turn it into a thread we shared it for the first time in two weeks on linkedin and then do it again two weeks later use a tool like distribution dot ai to make an email series about it right share it on reddit create a youtube short create a video about it this is again how you create once in distribute forever repurpose your greatest hits and then the second thing that you wanna do is recognized that ads might get expensive they also might get cheaper when people start to pull back their paid media budget like the cost per click actually does get cheaper sometimes but it might get expensive to but one thing that doesn't get expensive one thing that like stays the same is trust so investing in trust earning materials podcast appearances guest blogging guest post long form short form content getting your founders your subject matter experts on podcasts on these different types or even pressing publish on thought leadership research data and assets this can help you earn minds share now you might be saying i can't use third party resources to do these research studies okay but maybe you have proprietary data that you can use maybe you have some internal data that you can use or maybe you can be the curator of data from the industry and bring something to life that way right the third thing is deepen your relationships with customers during a downturn do you know who's also stressed your customers your users your clients the people you work with so how do you help them you helped them by offering value sharing templates giving them early access sending them a dm to say hey i noticed you're struggling with something can i help you hey i'd noticed that you guys were thinking about this i put this quick document together that i think might help check it out remember it is always cheaper to keep out a customer than acquire a new one and word mode doesn't get in cut in a budget meeting word mo always wins because it drives vitality and the highest value of leads turn your best customers into advocates double down on them make them love you make them want to talk about you deepen the relationship with those who you already work with and then the fourth one is to prioritize that evergreen content that compounds i know you wanna create that fast quick short viral clip sometimes you just gotta create the assets that are going to stand the test of time something evergreen something that you can create today that's gonna drive roi for the next few weeks right and then the fifth piece comes down to collaboration i don't think there's a better time in the world than during a downturn to start collaborating with other brands everybody wants to swap audiences everyone wants to share state share a booth even at an event create joint collaborative content right distribution becomes currency amidst the downturn and one of the best ways that you can do that without actually buying distribution is through collaborations right i can remember when we were just getting started that foundation i used to do these things on snapchat called snap swaps i don't even know if they still do these things but we would take over someone snapchat account and we would just like talk about business talk about what we're doing and would it would give us exposure to a whole new audience people loved it we had like thirty forty percent increase in the number of followers on our account after doing these things right here's the bottom line folks tough times expose weak marketing but they also reveal who the real ones are who know how to adapt if you're scrappy smart and strategic you can grow when everyone else is shrinking so when your budget gets cut ask yourself what do i already have that i can use again who is on my team that will tap the leverage to do more with less where can i show up that my competitors aren't what do my customers need most right now and what are the things that i'm investing in that have high cost a low yield and then build from there look if you're facing a budget cut or know someone who is trying to do more with lesson send them this episode if you're a marketing and you're struggling to figure out where you go amidst it all i've got two suggestions for you one hubspot is great i encourage you to check out the tool also check foundation a lot of organizations are struggling right now because they don't have agency partners who actually care who don't work closely with them to help them win a foundation that is our m o we want to help our clients win folks thanks so much for listening to the ross show and remember constraints don't kill creativity they sharpen it thank you so much for checking out this episode if you enjoyed it feel free to share with a friend a colleague and appear and if you're playing the long game remember always gonna be a downturn and i hope that you can get out of it better than you were when you went into it i will see on the internet there's gotta hustle with the business hustle with the business

how is it that some people can achieve ten times more with the same twenty four hours like they're not working longer they're not superhuman they don't have some type of ridiculous time warp capabilities but they have done something they've mastered leverage if you're still equating success with burning the midnight oil pulling in all the late night grinding until your burnt you're playing the wrong game in this episode i'm going to break down leverage one zero one how you can multiply your output impact and kinda of your income without multiplying your workload i'm gonna dive into the systems that i've used to grow multiple businesses at the same time i'm gonna talk through the ways in which i had to shift my own mindset to get more done i'm gonna talk about delegation automation how the best performers today are doing less but still achieving more and folks it's not magic it's math it's systems it's how you win yes don't get me wrong i am not saying that you shouldn't work hard i am saying that you should work hard while also working smart both this isn't an an and or situation you should do both i i always hear people say don't work hard work smart no work hard and smart that's where you get the best outcomes that's where you get closer to your goals that's where you achieve greatness and that's when if you're playing the long game you're able to win folks if you're playing the long game you're in the right place welcome to the ross simmons show let's start with a very clear definition leverage getting outs sized results from your efforts it's what happens when one hour of your time produces ten hours of value one decision unlocks ten x the impact of a bunch of micro tasks and based off of the historic definitions and i heard this i'll be transparent and honest for the first time from naval ra a few months back or years back he talked about the classic types of leverage one being people capital code in content all of these these four things are essentially the top performers of giving you leverage however the average person only uses one themselves becoming the bottleneck they are the doe they are the executor they are the dream they are the visionary they are the du the operator the creator the player they do it all it's noble but it's not scalable let's dive into the four different types of leverage one more time first people this is when you hire this is when you build teams this is when you delegate this is when you partner with someone who might have a a complimentary skill as you right you leverage people to get more done the other thing is capital this is when money just works on your behalf it could be in investments it could be dividend stocks it could be crypto it could be one of those various things right that is when money works for you third we have code these are tools and efforts automation software technologies that you've built or that you've deployed you've hired you've rented that work while you sleep and then the fourth one is content the evergreen ip that reaches people over and over again what you are listening to right now this audio asset is me i've created leverage thousands of people can interact with my content on the internet interacting with me building trust with me building rapport with me while i'm doing completely different things these are the four types of leverage that each of us can build and establish if you want to build something big if you just wanna reclaim your time you have to tap into leverage let's be honest i was be to believe hustle hard equal success hustle hard daily no days off all gas no breaks let's go and yeah don't get me wrong hard work matters but if you work hard but you can still get ten x more than the other people because they're not tapping into leverage that's when you win right you don't wanna just work hard on low level tasks you don't wanna do tasks that don't move the needle you don't wanna be spending your time doing things that other people could do for you for a fraction of the value and the fraction of the cost or that you could have automated using a system so folks you want to avoid the trap if everything that you strive for if everything that you show up for depends entirely on you you have no system you you are it right your own effort you're an employee of your own effort especially if you're an entrepreneur i can remember when i was maybe twenty two twenty three years old and i i found out about this this ability to use tools like up upwork and fiber and i was working at an agency and they had this project where they needed me to kinda like redo this this document to put logos on it to like visualize it make it look pretty i'm not a graphic designer so i said look for the amount of time that this is going to take me i may as well go into fiber pay five dollars and have somebody who actually is a designer bring this to life for me and they did it and it was gold and it was great and at the time i used my own personal cash to do this because the roi of being viewed internally as somebody who could do that so quickly so effectively and so efficiently was worth five dollars right so i did that and then eventually i was like listen boss i'm paying for this i've got a person on fiber that i found let's just use them and they were like whoa really what how did you do that and then i explained to them global talent and it it became a thing within their business right we all need to start thinking about how we can flip the script there is leverage that each of us can have in these four leverage assets these four ideas of leverage that i just talked about they can each set you free let's talk about how these levers can be pulled to give you leverage the first one is people i want you to delegate like a founder not a manager right delegate like a founder too many people hire help too many people never actually leverage their people to do more you see delegation folks is not about just handling tasks it's not about saying hey can you go do this thing for me i need you to upload this and upload this image with it make sure that you're using this template with this style this aesthetic this font size etcetera that is not real delegation real delegation is saying you know over the last few months i've noticed that you have a real solid skill set around managing the repurposing of our podcast you've done a great job what would it take for you to do that consistently to run it and help us grow our podcast listeners to forty five percent or by twenty percent or by ten percent whatever it may be when you start to communicate the outcome that you want you give complete ownership of the task you give complete ownership of the responsibility and you empower someone to think bigger than just the task think about the difference between you've been doing great at repurposing our podcast and i want you to be the lead on doing all of that but drive twenty percent growth of our listeners and get creative but you'd take the reins on that versus can you turn this every single podcast from here on out into two social clips one video in three tweets and just write some status updates to promote them every day there's a big difference right one's transferring outcomes one's transferring tasks when you transfer the outcome you're more likely to get creativity you're more likely to get accountability you're more likely to get ownership so ask yourself today where are you the bottleneck what is a five dollar an hour task that you're doing so you can focus on a thousand dollar an hour work right what are you doing that someone else could completely own and get excited about and do it better than you leverage through people means hiring great people giving them ownership and getting out of their way right and i know it sounds easy and this is all kind of probably even sound cliche but i will poke a little bit with what i just said i do think that it's that simple but you have to recognize that you do have to coach you do have to facilitate discovery you do have to build some development on certain folks and not everybody will have done something before so you have to guide them etcetera so you don't get out of the way completely help them guide them be a facilitator ask them help them see doors that they might not see today that's the play now the second thing is code this one is really really really starting to change the way i view the world entirely folks in the past the way to get leveraged through code was to build an engineering team build an engineering team that could create sophisticated systems and structures technologies applications and if you had to do something more than twice you would hire an engineer put in a request to your tech team to build it but now now there are ai code writing tools like bolt cursor lovable that you can use today to literally write an application to create an app to create a product to create a solution to create a calculator a survey whatever you may need i've seen organizations build internal use only crm i've built solutions to help me replace and manage expenses within foundation so today you can tap into technologies like eight n hubspot all of these tools to automate your systems so you can do more you can use tools for scheduling for reporting for managing email flows for notifications for lead routing you as an individual no longer need to be the glue holding everything together right leverage through code means building systems that work whether you're in the office on vacation or sleep and here's the most beautiful part about it it's never been easier to do it because you can talk to an l the entire time while you're debugging it i've created some of the best spreadsheets of my career over the last few months because i leveraged chat gp to help me see what i didn't know i could do and some of these some of these excel spreadsheet some of these documents some of these assets are just as good as actual applications right and you can do that now now the third type of leverage is one that doesn't come easily to everyone right but it's essentially the simple philosophy that every dollar you spend should buy back your time should buy back access it should give you access it should give you compounding value right this is when you're spending money on ads right when you're spending money to reach people into a proven funnel to drive leads to drive traffic to drive conversions or you're investing in a product that sells without you right you have an affiliate deal set up where you're you're incentivizing people to promote your work and they're just doing it organically right it's investing in the actual startups or investing in actual stocks or bonds or dividends stocks or crypto whatever it might be right if capital is able to work for you then make it work for you right the last one is content this is my favorite and it's the one that most people underestimate me but folks you could write a blog post today that generates leads for the next twelve months you can press publish on a youtube video that builds trust while you sleep you can create a blog post a podcast or guide that becomes a lead magnet and all of these things are leverage right now while you listen to this i'm probably be interacting with people on instagram facebook and x as well because great content gives you permanent permanent sales enable passive trust building and gives you the ability to be in more places every single day that's why i say it pretty much every episode folks create once distribute forever content is one of the few assets that grow the more that you use it and if you ever read the book create one's distribute forever then you should get it it's available wherever you get your books it will break down for you how to create great assets great stories great messages great content and how you can spread those stories on the channels where your audience is spending time now here's some mindset shifts that you need to make mindset shifts that i had to make and not all of them came easy i know that this can be tough i know that changing your mind can be one of the most difficult things but the first one that i needed to shift was that more hours equate to more impact right i wore as a badge of honor when i would work late into the evenings and early in the morning and it's it's interesting looking back because some of the years in which i spent a lot of that time i wish i knew what i knew now so i could have told myself to work on different things because i was oftentimes working on the wrong things and you might look at what you're working on and i would ask you like are you working on the right things what are the things that you are working on that are more likely to get you towards the end goal of your growth plan towards the end goal of your performance plan to the end goal of your career of your increase in salary your promotion the success of the company the organization that you are either employed in or that you run or that you own up piece of what are the things that you are doing that will have the most impact you have to think about over the last few weeks like where did you put your energy did you put a lot of energy into arguing with a stranger on the internet that nobody actually saw did you put a lot of energy into thinking about a problem that didn't actually exist did you spend a lot of energy questioning and wondering whether or not you should or shouldn't send a dm to somebody when in reality if you just sent it the world will continue to spin how many hours to have you wasted not by being action oriented not by building trust overthinking things over the impact of certain things stop measuring output by hours worked and start measuring the results that you produce and the value that you create the second thing is to stop trying to be the smartest person in the room this one is in particular of utmost importance for founders entrepreneurs and marketers managers leaders to hear hire people smarter than you ask people who have done what you want to do for help throw the ego out the window leverage requires humility you have to trust the systems you're building and you have to trust that growth is a part of the game you might be great at what you do but you are not the best and because of that you should ask yourself who is better than me who was doing better than me who knows things that i don't know and how can i learn from them how can i hire them how can i bring them into my org how can i put them on my team so i can thrive and we can all win together those becomes the questions that you have to ask right when you do that when you start to operate with humility and you operate with a a mindset that's rooted in one simple concept and that is growth overall you want to drive growth that's when you win the third one is this stop doing things that only work once if something worked once right but it doesn't scale throw out the window you need repeatable things folks you need to be able to do repeatable things so you can teach somebody else how to do it you need to be able to do reusable outputs right if you want to grow something meaningful you can't constantly be bespoke you can't constantly be doing things that are absolutely unique to your own circle of genius you need to feed something through a system that you've built that will work and translate into a desired outcome of your customers your clients every single time that looks feels the same folks let me give you my final takeaways here if you wanna grow something meaningful and not like burnout in the process you need leverage it's not just a productivity hack it's not a survival tool this is how you go from operator architect player doe of all the things into someone who actually is able to sit back and see things happen where they are how they are you don't need more hours in a day you need to use the hours that you've got just simply better so this week today i was gonna say this week but i don't want you to put this off i want you to do this right now ask yourself where can i stop doing and start del where can i stop repeating and start automating or documenting where can i stop pushing and where can i just let the stories that i've told do their thing find the lever and pull it thanks so much for listening to the ross show if this episode helps shift the way that you work think or believe that leverage could be tapped into in your life share with somebody else who's out there that's grinding too hard with way too little roi and remember success isn't and always about doing more it's about doing less it's about doing what matters it's about not just doing things yourself it's about doing things that ultimately will set you up so when you play the long game you win on your terms thank you so much for checking out the ross simmons show gotta hustle with the business hustle with the business

did you get your tickets yet inbound twenty twenty five what a lineup it's including folks like amy poe to patel sean evans from hot ones marquez brown lee glenn and doyle and so many more this is going to be an event that you don't wanna miss it's happening in san francisco september third and fifth twenty twenty five in the moscow center sam brand california folks this is one of those events that fundamentally has the ability to change the trajectory of your business your career your strategy and the way that you operate it's three days of inspiring keynote tactical breakout sessions and exclusive product reveals folks i am telling you now this is not an event that you will want to miss immerse yourself in san francisco ai scaling ecosystem discover research back frameworks connect with pioneers and do so much more visit inbound dot com slash register to get your ticket today ever feel like your b b company is stuck in the second gear no matter how much gas you press maybe you are walking around screaming all gas snow breaks all gas snow breaks you've got a talented team a product this solves a problem you're doing all the right things but when it comes to getting the traction you want your pipeline your conversions the results the clients things just keep falling flat lagging struggling and having issues over the last few years i've dedicated the vast majority of my career to working with b b brands helping them drive pipeline revenue traction engagement in the wonderful world of tech i've worked with everything from pre seed startups and helping them scale to become series a startups all the way from publicly traded companies looking to generate millions of dollars in revenue on the back of content i've seen it all i've seen the problems within some of the largest companies in the world i've got an exposure to the teams that are creating content that all of us have read i've supported the brands that move the needle in entire industries and across the board i have seen a handful of what i'd like to call silent killers of growth you see the growth stalls aren't always caused by a weak strategy or an algorithm change or bad luck but typically because of some bottlenecks things inside your process your messaging in your system that you don't actually see it could be your sales process it could be your value prop it could be your messaging it could be onboarding it could even be your go to market in general in this episode i'm gonna be diving deep and shine in the spotlight on some of the most common bottlenecks that i've seen holding b b companies back from scale more importantly i'm gonna walk you through how to fix them how you can move from plateau to hyper growth if you're playing the long game you're in the right place welcome to the ross simmons show alright let's start with this most companies don't stall because their ideas suck they don't stall because they work in a boring industry they don't stall because nobody actually wants what they are offering most of them saw because the systems that they have operated in are broken and misaligned the responsibilities abilities and the account that they're given their teams are broken the strategies that they're embracing are firm two thousand and nineteen when they need to wake up to the world around them today yes you do need one thing product market fit but let's assume that you've got that let's assume that the thing that you are offering the market actually doesn't a need that you've done the due diligence to create a product that people want you've talked to customers you didn't talk just to chat gp either you've actually talked to customers now it's about eliminating friction it's about eliminating friction between stages of the customer journey it's time for you to make sure that this pipe this pipeline doesn't have clog you don't want the flow of prospects to have a bunch of dips and leaks throughout the funnel you don't want a bottleneck problem and what's wild is that most most teams most organizations don't even know what they've got they don't even know that these problems exist so let's dive in to five of the most common ones that i've ever seen and the first one is this misaligned messaging misaligned messaging happens every single day this is a mistake that i see organizations make directly on their homepage directly on their ads directly in their stories and their status updates in their videos they make this mistake regularly and in the early stages the mistake is that instead of using their customer's language they use their investors language you can't will not believe how many times i've gone into a boardroom and i've talked to a founder i've talked to an entrepreneur head of marketing the first marketing hire and they articulate to me that the landing page the homepage needs to say a certain thing because that's what investors wanna see what are we talking about do you wanna know the number one thing that investors will care about besides your homepage revenue results growth sign contracts deals that will trump whatever message you have on your homepage you can call yourself the next gen ai powered platform or you can understand what your customers actually want you can listen to the sales call you could actually understand the real words that buyers use when they're talking about the pain that they have and you can articulate the relief that they will get when they work with you you do not need to sprinkle buzz words on everything you do not need to say things because the investors want you to you should say things because they are going to move the needle for your customers they're going to make your customers say yes this is a pain that i feel and i am ready to buy and if i could give you a simple framework on how to think about this it would be a d a ada old philosophy lifetime potential super powerful ai d attention interest desire and action those are the things that you need you need to ensure that your customers first and foremost have your attention when you they read your content on your website you have to learn them in by talking about the things that interest them the pain and how you can solve it then you're gonna doesn't make them have a feeling of desire oh i wanna really talk to these folks and then action the call to action the button of some sort that books a demo has a call do not have misaligned messaging as the first piece of friction in your journey the second mistake that i see often and this one can go in a few different ways one it happens in enterprise and two it happens on a small scale to with startups this is what i would call a bloated revenue process making your sales cycle drag on forever is just pure friction it's not great it's not fun no one wants to go through it it's not just being enterprise no it's friction folks too many handoff offs too many approvals no ability to just purchase right talking to everyone not able to get a price from you this is so so chaotic it is not ideal people want to buy the same way they want to buy from other things and yes sometimes people wanna be sold to and that's a part of it and you need to go through that experience but sometimes people just wanna buy your software if we're talking about a low ticket item i'm not trying to talk to your sales you might just wanna buy it just give me let me swipe my credit card in purchase right you don't always need to go through a bloated sales process make it easy shorten your decks lead with the results articulate case studies give me pricing on your website make it easy for me to buy incorporate a live demo directly on your website so i can play with this thing that's what you wanna do that is how you get through one of the biggest issues in many b2b b companies journey they drag on their sales process and they wonder why people are saying no two weeks into the flow it's because you are taking too long to allow them to make these decisions now the third one isn't something that is applicable to every single b b brand but when you are really set up for success you're ultimately delivering quick wins fast somebody signs up for your product you've got the sale congrats don't make onboarding feel like work make it feel like a success deliver that quick win in forty eight hours make the first week delightful send lube have a check in give a checklist right give them value early so they win and this isn't just something that i see in software companies that i work with this is something that as somebody who runs a b2b b company foundation right like we're service firm i think about all the time how can we as an agency deliver our new clients quick wins really fast value how can we help them win early how can we make their first week feel delightful like make them have zero regret in the decision to work with us how do we do that how do we make them feel great it's a difficult one to think about because oftentimes as a professional we think about things from our perspective but in reality we need to think about things from other people's perception no straight path hosted by ashley men baba tu is brought to you by the hubspot podcast network and it sheds light on the stories behind the shiny resumes the social media highlight reels the job titles no straight path aims to human eye success from a millennial perspective guests come from all walks of life and this is a perfect fit for any listener because it it brings interview style conversations that highlight some of the most important and diverse voices in the industry entrepreneurs marketers or salespeople you'll all love this show it is jam packed with some of the best content that i've come across lately in the hubspot podcast network in focus you gotta check it out one of my favorite episodes is running for office with walter garcia someone who was running for the california primaries and a bunch of other content that was absolutely gold please check it out enjoy what do they perceive when we write this email what do they perceive when we send this loom when we make this request when we ask for this when we share this when we update them on that being empathetic putting yourself in the customer's shoes in helping them win fast is the best way to reduce the likelihood of churn not just in service but also in software alright the fourth mistake that i see with the b2b problem is a lot of companies have great blog posts they have great decks they have great webinars but the problem is nobody sees them they don't share it on linkedin their sales team definitely doesn't they try to promote things they might run some ads but they're not really doing a a solid job at distributing the things that they've already created this isn't a content problem this is a distribution problem break your webinars into sixty second nuggets that can become a whole bunch of different linkedin posts over the course of a year take those case studies and turn them into slides in linkedin take that podcast and turn it into a blog post into an email into a thread on x and then share it on linkedin and if you don't know how to do this read the buck create once distribute forever it is an absolute gem of a book and i know i'm biased i wrote it but this is the thing folks you need to distribute your content so many b b brands are investing in the content but for getting to promote it it's not called the content industry it's the content marketing industry we need to market the content that we've produced so let's do that use a tool like distribution dot ai use hubspot to spread your stories this is how you win in the modern age and the fifth mistake the fifth problem that a lot of b brand suffer prem is teams operating in incomplete silos where marketing is talking about leads that aren't relevant to sales who's talking about pipeline and success is talking about n mps but nobody's rolling together and trying to actually understand the same customer journey the same kpis and truly think about this as a holistic team that only cares about one thing revenue and growth i know i said one thing but growing the revenue let's go with that growing the revenue growth isn't just what marketing owns growth is a team sport folks sales is involved marketing is involved customer success is involved it is a team sport we all need to care about what we're doing because if sales is bringing in the this pipeline of people who customer success can't even serve you're gonna have an issue and if marketing is bringing sales leads that are completely irrelevant sales is gonna fail so you need everyone to be working and operating within the same journey the same vision same boat rowing together now you might be thinking them ross i've got all of these i've got five these five locked in so where do i go from here here's what i would give to you a three step framework where you gotta ask yourself some questions and it's rooted in a simple cut philosophy impact urgency ease what is costing us the most right now what is the easiest things that we could ship this week and what are we doing that is slowing down the conversion the most now make a list and what you're going to see is that some of these things will have high impact low urgency and low ease okay put them on the map for later but some things might have high impact high urgency high east focus on those early asap right you don't need to fix everything but you do need to take a step back and look at the problems in front of you you need to unblock the things that lets momentum build again so think about where do you see a gap where's your conversion clip happening that's the moment where attention of your customer like really start could be your website it could be a demo it could be an empty it could be the first call i don't know but you gotta find it you have to find that gap and then build a bridge to get over it and that is how you win folks one of the key things that i would encourage anyone listening to this episode to try to embody and live is to shift their mindset into the mindset of a growth operator you see most people think that growth comes from adding more we need to add more leads we need to do more ads we need to write more blog post create more features but the reality is the best operators the best leaders realize that growth doesn't always come from addition it actually comes from subtraction from removing friction removing mis alignment removing complexity removing issues and when you start looking at your funnel like an engineer and not a marketer you start to maybe even see the truth you might start to see things that you didn't even realize were problems it's not about throwing more into the top it's not always about generating more and more pipeline you might need to just improve the quality of those people who are coming into your pipe driving growth is earned through relentless optimization and it starts by asking where are we stuck and why are we stuck what processes are we not following consistently what is the gap why are we saying yes to this conversation why are we entertaining this prospect why did this prospect even think that we could do what they want is our messaging that off right so if you're feeling that stall if you're feeling that gap but you're putting in the work and not seeing the velocity not seeing the roi not seeing the returns the chances are that there's something broken in your bottleneck that you actually haven't found yet and i know it sounds easy for me to just say in your ears hey go fix it but that's the job of a growth operator you need to understand where your gaps are you need to understand how you can fill them and if you do that you'll realize through all of this you will unlock the opportunities to drive growth again folks if this hits home share with your team your cofounder or a fellow operator in the trenches running revenue in growth thank you so much for listening to the ross show and i as always create wants distribute forever and i'll see you on the internet gotta hustle with the business hustle with the business

late nights tough decisions that quiet moment which is almost midnight where you're sitting there staring at the ceiling wondering if anyone even has a clue all the baggage decisions challenges and struggles that you're carrying with you on a day to day basis being a founder is a gift i love it there's nothing like it but it's also one of the lone jobs on the planet from the outside looking in everything is always working there's growth there's headlines there's momentum there's likes there's shares there's presentation there's clients there's deals there's prospects there's new hires there's celebrations there's new deals new wins look at this we're winning we're winning we're winning but behind the scenes sometimes when the weekend comes the evenings come it can oftentimes feel like it's just issue you're the one holding in the vision you're the one holding the pressure you're the one making the decisions that ultimately kinda guide the path of the org the vision of the company while still even amidst your own failures struggles challenges you have to show up every single day striving to deliver with clarity with confidence with intention and not really have a day off now i'm not talking about a vacation i'm talking about a day off where you aren't performing where you're not showing up for your team where you're giving value building trust building rapport connecting your on today i wanna talk about the loneliness of leadership why it's common even in success and more importantly how you can navigate it folks if you're playing the long game you're in the right place welcome to the ross simmons show let's start with something that a lot of people just don't wanna talk about and that is the fact that leadership can be isolating not because you're like physically alone but because the weight of the responsibility can sometimes just not be shared with anyone at all you literally are making decisions that shape people's careers sometimes they're they're livelihoods you decide when to take a risk when to walk away when you think a deal isn't right when you think client is it right a project isn't right you carry the cash flow concerns you have that vision drifting you have to contain it you have to have the tough conversations that no one else wants to have you have to send the email that no one else wants to share you get the emails that nobody else wants to receive and often it can feel like you can't really get everything together right sometimes you have to balance all of these things with the fact that you don't wanna worry your c founders you don't wanna raise flags with investors or partners you don't wanna overwhelm your team you don't want your team to see you weak there's so many things that go into this game of leadership and piece by piece not all at once you can get to a path where you feel like you're running a race alone and i think truly that this trap is one of the biggest mistakes that founders find themselves in it's not a trap that i haven't found myself in before there's been cases with my businesses where things have felt heavy lots of things going on lots of problems lots of challenges and instead of relying on the people who already believe in the vision who already believe in me believe in the goals believing in where we're going i just kinda kept it to myself but the moment i started to recognize the importance of actually letting the great people that you hire the great people that you work with make decisions and take accountability and responsibility the entire game gets less lonely the entire game gets a whole lot more fun my message to founders is to remember you're not alone in this experience some of the most accomplished people that i've ever met i'm talking people who are running like multi multi multi million dollar companies some of the best selling authors in the world some of the top investors in the world i have heard them say i feel so alone in this game this game is so lonely i'm just kinda lonely right i i have even heard people say they sold their company because they just wanted to work in an office they just wanted to work with people again because they for they missed having peers because they were the the top chief i wanna talk about why i think this happens some of the things that i've tried if very intentionally to avoid and my hope is that some founders out there some leaders out there because i don't think it's just founders folks let me let me caveat that it's also like leadership positions in general right like if you lead people you're wearing the same way it's not just the founder if you have responsibilities in org where you're responsible for a higher if you're responsible for promotions for raises for salaries for all of those things for somebody's growth those things that's weight right i feel you so let's talk about how you can avoid some of the things that i believe is truly a trap the most realistic trap that i think so many of us fall into is information as you see as a founder or a leader you're living in a different reality oftentimes and many people around you you oftentimes have a viewpoint a perspective and a lens that isn't the exact same as everyone who works with you and this is a massive massive problem that i see in works where we don't readily share the information you see the full dashboard you see the churn you see the partnerships that are falling apart you see the revenue slipping you see all of the problems but you have to keep internal more high you have to keep client feedback at the forefront of your what you're doing you have to keep the board engaged do you need partners to be onboard you need to really ensure that all of this is happening at once but because you don't see the same picture nobody input empathize with you nobody feels you nobody understands you nobody nobody even realizes what you're going through and you're sitting there thinking to yourself do they not see how much chaos is going on right now do they not see what i have on my back you're thinking i'm in the room with these people but my mental way is somewhere else and after a while you kinda start to like think to yourself there's no one talk to i gotta do this all myself here's the thing some of that information doesn't need to live in silo it doesn't need to live exclusively with you the second trap that i see founders fall into leaders fall into as well is that there is a hundred percent like this emotional labor that we go through that we need to kind of we kind of have to lean into i think that one of my greatest skills is that i have what i believe is like a steady state with emotions i'll see a problem and i can approach the problem i'm not mad if i call it a problem i'm not upset i'm not angry i just wanna fix this problem i don't have an issue with it and it allows me to just keep going even amidst the chaos and i know not everyone kind thinks and operates operations in the same way but it a lot of leaders are kind of expected to be resilient to be optimistic to be decisive and those things are smooth and easy to be honest when things are going well when everything's up into the right easy but when you feel that pressure when your last few decisions were wrong and you still have to show up with energy and you're feeling a little bit drained you have to motivate people even though you're doubting yourself like that's when it gets tough that's the emotional labor that can be challenging right so you have to recognize that like for many leaders they become the emotional safety net they have to be resilient they need to be optimistic they have to show the the vision they have to push the vision they have to talk about it and in some cases those emotional safety nets can have a breaking point the third problem with a lot of leaders is that their identity gets so wrapped up in the outcomes of their business of their projects of the things are doing your name is on the door your name is on the website your face in the pitch deck your reputation is intertwined with every outcome with every deliverable you have to sign off on these things and when it goes right there's no better feeling but when it goes wrong it kind of feels personal you know i took that personal michael jordan always had that quote where whenever he went into a game if he lost or somebody did something he would always say and that's when i took it personally right that's not ideal folks i i get it because i'm very much of that perspective all the time it's like i i do take a lot of things personally when it comes to like me missing if i dropped the ball on something i'll take it personally and i'll really think intently about how i can be better but i'll also call out that it can be a dangerous place to be it can be a dangerous place to not have that separation between your work and your worth and i think i have a separation there where my identity is tied directly to my outcomes but i do take outcomes very seriously now the fourth problem that i think happens with a lot of entrepreneurs and this is why i've joined groups like e etcetera is because there's not always a circle who you can talk to and be fully honest right as a business grows as your career grows your circle kinda gets smaller i forget what the quote is but it's some variation of vision up bigger but the circle gets smaller right and as the circle gets smaller the truth is like being honest being transparent talking about all of your wins or even all of your losses can be a little bit difficult because you don't really know who you want to share it all with right you don't know if you want to share that you're kind of unsure about this project that you're building this feature that you're building with your board you might not be a very clear if this project that you just lost is something that you really wanna talk about with your team because you're feeling like oh things are going solved right like you don't know that right so you keep quiet and in doing so you reinforces a illusion that you're the only one who feels this way folks let me tell you something whether it's not being honest with your people whether it's a tying your identity to outcomes emotional labor or holding info just to yourself these are all traps yes success can lead to isolation not because something's wrong but because the structures around you aren't really designed well this is where the loneliness comes in and this is when i think leaders need to realize that you are in control of breaking this loop you do not need to constantly be lonely at the end of the day being lonely as a leader and just uncomfortable but it's gonna impact your performance it's gonna cloud your decision making it's gonna give you a bunch of yourself doubt and yeah eventually you're gonna burn be fast just like a candle on a like birthday cake so here's how you remove that here's how you fix that my first piece of advice is to build a true inner circle whether it's joining a group like e y p hampton whatever join these groups where you can talk truly about your wins your losses your feelings your vision your path your your challenges your struggles no polish no cleanliness dirty gritty real stuff and if you can't join one of those types of groups take the initiative to own the development of a whatsapp group and invites some entrepreneurs people who you can talk to who will check on you who will challenge you invest in that i always say that every leader means to have two people in their life someone who is doing better than them and maybe a little bit older than them so they have that person who they can aspire to be like or they can look at and say yeah i gotta get there i gotta push and they can also tap into that person for wisdom and then they need that person that's a little bit further behind them but is out working them that is innovative that is pushing the limits that is doing big things so you can always feel like someone's coming for you and i know that might not be ideal in terms of what you wanna hear but i think having that duality is powerful because you're always persistent pushing yourself to be better with your innovation you get to see how other people are innovating and you can learn from someone who has done it now here's the second thing that i think is important intentional reflection this is kind of why one of the reasons why the raw image show exists right this is one of the reasons why i do these entries these like episodes where i'm just like reflecting on things that i care about because it allows me to just reflect gives me a a moment to share and regain my own perspective on how i'm doing and what i'm thinking and where i'm going the next step though and this is one that i think you have to tread very carefully on is that you need to include your team in the pressure i've had people who i've worked with the past who don't really realize that when you say include your team in the pressure you gotta do it thoughtfully yes your team can handle more than you think but do not invite them into the pressure and the challenges that are unbearable by someone at their level by someone who is brand new in their career don't over share every single fear yes you need to be transparent yes you need to open up your your your visibility into how things are going in your world yes you have to show them that you're human yes you need to showcase the challenges that are in front of you and talk about those and tell them like these are the problems that i need to help fix but you can't you can't you absolutely can't just start throwing the pressure on them and using it as a an excuse in many ways to get things off of your back and hope that they take them that is such a lazy way out don't do it sometimes you have to own it sometimes you have to take it and sometimes you have to deal with it so do that but you can be thoughtful in including your team and the pressure and when people have a better visibility and understanding of the full picture when they do get the elements that they can control and they understand the areas where they can support they can rise to the moment they can rise to the moment and help alleviate the pressure and maybe come up with ideas and solutions that are better than you because why you hire brilliant people if you're not gonna get out of their way and let them win alright the fourth thing is to actually work with a coach for probably two years i had a coach and it was a great experience for me it was awesome they talked to me about growing the business they had no stake my businesses that i didn't need to impress them they just helped me see clearly clarity objectivity around where i wanted to go and how i should get there and it was helpful and if you wanna get really deep on this you could also probably go see a therapist if you're really feeling lonely that's also a path for you now here are some things that i've learned over the years i have learned that as someone who has always been outside of a few projects a solo founder like foundation solo founder i started it in my parents basement distribution dot ai solo founder brought in some great team to support the execution but like there's a lot of a lot of weight in just being the solo low person to start it and i can recall moments after big wins where i still felt like kinda off and then i realized that it was because like i wasn't sharing or celebrating the wins with everybody else i was just getting the wins and holding it back and not celebrating and in slack not telling everyone about it i wouldn't tell my friends about it i wouldn't tell my partners about like business partners about it i wouldn't tell even my wife about it i just kinda let it go let it be there but when i realized and i started to talk about it with people and they started to celebrate it and they started to kinda go along the journey that's when the loneliness kinda went away right and that's when you shift folks you shift from performing to living it's not about performing right everyone always hears that quote fake it like you make it right and i get this sentiment in some rigor if you are twenty two years old and you want to be excellent and you need to fake it as in like fake believed and self confidence that you know what you can do this thing and do your thing right but don't fake the style of leader that you are i am a leader who really wants the best for of their people i want my people to win i want my people to grow i want my people to to achieve all of their greatest ambitions i want a team that understands the value of empathy i want a team to see me as a leader who will push them to do things that they might not have thought was possible but to celebrate them when they do it to reward them when they do it and i have to remind myself that i need to live into my state and my goals as a leader right it's not easy and it still isn't but that change created more space for me to have the clarity to make better decisions and for me to show up exactly how i want to for my team but also to avoid the feeling of loneliness i never feel lonely and i'll be honest it's hard for me to feel lonely when i have so many people who i believe are rooting for me right when i have people online who are commenting and liking and sharing and subscribing i built that network right and i know not everyone has that benefit so if you're listening to this and you're thinking you know this is exactly where i'm at right now i'm lonely let me tell you something you're not alone you're not broken you're not falling behind right the loneliness is one of the most common things amongst leaders but it doesn't have to be your default forever i know that the stress is real i know that the pressure is real but i need you to show up as yourself and i need you to recognize that you can go further with other people you can go further with honesty and you can unlock strength that you might not even realize you had there was a gentleman who i had come over to my place and do a little bit of work around the house and i was chatting with him was an older guy and he was looking for some work so i gave him this project and we were chatting it up talking about life and he had like maybe forty years on me in terms of age and we were just chatting it up and he said a simple quote that i'll never forget he said he who bears the he who wears the crown must bear the weight and leadership will always come with weight but it's not a weight that you have to carry by yourself that's the key it's a weight that you can carry with your peers your friends it's a weight that you can carry with your teammates with your colleagues if you have cofounder with them with your spouse it's a weight that you don't need to carry by yourself where you can build a network you can find a network you can find an outlet you can find a way you can find a home you can find a circle where you can be true to you thank you so much for checking out the ross show if this episode spoke to you please send it to someone in your circle that founder her a friend or leader who just might need the reminder to know that they're not known and that you might be even thinking about them because sometimes the most powerful thing that that person might need to hear is hey i see you i feel you and i hear you alright folks i'll see you on the thank you so much again for checking out ross show and i'll see you on online gotta hustle with the business hustle with the business

did you get your tickets yet inbound twenty twenty five what a lineup it's including folks like amy poe to patel sean evans from hot ones marquez brown lee glenn and doyle and so many more this is going to be an event that you don't wanna miss it's happening in san francisco september third and fifth twenty twenty five in the moscow center sam brand california folks this is one of those events that fundamentally has the ability to change the trajectory of your business your career your strategy and the way that you operate it's three days of inspiring keynote tactical breakout sessions and exclusive product reveals folks i am telling you now this is not an event that you will want to miss immerse yourself in san francisco ai scaling ecosystem discover research back frameworks connect with pioneers and do so much more visit inbound dot com slash register to get your ticket today marketers seo strategist discover ability experts or whatever we wanna call ourselves let's be honest we've spent years ob accessing over rankings the top spot on google featured snippets first page placement how many backlinks we got page authority but here's the thing folks search has changed the way that we think about search is completely flipped on its end it's no longer just hey how are we doing in google yes google is still the number one search engine yes it's not going anywhere soon but the way that even google operates has changed memory is now impacting all of us and no i'm not talking about the fact that you can't remember exactly what you did last friday i'm talking about the fact that within google within chat within gemini within claude is a little thing called memory if your seo playbook still starts and ends with metadata backlinks and blog post volume you're already behind if you're still saying oh yes we need to create x number of blog posts per month and this is going to influence the ll you're behind in this episode i'm diving into the next wave generative engine optimization and i'm gonna dive into how memory and personalization are fundamentally changing in the way that we discover brands products and information and how organizations can start to change their strategies today so you know how to operate amidst a time where l m's like chat gemini cloud google ai overview are all right rewriting the way in which we think about search and how you can evolve your strategy so you're not left behind folks if you're playing the long game you're in the right place welcome to the ross simmons show so let's start at the beginning what in the world is generative engine optimization ge o well ge is something that i wrote about just literally a year ago i've wrote peace on my website called generative engine optimization what it is and why we all need to be thinking about this thing and you fast forward to about months later and now everybody's agreement yet let's call it that cool i love it let's do it ge it's what happens when search stops being a list of blue links folks and it starts to be keep a focus around a conversation you see instead of ranking pages the all are now generating answers right instead of simply sending you a ton of traffic the decoupling of clicks in traffic has begun instead of exclusively relying on backlinks they're using memory they're also using your personal history your account preferences your pass searches your past questions your browser behavior and none of this is theoretically anymore cookies are dying memory is in it's happening when i ask chad gp where i should take a vacation obviously it's gonna tell me i should go to italy maybe because i've already told that italy italy's my favorite place and maybe because already told that i would love a bottle of bo maybe because i've asked it for tasting notes on two or three bottles of nice fine wine from tuscany in the past so of course that's where it's gonna tell me i should go but if you asked you might get a different answer if my colleague asks they might get a different answer if my wife asked she might get a different answer and if your best buddy asked guess what they might also get an answer but this isn't just about personal queries this exists in business too if you go to an l today and you type in what is the best generative engine optimization agency what is the best content marketing agency what is the best b b saas agency you might very well get a very different answer from somebody else especially if you happen to work at a company that offers those things so our bias shows up and many of us don't even realize it we're looking at these responses from feeling flattered not realizing that the l is telling you what you wanna hear because well it knows who you are when a colleague asks the exact same question they might get an exact different question response directly in google i asked my followers on x just a few weeks ago i was like hey folks i've been generative engine optimization and tell me what you get but of ten different responses to that tweet every single response was slightly different some of them were filled with ads some of them had an ai overview some of them added linked to search engine land and some of them added link to foundation inc was very different depending on the brand why memory why context shifts millions of personalized ser there is no longer one single ser that we can think about for a query there are millions millions of serbs millions of people experiencing this every single day millions of responses directly from the l inside a quad chat and beyond millions of responses directly in ai mode it is no longer best practice to follow the same old methodologies that we have in the past we now need to think differently we now need to remember the memory is kind of an invisible ranking factor so let's go deeper than that memory is what lets you tell chat remember i'm a b marketer remember i'm a high school teacher remember that i'm thirty eight remember that i am a massive fan of this team or that team remember i'm a software developer or an engineer right it's through this that google's gemini is able to prioritize certain answers right it's through this that claude is able to make a more technical recommendation to somebody who's a software developer than they would to a small business owner think about that for a second two people can ask the exact same thing but because the l knows that one person is a little bit more savvy than the next they might receive a less technical reply for example if i said i need to build a website how should i do that if it the l knows that i already know how to write code if the l already knows that i have used bolt i've used lovable i've used all of these technical tools they might make a recommendation around that if they know that i already have a github account they might make a recommendation that i'm on wordpress or maybe they might know that i'm a small business owner and i need something scrappy but something that's efficient and they might make a recommendation like you should use hubspot these are things that the ll is now going to think about and consider when it replies to the millions of queries associated with people right it's no longer did we just rank for that word it's now are we getting mentioned in the right user generated content forms are our authors seen as credible entities are we being picked up in the press with positive sentiment is our experts our leaders being quoted in industry magazines are we being inc on reddit on youtube on linkedin in blogs are our products name showing up in the ai generated answers do we have content that has modifiers and phrases that are aligned with the queries that people would look for it's all so messy memory is messy it's unique to the users it can't be crawled with the tool right most seo tools aren't built for this shift but the brands that win in ge are the ones who are going to embrace the complexity they don't optimize for everyone they're going to optimize for someone and do it repeatedly time and time again across multiple platforms the rise of personalized search results means we need to change let's get real about what this means folks all of us dreamed about ranking number one but what does it mean when the results vary based on who's logged in when your search history affects what shows up an l is setting your content you publish but never sends a click or if it does send a click it's halfway through an answer that just happens to position your content in a more compelling way halfway through with a citation this is the great decoupling of traffic and impact you might not get the click but if you're cited in the ai response did you win maybe here's what we're seeing folks we're seeing across the board top of funnel traffic is reducing its viability as a metric especially for generic educational content mid and bottom of funnel content holding value is still holding value still holding traffic right but the way users are arriving there isn't as linear as it used to be it's not as track always as they used to be so if your dashboard and your kpi for your team is always organic traffic growth and you might wanna rethink it you might want to consider impressions you might want to consider brand you might wanna consider a holistic strategy that doesn't just route itself in traditional seo metrics but instead starts to consider are we getting picked up by the press are we getting inbound are we getting is our activities leading to net new business opportunities and are we getting that is that happening are we getting more emails from people saying that they see our stuff are we getting more inquiries are we getting more downloads these are the things that you might need to start measuring instead of just going into your seo dashboard and thinking oh was traffic moving up into the right and i know what you might be thinking how do we how do we how do we win but you win by recognizing the shifts and change has to happen and with these shifts and changes you as an organization need to start thinking how can we optimize for the ll how can we embrace generative engine optimization so let me give you a few tips a few things that i think makes sense and i know that a lot of people are gonna get a little bit upset when i talk about this because they think that this means go find some fake people to just put associated with your blog post no i'm not talking about that author pages build author entities folks what does that mean does it mean that we should just create a bunch of fake author pages and put people on our our blog or as the author and call it a today no folks no that's not it you want to attach real humans to your content with real bios with real credentials who have a presence online the l m's are checking who created things are they credible is the content that they're producing relevant to the topic and if you think that you can just like spin up fake accounts and it's gonna work it's not it's not long term it's not maybe in the short term you can do it but the l m's are looking at actual linkedin profiles they're seeing what content people are posting on their linkedin they're reading it they're using it to inform their responses and their understanding who people are based off of that info no straight path hosted by ashley men baba is brought to you by the hubspot podcast network and it sheds light on the stories behind the shiny resumes the social media highlight reels the job titles no straight path aims to human eye success from a millennial perspective guests come from all walks of life and this is a perfect fit for any listener because it it brings interview style conversations that highlight some of the most important and diverse voices in the industry entrepreneurs marketers salespeople you'll all love this show it is jam packed with some of the best content that i've come across lately in the indie hubspot podcast network and folks you gotta check it out one of my favorite episodes is running for office with walter garcia someone who was running for the california primaries and a bunch of other content that was absolutely gold please check it out enjoy so the author page is a gateway it's a gateway to send people down the l m's in the bots through the experience of who is this author do they have other citations across the web do they write for other blogs do they create content for other websites how credible are they who are they getting featured with where are they speaking are they are they speaking out events are they getting quoted by top media publications in a positive way all of these things matter the second thing is that you want to use the industry language with authority folks passive content gets ignored you need to be authoritative you need to really be jargon aware niche specific and make sure that your content is using the language that your customers use if you are in a technical industry folks use technical language use the words in which your ideal customer would type in don't dumb it down to the point of agnes speak your industry's language in the way in which they speak because the l are trained on it and your industry is probably going to use it that technical phrase at jargon your customers are using they're typing they're asking they're using voice search we could call it voice search i don't really even know what to use call how to refer to this but like i talk to my l and i'll hit the voice button like the the audio button and i'll start to have a conversation and when i have this conversation i'm using the language that i would use with a professional in my industry with the expectation that the all will figure it out so you should be optimizing your content to speak in a way that aligns with your audience speak your industry's language folks speak your industry's language now here's another thing to keep in mind there was a study done there's a study and i quote it and i'll include a link in the the show notes so you can see act get it that analyze all of the pieces that were influencing the ll and from all of that there was a clear insight quotes stats and sources matter so when you are pressing publish on these pieces it's important to poll quotes from expert from leaders to pull stats and data from trusted sources to make sure that you're referencing the source who's credible did you get this from a university did you get this from a higher ed company did you get this from somebody who's a leader in the space did you get it from a top brand so right pull this information and if you're not using stats or citing others and you're going to reduce your visibility in the engine because they want to know that you are trustworthy alright the fourth tip is to create redundant modalities what does that mean redundant modalities is something that i believe deeply and it's something that i've preached for a very long time it's something that i wrote a book about called create wants distribute forever and it's the idea that when you write a blog post or you publish an in report they need to be rep packaged and reform into other modalities that people can consume take that blog post and turn it into a video take that video and turn it into a long form post that lives on linkedin take that long form post on linkedin and submit it as an answer on reddit take that same answer on reddit and submit it into a answer on quo make sure that you've created a thread on that the same thing and you've also shared it on your instagram as a real but also that you've incorporated it into something that might live on blue sky or threads same content different format create once distribute forever you optimize it with the queries in the keywords that are relevant to your niche and the l will find it the l will use it they'll source it google is now pulling youtube directly into their responses per complexity is pulling youtube videos directly into its responses citing it based off of the show notes based off of the transcripts from these channels so when you're doing this and you're seeing this you have to ask yourself why aren't we creating redundant modalities of assets why aren't we repurposing our content right reddit content is showing up higher than g two reviews right now in the ser youtube shorts might get cited before your blog post folks create redundant modalities and if this sounds like work you have a few options one you can work with a partner like foundation foundation inc taco strongly recommend you check them out i know buys or you can use a do it yourself solution like distribution dot ai again strongly recommend you check them out and also extremely biased but these are two ways that you can do it you can hire an agency or you can embrace software and if you embrace the agency side then you can have this put on autopilot if you embrace the software side then you can have the tools to allow you to repurpose and rep package your content at scale right create redundant modality so you are spreading your message everywhere so the l m's can consume it now here's something that a lot of seo might get upset by you now need to throw out the window all of your hate towards digital p digital p matters more than anything l cite of what they've seen and what they happen to see is the stories that are being published by top publications now when i talk about digital p i'm not talking about oh we need to create a quirky little infographic and then build links to it now when i talk about digital p i'm talking about establishing a methodology within your organization where you can create thought leadership content that resonates dog leadership content that stands on its own as valuable that is so good that people within your industry start to share it within their own internal slack channels that they're more likely to even reference and steal your graphics and your charts and put them at slides in keynote and conferences that they're speaking at this is the type of content you wanna create this is where community content and distribution intersect and this is where your brand is built folks if you want to succeed in this new age brand is no longer a dirty little word brand is no longer something that you can throw to the wayside it is something that you must embrace if people are consuming your valuable content if the media is talking about your valuable research they're talking about your ridiculously smart people in that conversation then spreads to subreddit slack groups on industry magazines and newsletters and sub stacks guess what the all are gonna notice and this is why this is why i'm excited i'm excited because the old rules are gone but don't get me wrong the fundamental still matter you still need to make sure that your website is technically up optimize and set up so the bots can scan it authorities still matters great content still matters relevant still matters distribution still matters trust still matters but now you're not just optimizing for the surgeon engineering robot crawl you're opt for the memory of the ai your buyer is taking on and the ai that your your buyers is talking to if you wanna win in this new world it's not just about backlinks and blog titles folks you need a strategy you need authors ship you need distribution and you need to embrace the idea that content without distribution might just leave you very very invisible in content without authority is trusted folks thanks for tuning in to the ross show if this helped you rethink the way that you are navigating seo generative engine optimization or anything under the sun or if this lit a fire under your content distribution plans your ge plans share it with a marketer on your team who might be still optimizing for twenty fifteen and remember whether it's human memory or machine memory you need to embrace that idea of creating once in distributing forever i hope you got value out of this episode if you enjoyed it please share and i'll see you on the internet thanks for checking out the ross simmons shelf gotta hustle with the business hustle with the business