B-Side: HubSpot + The Hustle (or ProfitWell's entire media strategy)
This episode might reference ProfitWell and ProfitWell Recur, which following the acquisition by Paddle is now Paddle Studios. Some information may be out of date.
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HubSpot + The Hustle (or ProfitWell's entire media strategy)
Two weeks back HubSpot closed on the sale of The Hustle, a media company and community for entrepreneurs. Everyone's talking about it, but people don't understand the why. Thankfully, we've been building a media network for the last couple of years as a software company, so I thought I'd share why we started giving up on traditional inbound marketing and moving to a media strategy. This is also what I think all of you should do.
To set the stage, the following is from three years ago. The only person doing marketing up until that point was me and before we jumped into a larger team I wanted to define what our direction should look like. The result was research on what's happening in the inbound market, as well as why the media strategy makes sense.
Apart from the lessons, it's also a good example of first-principles thinking. I had to redact some, because I can't share all of our secrets (you can have them if you come work at ProfitWell though :)). Enjoy and let me know what you think or where you'd like me to go deeper.
Let's talk about insurgencies and the Iraq war
At ProfitWell, two of our core axioms are think from first principles and always seek and increase your leverage. As we embark on setting up our marketing vision and direction we therefore need to find a strategy that gives us maximum ROI while fulfilling our goal of attracting subscription companies to our products.
We also need to understand our constraints:
- We don't throw around cash: We're bootstrapped, but even if we weren't, we're still too analytical to accept waste. We're willing to bet big, but we need something that pays big.
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With our constraints and goal in mind, I centered our research on studying marketing trends, but also going to the bedrock in understanding the tactics and strategies used in extreme scenarios to quickly win over groups. Why here? Human psychology of community is in our DNA at this point. If we strictly study marketing, the body of knowledge isn't wide enough and is too subtle and nuanced. If we look at extreme shifts in community, we get more signal and less noise into the most effective strategies.
While going deep on google scholar around cults and religions through a media lens were interesting, the richest research actually was around the psychology of insurgencies in the context of the Iraq war. I get this is a memo about ProfitWell's marketing strategy, but bare with me.
When coalition forces invaded Iraq in the early 2000s, an old school methodology of "Shock and Awe" was used. The strategy was to essentially bomb the area so much that Iraqi forces would be awed and shocked into giving up and simply accepting their new hierarchy.
This is akin to most direct response type sales and marketing. In a 30-minute informercial my goal is to shock and awe you into believing that you need the product by peppering you with the awesomeness of the product and the people who use it's features. Yes, war and marketing have very different outcomes and aims, but the approach is very single-move minded.
Single-move thinking is what got the coalition forces in trouble in Iraq. If we were just going to leave or install a puppet government like previous shock-and-awe campaigns, the approach would have worked (albeit still obviously devastating for the population[0]). Instead, these tactics created an insurgency—radicalized civilians who took up arms and fought against troops in an exceptionally resentful way (for obvious reasons).
Tactics needed to change, because coalition forces were losing. Rather than win by force and fear, coalition forces learned that they needed to "win the hearts and minds" of the community. Instead of bombs and air raids, US intelligence shifted to paying off tribal chieftains, troops distributed candy and food to local families, and Navy/Army construction battalions fixed utilities for local communities.
The result? Coalition forces won hearts and minds, and these communities not only agreed to stop fighting the coalition, but to help them against the truly bad actors in the region.
Love takes longer to foster, but it's more effective than fear.
What in the world does this have to do with marketing at ProfitWell?
Given our constraints, our goal is to win the hearts and minds of the subscription community. We need to do this by providing tremendous value to the community that builds trust.
In analyzing the literature on the insurgency strategy (and leveraging some lessons from when I worked in US intelligence), creating effective insurgencies comes down to two primary axes:
- Creating reciprocity and partnership by giving away value
- Boosting brand through media that engenders trust
Reciprocity through giving value away
Creating reciprocity through providing value for free is pretty easy to understand—those who give us gifts, we tend to view positively and feel obliged to repay them in some way. Like all things, there's varying levels of effectiveness.
A free toaster for opening a checking account is not as effective as a friend being there for you without you asking for help. Essentially there's a higher payoff for "help for help's sake" versus a clear exchange of "I'll give you this if you do this."
Given we're predisposed to being helpful and share what we learn (which our market appreciates), we'll lean towards providing a constant stream of value for free. While altruistic in being a good steward of our industry, it's also good for business.
ProfitWell Metrics and other free products
From a product perspective, freemium is the future. It's the best content you have at attracting our target customer. Old-school operators loathe giving away value, because they cut their teeth in a single-move world that only thought about conversions through push sales and marketing. There also wasn't as much pressure and density in distribution. Our world is different now. There's more competition for attention than ever. You need to pull users in.
With ProfitWell Metrics we provide all the subscription financial metrics a subscription company needs, and it's better than the paid competition. We will continue to develop this product forever, to the point that it's not just the best financial metrics product, but also the best business intelligence product any subscription company needs. All for free.
Being better than the paid competition is exceptionally important here, because in a freemium strategy we're still fighting perception of free being bad. This perception is waning rapidly—if the product is not only free, but also better, there's a double whammy of delight for the user. We relish in feedback that says, "I can't believe I'm getting this for free," or "I feel bad not paying you."
The result is we win their hearts and minds. Users then recommend us to their peers. They also are more than willing to get on the phone with us to learn about our paid offerings. The added benefit is the data is also a crucial piece in our virtuous product circle—studying the data and deploying that understanding into our paid products. More on this in the core product memo.
Take every call. Speak at every event. Answer every question.
We can deepen reciprocity through value by being exceptionally helpful. The second best answer to, "What does ProfitWell do?" is, "I don't know, but they know their stuff and are extremely helpful—you should talk to them." Even in a world of inbound marketing, this is currently not an accepted practice.
Most advice revolves around protecting your time, filtering out bad leads, conferences are a waste of time, etc. While we need to be smart about our time, these pieces of advice foster a single-move mindset. Growth is multi-move. Bad leads know good leads. Powerful, helpful keynotes spread and garner referrals. Help sells.
In this vein, our sales and support teams answers any pricing or retention questions that come in, as well as provides pricing and retention audits for even leads we know can't afford our prices [1]. We definitely triage the folks we know aren't great fits for us and don't pretend we know answers to companies/questions outside of our core competencies. Yet, it's imperative for us to be looked at as the hub of subscription growth.
Our marketing approach is also geared towards providing value. We must give subscription operators answers through exceptionally deep and actionable plans around subscription retention and monetization. Our north star here is people not believing we're giving away so much in terms of the playbooks for free.
Boosting brand through media that engenders trust
Our other pillar of creating an insurgency is going all in on media. As we set out on expanding the marketing team beyond just me writing a blog post each week, we will transform ProfitWell into a media company.
Media is better than traditional inbound marketing, because inbound is losing its effectiveness[2]. Everyone is running the same playbook. They're writing better, deeper content. Higher quality isn't bad, but given the deluge of content out there, the approach is heading to just another plank in the platform of online advertising. Put another way—inbound marketing of today is the equivalent of running google search ads.
On the other hand, media companies are the best in the world at driving traffic and audience. They're the worst at monetizing that traffic. B2B SaaS companies are pretty lazy at driving traffic, but they're pretty darn good at monetizing that traffic. So let's just combine the best of both worlds.
I'm not just think tanking this. I went deep on the data. Let's compare media to inbound for a moment.
Traditional Inbound Marketing
Traditional inbound marketing deploys what's known as the "wheel strategy." You take a content offer—ebook, webinar, industry paper, etc.—and then atomize the content and distribute it through email, social, ads, etc., to drive people to that offer. The entire goal is for someone to fill out a form and give you their contact information in exchange for the offer. You then nurture that lead through lead scoring and your sales team.
When the inbound marketing wave started it was a reaction to the push tactics of sales and marketing in the late 90s and early 2000s. Email still had the tinge of, “It’d be terribly rude to not answer or look at someone’s email, because it’s just like snail mail.” It also road the wave of more and more information being sought by consumers.
Density is now at an all time high. You can find out basically anything through a search. Everyone has at least a blog and most have responded with higher quality content, treating SEO like a machine. This is great for consumers, but for businesses, inbound marketing has lost a lot of leverage (which was bound to happen).
Here are some numbers from my research:
- The effective life of an ebook has gone down from 6.2 months three years ago to 1.8 months today.
- The max average touch point, per lead per week, from inbound has gone from 3.1 to 1.4, largely driven by the expectation that you can't send emails more than once (maybe twice) per week.
- Cost to create an offer has gone from an average of $1.2k to $10.4k. This is driven by rising salaries, design and quality expectations increasing, etc.
Inbound marketing is still amazing and we will continue to do it at ProfitWell, but we should not expect the outsized gains we once did. Instead, we should change the system we run and approach to something higher leverage. Media is that system.
Running a media strategy
Instead of putting an offer at the center of the strategy, media centers on building audience. Your goal isn't to chase the spikes and long tails of an offer attracting leads; it's to move your audience count up and to the right. It's exceptionally effective, as well.
The key difference here is media centers around shows. You attract an audience on a given topic or outcome and then episodically entertain and educate that audience towards that topic or outcome. For instance, we can create a show that teaches people how to set up their subscription pricing strategy over a season of 13 episodes (a quarter). We can also create a show that does a case study each week on the pricing strategy of a company.
Benefits here are threefold:
- Creating a rhythm and anticipation; also binging behavior.
Shows build from episode to episode. Done right, we'll be able to attract our personas more effectively through boosted brand. We'll also be associated with the topics we create shows around through the level of quality and education. Binging will take place, as well, creating a deeper connection. - Multiple mediums
Shows can be in multiple mediums. We can have a written newsletter, that's also an audio podcast, and has video. Users can choose how they want to consume the content. We're not making the decision for them. - Multiple shows
We'll start small, but multiple shows earn the right to be in our leads' inbox every single day. Media companies get a different perception than traditional blogs. Some users will want content three times per week. Others once per week. Regardless, we increase our average touch points per week.
How do costs and effectiveness compare though? Here's some data:
- Max average touch points per lead per week is much higher. Bloomberg is at 5.2. The Skimm is around 4.4. We'll be happy with anything over 3.
- Current estimates put the cost of a season of a show (13 episodes) under $10k. If this fails, the cost feels like a good hedge, because we'll at least have 13 good posts with high quality video or audio.
In red teaming this strategy, what has me worried and what do we need to figure out? I believe these concerns fall into two buckets.
Mechanical concerns
Creating quality content is not easy and we don't have budget or time to hire 30 people for our first show likeBuzzfeeddid or wait months to get our first show out. Beyond that, we also need to find a way to build multiple shows in different formats, cadences, and quality levels. This will take time, but we should start small and bring on a video producer instead of a content manager as our first hire.
Distribution Concerns
No one's really done this before in B2B. I don't know if we're really going to crack the perception of people only wanting one email per week. Will we get binging? Even if we get both of these, is there enough distribution to justify continuing the effort? These are all important questions we'll need to figure out. Given the untested waters here, we're going to focus on the mechanical side first, because if we can't produce content inexpensively there's not much we're going to be able to do long term.
We'll certainly have bumps along the way, but even if we fail completely, we'll have high quality, media-rich content that no one is really doing in the market. Therefore, this feels like a worthwhile direction to move forward on. Essentially, minimal to medium risk with potentially very high reward. We'll constrain with pushing 1-2 headcount plus me (PC), and see how much we can push. We'll evolve from there.
Our framework for the type of content we produce
Given our media strategy and constraints, we need deep thought around our approach. Through researching effective mass media and insurgency media, we need to understand our targets, as well as our core pillars around what should drive that content.
ProfitWell's targets for our shows
Let's start with our targets:
ProfitWell currently targets three main verticals:
- B2B SaaS and Prosumer
These companies sell to other businesses or sell to individuals who use their products to conduct some sort of work. Example customers include Notion, Schneider Electric, Bigcommerce, etc. - Consumer Subscriptions
These companies sell to consumers for a variety of uses, including sub-verticals like education, fitness, non-profits, media publications, and entertainment. Example customers include Masterclass, Starz, The Atheltic, Change.org, etc. - Subscription ecommerce
These companies sell a physical product on a recurring bases to their subscribers. Example customers include Dr. Squatch, Hubble Contacts, Hunt a Killer, lots of pet food brands, etc.
Amongst these verticals we have three cores of content:
- Pricing: content that coaxes toward ProfitWell's Price Intelligently product
- Retention: content that coaxes towards ProfitWell Retain
- General: content that attracts subscription companies in general, optimizing for ProfitWell Metrics, RevConnect, and other products coming down the pipe.
More in our target customers docs linked here, but the goal is to have a show that's building audience for the cross section of our cores and our verticals. Below you can see some examples of shows we're going to build or are already in the process of building. These shows will evolve over time, as well (ie. Pricing Page Teardown today shouldn't look like Pricing Page Teardown in two years).
Guiding principles on the type of shows and content we produce
In developing our shows and wider content, the following will act as guiding principles to filter options and debate directions:
- Expertise and Domain Authority
We need to show we're smart, but approachable. It's a tough needle to thread, but ProfitWell needs to be what people think of when they think of "subscriptions." Data and benchmarks are our friends. Q&A is encouraged. Our SEO footprint in this context also needs to be wide and deep. - Community Journalism and Local Focus
undefined - Action. Always Action. Takeaways.
undefined - [REDACTED - Come work at ProfitWell if you really want to know. :)]
Each show should have elements of each of these or go incredibly deep on one of them. The point is every episode will work to fulfill the view that we're the "subscription company."
How is the team organized and which type of content do we produce
We have three core functions within the team—creating content, making that content look good, and distributing that content. In terms of content creation, we produce four types of content:
- Upscale shows: Content producers spend their most time here, producing content that's to the level that people think our team is 10x the size. This team's north star is content that could be optioned to Netflix or a mass media network.
- Spread shows: Content producers here focus on content that's specifically made for social to capture audience or for sales to capture opportunities. Most of the production of this content should be outsourced and we should have higher volume.
- Drops, Events, and Product: Content here is focused on experience and splash. We'll be the first B2B company to do Supreme-style drops. Our event game will be the best of any event no matter who is there, and our product marketing will evolve to having the best ads on the market. It'll take a bit, but we'll get there.
- [REDACTED - Come work at ProfitWell if you really want to know. :)]
Our creative production team will work throughout these three different areas of content, developing treatments, graphical work, etc. They'll own the look and feel.
Distribution
This is our least developed area, but for now our distribution will be organized according to outcome. We'll have a team (likely just a person) for zero-to-lead (sparking awareness and then giving an email address), lead-to-demo (working on leads to get them to the opportunity stage), demo-to-close (sales), and close-to-happiness (customer success).
We'll start with one person who permeates these four areas (likely focusing just on one at first) and then mitosis the team from there following the Balfour playbook. Our approach will likely follow this path in order of lift and effort.
- Partnering
- Social and Demand Gen
- Community
Many bumps along the road
Our approach here is not going to be easy, but that's the very reason we're doing it. With time we'll create a moat of understanding and leverage from a production standpoint, as well as a moat for brand. There'll be bumps along the way, but the mission will be worth it in the end. We also lean on our own product for subscription media reporting to analyze and understand the relationship between our media output and bottom line.
[0] The metaphor isn't talking about the merits of war. Just a very narrow comparison of the before and after of strategies that alienate or win over the local population.
[1]Our retention and pricing audits are our first calls in our sales cycle where we provide an assessment of the company's current hits and misses of their pricing/retention based on their data, if they're hooked up to ProfitWell or through pattern matching if they are not. The outcome is they leave the call with an order of operations of what they should fix regardless of moving to next steps with ProfitWell.
[2] If HubSpot is smart they'll rebrand inbound AS media. This is the most likely scenario based on the data we're seeing in the market. My fear is they'll end up getting too addicted to the teat of offers, but maybe they buy a media company?
Do us a favor?
Part of the way we measure success is by seeing if our content is shareable. If you got value from this episode and write up, we'd appreciate a share on Twitter or LinkedIn.
00;00;00;05 - 00;00;22;03
Patrick Campbell
Everyone's talking about the media strategy that HubSpot is now taking on. But what really frustrates me is we're not understanding the why and the why is the most important part, because this isn't just a willy nilly vanity exercise in them trying to get some good street cred. It's actually part of the evolution of inbound marketing from profit.
00;00;22;03 - 00;00;38;21
Ben Hillman
Well, recur. It's Protect the Hustle or we explore the truth behind the strategy and tactics of B2B SAS growth to make you an outstanding operator. On today's episode, we're examining media strategies. Patrick, take it away.
00;00;41;07 - 00;01;04;03
Patrick Campbell
Welcome back to another episode of Protect the Hustle. This is the B-sides voice you're hearing. Face you're not seeing is Patrick Campbell, co-founder of Profit. Well, a couple of housekeeping items. I am now in Miami. I hate the heat. So this is the thing that I'm doing for love going to Florida during the Utah winter. But I'm in Miami and I'm checking out what all the hype is about.
00;01;04;03 - 00;01;30;26
Patrick Campbell
And so if you're here, you want to hang out, let me know. I will report back to all of you who are not in Miami, what all the hype is and what's going on. Another thing tomorrow. So this is airing on Thursday. If you're hearing this later in life. But tomorrow the team is releasing another drop. So we started doing drops and I don't think I'm supposed to tell you this, but if it involves a lot of physical pain on my end, so look out for that.
00;01;31;06 - 00;01;45;07
Patrick Campbell
And if you go to Fool.com, slash drops, you can get on the list. You can get alerted first thing Friday morning for the drop. I think it's a pretty cool drop, but it does involve some pain on my end and so maybe it's not so cool. And then also, I'm not really sure how these posts are being received.
00;01;45;19 - 00;02;01;04
Patrick Campbell
We're doing some that are a little bit more cultural, a little more exact development, and then some that are going deep on data or frameworks. Let me know. And we're literally measuring success by you sharing this on social. So please do that. Take a while, take me whatever makes sense. I just want to make sure you're getting value.
00;02;01;16 - 00;02;24;25
Patrick Campbell
And then the topic today, we're going to be going through a framework for you becoming a media company, including why you should probably abandon your current inbound strategy, then move to media. And I wrote this doc about three years ago when we change profile strategy from inbound marketing, but I thought everyone would enjoy it, mainly because HubSpot recently bought a media company for the very reasons we're going to talk about.
00;02;24;25 - 00;02;44;25
Patrick Campbell
And just for context, two weeks ago, HubSpot bought the Hustle, which is basically a media company, a community for entrepreneurs, and everyone's talking about it, but people aren't really talking about the why or trying to understand the why. And what's great is, as I've already mentioned, we've been building this media network for the last couple of years as a software company.
00;02;44;25 - 00;03;01;15
Patrick Campbell
It's called Profitable Recur. It's soft launched out there. We're going to do a bigger launch hopefully in the next month or so. But it's been a three year journey and I wanted to share why we started doing this, why we abandoned the traditional inbound marketing strategy and moved to this media strategy and to set the stage. All of this is from three years ago.
00;03;01;15 - 00;03;18;14
Patrick Campbell
I've redacted a couple of things because, you know, I just can't share everything, all of our secrets. But if you come work here, you can get all the secrets. But I was the only person doing marketing before this up until this point. And then we were going to build out a larger team and actually start building out our go to market function.
00;03;18;29 - 00;03;34;08
Patrick Campbell
And it was just a big game of, okay, what should we do? And so this is a lot of research that kind of came to be I also think it's a really good example of, you know, first principle thinking. And so I'm going to jump in with a pretty hard left turn here, but I promise you it is all worth it.
00;03;34;19 - 00;03;55;04
Patrick Campbell
So we're going to start by talking about insurgencies and specifically the Iraq war. So my background for those of you don't know is in econometrics and math. It's very much in a research background as well. But I did start my career working at U.S. intelligence. And so all of these kind of came together for some really good research around content marketing and I promise I'll I'll kind of explain that in a second.
00;03;55;04 - 00;04;13;16
Patrick Campbell
But at profit, well, we have these two core axioms. We have more axioms, but there's two of them that are kind of relevant today. One is think from first principles and the second is always seek and increase your leverage. We're a bootstrap company. We are a company that is basically not going to just hire 30 people for a particular endeavor.
00;04;13;16 - 00;04;34;13
Patrick Campbell
At one point we will, whether we're bootstrapped or not. But it is one of those things where we are always looking to seek our leverage and it was we embark on kind of setting up our marketing vision and direction. We needed to find a strategy that gave us maximum ROI while fulfilling our goal of attracting subscription companies to our product.
00;04;34;13 - 00;04;55;25
Patrick Campbell
They definitely cover us as well. One, we don't draw our own cash. Even if we weren't bootstrapped, we're still very analytical and strategic. It just kind of in our DNA. So we don't like waste and that doesn't mean we aren't willing to bet big or aren't willing to spend money. It just means that we have to have some sort of calculable like impact, even if it's still qualitative that we would expect for spending that cash.
00;04;56;09 - 00;05;16;28
Patrick Campbell
Our logo TAM total addressable market is small. Our revenue TAM is expanding exponentially. The amount of revenue that's coming in on subscription businesses is just growing crazily. But right now there's only about 100 to maybe 150,000 subscription companies in the world, and that number is not growing quickly. That includes all types of subscriptions, B2B, SaaS, subscription, ecommerce, consumer subscriptions.
00;05;17;11 - 00;05;36;15
Patrick Campbell
And then we also sell and this is the third big constraint we sell very consideration or trust products or products. They have buyer consideration and buy in. Even if our sale cycle ends up being relatively small or very product led, it's not something where someone's coming in and, you know, buying something off of a television ad for 1999 or something like that.
00;05;36;15 - 00;05;57;13
Patrick Campbell
So trust is super important. And so with those constraints in mind, I Senator research this is three years ago and studying marketing trends, but also going to the bedrock and understanding the tactics and strategies used in extreme scenarios to quickly win over groups. And the reason I started here is because the human psychology of community is in our DNA at this point.
00;05;57;13 - 00;06;30;15
Patrick Campbell
You know, it's not something that's necessarily, you know, going to develop all of a sudden over the next ten years, the tactics will. But, you know, the actual innate pieces of us are kind of baked at this point, no matter, you know, the origin story that you believe in. We're pretty baked. And so with that, if we strictly studied marketing, the body of knowledge isn't really wide enough and it's too subtle and nuanced to give us the results were looking for so if we look at a extreme shift in community, meaning a community that went from, you know, hate to to love or vice versa, we're going to get more signal and less noise into
00;06;30;15 - 00;06;51;20
Patrick Campbell
the most effective strategies. And you don't really find that in marketing, academic research or studies. And so while going deep on, you know, Google Scholar, which honestly, as a side note, is where I like to start when I'm really going after first principles of thinking about something from kind of those first steps. But I started going deeper on things like cults, religions, particularly through a media lens.
00;06;51;29 - 00;07;13;06
Patrick Campbell
It was interesting, but the richest research that actually was around the psychology of insurgencies, and particularly in the context of the Iraq war and I get this is a memo about, you know, proposals, marketing strategy. But just bear with me a moment. I promise we're going to come back around. But to give you a little bit of reminiscing of history, when coalition forces and just to be clear, I'm not going to go deep, deep, deep into everything that happened.
00;07;13;06 - 00;07;30;01
Patrick Campbell
We're talking about this again from a marketing lens. So I'm not going to go into all the merits and all this other fun stuff. I just, you know, want to use this as a specific example here. But when coalition forces invaded Iraq in the early two, thousands in old school kind of methodology was used of shock and or riot.
00;07;30;01 - 00;07;49;02
Patrick Campbell
You know, some of you who are old enough might remember that. But the strategy was essentially to bomb the area so much that the Iraqi forces would just be awed and shocked into just giving up and simply accepting their new hierarchy. And what was really kind of fascinating is that this is akin to most direct response type sales and marketing in a 30 minute infomercial.
00;07;49;02 - 00;08;13;11
Patrick Campbell
My goal is to shock and awe you into believing that you need the product by, you know, peppering you with how awesome it is, showing you people who, you know, have become awesome by using its features. And again, war and marketing, very different outcome and aims, but the approach is very single move minded. That's kind of where we have this crossover where in traditional kind of war, you know, basically having that single move, you know, it made sense, you know, 100 years ago.
00;08;13;11 - 00;08;35;28
Patrick Campbell
But today, and especially given some of the context of people just in general, you know, single move thinking is what got these coalition forces in trouble in Iraq because we were just going to leave or install a puppet government like previous shock in all campaigns, the approach would have quote unquote, worked. And again, not discussing the merits of war, obviously devastating in so many levels, but from kind of an outcome perspective would have worked.
00;08;35;28 - 00;09;01;10
Patrick Campbell
But instead, these tactics traded what's known as an insurgency. Basically, you would radicalize civilians who took up arms and they fought against troops in an exceptionally resentful way for obvious reasons. Again, so the tactics needed to change because coalition forces were losing and rather than win by force and fear, essentially what ended up happening is just like the coalition forces changed and learned that they needed to, quote unquote, win the hearts and minds of the community.
00;09;01;20 - 00;09;26;21
Patrick Campbell
And so instead of bombs and air raids, U.S. intelligence forces sort of just paying off through straight up cash, just paying off tribal chieftains in both Afghanistan and Iraq, troops distributed candy and food to local families and then Navy and Army construction battalions focused not on, hey, just building, you know, off the bases, but not only building up the bases, but also helping the local community with things like fixing utilities, fixing people's homes, these types of things.
00;09;26;21 - 00;09;44;25
Patrick Campbell
And so the result was that coalition forces were able to win the hearts and minds of these communities. And these communities only agreed to stop fighting the coalition, but also helped them basically go after the truly bad actors in the region. And the basic TLDR here is that love takes longer to foster, but it's ultimately more effective than fear.
00;09;45;06 - 00;10;17;18
Patrick Campbell
And so that in mind, what in the world does this have to do with marketing a profit? Well, well, given our constraints, our goal is to win the hearts and minds of the subscription community. And we need to do this by providing tremendous value to the community that ultimately builds trust. And so I went deep on kind of analyzing the literature over the insurgency strategy and also kind of leverage some of the lessons I learned when I worked in U.S. intelligence and basically creating an effective insurgency strategy comes down to two primary axes.
00;10;18;05 - 00;10;35;18
Patrick Campbell
You need to create reciprocity and partnership by giving away value. And second, you want to boost your brand through media that engender trust and doesn't have to necessarily be mass media, but it doesn't need to be media. And we'll talk about that in a little bit. But let's first talk about this reciprocity through, you know, giving value away.
00;10;36;00 - 00;10;56;00
Patrick Campbell
So creating reciprocity through providing value for free is pretty easy to understand. If you've read, you know, the book Influence, which, you know, everyone recommends, he talks about that a lot. But the basic idea is those who give us gifts, we tend to view positively and we feel obliged to repay them in some way. And like all you know, things, there's always different varying levels of effectiveness.
00;10;56;16 - 00;11;12;15
Patrick Campbell
But, you know, if I give you a free toaster for opening a checking account, it's probably not as effective as a friend, you know, being there for you without you even asking for help. Essentially, there's a higher payoff for, you know, court help for help sake versus a clear exchange of I'll give you this if you do this.
00;11;13;00 - 00;11;38;03
Patrick Campbell
And given we're predisposed to being helpful and share what we learn, you know what our market appreciates, what the subscription market appreciates, we're going to lean towards providing a constant stream of value for free. And this is altruistic. Yes, because we're being a good steward in our industry, but this is also good for business. And so the way that we've done this, a profit well, this is kind of was foreshadowing through the business is the first thing is profit metrics and other products are going to be free.
00;11;38;10 - 00;12;07;21
Patrick Campbell
We basically, you know, looked at freemium as the future. I've talked about that a lot. You can't really get me writing an article on the analysis of the subscription market without talking about freemium in some way. But you got to think about your product is the best content that you have at attracting your target customer. Old school operators, they loathe giving away value because they cut their teeth in this single move world that only thought about converging through push sales and push marketing, they're also wasn't just as much pressure and density and distribution, but our world is very different now.
00;12;07;21 - 00;12;30;14
Patrick Campbell
There's more competition for attention than ever, so you do need to pull these users in. And so with powerful metrics, we're providing all the subscription financial metrics a subscription company needs, and we set out to make it better than our paid competition. And we will continue to develop this product forever to the point that it's not just the best financial metrics product out there, but it's also the best business intelligence product out there for subscription companies.
00;12;30;29 - 00;12;49;12
Patrick Campbell
And it's all going to be free and being better than the paid competition. Just as a side note is exceptionally important because in freemium, we're still fighting the perception of free being bad, and this perception is waning really rapidly. But if your product is not only free, but it's better than the competition, there's a double whammy of delight for that user.
00;12;49;25 - 00;13;06;12
Patrick Campbell
And so we need to relish and we do and did relish in the feedback that says, Hey, I can't believe I'm getting this for free, or I feel bad that I'm not paying you. And the result is is there. We therefore win the hearts and minds of folks and then users recommend us to their peers. They also are more than willing to get on the phone with us to learn about our paid offerings.
00;13;06;24 - 00;13;25;22
Patrick Campbell
And the added benefit is that this data is also a really crucial piece in our virtuous product circle, where we study the data and deploy that knowledge and that understanding into our paid products. And there's more of this in kind of our product memos, which I'm not sharing obviously today. But it is one of those things, you know, that we have kind of more on that, and I'm more than happy to go into that if people ask.
00;13;26;06 - 00;13;47;15
Patrick Campbell
The second big piece of the reciprocity aspect is taking every call, speaking at every event, answering every question. We can deepen reciprocity through value by, you know, just being helpful. The second best answer to what does Will do is I don't know, but they know their stuff and are extremely helpful. You should talk to them. And even in a world of inbound marketing, this is currently not an accepted practice.
00;13;47;25 - 00;14;10;03
Patrick Campbell
Most advice revolves around protect your time filter out the bad leads, conferences are a waste of time, etc. And while we need to be smart about our time and we definitely are given our core axiom of seeking and increasing our leverage, these pieces of advice oftentimes foster that single move mindset growth. Is that multitude of mindset. Bad leads, no good leads, Powerful, helpful keynotes, spreading gardener referrals.
00;14;10;03 - 00;14;30;08
Patrick Campbell
You know, this whole concept of help sells. So in that vein, our sales and support teams answer any pricing or retention question that comes in, and we also provide pricing and retention audits even for leads that we know cannot afford our prices. We definitely triaged the folks we know aren't going to be great fits. And don't pretend we know answers to, you know, companies questions outside of our core competencies.
00;14;30;08 - 00;14;56;15
Patrick Campbell
Yet we still provide these folks help so that we can looked at as the hub of subscription growth. And our marketing approach is also geared towards, you know, providing a ton of value. We have to give subscription operators answers to exceptionally deep and actionable plans around subscription retention and monetization. So our North Star here is people not believing we're giving away or people just can't handle how much we're giving away so much in terms of our playbooks and we're doing it all for free.
00;14;56;24 - 00;15;11;27
Patrick Campbell
So that's kind of how we create that reciprocity. And some of you know that that's, you know, that's how you got, you know, sucked into being a customer or at least a user or referring us folks. And, you know, there is that altruistic piece of it because I think that, you know, I just want to be a helpful human being.
00;15;11;27 - 00;15;44;26
Patrick Campbell
I think our brand is just benefited by that, but it's also really good for business. Now, the second piece in the piece that we started with is just really the concept of media, right? And the second piece of an insurgency is really making sure you're boosting that brand through media that engender trust. And so the reason that this is so powerful is that as we set out on kind of expanding the marketing team beyond just, you know, me writing a blog post each week and that's what I was doing three years ago, we found that the media strategy was going to be the most powerful, most hedged kind of next evolution of inbound because media
00;15;44;26 - 00;16;04;07
Patrick Campbell
is better than traditional inbound marketing in almost every single way, because inbound is losing a lot of its effectiveness. And the one thing that I have in this memo that I think is funny to point out is this fun footnote where I basically said, if HubSpot is smart, they'll rebrand inbound as media. And this is the most likely scenario based on the data we're seeing in the market.
00;16;04;07 - 00;16;21;26
Patrick Campbell
I said my fear is that they'll end up getting too addicted to the teat of offers, but maybe they buy a media company. And so I said that three years ago, and I'm really glad it happened because it's, you know, validating in multiple different ways. But it was pretty cool to kind of, you know, see that when I was revisiting this memo, you know, basically last week after the announcement.
00;16;22;06 - 00;16;37;08
Patrick Campbell
But to kind of pick things back up, you know, the basic idea is when it's inbound, everyone is running the same playbook, the writing, better, deeper content, higher quality isn't bad, don't get me wrong. But given the deluge of content out there, the approach is heading to just another plank, if you will, in the platform of online advertising.
00;16;37;22 - 00;16;52;21
Patrick Campbell
Put another way, inbound marketing is basically going to be the equivalent of, you know, Google search ads. That's where it's heading. And yeah, it's better than just Google search ads in some ways and these types of things, but that's where it's headed, you know? And on the other hand, media companies are the best in the world at driving traffic and audience.
00;16;53;04 - 00;17;13;01
Patrick Campbell
They're the worst at monetizing that traffic. B2B SAS companies, on the other hand, are pretty lazy at driving traffic, but they're pretty darn good at monetizing that traffic. So the idea is just to combine the best of both worlds and I'm not just, you know, think tanking this idea. I went deep on the data. And so let's compare kind of the media strategy to an inbound strategy for a moment.
00;17;13;15 - 00;17;32;15
Patrick Campbell
And keep in mind this data, you know, I've looked into updating it, but it's remained fairly the same, at least trending in the same direction. So let's talk first about traditional inbound marketing. So traditional inbound marketing, for those who haven't thought of it, this way, the basic idea is you're running what's called a wheel strategy. You take a counter, offer an e-book, a webinar industry paper, something like that.
00;17;32;24 - 00;17;50;08
Patrick Campbell
You atomized the content and distribute it through email, social ads, etc. to then drive people to that offer. The entire goal is for someone to fill out a form and give you their contact information in exchange for the offer. You then nurture that lead through lead scoring and your sales team and the wheel just kind of keeps going on.
00;17;50;18 - 00;18;06;12
Patrick Campbell
Now with the inbound marketing we've started, it was a reaction to the push tactics of sales and marketing in the late nineties and early 2000. Emails still had this like tinge of I'd be pretty rude for me not to answer or at least look at someone's email because you know, it's just like snail mail, right? That was the mindset.
00;18;06;22 - 00;18;24;16
Patrick Campbell
And it was also riding the wave of more and more information being sought by consumers before they were making a purchase. Used to have to trust the salesperson. Right. And this is where all the stereotypes around sales folks came. But now I could do some Googling and I could do some research and all of a sudden discover, Oh, I want to get this brand versus this brand because of this reason.
00;18;24;24 - 00;18;45;02
Patrick Campbell
The issue is the density is now at an all time high. And this was true three years ago, and it's even more true today. You can find out basically anything through research. Everyone has at least a blog and most have responded with higher quality content, treating SEO essentially like a machine. And this is really, really great for consumers and it's not bad for businesses.
00;18;45;11 - 00;19;01;29
Patrick Campbell
But when you look at the business context, inbound marketing has lost a lot of leverage, which was bound to happen. Put another way, it used to be the strategy that when you were doing it, you were getting such good payoff for the work that you're putting in and now you're just getting less of that payoff. So it doesn't mean it's bad, doesn't mean you stopped doing it.
00;19;02;07 - 00;19;28;03
Patrick Campbell
It just means that's not as effective anymore. So here are some numbers from the research the effect of life of an e-book, which is essentially one of the core offers a lot of people use, has gone down from 6.2 months three years ago to 1.8 months today. Basically, that's the effectiveness of if you put an e-book out there, how long is it going to take to kind of just have middling or poor results and you're going to have eBooks that basically feed you, you know, the entire history of your company.
00;19;28;11 - 00;19;51;06
Patrick Campbell
But again, that pop that you're going to get isn't going to be as much today as it was, you know, a number of years ago. The Macs average touch points per lead per week from inbound has gone from 3.1 to 1.4, meaning if I look at all my leads, the max amount of touch points that I could expect has gone from, you know, a nice healthy three to basically a one.
00;19;51;17 - 00;20;12;20
Patrick Campbell
And this is largely driven by the expectation that you can't send emails more than maybe maybe twice a week if it's really good content because there's just a deluge of so much out there. And Social had a nice little sweet spot for us bringing us more traffic, but that's also lost a lot of its effectiveness because they're not really passing traffic through as much as you would want because they have an incentive to keep you on those platforms.
00;20;13;03 - 00;20;34;15
Patrick Campbell
And the other thing that's really interesting is that the cost to create an offer has gone from about $1,000, $1.2 thousand per offer to about $10,000, $10.4 thousand. And this is driven largely by rising salaries, design costs, quality of expectations, etc.. And this is not just like taking your blog post and making it into a PDF. This is actually a creating a decent offer.
00;20;34;25 - 00;20;54;27
Patrick Campbell
And so again, inbound marketing is still amazing and we're going to continue to do it at profit well, but we should not expect the outsized gains we once did. Instead, we want to change the system. We run an approach, something that is much, much higher leverage and media is that system. So instead of putting an offer at the center of the strategy, we're going to be talking about running a media strategy.
00;20;54;27 - 00;21;16;03
Patrick Campbell
Now, media centers on building an audience. Your goal isn't to chase the spikes and long tails of an offer attracting leads. It's to move your audience count up into the right. It's exceptionally effective. This as well. And for those of you who are at Protect the Hustle dot com and actually looking at the written version of this, what you're seeing is essentially the inbound strategy is you have these offers.
00;21;16;03 - 00;21;36;27
Patrick Campbell
So imagine you have an offer every single month or every quarter. Let's say you'll have a spike of downloads spike and then all of a sudden there's this long tail of people kind of going off. Whereas with a media strategy, you're essentially moving and constantly compounding that audience and moving it up into the right. And the key difference here is that media centers around shows or some sort of like episodic type content.
00;21;37;04 - 00;21;57;02
Patrick Campbell
You attract an audience on a given topic or outcome and then episodically entertain and educate that audience towards that topic or outcome. For instance, we can create a show that teaches people how to set up their subscription pricing strategy over a season of 13 episodes, which is basically a quarter. We can also create a show that does a case study each week and the pricing strategy of a company.
00;21;57;12 - 00;22;19;26
Patrick Campbell
For those of you who are kind of seeing the foreshadowing here, the latter basically became our show pricing page tear down, which we have, you know, 100,000 plus people watch every single month when it's in season, which is kind of insane. Now, here are the benefits and the three fold for media. First up, it creates a rhythm and participation also has this effect of bingeing that Netflix obviously discover.
00;22;20;10 - 00;22;39;11
Patrick Campbell
So shows build from episode to episode and done right will be able to track our personas more effectively through boosting our brand will also be associated with the topics we create shows around through kind of this level of quality and education. We're going to have bingeing that takes place and it's going to create a deeper connection with our leads and our community.
00;22;39;21 - 00;22;57;14
Patrick Campbell
Second big benefit here of media is there's multiple mediums. We can have shows that are in multiple mediums. We can have a written newsletter that's also an audio podcast and has a video. Users can choose how they want to consume the content and we're not making the decision for them. So for instance, this show right now, some of you are listening to this.
00;22;57;24 - 00;23;20;02
Patrick Campbell
Well, actually, all of you are listening to this if you're listening to this. But some of you don't even listen to this podcast and you just simply read the email that we send that basically has almost the exact same content, basically in written form. But you can choose the medium you want and depending on the topic, maybe you go back and forth a more data focus post, you're going to go into the written form, a more, you know, kind of exact development post or a decision to listen to the podcast.
00;23;20;12 - 00;23;41;24
Patrick Campbell
And the third big benefit here of media is there's multiple shows. So we'll start small, but multiple shows earn the right to be in our leaders inbox every single day. Media companies get a different perception than traditional blogs. Some users will want content three times per week, others will want it once per week. And regardless, we increase our average touchpoints that we can expect over time.
00;23;42;06 - 00;24;05;18
Patrick Campbell
So let's look at back at that data. So how do costs and effectiveness compare to the max average touch points per lead per week? Remember, in traditional inbound marketing, you're basically at 1.4 right now while Bloomberg is at 5.2, the skim is at 4.4, a profit. Well, we will be happy with anything over three. That means that we're getting on average or a max average, which is a little more complicated.
00;24;05;29 - 00;24;32;01
Patrick Campbell
We're essentially getting three touch points per week for the leads that we care about, which is huge. Now, in terms of costs, the current estimates and basically this turned out to be pretty right, but the cost of a season of a show, so 13 episodes of a show under $10,000. So if we get a show, 13 episodes, 13 videos, let's say, or 13 audio podcasts for $10,000 at the same price as an offer.
00;24;32;12 - 00;24;49;28
Patrick Campbell
So if this fails or this is what we felt three years ago, the cost feels like a good hedge because at the very least we will have 13 really good high quality pieces of video or audio compared to just an e-book. Right. And maybe it completely fails. It's not going to be a failure from a brand perspective. Right?
00;24;49;29 - 00;25;09;03
Patrick Campbell
That was the idea. Now, what we found is that some of the shows we produce, they actually have much, much less cost. So profit will report. The cost of that show was somewhere around, I think, like $4,000 per season. And there's some other shows that we're definitely going to be spending a lot more money on. But that's given the fact that we had this strategy going forward.
00;25;09;14 - 00;25;29;28
Patrick Campbell
Now, when we read this three years ago, what has me worried or as I said here and what do we need to figure out? So the concerns really fall into two buckets. So the mechanical concern is that creating quality content is not easy. Of course not. And we don't have the budget to hire 30 people. So BuzzFeed, they were starting a show right around then and that was the number of people they hired for their show.
00;25;29;28 - 00;25;45;13
Patrick Campbell
Obviously, they have a lot more cash than we do, but beyond this, we also need to find a way to build multiple shows in different formats, cadences and quality levels. We're not just going to hire multiple people for a team. We need to make sure that we are heading in the right direction and that's just going to take some time.
00;25;45;23 - 00;26;03;25
Patrick Campbell
But we got to start small. The first thing we did is we brought in a video producer instead of a content manager as that first hire, and we just started by basically having someone convert or having us, you know, myself and him, a guy named Ben Hillman, who's still with us today, which is great. Basically, you know, take that blog post and turn it into a video.
00;26;03;27 - 00;26;24;24
Patrick Campbell
That's how we started, which was really, really powerful. The other thing here is there's distribution concerns. No one's really done this in B2B before. You know, with this kind of done this, we were actually doing shows even before Wistia was we were working with them a lot. We kind of parallel, saw the future and I'm good friends with Brendan and Chris over there and so we were talking about this, but there's a perception in B2B of one email per week, right?
00;26;25;02 - 00;26;43;18
Patrick Campbell
Will we get the binging? We'll be able to kind of break that one email per week. You know, even if we get both of these is there are enough distribution to justify continuing the effort? I don't know. It's really, really hard. It's really hard to know that. And these are some really important questions. And to be really honest with you, we figured out some of these, but we haven't figured out all of these yet are profitable.
00;26;43;23 - 00;27;02;19
Patrick Campbell
Thankfully, the number one concerns now versus the other concerns that we had previously. So I anticipate we'll get to the end of that probably in the next couple of quarters, which is great. The way we looked at it is there's going to be bumps, but if we fail completely, we're going to have a really, really good, high quality media rich content that no one else is really doing.
00;27;02;19 - 00;27;19;19
Patrick Campbell
And so that was enough for us to justify. All right, let's move forward 1 to 2 head count plus me and just see how much we can push and then we'll evolve from there. And now the team is six total, but that includes distribution as well. So it's not a huge team, which is great and we're able to produce a ton.
00;27;19;28 - 00;27;37;09
Patrick Campbell
Now what I'm going to walk through is a little bit of a framework from this memo of how we kind of produce content, how we think about it. I'm going to redact some of this just for the sake of, you know, again, I'm all about transparency, but internally transparency is 100%. Externally, it's probably about 80% for a bunch of reasons.
00;27;37;09 - 00;27;56;27
Patrick Campbell
But that's a good debate if you want to get into, you know, transparency, the merits externally. Long story short, we have three targets in profit. Well, we have to SAS and prosumer. So these are companies like our customers and that's that they include folks like Notion, Schneider, Electric, MC Commerce, these types of folks, they typically are serving either a company or someone who's doing some sort of work.
00;27;57;11 - 00;28;17;18
Patrick Campbell
We have consumer subscription, so these companies sell to consumers of all kinds of sizes. There's a lot of sub verticals in consumer subscription, so education, fitness, nonprofits, media, entertainment. So our example customers in that world, we've got folks like Master Stars, the Athletic Change.org and then subscription commerce. So these are like physical goods sold on an episodic basis.
00;28;17;18 - 00;28;36;07
Patrick Campbell
And so some of our customers are like Dr. Squatch, Hubble contacts, Hunter killer lot of pet food brands, this type of thing. And then we've three types of core content. So we have retention content. So this is folks who we want to eventually get on our profile, retain product, we have our pricing content. These are folks we eventually want to be using profiles, price intelligently product.
00;28;36;16 - 00;28;57;08
Patrick Campbell
And then we kind of have this general bucket, which is basically folks just getting washed over with our brand, but also getting on metrics and some of our other products. And so the basic idea here is that we have this cross-section, right? So we have these three types of verticals, three types of content. We want a show or some sort of good content in every single one of those buckets.
00;28;57;19 - 00;29;15;06
Patrick Campbell
So this is what we set out to do right now. We've fulfilled, I think, half of the grid for the most part, more of the grid, depending on how you look at it. We've consumer subscriptions and B2B. We can kind of get away with combining some of that content. This piece of content you're listening to right now, this is part of the general bucket for B2B SAS.
00;29;15;18 - 00;29;35;29
Patrick Campbell
And so it's one of those things where that's kind of was the guiding light, and that was a big unlock when we kind of focused on filling those buckets and kind of starting in the right bucket as we kind of moved on. Now in terms of guiding principles and the types of shows and content that we produce, there's kind of four main buckets that we think through and we kind of filter most product decisions around content through.
00;29;36;13 - 00;29;53;13
Patrick Campbell
The first is expertise, domain authority. Our whole thing based on that trust point is we got to sound smart but approachable, so we got to break things down. The second one here is also community journalism and kind of a local focus. So this is something that we learned kind of in the research, the most successful newspaper in the United States.
00;29;53;23 - 00;30;09;27
Patrick Campbell
I don't know if it's still around, but it was the most successful and I think maybe the family wanted to get out of it at some point just to kind of retire. But their whole strategy was we're going to print as many names and publish as many faces as humanly possible of the local community. We're not going to publish things on national events.
00;30;09;27 - 00;30;27;14
Patrick Campbell
We're not going to publish things on even regional events. We're going to focus on what are they going to these chicken dinner stories like, oh, you know, the local chapter of whatever hosted a chicken dinner and Sally and Judy were there, you know, those types of stories. And so that's kind of our approach. We want, you know, people want to see themselves.
00;30;27;14 - 00;30;46;03
Patrick Campbell
They want to see their companies. They want to see their competitors. The frenemies, their enemies in this content. So we do focus a lot on like talking about people and showing people as well. Third big piece here is action, always action and takeaways. So we do the work, we want to do the work for our readers, our listeners, etc. like what should they be doing, what should they be implementing?
00;30;46;10 - 00;31;08;06
Patrick Campbell
And then the fourth piece I am going to redact just because of unfortunately, it's a really good one and I know that's teasing, but it's important to kind of protect our internal stuff. But the basic idea is each show should have an element of each of these or go directly or incredibly deep on them. And the point is, is that when we do these four things, it helps position us as the subscription company.
00;31;08;13 - 00;31;29;08
Patrick Campbell
Now, in terms of team and last couple of points here, basically we separate our team into kind of a couple of different buckets. So we have, you know, four different kind of types of content amongst that grid, meaning. So we have upscale shows. So these are like really highly produced. They're supposed to look amazing type shows. We have spread content.
00;31;29;08 - 00;31;44;14
Patrick Campbell
So these are more like targeted towards, you know, getting someone to sign up for something or getting someone with, you know, kind of a longer term volume play. So this is like a spread show, right? You get two episodes a week. The quality bar is high, but it's not like as high as our pricing page tear down show.
00;31;44;20 - 00;32;01;05
Patrick Campbell
And most of this type of content should be outsourced. So what I mean by that is all the creative pieces. So I actually wrote what you're seeing. I wrote most of it three years ago, of course, but I wrote this and then all of the production is basically outsourced so that, you know, we send off this recording and then it comes back, right?
00;32;01;11 - 00;32;20;04
Patrick Campbell
Whereas our upscale shows, we will heavily write things, will figure stuff out. We'll go through iterations, we'll work on all the graphics, these types of things, those upscale folk shows, that's where it is. And then we also have drops, events and product launches, types of things. So these are, you know, more experience and splashy, right? So we want to be where we are now.
00;32;20;04 - 00;32;40;19
Patrick Campbell
The first B2B company to do kind of supreme style drops. You know, our event game will be, you know, it is and has been one of the best kind of sponsors of events. We definitely don't paint it most in terms of sponsorship, but we always have the best effect. Sastre The last Aster that was in person, we definitely did not, you know, we weren't the top sponsor in terms of level, but we got the most leads.
00;32;40;26 - 00;32;58;19
Patrick Campbell
We know that same thing for Star Stock and some of these other events. We're really, really good at that experience. And then the fourth and then we also have product launches as well. Here in the fourth piece, I'm going to redact this one as well, just because, again, got to protect some of the internal stuff. But if you want to come work here and hang out, you can get all the secrets and then our creative production team.
00;32;58;19 - 00;33;16;09
Patrick Campbell
So that's another kind of role. It sits kind of under all of this. So creative production is more of just like making sure things look good, making sure things are sound right, having a good design palette for things, and kind of more of the graphical interface of things. And then the final piece I want to talk through and then we can wrap up is distribution.
00;33;16;09 - 00;33;34;04
Patrick Campbell
So this has been our least developed area. Last quarter is when we really went all in on, you know, this is the last big piece of the puzzle is making sure. And it's not that there weren't experiments in the past three years. It's just now we're like doing a lot of the experimentation on distribution. So we organize our team for distribution in kind of outcomes.
00;33;34;15 - 00;33;51;21
Patrick Campbell
So we have a02 lead outcome. So this is like people have never heard of us getting them to be a lead. We have lead a demo. This is kind of taking leads, making them opportunities demo to close, which is basically sales and then close to happiness, which is basically customer success. So we want, you know, basically a growth manager for each of those outcomes.
00;33;51;21 - 00;34;08;26
Patrick Campbell
And then basically these teams will kind of mitotic, you know, evolve. So all of a sudden, you know, for example, zero two lead will probably expand into a separate social person as well as a separate demand gen person and so on and so forth. And so that team will kind of grow kind of in the Bell model of growth overall.
00;34;09;06 - 00;34;26;07
Patrick Campbell
And the order of operations here I think is most interesting for a lot of you. We started with just email and that's where the bulk of distribution been just our existing list. We also have experimented a lot with partnering and then kind of where we're at is partnering as well as social and demand gen. That's kind of the big piece of the puzzle we're working on now.
00;34;26;12 - 00;34;45;01
Patrick Campbell
And then the next iteration is basically community. So this order of operations was basically decided on, Hey, we have to figure out the mechanics of producing things. We're not going to have as much time to do the distribution. And so what ended up happening is we want to measure like what are the things that are going to cost us the least in terms of distribution, but give us enough of an impact.
00;34;45;01 - 00;35;01;17
Patrick Campbell
Right? So our existing list is a really good example. Partnering is a really good example, and then all of a sudden social dimension that takes more effort, maybe higher pay off, don't get me wrong, but like again, kind of that r y as we're figuring out the mechanics. But that was the basic idea. And there's been a lot of like fun bumps along the road with this.
00;35;01;25 - 00;35;18;15
Patrick Campbell
I think we've done a really good job. I think like all things, if we did it over again, we probably could have shaved 20 to 30% of time off. But that's the nature of building is like sometimes you can't see the future quite yet. If I just summarize this for all of you, though, I think that a couple of things to really keep in mind.
00;35;18;15 - 00;35;44;00
Patrick Campbell
For one start small. I'm a big believer in everyone should be doing something with media and what I would do is I would just start a podcast. Audio first allows you to kind of hide behind, you know, not having to worry about your face being out there if you're a charismatic person or you have someone you know who's really high charisma on your team but also knowledgeable, which don't always go together, like that person can just start a generic podcast and probably do well.
00;35;44;02 - 00;36;00;13
Patrick Campbell
And the expectation is you're not looking to become a YouTube star here. And so a lot of people are like, Oh, I started this and I'm only getting like 600 people a week listening my podcast. And I was like, Okay, so what's the best webinar you've ever done? And a lot of B2B folks like, oh, like 100 people.
00;36;00;13 - 00;36;18;04
Patrick Campbell
And I was like, okay, so if you had a webinar essentially every single week that 600 people were coming to like, would you be happy? Like, Oh, holy cow, yeah, be awesome. Well, that's what you're doing. You're like, literally between the ears of your leads and hopefully those people who can help you. And so that's why I always recommend start with just a podcast.
00;36;18;04 - 00;36;38;17
Patrick Campbell
If you don't have someone or you're not yourself as charismatic and it's okay to find, I'm actually an incredible introvert. And so like, I definitely resonate with those folks. I just did debate. That's why I went to the school I went to for college. And so I got really well trained on a lot of this stuff, and that's why I can come off somewhat charismatic on a podcast, even if I'm not really that charismatic.
00;36;38;17 - 00;36;58;21
Patrick Campbell
But the basic idea is, is that if you don't have that charisma, it's okay structure and script is then going to be your friend. But I would start with a podcast, start with something small. Maybe it's just interviewing people in your team, maybe it's just interviewing the leads you want to target. Maybe it's just interviewing someone, or maybe it's you putting together, you know, 10 to 15 minute clips of, you know, how to do X or how to do Y.
00;36;58;21 - 00;37;19;02
Patrick Campbell
If you want to do a video, that's fine. But I recommend starting small podcast is relatively cheap. Also relatively convince everyone to get on the same page with and don't overthink like, Oh, it's got to be perfect. It's got to look great. If you look at pricing page, tear down the original ones, it was just a simple set like some wood we bought from Home Depot and we just I think it was one camera.
00;37;19;03 - 00;37;35;23
Patrick Campbell
We turned it on and then we had like a TV as a monitor and basically just showed graphs and then talked about them. That's literally all it was. Now it's got some heavy scripting, it's got three, four cameras, got like all kinds of stuff and a SAT and stuff like that. But we built to that. We didn't start there.
00;37;35;23 - 00;37;59;24
Patrick Campbell
And so that's kind of where I would start. And I think that everyone who's listening to this should have a podcast of some sort and should be using that, and then you can build from there. But with that, I think I have talked everyone's ears off. I think the HubSpot move was great. I think that ultimately when you're thinking about your business, media is the way to go if you're going to use content and I think everyone's going to have to use content at some point, but let me know what you think.
00;37;59;24 - 00;38;23;01
Patrick Campbell
Respond to this email if you want to understand any questions or if you're not on the email, you can go to protect the hustle dot com and sign up. But let me know how I can be helpful. If you want me to go deeper here. I don't have to go deeper here. I thought this was really interesting in the context of HubSpot making this move and a little subtle jab of, Hey, we were here first HubSpot, but obviously they have a lot more money, especially as they cross a billion and a RR, which is really powerful.
00;38;23;01 - 00;38;38;25
Patrick Campbell
So yeah, long story short, hit me up. If not, I'm just that PC a prof Welcome, and I hope everyone has a phenomenal weekend. And if you got value out of this, make sure you share it on Twitter, LinkedIn, the social media network of your choice and tag us so we can kind of see it interact and all that kind of fun stuff.
00;38;39;04 - 00;38;44;18
Patrick Campbell
All right. We'll see. I'll be well.
00;38;44;18 - 00;39;25;11
Ben Hillman
Thanks for listening. If you enjoyed this episode, we'd really appreciate it if you left a five star review of this podcast or the equivalent rating wherever you listen or watch. Also make sure you subscribe to and tell your friends about Protect the Hustle, a podcast from Al Roker, the largest, fastest growing media network dedicated to the world of subscriptions.
