September 18, 2024 • 49 mins
Join us for a conversation with Hamlet Azarian from Azarian Growth Agency as we explore the key differences between growth and traditional agencies. Hamlet explains how managing the customer lifecycle, from acquisition to retention, maximizes customer lifetime value. Learn how programs like the National Science Foundation optimize acquisition costs and attract investors.
Hamlet shares his experience scaling businesses, including a successful M&A exit. Success stories like CBDFX’s rise through SEO and Disco’s transformation of Survey Junkie into a unicorn highlight the power of strategic experimentation.
We also discuss scaling startups from $1 million to $10 million, investor criteria, and the future of AI-driven personalization. Tune in for actionable advice.
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Guest Contact Information:
Hamlet Azarian
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hamletazarian/
Twitter: https://x.com/hamletazarian
Azarian Growth Agency
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/school/azarian-growth-agency/
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:17):
Howdy.
Welcome back to anotherfun-filled episode of the
Unknown Secrets of Networking.
I am your host, Matt Bertram.
I have a special episode heretoday.
I have a special guest, HamletAzarian, with Azarian Growth
Agency.
He also has quite a bigecosystem of other things that
he does, and really one of thekey topics that people have been
(00:38):
asking me about is growthagency versus traditional agency
and what the difference is, andso I brought Hamlet on to kind
of explain that, share his storyand talk about some things that
you might be able to do toincorporate some of these
strategies into what you'redoing and clients that you have,
as well as if you might be oneof these clients.
(01:00):
Azarian might be a greatconnection for you.
All right, Hamlet, let me know.
Tell me what is the difference?
How would you define growthagency versus traditional agency
?
Let's start there.
Speaker 2 (01:11):
Well, first of all, matthew, thanks for having me on
.
It's a pleasure to be here,really excited about being on
the show.
So, yeah, let me explain whatthe big difference between a
traditional agency and a growthagency, the way we describe it.
So, in most digital marketingareas, traditional agencies are
really concerned about thefunnel.
This, typically, what I mean bythat is they're trying to
(01:32):
acquire the customers for you,they're trying to get them to
your landing page, they'retrying to convert them, and
that's really the main focus.
They don't go above and beyondthat.
And what a growth agency does,which is a little bit different,
is a growth agency is lookingat the full funnel, and what I
mean by the full funnel is notonly getting the customers to
(01:53):
show up, not only getting themto buy, but getting them to buy
again and then continuously telltheir friends and build sort of
this full ecosystem.
That what you start doing is youstart measuring what the
lifetime value of a customer is,and your overarching goal of a
growth agency is you want toincrease the lifetime value as
(02:15):
much as you can on, at the sametime bringing the customer
acquisition costs as low as youcan, so you can have an LTV over
over CAC, which is whatinvestors try to shine upon and
they get excited about when theysee incredible numbers,
typically in the 6, 7, 8%, the8x range.
So if you're make the math easy, if you do $1,000 a year in
(02:37):
revenue and you're able todivide that by eight, and let's
say you bring it in for $125,$150 for the customer
acquisition cost, investors getexcited and they're ready to
invest into your business.
Speaker 1 (02:48):
So it's really about, well, full funnel management,
right, or full brand management.
You're looking at the lifetimevalue of the customer, you're
looking at the repeat businesscycle, but really I think the
key difference is helping tellthe story to different
stakeholders on the value of thedigital marketing you're
providing beyond just bottomline revenue growth, of getting
(03:11):
this lead in the door for thisvery snapshot of this month or
this quarter or something likethat.
You're looking at more of thelonger term and you're trying to
incorporate these strategiesinto that.
I think even like that's partof it.
Speaker 2 (03:26):
Yeah, for sure, that's definitely part of it.
The other difference, which Ididn't get into, is you're
embedded into the product itself.
So there are times wheremarketing actually can change
the outcome of what the productis, because what you're trying
to do is you're getting to thisnotion of product to market fit,
and what does that reallyreally mean?
(03:46):
Right, and what that reallymeans is you as a marketer
because your front lines, you'reable to really test and iterate
different value propositionsand sometimes you're able to
actually test things that theproduct team is thinking about
building and they're not builtyet yet to be able to prioritize
(04:07):
what should actually beexecuted in the product roadmap.
And what this sometimes leadsto is a completely brand new
product that people weren'tenvisioning before, because the
market wants this, wants Aversus B, and so on and so forth
.
Speaker 1 (04:23):
So, like quantitative research, maybe you're doing
some surveys, you're doing somestudies, like I think you know,
throwing stuff out there onTwitter or social media to see
how people are responding to it.
I mean, can you expand uponthat a little bit?
Yeah, of course.
Speaker 2 (04:36):
So what you're doing is a bunch of several things,
right?
So I can give you one example.
I'll give you a non-paidversion of an example and I'll
give you a paid version of anexample.
So, on a non-paid version, wehad a client and they had just
recently gotten a seedinvestment.
A seed investment is a smallround that typically is designed
(04:57):
for you to be able to build theproduct itself.
And the founder came to us andhe was telling us hey, I'm about
to build this product, but I'mnot sure if the market really
wants it.
And it was a small amount, itwas like 350, $400,000 that he
got in.
He was a technical founder, heled a large engineering group at
one of the big tech companiesand he had the chops and the
(05:20):
know-how on how to build thisright, but he wasn't sure if he
should invest his time intobuilding this and if this would
turn into a scalable business.
So what we did is we, with hissupport, got enrolled in a
national program called theNational Science Foundation NSF,
and the reason we did that iswe wanted to have a way of, as
(05:44):
we reached out to this potentialcustomers, to say that we were
part of a program.
And this was.
We were doing customerdiscovery and we were going to,
we were going to be interviewingthem.
What we really were doing wasnot just customer discovery, we
were also trying to see what themarket really wanted to do.
We began a cold outreachstrategy.
We looked at LinkedIn.
We found his ideal customerprofile, which were engineering
(06:07):
managers as well as CTOs atFortune 100 and Fortune 500.
So if you've ever tried toreach out to an engineering
manager at a Fortune 1 orFortune 5, it's incredibly hard
to get them even interested totalk to you or even want to have
a conversation with you.
So because we were part of thisprogram and it was affiliated
with the University of SouthernCalifornia, we were able to use
(06:28):
that angle right.
We had a USC email, we werepart of this program.
We looked at their LinkedInprofile and we said, hey, we
really see that you've doneincredibly well in your career.
We just need about 15, 20minutes of your time.
We're working on this projectand we want to see if there's
even a market interest in it.
That little program that I'mtalking to you about.
(06:49):
We only emailed about 150, 200people, which resulted in about
100 phone calls.
In those 100 phone calls, wequickly learned that there was a
potential need, but it wasn'tgoing to be a venture scale
business.
What it was really going to bewas venture scale business.
What it was really going to bewas a lifestyle business,
because everybody's engineeringstack was so different that was
(07:10):
going to be incredibly hard tobuild something that was venture
scale.
Once we learned this, we were inthis, you know, conundrum.
What do we do?
Do we move forward?
We not move forward.
You know, he had to go througha lot of soul searching and he
came back and he went back tothe investors and he said you
know, guys, I don't think thisis going to work out.
This is not what I want tobuild.
(07:30):
I want to build a $10 million ayear business where it's a
lifestyle business.
What I really want to build isthe next unicorn.
I want to build a billiondollar business.
So he went back and he actuallygave the money back to the
investors, which later on theyended up giving it all back to
him, which led to his newventure that ended up becoming a
venture-scaled business as well.
So that's on a non-paidstrategy, right On a paid
(07:53):
strategy.
We had a similar problem, sothis company was called Camino
Financial.
We have case studies on it onour website and I'll probably
talk about it a little bit here.
We were running, we weretargeting B2B businesses.
These were Latina-owned,first-generation businesses that
(08:15):
had come into the US and whatwe had started doing is running
Facebook ads.
But we were a broker, and whatthat means in fintech is we
didn't really have a product yetand we weren't sure what our
product needed to be.
So we started testing differentvalue propositions and
different product offerings tosee what would be interesting
for our potential customers, andthat allowed us to figure out
(08:36):
what we call the microloan,which was an entry-level loan
for businesses to be able tobuild out their credit score and
their credit history.
This testing and iterationprocess allowed us to eventually
lend up to $150 million loansin first-generation businesses
and family-owned businesses thathave moved into the US.
(08:57):
So this is two examples how thegrowth aspect of it led to the
eventual either shutting down ofthe business, or also the path
of growth that led to $150million loan originations for
the company.
Speaker 1 (09:11):
Awesome.
That's a great case study,hamlet, and I'm excited we just
jumped right into this.
Let's back up a little bit andyou can credentialize a little
bit your background.
You've raised $250 million fordifferent kind of startups.
Why don't you share with theaudience your origin story and
how you got into this?
Speaker 2 (09:32):
Yeah for sure.
So initially, when the birth ofthe agency, let's say right.
So what ended up happening is Iwas working for different
startups as an advisor and Iwould come in and I would, you
know, build out their strategies.
And then eventually, one of theadvisors that I met was Sean
(09:53):
and Kenny Salas with CaminoFinancial, which I just kind of
just shared the eventual results, and they asked me hey, can you
do more than just advising?
Can you actually execute?
I said yeah, sure, but you knowI like advising, but I can do
it two or three days a week.
That's all I can do.
So I started working with themand I was having a ton of fun.
We're growing the business.
When I joined them we were onlyfive people, six people.
(10:14):
We eventually ended up growingthe business to well over 150
employees, had offices in LA,mexico City as well as Columbia,
and eventually had an M&A exitwhich allowed us to kind of have
a full cycle from beginning toend.
But while I was working withthem, I also met another company
called CBDFX.
They were a CPG brand and theywanted help and guidance on
(10:37):
their SEO strategy.
So CBD, as most of you guysknow, is an incredibly
competitive space, a huge searchvolume.
You can't really run ads atthat time, but you have to
really dig in and build out anSEO strategy, which I provided
guidance for them.
Similar things started helpingbuild out their teams of
execution and now they are thesecond largest privately held
(10:59):
brand of CBD in their category.
So they're sold in the US.
In Europe they're sold onlineand offline, they have a
wholesale business and so on andso forth.
Also at the same time, Istarted working for another
company called Disco and I wasleading their overall
go-to-market strategy for theirconsumer-facing branch, which
was Survey Junkie.
(11:19):
This business ended up scaling.
They were spending about$150,000 in ads.
We scaled it to 1.5 million.
They became a unicorn as well.
When I did all these things,different VCs started taking
notice and they said, hey, howthe heck are you doing this all
at the same time across threedifferent businesses?
And I was like you know what?
(11:40):
It's really not hard.
I'm just finding really goodpeople.
I'm running a bunch ofexperiments and tests and
through those experiments we'relearning.
And then they're like, yeah,but you're doing it all at the
same time in three differentcompanies, how's that happening?
I'm like, well, I'm justtesting the right things and
they're like what does that mean?
I'm like well, I'm just not.
I'm not doing the basic test,right.
(12:02):
I'm not doing the.
Let me test the color of greenversus red or the shade of red.
I'm like, who cares about that?
What is that going to give you5% or 10%?
I'm like testing the whole damnbusiness.
I'm testing the valueproposition of the business,
what really really matters,digging inside to the data and
seeing where there's a specialfocal point that generates more,
(12:23):
less churn, the customer stayswith you longer, or whatever it
might be.
And I just come up with a bunchof ideas with the team and we
just start running tons ofexperiments and we see if it
works.
And they're not like oh, welove that.
Can you do that for morebusinesses?
Like, no, I'm good, I'm goodBecause I knew what it took,
right.
I'm like I'm maxed out.
I could only do this for threeat a time.
(12:43):
If one of them drops off orsomething happens, I will kind
of help you out.
This went on for a while.
Two years passed, three yearspassed, and then eventually I
started saying, okay, if theinvestors are asking me to start
an agency, I probably shouldlisten to them and begin an
agency.
I was like I got to do itdifferently and what I wanted to
(13:04):
do is I wanted to take one ofthe issues I was having with
each one of these businesses wasI might come up with a strategy
, I might come up with the idea,but I still needed people right
, I still needed talent, I stillneeded resources to be able to
execute.
So I thought about okay, what ifI already had the team?
What if we were no longer anagency like a traditional agency
(13:28):
, where we had specialists thatwere only working on multiple
clients or multiple projects?
What if we flipped it on itshead and said what if we build
dedicated teams that work onmaximum one or two accounts,
depending on the scope of work,and they go really deep in each
one of those accounts?
So it's almost like you'rehiring a whole team and you're
(13:52):
hiring it at the same rate youwould have paid for a director.
And what if this team has theselective learnings of all the
experiments that are runningacross all of the accounts and
is quickly able to identifytactics across different
strategies that are working andimplemented and, you know,
obviously make it more uniquefor a specific customer?
(14:14):
So that's what we've been sothat's a very ingrowth agency.
Speaker 1 (14:18):
And in addition to that yeah, no, there's two
things I wanted to kind of addto what you're saying.
I think that one of the bigthings that I've heard from
clients that they've seen with alot of traditional agencies out
there is kind of this waterfallmentality as far as like
delivery of work as well as likethere's so many different
(14:40):
people on the account or it'skind of the game of telephone.
Some of the people doing thework are not engaged with the
account as much or even met theaccount, and so it takes a long
time to get stuff done.
You're playing the game oftelephone and then it's not like
like there's easy things thatif you were working on the
account or the account managerwould know that when it gets to
(15:03):
the delivery person they don'thave the benefit of all that
kind of information.
So structuring it from like anintegrated team standpoint,
where maybe there's somebodythat's busy, that doesn't know
what they want to do, and thenthey have a dedicated team to
them, they can help with thatexecution, I think it's a great
(15:23):
strategy and a structure that'sreally nice.
Also, I recently had interviewedBilly Jean is marketing.
I don't know if you know who heis, but one of the things he
said that really resonated withme.
That really echoed in what youwere saying was well, if you're
looking for a 10X difference inwhat you're offering versus
(15:46):
something else and you're tryingto do little word changes or
color changes, you're not goingto get those big changes either
way, and so, essentially, youneed to change the overall offer
.
Or even another guy that I wasinterviewing, you got to change
(16:06):
the whole name of the company.
If you're maxing out two tothree years because it's already
found its place in the market,right, or or people don't know
about it, that might be theissue.
But if you want outsized gains,you got to make outsized changes
.
Right, you got to.
You got to really, um, reallygo over the top with what you're
(16:27):
doing, and then you'll seethose stark differences in in
the type of engagement, and Imean even some of the things
that you said with cold emailoutreach.
As far as wow, we, we reachedout to 150 people and we had 150
responses.
That's pretty incredible.
That really goes into the rightkind of targeting and
demographics and everything thatyou're, you're, you're trying
(16:50):
to do is is is pretty amazing.
Speaker 2 (16:52):
So thank you, man Appreciate it.
Speaker 1 (16:56):
So you know, let's talk about maybe, okay, there's
a founder that's trying to seekinvestment or there's maybe an
agency that's working with thecompany that has a great product
, but they just don't spend themoney.
Roas is fantastic, you need todump.
(17:18):
I would just dump this up tillwe hit a plateau and what we're
spending and they're like wecan't handle that.
Either we can't scale or wedon't have the money to do that.
But it's like you're putting in25 cents and you're getting a
dollar 50 back, like keepspending.
And so curious what your advicemight be or what you've seen as
(17:40):
far as like mistakes, whenpeople are going okay, I think I
need investment, but they don'tknow about how to get it.
Speaker 2 (17:47):
So I think some of the challenges that people have
is so I'll give you an exampleof a bootstrap business that
we've been working with, wherewe started at zero and they're
now doing 1.5 million and thenthey're on the way to do $2
million.
So the company's called Ordersco.
When we initially met them,they didn't even have a website.
They had an incredible product.
(18:07):
Like, literally, I was just.
It was one of those momentswhere I'm like how the hell did
you build this product?
They're like yeah, I know We'vebeen just like tinkering away.
We've been talking to customers, we've been really digging into
what the pain point is andincredible engineers right,
really smart, really talented,but come marketing, no idea.
(18:28):
So it's like we don't really,we really don't want outside
capital.
We want to try to do this onour own.
We want to see how big we canget it.
We want to build a traditionalbusiness All right, cool.
So one of the first things wedid right away for them was try
to figure out all right, whereare we going to find their
customers?
Where do they exist?
And they're really going afterrestaurants, and what they had
(18:49):
built was a platform, anall-in-one platform that allows
any small restaurant to be ableto get third-party delivery apps
to you know, you can use uber,eats, postmate, grubhub,
whatever it might be.
And if you didn't know at thetime when they had built this
that you had to, if you wentinto a restaurant you might see
all these different screens andall these tablets up.
(19:10):
It's because you need to buyeach one of those tablets, or
you need to get each one of thetablets to start what the orders
were.
So they had figured out a wayto consolidate all of that into
one tablet, or no tablet at all,so they could start bringing
orders in.
But they wanted to now gettheir message out right.
So they came to us and they'relike, hey, what do we do?
We're like, all right, firstyou build a website.
You need to clearly explainwhat you're trying to do for the
(19:34):
customer.
You need to put together bothan online SEO strategy as well
as a paid strategy.
But they're like, no, we don'thave money.
We're like, all right, you havesomething, what do you got?
We're like, okay, we can affordto do $5,000 to see if it's
going to work or it's not goingto work.
I'm like, all right, with abudget like that, let's start
with Facebook.
We really don't have muchchoices.
(19:55):
If you go after Google, we'renot going to be able to learn
enough because we're not goingto get enough clicks, but with
Facebook, we could actually seeif the value proposition is
going to work.
We started testing differentconcepts.
We started testing differentpricing, we started testing
different target audience and,fast forward to today, we scaled
them up to a point where wehave investors coming to them
(20:16):
now wanting to invest into thebusiness, and the reason that's
happening is that their LTVs arephenomenal.
So their lifetime value of acustomer is incredible.
At the price that they'recharging, they're cheaper than
everybody else in the market.
In addition to that, their CACis really reasonable.
They're able to sustain and getmost of the money back within
(20:39):
three to four months.
So in most in traditionally inthis sector it takes eight
months, nine months, 10 monthson your customer acquisition
costs before you're able to getthe money back.
So they're able to do it in,you know, a half to a third of
the time, and because of thisthey've been able to grow
quickly.
They got to a point where weplateaued right.
(21:00):
So this story got to a stagewhere we were at all right.
We're at one and a half.
How do we get to 10 million?
Man?
We need more money.
And so we started going out tothe marketplace, showing all the
incredible success we've had,and what we started getting were
offers from investors, whichwere nice, but it felt like it
was a different time, right ifthese offers in 2024 felt like
(21:25):
they're a third or a fourthlower than what their peers were
getting in 2022, becauseobviously they were looking at
what the other competitors got,what type of evaluation they got
and where they were at theirstage, and they're like, man, do
we really now need the capital?
Like we're growing on our own.
So we got into this whole debatefor a while.
We tried we still tried pushingthrough it, and we're like, man
(21:47):
, there's this whole new segmentof customers that we need to
tap into.
So we're like, okay, we need tochange a new offer for them.
And which is what weexperimented with?
And my god, like the cap justdropped even more.
We're like all right, wefigured out a new offer.
So we figured out like anannual plan that brings the CAC
even further down, but it nowgot our payback period to one
(22:10):
month.
So in theory, we actually don'tneed any more investment
capital, because now we're ableto get the customers and pay for
it right away and kind of beable to scale the business up.
Speaker 1 (22:24):
Wow, that's impressive.
So if you were to zoom out andjust say what are some of the
key factors to successfulfundraising, how would you
summarize it?
Speaker 2 (22:35):
So I would say is they investors want to
understand, depending on whatstage you're at, right.
So if you're early stage andyou have no, you have no revenue
coming in.
They're really looking at youas the founder and your
capabilities of buildingwhatever this initial set of
product is.
And can you actually go get 10,20, 30, 40 people to pay you
(22:58):
that you don't know right.
So these are completelyisolated people and do they
believe in your ability to beable to do that?
And normally they'll investsomewhere between 300 to about
$500,000 for that and get about10% of the company.
Okay.
So if you're able to do thatwithout it, I highly recommend
(23:19):
it.
So meaning, if you're able tobuild the products, if you have
enough financial resources to beable to sustain, however, you
have to be able to get to an MVPor a minimum product.
It's not worth giving up the10% for the $300,000.
Speaker 1 (23:35):
Because you're going to hate yourself.
Speaker 2 (23:36):
Later on You're going to be like oh my God, Right.
So the next phase is usuallyyou have to get to about a
million dollars a year andthat's typically $80,000 a month
in revenue or sales.
This is where they're lookingfor a predictable, scalable
go-to-market.
We call it a growth engine, orone channel that you can put
(23:57):
more money into.
That's going to show a reallypositive LTV over CAC ratio.
The business itself,operationally, can handle more.
So you've figured out the salesmechanism.
You've figured out thefulfillment mechanism.
You've demonstrated that notonly can you build the product,
but you're now talking to yourcustomers and you're trying to
figure out what the next thingis that you should be building
(24:20):
and you have customers that arealready ready to pay you for
whatever that next thing is.
Sometimes you've already begunbuilding that and you have
pre-orders on it, or you havecustomers that are on beta the
next thing and you're startingto get early traction on it.
Then the next phase istypically around 10 million.
So you now you got to go from 1million a year right to 10
million a year.
(24:40):
So it's a substantial leap up.
And what this really means iscan you actually build a
scalable team that can handleall of this, including multiple
growth engines that can handleall of this, including new
revenue channels and includingnew customer segments.
Speaker 1 (24:59):
Okay, so in like 2024 and the market you know we're
in an interesting place rightnow, I think, in the market.
I mean, what do you think thatinvestors are looking for?
And also, how do you likestartups build strong
relationships with with theirinvestors or potential investors
?
Speaker 2 (25:16):
The, the.
What they're looking for hasn'tchanged right.
So what they're looking for isan incredible team, a great
product, the ability to executesome basic fundamentals that are
showcased in already, how thebusiness is already doing.
All of those have remained thesame.
They've just become much moreselective.
(25:38):
They've just become much moreselective, so they want to make
sure they're putting the rightbets into the right companies
where in the past they mighthave been a little more lenient.
They're like well, you know,the founder is not as
experienced and the team is alittle weak, but I can help find
that additional person.
So what they're hoping now isthat your core team is in place
(25:58):
already.
You've been able to recruit whoyou're going to be executing
with, you're demonstrating yourtechnical know-how, you have
figured out your marketingcomponents of it, or understand
how all the unique economicswork, and you are on the path of
growth.
It doesn't have to be 20% monthover month or 30% month over
(26:18):
month right, it just has to showreasonable growth and you
understand the financial.
So you're not burning cashunnecessarily, you haven't hired
way too many peopleunnecessarily and you're
treating it more like a realbootstrap business.
If you actually do that, theironic thing happens is more
capital wants to come to you,more investors want to come to
(26:39):
you and work with you and all ofthose different things.
Speaker 1 (26:43):
It's true across the board.
It's true in recruitment Like.
It's true Like if you don'tneed something, people want you.
If you do need something,there's a reason and people look
at you as a red herring.
Potentially One of the thingsthat I think is really
interesting and I want to getyour take on it is you know,
(27:04):
initially you start out maybeyou're you're you're you're
doing some, some surveys andyou're trying to find product
market fit and you're doing somemarketing and to get your
initial customers time to addthe sales component right, add
that sales team to it.
And then how are you viewingthe partnership between sales
(27:25):
and marketing?
That's something I reallybelieve in.
Is sales and marketing atbigger organizations really need
to work together?
And a lot of times they don't.
And that's where the advent oflike the CRO has come in to to
try to bring them together.
Speaker 2 (27:42):
So I think, on day one, you're trying to sell even
if you don't have a productbuilt.
You're trying to get pre-ordersor you're trying to get some
version of a commitment.
Hey, if, if this product wasbuilt today and whatever, how
much are you like?
You, you're really gettingclose to it.
You're trying to get a numberout of them and then, on top of
(28:02):
that not only once you get thenumber you're like all right,
are you willing to put 10% ofthat into a deposit right now?
And I will give you 30%discount, cheaper than whatever
number they throw out, right?
So what you're trying to reallysee is is there a real
commitment on that number?
Or they are, are not, they'rejust kind of just being nice,
and that happened before theproduct is even built.
(28:24):
So I think that's a reallycritical element of this,
because then you're able to seeand you can actually showcase
this now to other people right,you can go to investors and
you're like not only did we docustomer discovery, I actually
sold the product already.
Here's our some deposits.
This is the average price thatpeople are willing to pay for it
, and I have commitments, I havedeposits.
(28:46):
I now need to go build it,right.
So that's that part.
The second part, I think whatyou brought on is sales and
marketing.
It's more than that, so it'snot just sales and marketing.
I think it's really sales,marketing, product engineering,
it's the whole organizationoperations, right.
So I think it's really reallycritical now and it's going to
(29:07):
become even more in the nearfuture.
I don't think organizations aregoing to be as large.
I think we're all in the phaseof superpowers, right.
Like where AI has gone in thisvery short period in the last
four or five, six years.
It is really allowing us to bemuch more productive.
(29:27):
It's giving us exponentialskills and unlocks that we can
have and, let alone where it'sheaded, it's making most of us
become much more generalist andspecialist select T-shaped
marketers in the marketing world, and that applies also in sales
and that also applies inengineering, right.
We have an understanding of thebreadth of knowledge that we
(29:50):
need to do and we're going to bereally, really good at certain
things, and the team sizes mightnot necessarily be as big, so I
do foresee companies andorganizations being much leaner
and being able to do much moreand much quicker and much faster
.
Speaker 1 (30:06):
To highlight a little bit of what you were saying the
T-shaped is the breadth andthen the depth for people
listening and so really, peopleare becoming experts and also
having a wide range of knowledge.
And then you apply AI on largeleverage models and some of the
automations and personalizationsto that.
(30:27):
You can take someone that coulddo X amount in whatever period
of time.
Their productivity goes throughthe roof and so you really
don't need as many people.
You know kind of going back tothe question, and we can go to
AI next, as far as like wherethe future trends are coming.
But let's say, you know you'reokay, you're a founder and
(30:51):
you're the CEO, your job is tosell, right, and usually the
CEO's job is to sell.
But say, you start to grow andyou have a clip and you start
hiring people and you know you,you have a website now and you
have, um, some advertising goingand and you're, you're getting
your name out there, right, andyou're finding your place in the
marketplace and you're saying,okay, now, now I need boots on
(31:15):
the ground and in addition tomyself, right, or or my
executive team, and and therewas this book called the E-Myth
that we had everybody read,where it's kind of cool.
You build the organization andliterally you're wearing like 50
hats and then, like, you takethe hats off as you build the
organization but say you needsome salespeople, right, and you
(31:35):
need some people to go knock ondoors and give presentations
and do pitches.
And you need some people to goknock on doors and give
presentations and do pitches,and you need some account-based
selling.
What size organization shouldyou be?
Or when should you startthinking about that?
Because, as a founder or owneror whatever, your time is going
to start getting pulled in a lotof different directions and you
(31:56):
need to duplicate yourself inthat sales function.
And with advertising, look, youcan scale pretty quick, right,
and you can reach the right kindof people and get your message
out there.
And maybe you have order takers.
If you're doing e-commerce likein inbound, but like if you
need true B2B salespeopleespecially we talked a lot about
(32:19):
SaaS companies and technologycompanies there's a premium on
those people in the marketplace.
Oh yeah, when do you decide toopt to bring people like that on
and build a sales team?
Speaker 2 (32:33):
I think that depends on the segment you're going
after, right?
So if you're going after, like,there's B2B segments, like the
restaurant tech that I wastelling you, you're dealing with
SMBs and you can build a salesteam much earlier in there,
because it's not the same levelof sales skills needed.
You're not trying to sell tofive people in an organization
(32:54):
or to a committee.
You're really you're meetingwith the owner, you're meeting
with the small business operator.
It's it's typically, you knowthe decision feels like a b2c
and you can start, because ofthat, systemizing the process
much earlier on.
Now, that applied to camino,that applied to orders.
But now, if I go the other wayand I look at something like
Disco, which was much more B2Band we were selling to much
(33:17):
larger organizations, the samething also applies there.
Team are part of the process initself.
What I mean by that is you knowyou're going to trade shows,
you're going to conferences, youmight be hosting different
webinars, you might be actuallyhosting dinners or regional
(33:40):
events that you're inviting thepotential clients that you want
to sell, plus the clients thatyou've already sold, and that
does involve boots underground,right.
So it really depends on thetype of business you're building
Both, I believe, needed earlyon.
Sales is a critical part of it.
Like, as I said, even like theproduct was built, you're trying
to sell it right.
So.
So I think, as a founder, whatyou're trying to do is you're
(34:04):
trying to figure out what is mysales process as soon as
possible as you can at the sametime is how does marketing and
sales play together before I getmy lead, when I get my lead,
and sometimes on a larger ticket, b2b sales, the window is much
longer.
Right, we have some clientsthat are six months it takes.
(34:25):
So there's a lot of marketingthat goes from that moment that
that first phone call occurredtill the six months before they
make a decision, all the wayfrom case studies, all the way
from answering any rebuttalsthat come and showcasing
different work, that we've doneanything new, that that arises
in the midst of the salesprocess, and so on and so forth.
Speaker 1 (34:45):
So I hope that answers your question.
No, it does.
I.
I think that a lot of foundersthink that if they're
technically driven right orthey're engineers or I see a lot
of this We've seen a lot ofpeople that have been in the
industry for 30 years, they'reengineers they come out of it.
They say I have this idea, likeI have, I want to start a
(35:09):
second career, I want to startthis company, and they're
they're very, very good atwhatever it is they did.
There's a need in themarketplace, but then they
discover I don't have this hugesales apparatus and all these
logos behind me to help opendoors.
How do I tell that story?
And they just think that ifthey build it, people will come,
and then that's when the wholemarketing conversation starts to
(35:31):
happen and they have to buildall that out.
I want to transition into andyou broached the topic of AI.
Let's expound upon that of kindof where you see the future
going.
I mean, I know, when I listento podcasts about AI and people
at OpenAI or people even atGoogle, like Eric Schmidt just
(35:52):
did a talk and like he can'teven see out six months right Of
like what's going to happen.
Speaker 2 (35:57):
So fast, right, like what's coming out and how
quickly it's coming.
Speaker 1 (36:00):
Yeah, and so so I mean just tell me kind of your
take on it and like what you'reseeing and and you know what
predictions you might have.
I think a lot of people arestart.
I mean you know whatpredictions you might have.
I think a lot of people arestart.
I mean I think when uh, applerolls out which I think it is
rolling out in October um thethey they postponed it they're
(36:21):
putting uh chat GBT on the Applephone and so then people will
really be using it and Google'slooking at from a search
standpoint and there's now likecomplexityai and there's, I mean
, ai is creeping into everything.
It's creeping into education,it's creeping into, like
(36:41):
learning, even the creativitycomponents.
You look at what's going onElon Musk in the cars.
I mean it's, it's everywhereright and it's coming at us
really, really fast and I thinkit's going to dramatically
change our world.
(37:01):
And so I just want to hear kindof what you're seeing.
Speaker 2 (37:04):
Yeah, of course.
So a little bit about us and AI.
We give incredible talks duringNew York tech Week, san
Francisco Tech Week and LA TechWeek.
One of the talks that we didwas how I taught my six-year-old
son about different largelanguage models and I used
different children games inexplaining that to him and how
(37:25):
generative adversarial networkmodels work, or variable
autoencoders how do they work?
So?
I totally nerded out and reallyexplained it basically to them.
So, in regards to our agencyitself, it's core of what we do.
I think in June 2020, if youknow your open AI timeline
that's when 3.5 came out right.
(37:47):
So right away we were on it.
We were trying to figure outhow do we utilize it.
We dealt with the early stagehallucinations.
We dealt with this is toogeneral problems.
How do we make it much morespecific?
So, where I think we are at thestage of right now, it's still
super early.
Not everyone really fullyunderstands it, at least the
mass population of it, but thepeople who are using it, they
(38:10):
see it as an incredible toolthat is allowing them to move
much faster, much quicker, muchmore easier in finding
information and being able toquickly figure out personalized
strategies or plans, and that'show we end up using it.
For us, where has it helped in?
(38:31):
It's helped in marketingworkflows, it's helped in
marketing strategy building.
It's helped us in design.
It's helped us in contentcreation.
It's helped us in coding, sothere isn't a team in our
organization that has notbenefited from it.
So every single aspect of ourteam has flourished.
(38:52):
There's so many tools we'vegone through, by the way, last
year at this time there was 350startups that had got an
investment for AI.
This year at this time there's1,500.
So there's been an exponentialgrowth in just the amount of
companies that are trying tobuild around this right.
Speaker 1 (39:12):
Well, my team keeps bringing like different tools,
like, hey, let's incorporate,like, let's use this, let's do
that, and they're all doingsomething like a little bit
differently, like there's got tobe a washout at some point, but
we're we're looking atdifferent, different kind of
things for everything that youcan think of, right, um, I
actually I I wrote I uh, when SEranking was launching their, uh
(39:34):
, their podcast, I was like thefirst interview and it was right
around that timeframe that chatGBG came out and we were just
talking about like what, um,what, how to use it like, what
to do, like people, and it'sjust like talk to it, right, and
?
And I wrote a blog after thatand I said, okay, we're in this
information age, like attentionage, I think that we're going to
(39:57):
move into like a intimacy agelike, where you know everything
is so personalized.
And I mean, if you talk to a AIlike and they train it to be
like a therapist or to be aneducator or whatever, you can
give it all kinds of parametersand you just talk to it like a
(40:18):
human and it's going to give youfeedback and and it's going to
give you better, better feedbackmost likely than you would get
talking to a, you know acredentialed human.
You know what.
Speaker 2 (40:30):
I mean, I mean there's now on the citation.
Speaker 1 (40:35):
What were you saying?
Speaker 2 (40:36):
Yeah, yeah, let me give you an incredible story
around that.
So my, my, my wife knows, andshe hates, how busy I get and I
always forget the most importantthings, right, like the
birthday card or the Valentinecard.
And man about this lot, and she, she figured this out.
It took her a while to figureit.
Man about this lot, and shefigured this out.
(40:56):
It took her a while to figureit out.
But this last February samething happened.
Is I forgot to write that nicecard that she always likes?
She just likes simple things,she just likes thoughtful cards.
I was like, oh shit, what am Igoing to do?
It's Valentine's again.
I haven't had time to thinkabout this and I was just
nerding out on fine-tuning andbeing, and this is when gpt
transformers that come out.
I'm like what if I just startloading up all the previous
(41:19):
cards I've written to her?
What if I load up some of thepictures of our kids, some of
the trips we've done this pastyear, and just ask it to write a
nice little personalized letterto her?
It did.
I was like, damn, this is muchbetter and it met my style, my
writing the same exact ways thatI enunciate and punctuate on my
letters Like this is so good.
(41:40):
It took me a whopping 15minutes and I sent it to her and
she started bawling.
She's like wow, this was sogood.
She's like I know you didn'thave time, so how did you
actually do this so good?
She's like I know you didn'thave time, so how did you
actually do this?
I'm like she's like did you useGPT again?
I'm like, yeah, I use GPT.
She's like I don't care, it wasso, so good, I'll take it.
Speaker 1 (41:59):
So I got a very similar story, did something
very similar to that, and youknow my wife's big on posts on,
like public displays ofaffection, right, so like
posting it on Facebook, and sothat's what I did.
I took a bunch of images, Iwrote something nice, I posted
it first year, like she was justlike enthralled, right, like
(42:22):
this is amazing.
I had so many brownie points.
And then year two came aroundand I think I had sent her an
article about, like howdifferent industries are going
to get affected by AI, likemaybe the week before, and she
put two and two together and shewas like this was not, you was
it, and I was like it was me,because I had to do the
(42:43):
prompting and like all this guyand she was like no, so your
wife was like good with it.
Like my wife was like no, youdidn't put in the effort.
I said I did put in the effort.
I said I did put in the effortI put in a lot of effort.
Speaker 2 (42:55):
What are you?
Speaker 1 (42:55):
yeah, I was like, and I was like how do you not like
this?
And she's like so.
So I think that there's thishuman element that that's going
to be uh, part of uh, the thezeitgeist for for a long time as
far as like how, how it affectshuman culture, but it's going
to seep into everything.
Speaker 2 (43:12):
Imagine about education, right, like so we
have a couple of our teammembers who are getting their
masters now, and then I'm likeman and remember in our, in our
organization, it's all I amRight.
So so they have every tool.
We don't even know how manytools we have.
It's like insane amount oftools that we have.
They have access.
So.
(43:33):
So I've've been, and weencourage in every one of our
workflows to share the prompthow did you do it?
And we have, like uh, brownlunch series where we're sharing
each other different techniquesand strategies.
Did you know I could do this?
They're like oh, wow, I didn'tknow I could do that either.
So, so that's continuouslyhappening, right.
So I look at her.
I'm like are you actuallyreading books?
Now?
She's like well, I'm trying to,but it's really, really right.
So I look at her.
I'm like are you actuallyreading books?
Now she's like well, I'm tryingto, but it's really really hard
(43:56):
right.
Like I can just ask it and theycould summarize it for me and
they can tell me what's going on.
So the whole education system,I think, is going to be like mad
.
It's going to be completelydifferent.
Speaker 1 (44:07):
It's going to be what we grew up with.
It's not going to exist, right.
So well, I I remember that inschool I was like they're like,
how to do long form math orwhatever right?
And I go, I'm going to use acalculator.
And then they're like, no, youhave to learn how to do.
And I said, but I'm alwaysgoing to have a calculator.
And I was like, if I'm alwaysgoing to have a calculator, and
(44:30):
this is supposed to help me withwhatever job that I have why
can't I use a calculator?
You know well, you need tolearn how to do it.
I think that that same argumentis just going to be multiplied
by a ton.
Ok, so we're going off ontangents.
I love it.
I've been thinking aboutturning this podcast into like a
(45:00):
longer form podcast where, like, really get to know people and
start to break down things andbut but we don't have that yet.
Freelancers or agencies or evenfounders that maybe want to
transition, to be more kind ofgrowth-based, that are offering
digital marketing services, oreven just kind of final words
(45:22):
for founders that are looking tomake decisions with this rapid
growth environment.
I think it's going to be reallywild with what's going on with
AI and then what is really thebest way to get in contact with
you, some of the stuff you'redoing.
I know you've done a ton ofwebinars on AI and some of them
(45:44):
look really, really fascinating,so I'd encourage people to go
check that out.
But yeah, what is some advicefor people if they want to move
more towards growth agencies, orwhat should they be looking for
?
And then founders like any kindof parting tips?
Speaker 2 (46:01):
Yeah, I think the biggest really is it's moving
from campaign based or outputdriven initiatives to really
staying focused on what mattersand what really drives results
and what really drives growth,and switching your mindset to
constant learning or a growthmindset.
(46:22):
So you're always in this notionof like, how do I fail 95% of
the time?
And that's what you have toconstantly be thinking about.
So you have to be wrong 95% ofthe time.
And how am I right that 5%?
And obviously, with that 5%you're going to go really big on
right.
Like once you figure it out,you're going to scale it up, go
(46:44):
as fast as you can, run asquickly as you can and really
grow it to the next stage.
But you have to constantlythink that way and the reason
I'm bringing this up right andthis will answer how do you get
a hold of us is we have a wholeecosystem and there's multiple
ways you can get a hold of us.
You can monthly join us in ourGrowth Lab webinar series where
(47:06):
we unveil literally what we do.
There's no black box inmarketing anymore.
I could literally show you whatI learned today and by tomorrow
it's already outdated.
That's the world I think, welive in, I think, and that's
what we try to do.
And the last one, one recentone we talked about SEO and how
(47:27):
to future-proof your SEOstrategy and we dug into all the
Google patents related to AIoverviews and kind of showed how
that actually works and how doyou participate in that and how
do you rank in that all of that.
Another way you can get a holdof us is we have an academy, so
this academy is structured tohelp if you want to transition
(47:47):
into growth marketing.
In our last cohort we had over400 students applied.
It costs you absolutely nothing.
We provide 100% scholarshipsfor this.
You often have to select it.
We can't take everybody in.
We had 30 students that got thefull scholarships and had over
40 startups that applied and sixof those startups got full
scholarships, where we builddedicated teams with the
(48:10):
startups to help them throughcustomer discovery.
So this way you're able to kindof learn and grow and do all
the things that we preach andyou get our hands on right.
You learn from us as you'redoing it.
Another way is we have a podcastas well.
We interview different founderswho have made it in their
journey and what they learnedalong the way, as well as VCs
(48:31):
and what they're looking for infounders and what do they want
to invest in, and so on and soforth.
So, if you're a startup,amazing.
If you're a challenger brand wedidn't even talk about that.
These are brands that areposition four or position five
in their respective category,you know.
And they're stuck and they'replateaued and they're looking
for someone to work with.
(48:52):
Feel free to reach out to us atAzarian Growth Agency.
And we're stuck and they'replateaued and they're looking
for someone to work with.
Feel free to reach out to us atAzarian Growth Agency and we're
more than welcome to take alook, see if we can help you
guys as well, too.
Speaker 1 (49:01):
Awesome.
Well, hamlet, this has beengreat.
I've enjoyed it.
I think it's been enlighteningfor a lot of people, so really
appreciate having you on.
Speaker 2 (49:11):
Thank you.
Thanks for having me.
It was a lot of fun.
It was fun jamming with you,and I'm sure we could have gone
on to many different topics aswell.
Speaker 1 (49:18):
Sounds good.
Until the next time, everybodybye-bye for now, bye-bye,
bye-bye.
Howdy.
Welcome back to anotherfun-filled episode of the
Unknown Secrets of Networking.
I am your host, Matt Bertram.
I have a special episode heretoday.
I have a special guest, HamletAzarian, with Azarian Growth
Agency.
He also has quite a bigecosystem of other things that
he does, and really one of thekey topics that people have been
(00:38):
asking me about is growthagency versus traditional agency
and what the difference is, andso I brought Hamlet on to kind
of explain that, share his storyand talk about some things that
you might be able to do toincorporate some of these
strategies into what you'redoing and clients that you have,
as well as if you might be oneof these clients.
(01:00):
Azarian might be a greatconnection for you.
All right, Hamlet, let me know.
Tell me what is the difference?
How would you define growthagency versus traditional agency
?
Let's start there.
Speaker 2 (01:11):
Well, first of all, matthew, thanks for having me on
.
It's a pleasure to be here,really excited about being on
the show.
So, yeah, let me explain whatthe big difference between a
traditional agency and a growthagency, the way we describe it.
So, in most digital marketingareas, traditional agencies are
really concerned about thefunnel.
This, typically, what I mean bythat is they're trying to
(01:32):
acquire the customers for you,they're trying to get them to
your landing page, they'retrying to convert them, and
that's really the main focus.
They don't go above and beyondthat.
And what a growth agency does,which is a little bit different,
is a growth agency is lookingat the full funnel, and what I
mean by the full funnel is notonly getting the customers to
(01:53):
show up, not only getting themto buy, but getting them to buy
again and then continuously telltheir friends and build sort of
this full ecosystem.
That what you start doing is youstart measuring what the
lifetime value of a customer is,and your overarching goal of a
growth agency is you want toincrease the lifetime value as
(02:15):
much as you can on, at the sametime bringing the customer
acquisition costs as low as youcan, so you can have an LTV over
over CAC, which is whatinvestors try to shine upon and
they get excited about when theysee incredible numbers,
typically in the 6, 7, 8%, the8x range.
So if you're make the math easy, if you do $1,000 a year in
(02:37):
revenue and you're able todivide that by eight, and let's
say you bring it in for $125,$150 for the customer
acquisition cost, investors getexcited and they're ready to
invest into your business.
Speaker 1 (02:48):
So it's really about, well, full funnel management,
right, or full brand management.
You're looking at the lifetimevalue of the customer, you're
looking at the repeat businesscycle, but really I think the
key difference is helping tellthe story to different
stakeholders on the value of thedigital marketing you're
providing beyond just bottomline revenue growth, of getting
(03:11):
this lead in the door for thisvery snapshot of this month or
this quarter or something likethat.
You're looking at more of thelonger term and you're trying to
incorporate these strategiesinto that.
I think even like that's partof it.
Speaker 2 (03:26):
Yeah, for sure, that's definitely part of it.
The other difference, which Ididn't get into, is you're
embedded into the product itself.
So there are times wheremarketing actually can change
the outcome of what the productis, because what you're trying
to do is you're getting to thisnotion of product to market fit,
and what does that reallyreally mean?
(03:46):
Right, and what that reallymeans is you as a marketer
because your front lines, you'reable to really test and iterate
different value propositionsand sometimes you're able to
actually test things that theproduct team is thinking about
building and they're not builtyet yet to be able to prioritize
(04:07):
what should actually beexecuted in the product roadmap.
And what this sometimes leadsto is a completely brand new
product that people weren'tenvisioning before, because the
market wants this, wants Aversus B, and so on and so forth
.
Speaker 1 (04:23):
So, like quantitative research, maybe you're doing
some surveys, you're doing somestudies, like I think you know,
throwing stuff out there onTwitter or social media to see
how people are responding to it.
I mean, can you expand uponthat a little bit?
Yeah, of course.
Speaker 2 (04:36):
So what you're doing is a bunch of several things,
right?
So I can give you one example.
I'll give you a non-paidversion of an example and I'll
give you a paid version of anexample.
So, on a non-paid version, wehad a client and they had just
recently gotten a seedinvestment.
A seed investment is a smallround that typically is designed
(04:57):
for you to be able to build theproduct itself.
And the founder came to us andhe was telling us hey, I'm about
to build this product, but I'mnot sure if the market really
wants it.
And it was a small amount, itwas like 350, $400,000 that he
got in.
He was a technical founder, heled a large engineering group at
one of the big tech companiesand he had the chops and the
(05:20):
know-how on how to build thisright, but he wasn't sure if he
should invest his time intobuilding this and if this would
turn into a scalable business.
So what we did is we, with hissupport, got enrolled in a
national program called theNational Science Foundation NSF,
and the reason we did that iswe wanted to have a way of, as
(05:44):
we reached out to this potentialcustomers, to say that we were
part of a program.
And this was.
We were doing customerdiscovery and we were going to,
we were going to be interviewingthem.
What we really were doing wasnot just customer discovery, we
were also trying to see what themarket really wanted to do.
We began a cold outreachstrategy.
We looked at LinkedIn.
We found his ideal customerprofile, which were engineering
(06:07):
managers as well as CTOs atFortune 100 and Fortune 500.
So if you've ever tried toreach out to an engineering
manager at a Fortune 1 orFortune 5, it's incredibly hard
to get them even interested totalk to you or even want to have
a conversation with you.
So because we were part of thisprogram and it was affiliated
with the University of SouthernCalifornia, we were able to use
(06:28):
that angle right.
We had a USC email, we werepart of this program.
We looked at their LinkedInprofile and we said, hey, we
really see that you've doneincredibly well in your career.
We just need about 15, 20minutes of your time.
We're working on this projectand we want to see if there's
even a market interest in it.
That little program that I'mtalking to you about.
(06:49):
We only emailed about 150, 200people, which resulted in about
100 phone calls.
In those 100 phone calls, wequickly learned that there was a
potential need, but it wasn'tgoing to be a venture scale
business.
What it was really going to bewas venture scale business.
What it was really going to bewas a lifestyle business,
because everybody's engineeringstack was so different that was
(07:10):
going to be incredibly hard tobuild something that was venture
scale.
Once we learned this, we were inthis, you know, conundrum.
What do we do?
Do we move forward?
We not move forward.
You know, he had to go througha lot of soul searching and he
came back and he went back tothe investors and he said you
know, guys, I don't think thisis going to work out.
This is not what I want tobuild.
(07:30):
I want to build a $10 million ayear business where it's a
lifestyle business.
What I really want to build isthe next unicorn.
I want to build a billiondollar business.
So he went back and he actuallygave the money back to the
investors, which later on theyended up giving it all back to
him, which led to his newventure that ended up becoming a
venture-scaled business as well.
So that's on a non-paidstrategy, right On a paid
(07:53):
strategy.
We had a similar problem, sothis company was called Camino
Financial.
We have case studies on it onour website and I'll probably
talk about it a little bit here.
We were running, we weretargeting B2B businesses.
These were Latina-owned,first-generation businesses that
(08:15):
had come into the US and whatwe had started doing is running
Facebook ads.
But we were a broker, and whatthat means in fintech is we
didn't really have a product yetand we weren't sure what our
product needed to be.
So we started testing differentvalue propositions and
different product offerings tosee what would be interesting
for our potential customers, andthat allowed us to figure out
(08:36):
what we call the microloan,which was an entry-level loan
for businesses to be able tobuild out their credit score and
their credit history.
This testing and iterationprocess allowed us to eventually
lend up to $150 million loansin first-generation businesses
and family-owned businesses thathave moved into the US.
(08:57):
So this is two examples how thegrowth aspect of it led to the
eventual either shutting down ofthe business, or also the path
of growth that led to $150million loan originations for
the company.
Speaker 1 (09:11):
Awesome.
That's a great case study,hamlet, and I'm excited we just
jumped right into this.
Let's back up a little bit andyou can credentialize a little
bit your background.
You've raised $250 million fordifferent kind of startups.
Why don't you share with theaudience your origin story and
how you got into this?
Speaker 2 (09:32):
Yeah for sure.
So initially, when the birth ofthe agency, let's say right.
So what ended up happening is Iwas working for different
startups as an advisor and Iwould come in and I would, you
know, build out their strategies.
And then eventually, one of theadvisors that I met was Sean
(09:53):
and Kenny Salas with CaminoFinancial, which I just kind of
just shared the eventual results, and they asked me hey, can you
do more than just advising?
Can you actually execute?
I said yeah, sure, but you knowI like advising, but I can do
it two or three days a week.
That's all I can do.
So I started working with themand I was having a ton of fun.
We're growing the business.
When I joined them we were onlyfive people, six people.
(10:14):
We eventually ended up growingthe business to well over 150
employees, had offices in LA,mexico City as well as Columbia,
and eventually had an M&A exitwhich allowed us to kind of have
a full cycle from beginning toend.
But while I was working withthem, I also met another company
called CBDFX.
They were a CPG brand and theywanted help and guidance on
(10:37):
their SEO strategy.
So CBD, as most of you guysknow, is an incredibly
competitive space, a huge searchvolume.
You can't really run ads atthat time, but you have to
really dig in and build out anSEO strategy, which I provided
guidance for them.
Similar things started helpingbuild out their teams of
execution and now they are thesecond largest privately held
(10:59):
brand of CBD in their category.
So they're sold in the US.
In Europe they're sold onlineand offline, they have a
wholesale business and so on andso forth.
Also at the same time, Istarted working for another
company called Disco and I wasleading their overall
go-to-market strategy for theirconsumer-facing branch, which
was Survey Junkie.
(11:19):
This business ended up scaling.
They were spending about$150,000 in ads.
We scaled it to 1.5 million.
They became a unicorn as well.
When I did all these things,different VCs started taking
notice and they said, hey, howthe heck are you doing this all
at the same time across threedifferent businesses?
And I was like you know what?
(11:40):
It's really not hard.
I'm just finding really goodpeople.
I'm running a bunch ofexperiments and tests and
through those experiments we'relearning.
And then they're like, yeah,but you're doing it all at the
same time in three differentcompanies, how's that happening?
I'm like, well, I'm justtesting the right things and
they're like what does that mean?
I'm like well, I'm just not.
I'm not doing the basic test,right.
(12:02):
I'm not doing the.
Let me test the color of greenversus red or the shade of red.
I'm like, who cares about that?
What is that going to give you5% or 10%?
I'm like testing the whole damnbusiness.
I'm testing the valueproposition of the business,
what really really matters,digging inside to the data and
seeing where there's a specialfocal point that generates more,
(12:23):
less churn, the customer stayswith you longer, or whatever it
might be.
And I just come up with a bunchof ideas with the team and we
just start running tons ofexperiments and we see if it
works.
And they're not like oh, welove that.
Can you do that for morebusinesses?
Like, no, I'm good, I'm goodBecause I knew what it took,
right.
I'm like I'm maxed out.
I could only do this for threeat a time.
(12:43):
If one of them drops off orsomething happens, I will kind
of help you out.
This went on for a while.
Two years passed, three yearspassed, and then eventually I
started saying, okay, if theinvestors are asking me to start
an agency, I probably shouldlisten to them and begin an
agency.
I was like I got to do itdifferently and what I wanted to
(13:04):
do is I wanted to take one ofthe issues I was having with
each one of these businesses wasI might come up with a strategy
, I might come up with the idea,but I still needed people right
, I still needed talent, I stillneeded resources to be able to
execute.
So I thought about okay, what ifI already had the team?
What if we were no longer anagency like a traditional agency
(13:28):
, where we had specialists thatwere only working on multiple
clients or multiple projects?
What if we flipped it on itshead and said what if we build
dedicated teams that work onmaximum one or two accounts,
depending on the scope of work,and they go really deep in each
one of those accounts?
So it's almost like you'rehiring a whole team and you're
(13:52):
hiring it at the same rate youwould have paid for a director.
And what if this team has theselective learnings of all the
experiments that are runningacross all of the accounts and
is quickly able to identifytactics across different
strategies that are working andimplemented and, you know,
obviously make it more uniquefor a specific customer?
(14:14):
So that's what we've been sothat's a very ingrowth agency.
Speaker 1 (14:18):
And in addition to that yeah, no, there's two
things I wanted to kind of addto what you're saying.
I think that one of the bigthings that I've heard from
clients that they've seen with alot of traditional agencies out
there is kind of this waterfallmentality as far as like
delivery of work as well as likethere's so many different
(14:40):
people on the account or it'skind of the game of telephone.
Some of the people doing thework are not engaged with the
account as much or even met theaccount, and so it takes a long
time to get stuff done.
You're playing the game oftelephone and then it's not like
like there's easy things thatif you were working on the
account or the account managerwould know that when it gets to
(15:03):
the delivery person they don'thave the benefit of all that
kind of information.
So structuring it from like anintegrated team standpoint,
where maybe there's somebodythat's busy, that doesn't know
what they want to do, and thenthey have a dedicated team to
them, they can help with thatexecution, I think it's a great
(15:23):
strategy and a structure that'sreally nice.
Also, I recently had interviewedBilly Jean is marketing.
I don't know if you know who heis, but one of the things he
said that really resonated withme.
That really echoed in what youwere saying was well, if you're
looking for a 10X difference inwhat you're offering versus
(15:46):
something else and you're tryingto do little word changes or
color changes, you're not goingto get those big changes either
way, and so, essentially, youneed to change the overall offer
.
Or even another guy that I wasinterviewing, you got to change
(16:06):
the whole name of the company.
If you're maxing out two tothree years because it's already
found its place in the market,right, or or people don't know
about it, that might be theissue.
But if you want outsized gains,you got to make outsized changes
.
Right, you got to.
You got to really, um, reallygo over the top with what you're
(16:27):
doing, and then you'll seethose stark differences in in
the type of engagement, and Imean even some of the things
that you said with cold emailoutreach.
As far as wow, we, we reachedout to 150 people and we had 150
responses.
That's pretty incredible.
That really goes into the rightkind of targeting and
demographics and everything thatyou're, you're, you're trying
(16:50):
to do is is is pretty amazing.
Speaker 2 (16:52):
So thank you, man Appreciate it.
Speaker 1 (16:56):
So you know, let's talk about maybe, okay, there's
a founder that's trying to seekinvestment or there's maybe an
agency that's working with thecompany that has a great product
, but they just don't spend themoney.
Roas is fantastic, you need todump.
(17:18):
I would just dump this up tillwe hit a plateau and what we're
spending and they're like wecan't handle that.
Either we can't scale or wedon't have the money to do that.
But it's like you're putting in25 cents and you're getting a
dollar 50 back, like keepspending.
And so curious what your advicemight be or what you've seen as
(17:40):
far as like mistakes, whenpeople are going okay, I think I
need investment, but they don'tknow about how to get it.
Speaker 2 (17:47):
So I think some of the challenges that people have
is so I'll give you an exampleof a bootstrap business that
we've been working with, wherewe started at zero and they're
now doing 1.5 million and thenthey're on the way to do $2
million.
So the company's called Ordersco.
When we initially met them,they didn't even have a website.
They had an incredible product.
(18:07):
Like, literally, I was just.
It was one of those momentswhere I'm like how the hell did
you build this product?
They're like yeah, I know We'vebeen just like tinkering away.
We've been talking to customers, we've been really digging into
what the pain point is andincredible engineers right,
really smart, really talented,but come marketing, no idea.
(18:28):
So it's like we don't really,we really don't want outside
capital.
We want to try to do this onour own.
We want to see how big we canget it.
We want to build a traditionalbusiness All right, cool.
So one of the first things wedid right away for them was try
to figure out all right, whereare we going to find their
customers?
Where do they exist?
And they're really going afterrestaurants, and what they had
(18:49):
built was a platform, anall-in-one platform that allows
any small restaurant to be ableto get third-party delivery apps
to you know, you can use uber,eats, postmate, grubhub,
whatever it might be.
And if you didn't know at thetime when they had built this
that you had to, if you wentinto a restaurant you might see
all these different screens andall these tablets up.
(19:10):
It's because you need to buyeach one of those tablets, or
you need to get each one of thetablets to start what the orders
were.
So they had figured out a wayto consolidate all of that into
one tablet, or no tablet at all,so they could start bringing
orders in.
But they wanted to now gettheir message out right.
So they came to us and they'relike, hey, what do we do?
We're like, all right, firstyou build a website.
You need to clearly explainwhat you're trying to do for the
(19:34):
customer.
You need to put together bothan online SEO strategy as well
as a paid strategy.
But they're like, no, we don'thave money.
We're like, all right, you havesomething, what do you got?
We're like, okay, we can affordto do $5,000 to see if it's
going to work or it's not goingto work.
I'm like, all right, with abudget like that, let's start
with Facebook.
We really don't have muchchoices.
(19:55):
If you go after Google, we'renot going to be able to learn
enough because we're not goingto get enough clicks, but with
Facebook, we could actually seeif the value proposition is
going to work.
We started testing differentconcepts.
We started testing differentpricing, we started testing
different target audience and,fast forward to today, we scaled
them up to a point where wehave investors coming to them
(20:16):
now wanting to invest into thebusiness, and the reason that's
happening is that their LTVs arephenomenal.
So their lifetime value of acustomer is incredible.
At the price that they'recharging, they're cheaper than
everybody else in the market.
In addition to that, their CACis really reasonable.
They're able to sustain and getmost of the money back within
(20:39):
three to four months.
So in most in traditionally inthis sector it takes eight
months, nine months, 10 monthson your customer acquisition
costs before you're able to getthe money back.
So they're able to do it in,you know, a half to a third of
the time, and because of thisthey've been able to grow
quickly.
They got to a point where weplateaued right.
(21:00):
So this story got to a stagewhere we were at all right.
We're at one and a half.
How do we get to 10 million?
Man?
We need more money.
And so we started going out tothe marketplace, showing all the
incredible success we've had,and what we started getting were
offers from investors, whichwere nice, but it felt like it
was a different time, right ifthese offers in 2024 felt like
(21:25):
they're a third or a fourthlower than what their peers were
getting in 2022, becauseobviously they were looking at
what the other competitors got,what type of evaluation they got
and where they were at theirstage, and they're like, man, do
we really now need the capital?
Like we're growing on our own.
So we got into this whole debatefor a while.
We tried we still tried pushingthrough it, and we're like, man
(21:47):
, there's this whole new segmentof customers that we need to
tap into.
So we're like, okay, we need tochange a new offer for them.
And which is what weexperimented with?
And my god, like the cap justdropped even more.
We're like all right, wefigured out a new offer.
So we figured out like anannual plan that brings the CAC
even further down, but it nowgot our payback period to one
(22:10):
month.
So in theory, we actually don'tneed any more investment
capital, because now we're ableto get the customers and pay for
it right away and kind of beable to scale the business up.
Speaker 1 (22:24):
Wow, that's impressive.
So if you were to zoom out andjust say what are some of the
key factors to successfulfundraising, how would you
summarize it?
Speaker 2 (22:35):
So I would say is they investors want to
understand, depending on whatstage you're at, right.
So if you're early stage andyou have no, you have no revenue
coming in.
They're really looking at youas the founder and your
capabilities of buildingwhatever this initial set of
product is.
And can you actually go get 10,20, 30, 40 people to pay you
(22:58):
that you don't know right.
So these are completelyisolated people and do they
believe in your ability to beable to do that?
And normally they'll investsomewhere between 300 to about
$500,000 for that and get about10% of the company.
Okay.
So if you're able to do thatwithout it, I highly recommend
(23:19):
it.
So meaning, if you're able tobuild the products, if you have
enough financial resources to beable to sustain, however, you
have to be able to get to an MVPor a minimum product.
It's not worth giving up the10% for the $300,000.
Speaker 1 (23:35):
Because you're going to hate yourself.
Speaker 2 (23:36):
Later on You're going to be like oh my God, Right.
So the next phase is usuallyyou have to get to about a
million dollars a year andthat's typically $80,000 a month
in revenue or sales.
This is where they're lookingfor a predictable, scalable
go-to-market.
We call it a growth engine, orone channel that you can put
(23:57):
more money into.
That's going to show a reallypositive LTV over CAC ratio.
The business itself,operationally, can handle more.
So you've figured out the salesmechanism.
You've figured out thefulfillment mechanism.
You've demonstrated that notonly can you build the product,
but you're now talking to yourcustomers and you're trying to
figure out what the next thingis that you should be building
(24:20):
and you have customers that arealready ready to pay you for
whatever that next thing is.
Sometimes you've already begunbuilding that and you have
pre-orders on it, or you havecustomers that are on beta the
next thing and you're startingto get early traction on it.
Then the next phase istypically around 10 million.
So you now you got to go from 1million a year right to 10
million a year.
(24:40):
So it's a substantial leap up.
And what this really means iscan you actually build a
scalable team that can handleall of this, including multiple
growth engines that can handleall of this, including new
revenue channels and includingnew customer segments.
Speaker 1 (24:59):
Okay, so in like 2024 and the market you know we're
in an interesting place rightnow, I think, in the market.
I mean, what do you think thatinvestors are looking for?
And also, how do you likestartups build strong
relationships with with theirinvestors or potential investors
?
Speaker 2 (25:16):
The, the.
What they're looking for hasn'tchanged right.
So what they're looking for isan incredible team, a great
product, the ability to executesome basic fundamentals that are
showcased in already, how thebusiness is already doing.
All of those have remained thesame.
They've just become much moreselective.
(25:38):
They've just become much moreselective, so they want to make
sure they're putting the rightbets into the right companies
where in the past they mighthave been a little more lenient.
They're like well, you know,the founder is not as
experienced and the team is alittle weak, but I can help find
that additional person.
So what they're hoping now isthat your core team is in place
(25:58):
already.
You've been able to recruit whoyou're going to be executing
with, you're demonstrating yourtechnical know-how, you have
figured out your marketingcomponents of it, or understand
how all the unique economicswork, and you are on the path of
growth.
It doesn't have to be 20% monthover month or 30% month over
(26:18):
month right, it just has to showreasonable growth and you
understand the financial.
So you're not burning cashunnecessarily, you haven't hired
way too many peopleunnecessarily and you're
treating it more like a realbootstrap business.
If you actually do that, theironic thing happens is more
capital wants to come to you,more investors want to come to
(26:39):
you and work with you and all ofthose different things.
Speaker 1 (26:43):
It's true across the board.
It's true in recruitment Like.
It's true Like if you don'tneed something, people want you.
If you do need something,there's a reason and people look
at you as a red herring.
Potentially One of the thingsthat I think is really
interesting and I want to getyour take on it is you know,
(27:04):
initially you start out maybeyou're you're you're you're
doing some, some surveys andyou're trying to find product
market fit and you're doing somemarketing and to get your
initial customers time to addthe sales component right, add
that sales team to it.
And then how are you viewingthe partnership between sales
(27:25):
and marketing?
That's something I reallybelieve in.
Is sales and marketing atbigger organizations really need
to work together?
And a lot of times they don't.
And that's where the advent oflike the CRO has come in to to
try to bring them together.
Speaker 2 (27:42):
So I think, on day one, you're trying to sell even
if you don't have a productbuilt.
You're trying to get pre-ordersor you're trying to get some
version of a commitment.
Hey, if, if this product wasbuilt today and whatever, how
much are you like?
You, you're really gettingclose to it.
You're trying to get a numberout of them and then, on top of
(28:02):
that not only once you get thenumber you're like all right,
are you willing to put 10% ofthat into a deposit right now?
And I will give you 30%discount, cheaper than whatever
number they throw out, right?
So what you're trying to reallysee is is there a real
commitment on that number?
Or they are, are not, they'rejust kind of just being nice,
and that happened before theproduct is even built.
(28:24):
So I think that's a reallycritical element of this,
because then you're able to seeand you can actually showcase
this now to other people right,you can go to investors and
you're like not only did we docustomer discovery, I actually
sold the product already.
Here's our some deposits.
This is the average price thatpeople are willing to pay for it
, and I have commitments, I havedeposits.
(28:46):
I now need to go build it,right.
So that's that part.
The second part, I think whatyou brought on is sales and
marketing.
It's more than that, so it'snot just sales and marketing.
I think it's really sales,marketing, product engineering,
it's the whole organizationoperations, right.
So I think it's really reallycritical now and it's going to
(29:07):
become even more in the nearfuture.
I don't think organizations aregoing to be as large.
I think we're all in the phaseof superpowers, right.
Like where AI has gone in thisvery short period in the last
four or five, six years.
It is really allowing us to bemuch more productive.
(29:27):
It's giving us exponentialskills and unlocks that we can
have and, let alone where it'sheaded, it's making most of us
become much more generalist andspecialist select T-shaped
marketers in the marketing world, and that applies also in sales
and that also applies inengineering, right.
We have an understanding of thebreadth of knowledge that we
(29:50):
need to do and we're going to bereally, really good at certain
things, and the team sizes mightnot necessarily be as big, so I
do foresee companies andorganizations being much leaner
and being able to do much moreand much quicker and much faster
.
Speaker 1 (30:06):
To highlight a little bit of what you were saying the
T-shaped is the breadth andthen the depth for people
listening and so really, peopleare becoming experts and also
having a wide range of knowledge.
And then you apply AI on largeleverage models and some of the
automations and personalizationsto that.
(30:27):
You can take someone that coulddo X amount in whatever period
of time.
Their productivity goes throughthe roof and so you really
don't need as many people.
You know kind of going back tothe question, and we can go to
AI next, as far as like wherethe future trends are coming.
But let's say, you know you'reokay, you're a founder and
(30:51):
you're the CEO, your job is tosell, right, and usually the
CEO's job is to sell.
But say, you start to grow andyou have a clip and you start
hiring people and you know you,you have a website now and you
have, um, some advertising goingand and you're, you're getting
your name out there, right, andyou're finding your place in the
marketplace and you're saying,okay, now, now I need boots on
(31:15):
the ground and in addition tomyself, right, or or my
executive team, and and therewas this book called the E-Myth
that we had everybody read,where it's kind of cool.
You build the organization andliterally you're wearing like 50
hats and then, like, you takethe hats off as you build the
organization but say you needsome salespeople, right, and you
(31:35):
need some people to go knock ondoors and give presentations
and do pitches.
And you need some people to goknock on doors and give
presentations and do pitches,and you need some account-based
selling.
What size organization shouldyou be?
Or when should you startthinking about that?
Because, as a founder or owneror whatever, your time is going
to start getting pulled in a lotof different directions and you
(31:56):
need to duplicate yourself inthat sales function.
And with advertising, look, youcan scale pretty quick, right,
and you can reach the right kindof people and get your message
out there.
And maybe you have order takers.
If you're doing e-commerce likein inbound, but like if you
need true B2B salespeopleespecially we talked a lot about
(32:19):
SaaS companies and technologycompanies there's a premium on
those people in the marketplace.
Oh yeah, when do you decide toopt to bring people like that on
and build a sales team?
Speaker 2 (32:33):
I think that depends on the segment you're going
after, right?
So if you're going after, like,there's B2B segments, like the
restaurant tech that I wastelling you, you're dealing with
SMBs and you can build a salesteam much earlier in there,
because it's not the same levelof sales skills needed.
You're not trying to sell tofive people in an organization
(32:54):
or to a committee.
You're really you're meetingwith the owner, you're meeting
with the small business operator.
It's it's typically, you knowthe decision feels like a b2c
and you can start, because ofthat, systemizing the process
much earlier on.
Now, that applied to camino,that applied to orders.
But now, if I go the other wayand I look at something like
Disco, which was much more B2Band we were selling to much
(33:17):
larger organizations, the samething also applies there.
Team are part of the process initself.
What I mean by that is you knowyou're going to trade shows,
you're going to conferences, youmight be hosting different
webinars, you might be actuallyhosting dinners or regional
(33:40):
events that you're inviting thepotential clients that you want
to sell, plus the clients thatyou've already sold, and that
does involve boots underground,right.
So it really depends on thetype of business you're building
Both, I believe, needed earlyon.
Sales is a critical part of it.
Like, as I said, even like theproduct was built, you're trying
to sell it right.
So.
So I think, as a founder, whatyou're trying to do is you're
(34:04):
trying to figure out what is mysales process as soon as
possible as you can at the sametime is how does marketing and
sales play together before I getmy lead, when I get my lead,
and sometimes on a larger ticket, b2b sales, the window is much
longer.
Right, we have some clientsthat are six months it takes.
(34:25):
So there's a lot of marketingthat goes from that moment that
that first phone call occurredtill the six months before they
make a decision, all the wayfrom case studies, all the way
from answering any rebuttalsthat come and showcasing
different work, that we've doneanything new, that that arises
in the midst of the salesprocess, and so on and so forth.
Speaker 1 (34:45):
So I hope that answers your question.
No, it does.
I.
I think that a lot of foundersthink that if they're
technically driven right orthey're engineers or I see a lot
of this We've seen a lot ofpeople that have been in the
industry for 30 years, they'reengineers they come out of it.
They say I have this idea, likeI have, I want to start a
(35:09):
second career, I want to startthis company, and they're
they're very, very good atwhatever it is they did.
There's a need in themarketplace, but then they
discover I don't have this hugesales apparatus and all these
logos behind me to help opendoors.
How do I tell that story?
And they just think that ifthey build it, people will come,
and then that's when the wholemarketing conversation starts to
(35:31):
happen and they have to buildall that out.
I want to transition into andyou broached the topic of AI.
Let's expound upon that of kindof where you see the future
going.
I mean, I know, when I listento podcasts about AI and people
at OpenAI or people even atGoogle, like Eric Schmidt just
(35:52):
did a talk and like he can'teven see out six months right Of
like what's going to happen.
Speaker 2 (35:57):
So fast, right, like what's coming out and how
quickly it's coming.
Speaker 1 (36:00):
Yeah, and so so I mean just tell me kind of your
take on it and like what you'reseeing and and you know what
predictions you might have.
I think a lot of people arestart.
I mean you know whatpredictions you might have.
I think a lot of people arestart.
I mean I think when uh, applerolls out which I think it is
rolling out in October um thethey they postponed it they're
(36:21):
putting uh chat GBT on the Applephone and so then people will
really be using it and Google'slooking at from a search
standpoint and there's now likecomplexityai and there's, I mean
, ai is creeping into everything.
It's creeping into education,it's creeping into, like
(36:41):
learning, even the creativitycomponents.
You look at what's going onElon Musk in the cars.
I mean it's, it's everywhereright and it's coming at us
really, really fast and I thinkit's going to dramatically
change our world.
(37:01):
And so I just want to hear kindof what you're seeing.
Speaker 2 (37:04):
Yeah, of course.
So a little bit about us and AI.
We give incredible talks duringNew York tech Week, san
Francisco Tech Week and LA TechWeek.
One of the talks that we didwas how I taught my six-year-old
son about different largelanguage models and I used
different children games inexplaining that to him and how
(37:25):
generative adversarial networkmodels work, or variable
autoencoders how do they work?
So?
I totally nerded out and reallyexplained it basically to them.
So, in regards to our agencyitself, it's core of what we do.
I think in June 2020, if youknow your open AI timeline
that's when 3.5 came out right.
(37:47):
So right away we were on it.
We were trying to figure outhow do we utilize it.
We dealt with the early stagehallucinations.
We dealt with this is toogeneral problems.
How do we make it much morespecific?
So, where I think we are at thestage of right now, it's still
super early.
Not everyone really fullyunderstands it, at least the
mass population of it, but thepeople who are using it, they
(38:10):
see it as an incredible toolthat is allowing them to move
much faster, much quicker, muchmore easier in finding
information and being able toquickly figure out personalized
strategies or plans, and that'show we end up using it.
For us, where has it helped in?
(38:31):
It's helped in marketingworkflows, it's helped in
marketing strategy building.
It's helped us in design.
It's helped us in contentcreation.
It's helped us in coding, sothere isn't a team in our
organization that has notbenefited from it.
So every single aspect of ourteam has flourished.
(38:52):
There's so many tools we'vegone through, by the way, last
year at this time there was 350startups that had got an
investment for AI.
This year at this time there's1,500.
So there's been an exponentialgrowth in just the amount of
companies that are trying tobuild around this right.
Speaker 1 (39:12):
Well, my team keeps bringing like different tools,
like, hey, let's incorporate,like, let's use this, let's do
that, and they're all doingsomething like a little bit
differently, like there's got tobe a washout at some point, but
we're we're looking atdifferent, different kind of
things for everything that youcan think of, right, um, I
actually I I wrote I uh, when SEranking was launching their, uh
(39:34):
, their podcast, I was like thefirst interview and it was right
around that timeframe that chatGBG came out and we were just
talking about like what, um,what, how to use it like, what
to do, like people, and it'sjust like talk to it, right, and
?
And I wrote a blog after thatand I said, okay, we're in this
information age, like attentionage, I think that we're going to
(39:57):
move into like a intimacy agelike, where you know everything
is so personalized.
And I mean, if you talk to a AIlike and they train it to be
like a therapist or to be aneducator or whatever, you can
give it all kinds of parametersand you just talk to it like a
(40:18):
human and it's going to give youfeedback and and it's going to
give you better, better feedbackmost likely than you would get
talking to a, you know acredentialed human.
You know what.
Speaker 2 (40:30):
I mean, I mean there's now on the citation.
Speaker 1 (40:35):
What were you saying?
Speaker 2 (40:36):
Yeah, yeah, let me give you an incredible story
around that.
So my, my, my wife knows, andshe hates, how busy I get and I
always forget the most importantthings, right, like the
birthday card or the Valentinecard.
And man about this lot, and she, she figured this out.
It took her a while to figureit.
Man about this lot, and shefigured this out.
(40:56):
It took her a while to figureit out.
But this last February samething happened.
Is I forgot to write that nicecard that she always likes?
She just likes simple things,she just likes thoughtful cards.
I was like, oh shit, what am Igoing to do?
It's Valentine's again.
I haven't had time to thinkabout this and I was just
nerding out on fine-tuning andbeing, and this is when gpt
transformers that come out.
I'm like what if I just startloading up all the previous
(41:19):
cards I've written to her?
What if I load up some of thepictures of our kids, some of
the trips we've done this pastyear, and just ask it to write a
nice little personalized letterto her?
It did.
I was like, damn, this is muchbetter and it met my style, my
writing the same exact ways thatI enunciate and punctuate on my
letters Like this is so good.
(41:40):
It took me a whopping 15minutes and I sent it to her and
she started bawling.
She's like wow, this was sogood.
She's like I know you didn'thave time, so how did you
actually do this so good?
She's like I know you didn'thave time, so how did you
actually do this?
I'm like she's like did you useGPT again?
I'm like, yeah, I use GPT.
She's like I don't care, it wasso, so good, I'll take it.
Speaker 1 (41:59):
So I got a very similar story, did something
very similar to that, and youknow my wife's big on posts on,
like public displays ofaffection, right, so like
posting it on Facebook, and sothat's what I did.
I took a bunch of images, Iwrote something nice, I posted
it first year, like she was justlike enthralled, right, like
(42:22):
this is amazing.
I had so many brownie points.
And then year two came aroundand I think I had sent her an
article about, like howdifferent industries are going
to get affected by AI, likemaybe the week before, and she
put two and two together and shewas like this was not, you was
it, and I was like it was me,because I had to do the
(42:43):
prompting and like all this guyand she was like no, so your
wife was like good with it.
Like my wife was like no, youdidn't put in the effort.
I said I did put in the effort.
I said I did put in the effortI put in a lot of effort.
Speaker 2 (42:55):
What are you?
Speaker 1 (42:55):
yeah, I was like, and I was like how do you not like
this?
And she's like so.
So I think that there's thishuman element that that's going
to be uh, part of uh, the thezeitgeist for for a long time as
far as like how, how it affectshuman culture, but it's going
to seep into everything.
Speaker 2 (43:12):
Imagine about education, right, like so we
have a couple of our teammembers who are getting their
masters now, and then I'm likeman and remember in our, in our
organization, it's all I amRight.
So so they have every tool.
We don't even know how manytools we have.
It's like insane amount oftools that we have.
They have access.
So.
(43:33):
So I've've been, and weencourage in every one of our
workflows to share the prompthow did you do it?
And we have, like uh, brownlunch series where we're sharing
each other different techniquesand strategies.
Did you know I could do this?
They're like oh, wow, I didn'tknow I could do that either.
So, so that's continuouslyhappening, right.
So I look at her.
I'm like are you actuallyreading books?
Now?
She's like well, I'm trying to,but it's really, really right.
So I look at her.
I'm like are you actuallyreading books?
Now she's like well, I'm tryingto, but it's really really hard
(43:56):
right.
Like I can just ask it and theycould summarize it for me and
they can tell me what's going on.
So the whole education system,I think, is going to be like mad
.
It's going to be completelydifferent.
Speaker 1 (44:07):
It's going to be what we grew up with.
It's not going to exist, right.
So well, I I remember that inschool I was like they're like,
how to do long form math orwhatever right?
And I go, I'm going to use acalculator.
And then they're like, no, youhave to learn how to do.
And I said, but I'm alwaysgoing to have a calculator.
And I was like, if I'm alwaysgoing to have a calculator, and
(44:30):
this is supposed to help me withwhatever job that I have why
can't I use a calculator?
You know well, you need tolearn how to do it.
I think that that same argumentis just going to be multiplied
by a ton.
Ok, so we're going off ontangents.
I love it.
I've been thinking aboutturning this podcast into like a
(45:00):
longer form podcast where, like, really get to know people and
start to break down things andbut but we don't have that yet.
Freelancers or agencies or evenfounders that maybe want to
transition, to be more kind ofgrowth-based, that are offering
digital marketing services, oreven just kind of final words
(45:22):
for founders that are looking tomake decisions with this rapid
growth environment.
I think it's going to be reallywild with what's going on with
AI and then what is really thebest way to get in contact with
you, some of the stuff you'redoing.
I know you've done a ton ofwebinars on AI and some of them
(45:44):
look really, really fascinating,so I'd encourage people to go
check that out.
But yeah, what is some advicefor people if they want to move
more towards growth agencies, orwhat should they be looking for
?
And then founders like any kindof parting tips?
Speaker 2 (46:01):
Yeah, I think the biggest really is it's moving
from campaign based or outputdriven initiatives to really
staying focused on what mattersand what really drives results
and what really drives growth,and switching your mindset to
constant learning or a growthmindset.
(46:22):
So you're always in this notionof like, how do I fail 95% of
the time?
And that's what you have toconstantly be thinking about.
So you have to be wrong 95% ofthe time.
And how am I right that 5%?
And obviously, with that 5%you're going to go really big on
right.
Like once you figure it out,you're going to scale it up, go
(46:44):
as fast as you can, run asquickly as you can and really
grow it to the next stage.
But you have to constantlythink that way and the reason
I'm bringing this up right andthis will answer how do you get
a hold of us is we have a wholeecosystem and there's multiple
ways you can get a hold of us.
You can monthly join us in ourGrowth Lab webinar series where
(47:06):
we unveil literally what we do.
There's no black box inmarketing anymore.
I could literally show you whatI learned today and by tomorrow
it's already outdated.
That's the world I think, welive in, I think, and that's
what we try to do.
And the last one, one recentone we talked about SEO and how
(47:27):
to future-proof your SEOstrategy and we dug into all the
Google patents related to AIoverviews and kind of showed how
that actually works and how doyou participate in that and how
do you rank in that all of that.
Another way you can get a holdof us is we have an academy, so
this academy is structured tohelp if you want to transition
(47:47):
into growth marketing.
In our last cohort we had over400 students applied.
It costs you absolutely nothing.
We provide 100% scholarshipsfor this.
You often have to select it.
We can't take everybody in.
We had 30 students that got thefull scholarships and had over
40 startups that applied and sixof those startups got full
scholarships, where we builddedicated teams with the
(48:10):
startups to help them throughcustomer discovery.
So this way you're able to kindof learn and grow and do all
the things that we preach andyou get our hands on right.
You learn from us as you'redoing it.
Another way is we have a podcastas well.
We interview different founderswho have made it in their
journey and what they learnedalong the way, as well as VCs
(48:31):
and what they're looking for infounders and what do they want
to invest in, and so on and soforth.
So, if you're a startup,amazing.
If you're a challenger brand wedidn't even talk about that.
These are brands that areposition four or position five
in their respective category,you know.
And they're stuck and they'replateaued and they're looking
for someone to work with.
(48:52):
Feel free to reach out to us atAzarian Growth Agency.
And we're stuck and they'replateaued and they're looking
for someone to work with.
Feel free to reach out to us atAzarian Growth Agency and we're
more than welcome to take alook, see if we can help you
guys as well, too.
Speaker 1 (49:01):
Awesome.
Well, hamlet, this has beengreat.
I've enjoyed it.
I think it's been enlighteningfor a lot of people, so really
appreciate having you on.
Speaker 2 (49:11):
Thank you.
Thanks for having me.
It was a lot of fun.
It was fun jamming with you,and I'm sure we could have gone
on to many different topics aswell.
Speaker 1 (49:18):
Sounds good.
Until the next time, everybodybye-bye for now, bye-bye,
bye-bye.
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