October 22, 2023 • 51 mins
Join host Kris Krüg and digital marketing virtuoso Jordan Behan for an episode that promises more than just surface-level chatter. In this dynamic conversation, we delve deep into the maze of digital landscapes—from AI-driven podcasting algorithms to the metrics that actually matter for your startup.
🔍 What to Expect:
- Uncover the role of Machine Learning in reshaping how podcasts are discovered.
- Decode the enigma of authentic digital engagement beyond Google Analytics.
- Navigate the high seas of entrepreneurship with KPIs that can make or break your venture.
- Discover how API integrations and chatbots are redefining social media engagement.
🛠️ Tech Tips & Tricks:
- Get the lowdown on cohort analysis and A/B testing for hyper-personalized user experiences.
- Explore must-have tools for success, from advanced photo editing to CRM platforms.
🤔 Who Should Tune In:
- Digital Strategists
- Entrepreneurs
- Tech Enthusiasts
- Marketers seeking authentic engagement
🚀 Ready to elevate your digital game? Tune in and let's disrupt the status quo together!
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Check, check one, two, check one, two.
(00:02):
Is this thing on, Jordan?
Microphone, I think so.
I can hear you.
What's up, internet? It's Chris Krug.
Yeah, man. I'm reading you loud and clear.
Jojo. Right on.
Hey, is this my podcast or yours here today?
I think we said this one was going to be yours.
Oh, man.
Did you hear our buddy, Dave Olsen in Japan yesterday talking about how
(00:24):
he doesn't really like the podcast of two blist celebrities talking about each other's lives?
Or something like that?
Is he just like preemptively taking a shot at us?
I think so, actually.
I think you have given us honor.
No one would consider me a blist celebrity, so I clearly wasn't referring to me.
He may have been talking about you, though.
You're pretty close to being a Vancouver cyclist blist celebrity.
Okay, maybe a little bit.
That's neither here nor there, Chris.
(00:46):
I'm not sure.
I'm not sure.
I'm not sure.
I'm not sure.
I'm not sure.
That's neither here nor there, Chris.
I see the type of celebrity you're trying to impersonate here today as a rock star.
Why, you decided not to shave?
Because you're on the Motley Crue podcast today?
Oh, man.
(01:08):
Don't give me a hard time about the fact that I didn't shave.
We did talk about doing this, but I'm going to pretend like it's just off the cuff impromptu.
Don't worry.
Probably would have shaved.
Don't worry. Every single one of your hairs is in perfect alignment.
You look bad.
Oh, man. Thank you.
All right. That was a free intro ramble, but I'm KK.
This is my buddy Jordan.
We're getting together today to just talk about creativity, artificial intelligence, a little bit of marketing and personal branding stuff.
(01:34):
Jordan, why don't you give your intro of yourself and then I'll reserve the rights to annotate that along the way.
I'm a marketer.
I operate an agency called Narrate Creative.
I've been in business 10 years.
Previous to that, I worked at a bunch of local startups, which is how.
I met Chris immediately.
I would just conjured up the image of couch beers.
(01:56):
Do you remember couch beers?
I'm off on a tangent here, but I used to host back in the early days of streaming when there was just like there was a handful of tools we could even get away with using.
I had a live show that I hosted on Friday afternoons at my employer Strata and it was couch beers.
We just had people come by, sit on the couch, drink beers and talk, not unlike what we're doing here.
(02:20):
Yeah. Hey, I, this is not going to one up you episode.
It's just more of a yes.
And does couch beers remember beer casting?
I think are you referring to the, was that Justin Rose?
No, man.
Greg Maron came up to Vancouver in the early days.
I had just moved back.
(02:42):
And he brought with him like two mics and a bunch of wires and some microphone stands and a mixing board.
And he ran it all into his laptop and we started recording.
And he would buy us pictures of beer and put us around his microphones and records conversation, taking on the internet.
That predates me.
I won't say that couch beers was derivative, but could easily could say it was inspired by.
(03:05):
We were all just renegade media makers back in the day, plugging in stuff into whatever would work, making it happen.
Not a lot has changed actually.
No. And I guess that's, I'm taking a roundabout way of talking about my background, but now I just fool around with these software tools and help software companies figure out how to do the same.
(03:26):
Yeah.
You've got a pretty good little formula figured out. It seems like you're working with a bunch of fast founders and you're helping them get themselves out there.
You're using some AI tools as well as videos and podcasts to give people stories out into the wild.
There's just, there's been a huge evolution in the tools that I use to do my work and the means with which I go about doing my work, leveraging different people, different technologies.
(03:53):
Like you say, AI calls for me, it just became routine.
And then to share with you the things that I have been doing and watching your eyes light up.
I realized, Hey, hang on a second. I'm onto some stuff here and I work in a vacuum, man.
I joked about how I wasn't going to change out of my pajama pants. I'm sitting in my living room.
I'm often just sitting over there on the couch with a laptop in and I don't realize that in spite of being an old dog, I'm still learning some new tricks.
(04:20):
You've done a really good job of taking some of that renegade video making stuff and putting some process behind it.
And that's what grabbed my attention is because with me launching these creative communities and my pod and my blog and discord and blogging again, like five, it's a lot of stuff.
The more I can automate that and move the piece of the content around the ecosystem, the better off I am.
(04:43):
And so my eyes were lightened up when you were talking to me about recording videos and then five or six different pieces of the content out of that.
And I'd be in your process. I'd watch the long form stuff, y'all shorts pop off over the week.
First of all, you are easily my most prolific audience member ever.
That's evidenced by the likes and comments that I've received over the past couple of weeks.
(05:06):
If I didn't make it clear the other day at breakfast how ecstatic I am to have your support.
Let me reiterate it again. Now that means a lot to me.
It's a validation for going through the work of getting it done in the first place.
You don't need to thank me. It's so legit. First of all, I like you.
Thank you, Chris. And then you're making cool shit.
(05:28):
You published that video with our friend, Miranda Levers from Thinkerrithic the other day.
You didn't fucking shout me out in that episode, but you did reference the photo walk that I led where you all met back in.
I feel awful about that. Man, I just look for any chance I can to buck.
And I try to let my guests do the talking, but I'm terrible for terrible.
(05:51):
One of the things I like about Jordan is that as I gone deep down this rabbit hole of cycling, I've been able to see his competitive spirit come out.
Yeah. Hell yeah. Yeah. A little bit of his like good natured arrogance.
Like I'm fast. Try and catch me. Heck yeah. I actually have four pairs of socks that say exactly that.
(06:12):
Catch me if you can, which is like humble brags. Right. If you can. Great. Good on ya.
If somebody catches me, it's like you give them a shout out. There you go. Your brags are harder, dude. They're harder.
I was watching a podcast of yours, the founder recently, and I really appreciate the tone you had with him.
You were both friendly and wanted to hear his story, but you're also challenging him and stuff professionally.
(06:34):
But then at the end, you got into the part where you were comparing times and making sure that he knew that he couldn't get ya.
Rick, who the top dog was. To be fair, Rick, he's a spectacular athlete and we've always had that kind of chat in common.
It was the gross grind. We were bragging about gross grind times.
Go ahead. Let's go ahead. I did a 37 minute gross grind the other day and that tends to like water people's eyes a little bit.
(07:00):
And it was fun because I was like, hey Rick, what's your gross grind PR? He said, I don't know what my PR is.
But I was up there the other day and did a 38 and I was like, oh, is that I'm sorry, ladies and gentlemen, Jordan is not available.
Yeah. Disappoint all three people. I'll take you through. Paul, I had one more point.
Actually, I still had the mic. I forgot the photo walk with Miranda and that story being trapped in there and my comments and my engagement in your podcast.
(07:30):
That was a story that has never been told.
And a whole bunch of people hopped on your comments after that and started to share photos and videos that I had never even seen from that walk 20 years ago.
And it ended up being a sweet little community wander down every lane.
I think about the value of my network to come at it from 50,000 feet.
I have an incredibly valuable network and this conversation is evidence of that.
(07:55):
But to quantify the value of that network, you take a look at a photo like that one that you shared of all of us.
All right, everybody stand shoulder to shoulder in an alley in Gastown and we're going to get a photo of everybody on this photo walk.
And you think about everything that has happened to everyone in that photo in the 18 years since that photo was taken.
And it is mind blowing. Founders of Hoosely, founders of Thinkerific, influenced the...
(08:22):
Yeah. And Jocely Rockefeller. Yeah.
How close a lot of us have remained to over the years.
The fact is there was a handful of people that had technology in common, but I was a marketing guy.
I came at it from I'm on to this social web thing that seems really cool.
And I want to surround myself with other people that understand what that is.
(08:44):
And that was the technology community, which is how I ended up here.
That was like the 30 people that had social media in common.
We care enough about this thing that we're going to gather, we're going to walk around taking digital and film photographs together and sharing them and then tagging them and creating these like folksonomies.
And it was that what I had in common.
(09:06):
I have a hypothesis about that actually.
And you know, this is the toughest, it's near and dear to my heart.
I just moved back to Vancouver and taking a look at the scene and seeing where it's at and what it needs and where I can plug myself in.
OK, so we convened that community around the Northern Voice, which was a blogging and personal publishing company, social media word.
(09:29):
And I remember that Kim Bray and Forest Man, Brian Lantz, Sipri and Lomas and a few of the other core organizers of that Northern Voice conference had a commitment from the beginning.
The late Darren Barefoot?
The late Darren Barefoot.
Yep.
Open source, non-commercial.
So from the very beginning, it didn't have a core for vibing and people weren't all just there to make money.
(09:52):
It was truly our passion and enthusiasm for technology and writing and photography and building community that brought it all together.
That's why it has stay in power and why it's transcended just a professional network and ended up as a friend network of people who considers themselves colleagues and a part of the same community.
It's been really cool.
(10:13):
It's like a ground up ad hoc community where if you're a part of it, you're part of it, if you feel like you're a part of it, who else is a part of it?
It's inclusive.
It's not necessarily money focused, but there was a lot of people that built at least two billion dollar companies out of that group.
I didn't want to interrupt you, but I did say Darren's name and I'd be remiss if I didn't also mention his wife, Julie.
(10:37):
And I went to his memorial service and it was like a class reunion.
Everybody was there.
I saw Miranda.
I saw our good buddy, Matt, who I'm riding with on Saturday.
Yeah.
Yes.
Yeah.
Todd ceiling, James and Manic.
The old band was back together and it really did feel like a high school reunion.
Hugs all for years.
(10:59):
We couldn't meet and hug one another and stuff.
It was Darren getting us all back together again one last time, but certainly not the last time that we meet because long term bonds were formed, man.
A lot of us are still in touch.
I think about that all the time.
How cool it is to know all of these people and to have everyone has their little areas of expertise and influence.
(11:22):
And I do feel I can call upon that if I have to.
And occasionally I do.
Yeah, we got John Beeler in that crew and Ryan Holt.
A whole new job.
Yeah.
Like you say, the ball wits.
The particle accelerator.
Yeah.
Wild.
I saw that you commented on his thing and said, can I have a tour?
(11:44):
I'm interested to know the answer to that because it might be no.
And that's who knows.
It was like, oh, you can't go anywhere near this piece of friggin Iron Man technology.
That's you hired the wrong guy for the job.
You don't want John's friends coming by because he's got a lot of friends.
He's the communications guy for the kind of thing that an evil villain would make in a superhero movie called Triumph.
(12:07):
Yeah.
Yeah, you're right.
John is the perfect guy to get the word out about that for real.
Oh, man.
He's got to legit tinker and hackers and so fun watching him build all these synthesizers and this weird 3D scanning and printing technology.
Talk about a guy who's gone down the techno maker creative rabbit hole.
He was the guy that printed all those heads for that Douglas Copeland thing.
(12:30):
He scanned and printed out.
He was scanning people on his iPhone.
Yeah, my kids met him when when they were really young.
We went to the Maker Faire and a highlight was always John's booth and the 3D printing that they were doing on site and handing out little trinkets and toys and Enderman from Minecraft and things like that.
They're handing out to the kids just to show what was possible.
(12:51):
I remember my son made a little necklace out of it.
And then John is somebody that we would see once a year, but it was super cool visit, right?
For the kids to meet.
And yeah, lest we sound like complete grandpas and not just the uncles that we are.
Let's prove to the youngsters that you're still relevant.
Take us into these tools and stuff that we want to dive into.
I come at this from a perspective of wanting to promote my agency and demonstrate that I'm following best practices about thought leadership and talking heads founder type.
(13:25):
So I have only last year I started I realized I should have a podcast.
I record similar to what we're doing here with Riverside long form 30 40 minute conversation with a founder where I throw 12 questions over the fence to them a couple of days before and then send them the Riverside link and then we roll tape.
Why 12 and are they always the same?
(13:47):
Some of them are the same 12 roughly equates to 30 to 40 minutes of talking.
Because your process driven and repeatable.
Right.
I look at the 12 I wrote for the last guest and I augment them a little bit for the other guests.
There are things I always really liked the forget his name James inside the actor studio or he's okay.
Now I'm just going to ask you the same 12 questions.
(14:08):
I got what's your favorite curse word that kind of and so I like the idea of having a certain number of baked in questions that you ask everybody.
I start with tell me the story of how we met.
That's a good one.
Actually, I in general don't like asking everybody the same questions as a format but I do like you asking everybody so yeah we met.
(14:29):
It's a more exciting way to kick off the conversation than why don't you recite your bio or why don't I give this long winded explanation.
Yes.
While you're here and psychologically and philosophically it points you right at something that I find fascinating which is friends are key because they unlock memories or areas in our brain that we don't
have about experiences that we both went through together.
(14:52):
I love hearing this.
Tell me how we met because I think I know but it's probably a lot different than what you're about to say.
It's my job to try to recall how you and I met.
I was just saying I said no that's fine but I hadn't thought about it in a while.
We probably met because I just showed up to a barbecue at bright.
(15:13):
Yeah, that could be very well we're having those rooftop barbecues.
I say we met outside workspace with you smoking one of those big cannons you used to roll back before you became a healthy guy.
We probably met before that.
I recall that happening.
But I think we met before that.
(15:34):
Didn't inhale.
Never.
It just reminds me too that we another shout out to James share it at one of those bar camps.
James had a tool called ad hack and it was like in an hour we're going to make a commercial for something.
We're split into groups of six and go make a commercial we made a commercial that was a circle of people similar to that 70 show or the camera scans from person to person.
(16:01):
And the suggestion was that everybody was exhaling like steam off camera or whatever.
Then the payoff is at the end, we were all passing around a fatty, but it was a slice of Uncle fatty's pizza.
That's the sort of thing that we did for fun back then man.
That was a riot.
I think that it's still online somewhere, we're gonna have to dig that up.
(16:23):
Yeah, share a fatty today.
Yeah.
I was still talking about the podcast I record my 30 to 40 minute interview.
And this is the process part of it kicks in, because my biggest concern was always, if it's too much work, I'm not going to do it.
And so I have to pass that work on and essentially pay to have people do it for me or it's not going to get done right at those episodes are just going to sit there on my drive and nothing's going to happen.
(16:52):
So my next move is I download the file from Riverside, I upload it to Google Drive.
And then it's actually a LinkedIn messaging conversation, which a lot of my conversations happen you and I plan this thing through what's we went bounce around the apps but that's our nature.
I tagged my guy in London, Sammy, and he edits the episode for me. He uses D scripts like I do.
(17:17):
He creates six to eight clips, based on his intuition. What's good. Share the clips, some of them are one minute some of them are two always emphasizing focusing on the get the guest and what they have to say.
And what I get back is a drive folder that has all these clips.
And actually, in my mind I'm thinking about better ways to automate this, he should be tagging assistant to say that the stuff is ready so that she can move it into notion and put it on the calendar for me.
(17:47):
But even since I had that conversation with you now it's a notion content calendar, where she'll tag me right now how it works is he says here it is it's uploaded, and then the invoice comes through PayPal.
I tell my assistant that stuff is in the folder, she schedules it onto a calendar, I go in and write the blurbs for each one of those clips that she then logs in and schedules directly into my LinkedIn, there was a fun moment at breakfast the other day, where
(18:19):
my phone started buzzing, and I showed it to you and it was my assistant saying that my social media was scheduled through December.
It's incredible.
It's something.
There's more to it than that.
Think of things and then go put them in and then push. Yeah, yeah, it occurs to me that I can remove a little bit of friction in that process. And the more I do the faster everything gets because it might be a half a day between me saying thanks Sammy that's great
(18:48):
and then going into slack to tell Daniella that the stuff is ready for her to schedule and to write. I'm sure the speed part is really nice, but my real interest in it is this pre enough creative cycles, I want to be able to sit down and talk to you and record one of these
and then get up walk away and go do something else and not spend the next two and a half days editing audio video writing up social posts blog posts all that of this that the other thing.
(19:13):
Yeah.
I'm going to cut down the amount of cool creative interviews like I did a podcast test the other day with a buddy of mine where we're talking about cycling. He wants to do a cycling podcast and I was like okay, here's what I do.
I started telling him and he was whoa. I thought we were just going to be having like, I was like no man I don't fuck around. This is legit. I started showing him I do this and this.
(19:34):
But there's a guy who was a guest on my podcast Trevor Longino and he put me on to this tool called Opus and I tested it since you and I talked last week.
And it is mind blowing and you definitely want to check it out. So, how it works is you put in a link to something posted somewhere it can be a publicly available Google Drive link or a YouTube video link.
(19:59):
Do these things need to be edited? No, not really. Like, this is the raw conversation. There are people who who care enough to watch this to watch our fuck ups to what if we're awkwardly fumbling our words whatever else that's part of the charm or what have you.
I don't think this needs to be heavily edited and my instructions to Sammy are not to like we have the AI tools will remove the filler words and stuff like that but we don't go crazy with that. It's the clips that have the value. That's what gets shared on LinkedIn.
(20:29):
And that's the way people consume most of my content or in YouTube short. So you look at a YouTube episode and it's what the fuck this podcast has 35 views or 55 views. I'm going to mention that I got tic tocs that have thousands right or and that's that's the secret.
So when I say that my assistant schedules it into LinkedIn I didn't mention the fact that they also become Instagram reels and talks and and now I'm fiddling with the idea of doing text based posts based on the transcript.
(20:58):
That's where this opus tool comes in, you throw it a link, similar to Sammy the human who's selecting what he thinks is good, it finds stuff that it thinks is good and it gives you the transcript of what is being said in that clip.
It throws the clip, and then it gives you its argument for why it received the score it did this clip starts with an interesting hook where the host says, yeah, and then it concludes with a minute or two minutes, and it throws the captions right on there for you.
(21:30):
And it's free.
So it's 30 minutes of upload time per month, and teen clips or something for free, and then whatever 3550 but I don't know what the hell these tools are I've got, I got a list as long as my arm of things that I pay 35 to 50 bucks a month for that I'm automating
(21:51):
with. This is the business that I'm in is helping a business owner to convince another business owner or another worker within a company, a user, if you like, that it's like paying that $50 a month will make you better at what you do so part with the 50 bucks, get the job
that save yourself hours and hours like you say freeing up creative cycles to do the high impact work we're still figuring out what the high impact work is, but we're going to be free to do it.
(22:17):
It's the systems right. Everything that I've just described is a system that I had to create there's an SOP and notion that says when this happens.
Here's the series of things that you do in order to get that done.
My assistant knows this stuff by now she's been doing it for two years. Should she be replaced or some ill fate befall her, we hand that list off to somebody else when you get the slack message from Jordan that an episode is ready.
(22:46):
Follow these steps. And as an agency owner, my highest value work is sales calls, I've got to avail myself to sales calls as much as I can.
Then everything else that I do is enabling sales cost to happen. So recording the podcast, high value work at the moment at least and AI can't replace me in that capacity.
(23:08):
Practically can I could build a Jordan podcast host tool. It's not that easy. I'm like 60% of the way there. I would. Yeah. I got the voice part down and I got the image part down, but I can't integrate the voice with the skills and I don't quite got video.
I mean, surely somewhere there's a model or the tool where you could train it using all of the recording hours that I've put up on YouTube. I say recreate this guy and animate him to match the, what I keep thinking about actually.
(23:43):
One thing that really bugs me about my podcast is that I'm looking at you on the screen here, which is a disconnect from looking into the camera of my, but they have AI tools that fix that right. Live.
I look here and it puts my eyes up where they belong. It says Teleprompter AI. You can read off your Teleprompter, but it moves your eyes over. I should have that by now. In fact, OBS should have it.
(24:07):
You said, what is OBS? And I was like, it's a virtual camera, which is one link in the chain of virtual cameras that I'm using in order to speak to you today, which is its own rabbit hole. We can go down.
Is your virtual camera better than my physical camera?
No, and I still have the physical camera. What the virtual camera does is enables the green screen technology. This brick wall does not exist in the real world. This is a green screen. It would allow me to superimpose graphics over top.
(24:40):
I noticed a little logo at the corner of your podcast. Yeah, I don't know if it appears. I'm going to do that. Hopefully there'll be one right here. Okay.
There is a logo in this image too, but the way I'm cropped from the riverside, you can't see it, but there is a logo here behind it. No pre-branding opportunity.
I don't have an amazing webcam. I would prefer to have a mirrorless digital camera as my webcam, but I don't. I have my iPhone SE.
(25:10):
Is that the state of the art?
No, it's a piece of...
No, is the state of the art to use a Canon mirrorless as your webcam?
State of the art would be like a full mirror DSLR, but they're just heavier to pack around and whatnot. So like a proper mirrored. You'd never learn about that stuff than I do, but...
(25:31):
I've never live streamed with mine. Yeah, yeah. I'm going to try it. I'm going to try it.
Absolutely. So that would be... That's the high watermark of YouTube live streaming is to have the DSLR mounted and then of course to have others on the side or whatever.
And this is a lesson in itself, right? I try to tell people not to get stuck on the need for all these tools and shit. I had a guy on my show named Stephen Pope who has all the tricks and tools, and then I had another guy called Daniel Kating, and he was like iPhone and wired headset.
(26:10):
And one respects the other and they're like, they're both doing it their own way or whatever. I got my iPhone hooked into a needed, got the MacBook Air. So I need an external dongle receiver daily. Oh, here. What do you call that? A hub?
I've got a key light here. Elgato key light. Really love that. But that goes into a tool called Camo Studio. So I've got a Camo Studio app on the phone and a Camo Studio app on my MacBook. And those are saying, hey, take this camera and display it in OBS where the green screen effect happens.
(26:47):
And then that's going into Riverside saying, okay, the camera is OBS. The mic is the Audio Technica ATX 1200 whatever.
Not touching your mic Jojo. I know it sounds like shit. I do it. I kick the desk. I'm terrible. But the yeah pretty good microphone, decent, decent video quality with my iPhone.
(27:09):
And I do have a little audio reflector here, but I don't think it does a damn thing. It just takes up space on my desk. It's only you sound great. I'm glad to hear that this this microphone was on sale for $65 Canadian dollars and prime on prime days the other day.
So I told my friend Wyatt to go out and buy one.
I have a bit of an acknowledgement to make on this on this topic. For gosh, 20 years I've been published YouTube these one take videos or I just point the camera at me and whoever I'm with and we do our spiel and if we messed up, maybe Jojo keeps going.
(27:41):
And that's always been my jam and it's worked well enough for me and it's helped me get stuff out there. And I've always been like pretty proud of that way of doing things.
With all these cool new tools and stuff like script and other opus and other editing tools and stuff. I felt the need to like out my production values and make things look better and sound better and keep up with my peers or whatever it's stuck and so I it's been a cool learning process.
(28:06):
I've got to learn new tools I feel empowered and like I am able to edit audio video in a way that I wasn't able to before and stuff and and there's been some hiccups along the way I've released stuff that sounds a little glitchy or weird but that's been a part of the process.
I've got to deal with it but the acknowledgement is I've let that stuff prevent me from getting episodes out so I got an episode with Christopher Rillo that's still in the can I've got one with Thomas Gerard that's still in the can and these are the types of things I would have published the day of or day after I recorded them but because I'm trying to make them better or perfect or something I have held them back.
(28:44):
I don't think that they haven't gotten twice as good by being waiting twice as long as published them or whatever. I'm just trying to figure out what that balance is for me of great production values.
I want to have an intro and outro and background music and this that and the other thing but yeah I'm just trying to figure out that balance between production values and also like the whole authenticity thing.
(29:05):
You know, people responded really well to those truck pods I was doing or I was rolling around in my truck making video blogs and podcasts there and I think that was just because they looked and sounded so different than everything else that you right now.
Your content is definitely a lot better live than it is in draft. That's something I tell my clients all the time too as we're back and forth haggling about grammar or like what word to use here or whatever and we should have published yesterday.
(29:36):
Stop worrying about it just publish and I think you're onto something there where authenticity and and the availability of the content is a hell of a lot more important than polish and coming back to the opus thing which is at the extreme end of automation where you're just giving it a link and it's spitting out clips.
You're still at least with me and with this test that I ran I'm leaving it up to the machine to make those decisions. I'm not going to jump in and be some strict arbiter of quality and say you should have used that clip or this clip or I want to edit the top or tail or whatever else.
(30:06):
It's still somewhat raw somewhat off the cuff the source material is still. Now, if you really want to geek out, you can get in dscript and you can do removing filler words and things like that that I consider that table stakes you get just run the tools, remove the 33
um's and ah's or 333 I should say and then you have a slightly better you got those funny jump cuts or whatever so your authenticity takes a bit of a hit.
(30:31):
Maybe the quality is worth doing.
But what that it actually can do is what I like about that tool in particular.
You can just like once it's transcribed the audio, you can just delete sentences in the audio and it does the edit for you. But better than that you can actually do word substitution.
(30:53):
I know I meant to say this and because you've trained it with more than 10 minutes of your voice, it will actually fill the gaps in with a read from your own voice that that matches the audio so it sounds somewhat seamless and I guess that's the overdub function in
dscript. Yeah, yeah. And then I think that's probably your best bet tool for having those intros and extras just sitting in a template.
(31:19):
But, but I think there's a place in the world for the, the kind of like raw unedited, particularly shorter form stuff where you're just in your truck and rolling.
And I think you can deviate from that just because a tool exists that allows you to polish it to the. Yeah, I am trying to find that balance. Yeah, there might be like one or two gold nuggets in this whole fucking hour of us talking about the technology community
(31:48):
and me talking about how fast your legs are when they're shaving and stuff. There's a lot of bullshit going on to get the good gems of the overdub function in the strip.
I guess I just want to like for anyone listening when I really get into the weeds of all the different things that I've got going on here. Like I consider this actually to be like Bush League to like this, there's nothing especially advanced or out of touch here.
(32:12):
It's just a bunch of in many cases open source free tools that I'm using. I do think that the formulas and the recipes are novel. You're not necessarily inventing new technology but you're bringing to bear software as a service that's never been used or in conjunction
with other things. Yeah, for the DIY punk rock approach to him. Sure, but I guess the point I'm trying to make is don't feel like you even have to get to this level in order to get out and make something.
(32:39):
Roll, put your, roll your camera, set it up, prop it up somewhere and record yourself doing something.
And don't be afraid to suck and make some stuff and then figure out what you don't like about it. The other day I realized holy shit I smashed my desk and my microphone a lot I gotta stop doing that I still haven't stopped.
(33:00):
Just make something and don't let the process get in the way of creating. Let your process of all over time. Yeah, make the stuff and share it with people, because what we have to say is a hell of a lot more important than the hours of editing involved with getting it in
front of somebody. Now I appreciate the encouragement there I definitely want to keep quality high but I also want to make sure that the friction is low so between now when I get a team to keep things on the shoestring.
(33:29):
For me, yeah, removing friction means leveraging team.
Yeah, and you gotta give me that that guy's number there man Leo Sammy's super suit media in London, he is a proper music producer.
And I like to say he's like slumming producing my podcasts.
He was introduced to me by a mutual friend of ours ding zang, who's the sales rapper on LinkedIn. He made my podcast has a fancy intro with an actual song like a rap song that's like inspired by Jurassic five that is this whole story where ding and I
(34:03):
collaborated on that and Sammy produced it and just do typical like LinkedIn connections where we all met one another and where each one of us has our strength and there's this like collaboration going on and
that actually sounds really fun where I've looked at it as like a task or to do I think if I can, I'm going to get my friend MC Benny and Uganda to help me make sure.
(34:26):
And, and I'll do the creative project instead of something on my to do list, what you could do for fun is if none of you are going to chat GPT and write a prompt that says, My name is Chris Krug, I'm a futurist and technologist, live in Vancouver, BC.
Act like a battle rapper and write me a two minute battle rap.
(34:50):
You know what I mean? Like, the, get the output and then it's then have your buddy record the now, a little bit of human oversight oh no change this wording or whatever or whatever but chat GPT is not a bad rapper or country music writer.
So it was like early on when I was monkeying around with chat GPT my favorite thing to do was to have it write poems and songs with really basic prompts and now my prompting skills have leveled up considerably.
(35:21):
I was thinking about this morning because I was doing some work and it was like, Jeez, this prompt, I wonder if it would be faster for me to edit this document myself because this prompt is 200 words.
Document length wrong.
I learned chat GPT prompts from TikToks and stuff too.
The same way I learned how to cook salmon, or it's not TikTok. I will, it's Instagram reels because I'm a grown up.
(35:45):
Like you get these expert creators and they're like you're the reason why your chat GPT results suck so bad is because your prompts are bad and so here's how you do it's well hey.
So now it's you think through these problems, think deeply about how to all of this thing feels like an elaborate excuse to justify scrolling fucking Instagram reels all day long.
(36:06):
You're like no I'm working. I'm working here. I'm up to my skills.
I hate that I doom scroll Instagram reels. I wish I spent less time doing it. I don't actually even think of myself as somebody who does, but a couple of times a day I find myself like, I know that if I click that reel, and then I swipe, I'm going to get another one.
(36:31):
And every once in a while you get something of value, nine times out of 10 is cycling meme shit which entertains the hell out of me and I love it. But every once in a while you get somebody who, that's the other thing too, is you swipe three or four times and you're going to see like an ad or, hey are you a course creator or coach who's trying to sell more?
And I was like yes, how did you know and then I actually listened to what they have to say. This is something that I do all the time, which is, I try to learn from experts, stand on the shoulders of giants,
(37:00):
and to learn the content that they're trying to teach me. But way more fascinating to me than that is, what are you using? How are you targeting me and what are you using to sell to me? How did your Instagram reel ad end up in my
front of my eyeball? And what you're saying and the information they know about me. Have you ever been scrolling through and it's, hey if you were born in 1976, I'm like, how did you know? Like, you're not supposed to know that. Or like the custom t-shirt, this is a being thing.
(37:31):
Yeah, I was going to reference the t-shirt when you said yeah. Anyway, there is some science to the targeting, but I am fascinated by how people go about using, not just targeting, but the psychology of what they're saying, what they're selling, and then I sign up for things so that I can consume their content and receive their emails and all of that stuff so that I'm constantly studying like how do I get better at this stuff. Yeah.
(37:58):
Maybe that's a good place to jump into next. Maybe talk a little bit about how you're targeting your content and some of the tools you're using under the hood there and how you get your stuff in front of the right people.
Sure. I tend to focus my time on LinkedIn. I did talk about how all of my content gets distributed on all of the other platforms, but my personal Instagram is cycling related and I share some cycling stuff there, but there's no business, other than I linked to my website and my bio.
(38:27):
There's no direct connection between Jordan's cycling shit to my work stuff. So I focus on LinkedIn and trying to network there, share content there. That's where I think the business value is.
We could talk about how some of the other platforms are a dumpster fire and then anything that is trying to come along and replace it is like tumbleweeds of a lack of engagement or these tiny sub communities that haven't expanded to.
(38:58):
LinkedIn is the crown king of business networking. So I'm not going to talk about anything else, but what I do is, and really what I'm training founders to do is to use LinkedIn sales navigator.
So you can use the various radio boxes of the people that you want to network with and understand and create these accounts lists and leads lists and like really drill down into the weeds of like company size, age, maturity levels, technologies used, things like that.
(39:30):
And then on the personal level, it's what's your job title and your duration in your job and have you posted to LinkedIn in the previous 30 days and things like that. And then you can generate these lists of people. If you're so inclined, you can reach out to and connect with.
And where did you go?
Back and if you really wanted to as well, you can leverage tools to increase the volume of those connections. I'm not going to advocate for that on your podcast and a public forum, but I know there are people who do.
(40:07):
You can reach a lot of people and have a lot of conversations. And then you can also structure your network to look the way you want it to. Right. If I'm trying to talk to more SaaS founders and everybody in my network is like a, an old school social media person from back in the day.
I need more founders.
I need to search for them, filter them out, find them and actually connect with them.
(40:30):
And so that's what I do. And then of course the content that I share is relevant to them and hopefully some of them see it.
But it's if you want to have, if you want a network that looks a certain way or is a certain type, there's a very specific niche type of person or people that you're trying to reach. That's a good way of going about it. And what is it? Like 80 bucks a month or 60 or 70 bucks a month.
(41:01):
You're using it with founders and you're using it yourself, but you actually think that it's like a tier one tool for anyone who's doing any sort of like targeting or sales people. Is it something I should be using?
I suppose it would depend on what your goals are.
It's
if you were
(41:23):
if you were trying to reach out to other futurists, podcasters, things like that, certainly I'm dancing around the subject here, but it's we deal in high volumes, right?
Like we build lists of hundreds, thousands of contacts and we put them through a tool like Get Prospect and then go into cold email. And actually I don't mind admitting that yes, my agency on behalf of our clients is sometimes the people who are pitching you in your inbox.
(42:00):
That is the nature of business to business sales.
Yeah, absolutely. You generate a list of the people that are relevant to try to sell to and then you try to show them value. And if there's a if there's a differentiating piece or if there is a silver bullet, it's like we try to say the right things to the right people and to actually show them value.
(42:23):
And the rest of it is
yeah, blunt force, high volume.
In many cases, automated drip. And so if you aspire to reach a lot of people with a seemingly personalized but actually mail merged message, then my answer is yes.
(42:49):
Yeah, if you prefer to be a little more ad hoc and to reach out to people one to one, then you can do that with your typical like LinkedIn people search for free.
Right. This seems to be a good point to say, this is the stuff that you do day in and day out. This is what your podcast is about. So why don't you talk to people a little bit how they can get in touch with you or who you want to get in touch with you here.
(43:11):
Sure.
I deal with business to business software founders, ideally post revenue, post a little bit of funding.
I'm early stage guy, we, we operate like a fractional marketing department or fractional marketing executive, so it would be like pre like before you hire a full in house marketing team maybe you've got a handful of juniors or whatever.
(43:41):
But my sweet spot is, you got a founder sometimes a technical founder sometimes a business founder who understands the value of publishing on social media, creating a bit of a narrative and using that to help facilitate founder led sales conversations.
So if that sounds like you, or you are a marketing executive for an early stage startup that wants to put this stuff on turbo.
(44:12):
You want to put this stuff on social media and enabling sales through LinkedIn conversations. That is the sweet spot I'm niching down, even like even further all the time and just that niche is the way it's where business happens.
Leveraging the platform for like content sharing personal stories, talking about the business problems you solve so that people get familiar with that.
(44:42):
Everything from fundraising to actually selling things like that is where it's at. That's what happened a lot about niching down lately which is interesting because I think it comes from maybe like your cycling background around gearing down or whatever.
I've been thinking about it a lot as like discovering your unique Venn diagram that with the advent of AI and a bunch of kind of pablum vanilla stuff being put out there is like your really unique five overlapping circles in the spot right there in the middle is more valuable than ever.
(45:14):
And so I'm trying to figure out exactly what that is for myself and really continue to niche down, find my unique Venn diagram and share that bit with the world that seems to be where the real value is.
Yeah, I it's like one of the most important lessons that I teach clients is, let's say you've built, I guess, project management or customer relationship management software tool or whatever and it's any business could use it.
(45:46):
And often founders often think about, oh, this is great because now my total addressable market is every business in the world right I'm going to be a multi billionaire and it's no you're not because there are 800 other tools just like yours, and there is nothing unique about what you're doing.
And so you have to niche down, even if you have, let's say for example, it's like, we built it for construction companies. It's great still not niche enough you have to niche down even further and the reason for that is because those emails that I'm sending to people's
(46:21):
boxes still sound too generic, you have to go laser focused and be like, No, this is for the one man band handyman type business where you're working from your truck, and it broke down last week, and you're managing your entire business from this one app in your phone,
it does your payments, it does your bookings, it does all of that like really focus in on the psychology of what it's like to be that one person in the world whose life is going to be made better by this technology, instead of thinking about the masses of people,
(46:55):
you can't afford to reach the masses until you've got like series D funding, you know you've got now is five months of runway before you're fucking dead. And if you don't do anything you're going to die. That's the reality. So get off your fucking hands and do something for someone, but make sure you know who that someone is, and, and be able to communicate what it is that you're going to do that's going to make a difference.
(47:21):
Give me a reason why your my $50 a month is going to free myself up for my high value work which might be building stairs outside of somebody's house or whatever.
But it's
niching down is like a survival tactic. It allows you to matter to somebody, instead of being like this nebulous I don't understand what the hell you're doing. So it's not an accident that I say, I deal with pre or post revenue, because they can afford a little bit of funding
(47:55):
and a full marketing department yeah maybe as some junior yeah yeah totally yeah so that when I when the person hears that they're like, that's me okay yeah yeah I've got oh I did hire a marketing person and they aren't a gray haired executive with 18 years of experience
doing this stuff. They are more like the guy that needs to be told what to be doing day in and day out or what have you and it's like, that's how my message resonates, and how I'm able to actually sell against my competition, because nobody is doing this as
(48:28):
biased as I am, nobody is like getting down into the weeds of your problem. Like that. When I really got hyper there about the how you're running out of money. That's the part that makes you sweat a little bit and we pick up the phone.
But the passion for it is clear and so is your expertise like I can tell you actually genuinely care you really know what you're talking about and so I'm sure if there are people who fit that description that you just gave I bet they're going to be pretty inclined to get in
(48:58):
touch with you after yeah guys look me up on LinkedIn Jordan being or narrate creative calm.
So that's where people can find you professionally hey what's up with that. I don't know. Yeah, you triggered like a balloon effect in Riverside or something or weird.
The fingers. That's cool. So that's the people can find you professionally, but what if someone wants to challenge your grouse grind times or see if they can beat you in your age bracket on a bicycle.
(49:31):
You could follow me on Strava to Jordan being on Strava.
There, and Instagram I guess is a good place to DM me about cycling related things if you're into cycling I'm also Jordan being on Instagram one word on Instagram button.
Nobody can beat you at.
(49:52):
Nobody can beat me at. Nobody watching this can beat me in a cyclocross race.
From where to where.
That's like a three and a half kilometer loop through a park like it's a very. Okay, how about the okay so I know the alley cat race, not a cyclocross. I probably can't be an alley cat either because I'm pretty like brave when it comes to riding in traffic.
(50:17):
I used to be a messenger.
Nobody watching this can beat my Mount Seymour time of 44 minutes.
All right, all right, we'll see what happens man, and I, if there's somebody out there that can get up the grouse grind faster than 37 minutes I'd like to hear from you too.
I know you will.
I love you brother it's so great to be back in Vancouver it's great to be back in touch and you've really been teaching me a lot. And it's nice to just be like rubbing shoulders with someone who's on a similar trajectory and stuff so thank you Chris it's really cool to get
(50:51):
reacquainted. I've been talking about.
I talked for years about I gotta go over to Galeano and visit Chris. I never made it, and I regret that.
We can go over there together anytime man there's all sorts of fun things coming up I got involved if I had to do a Halloween party yesterday so we can still go to the islands.
Cool. Thanks Chris. Yeah, pleasure chatting with you man. Yeah, talk soon. Thanks Jordan. You got it. Bye.
Check, check one, two, check one, two.
(00:02):
Is this thing on, Jordan?
Microphone, I think so.
I can hear you.
What's up, internet? It's Chris Krug.
Yeah, man. I'm reading you loud and clear.
Jojo. Right on.
Hey, is this my podcast or yours here today?
I think we said this one was going to be yours.
Oh, man.
Did you hear our buddy, Dave Olsen in Japan yesterday talking about how
(00:24):
he doesn't really like the podcast of two blist celebrities talking about each other's lives?
Or something like that?
Is he just like preemptively taking a shot at us?
I think so, actually.
I think you have given us honor.
No one would consider me a blist celebrity, so I clearly wasn't referring to me.
He may have been talking about you, though.
You're pretty close to being a Vancouver cyclist blist celebrity.
Okay, maybe a little bit.
That's neither here nor there, Chris.
(00:46):
I'm not sure.
I'm not sure.
I'm not sure.
I'm not sure.
I'm not sure.
That's neither here nor there, Chris.
I see the type of celebrity you're trying to impersonate here today as a rock star.
Why, you decided not to shave?
Because you're on the Motley Crue podcast today?
Oh, man.
(01:08):
Don't give me a hard time about the fact that I didn't shave.
We did talk about doing this, but I'm going to pretend like it's just off the cuff impromptu.
Don't worry.
Probably would have shaved.
Don't worry. Every single one of your hairs is in perfect alignment.
You look bad.
Oh, man. Thank you.
All right. That was a free intro ramble, but I'm KK.
This is my buddy Jordan.
We're getting together today to just talk about creativity, artificial intelligence, a little bit of marketing and personal branding stuff.
(01:34):
Jordan, why don't you give your intro of yourself and then I'll reserve the rights to annotate that along the way.
I'm a marketer.
I operate an agency called Narrate Creative.
I've been in business 10 years.
Previous to that, I worked at a bunch of local startups, which is how.
I met Chris immediately.
I would just conjured up the image of couch beers.
(01:56):
Do you remember couch beers?
I'm off on a tangent here, but I used to host back in the early days of streaming when there was just like there was a handful of tools we could even get away with using.
I had a live show that I hosted on Friday afternoons at my employer Strata and it was couch beers.
We just had people come by, sit on the couch, drink beers and talk, not unlike what we're doing here.
(02:20):
Yeah. Hey, I, this is not going to one up you episode.
It's just more of a yes.
And does couch beers remember beer casting?
I think are you referring to the, was that Justin Rose?
No, man.
Greg Maron came up to Vancouver in the early days.
I had just moved back.
(02:42):
And he brought with him like two mics and a bunch of wires and some microphone stands and a mixing board.
And he ran it all into his laptop and we started recording.
And he would buy us pictures of beer and put us around his microphones and records conversation, taking on the internet.
That predates me.
I won't say that couch beers was derivative, but could easily could say it was inspired by.
(03:05):
We were all just renegade media makers back in the day, plugging in stuff into whatever would work, making it happen.
Not a lot has changed actually.
No. And I guess that's, I'm taking a roundabout way of talking about my background, but now I just fool around with these software tools and help software companies figure out how to do the same.
(03:26):
Yeah.
You've got a pretty good little formula figured out. It seems like you're working with a bunch of fast founders and you're helping them get themselves out there.
You're using some AI tools as well as videos and podcasts to give people stories out into the wild.
There's just, there's been a huge evolution in the tools that I use to do my work and the means with which I go about doing my work, leveraging different people, different technologies.
(03:53):
Like you say, AI calls for me, it just became routine.
And then to share with you the things that I have been doing and watching your eyes light up.
I realized, Hey, hang on a second. I'm onto some stuff here and I work in a vacuum, man.
I joked about how I wasn't going to change out of my pajama pants. I'm sitting in my living room.
I'm often just sitting over there on the couch with a laptop in and I don't realize that in spite of being an old dog, I'm still learning some new tricks.
(04:20):
You've done a really good job of taking some of that renegade video making stuff and putting some process behind it.
And that's what grabbed my attention is because with me launching these creative communities and my pod and my blog and discord and blogging again, like five, it's a lot of stuff.
The more I can automate that and move the piece of the content around the ecosystem, the better off I am.
(04:43):
And so my eyes were lightened up when you were talking to me about recording videos and then five or six different pieces of the content out of that.
And I'd be in your process. I'd watch the long form stuff, y'all shorts pop off over the week.
First of all, you are easily my most prolific audience member ever.
That's evidenced by the likes and comments that I've received over the past couple of weeks.
(05:06):
If I didn't make it clear the other day at breakfast how ecstatic I am to have your support.
Let me reiterate it again. Now that means a lot to me.
It's a validation for going through the work of getting it done in the first place.
You don't need to thank me. It's so legit. First of all, I like you.
Thank you, Chris. And then you're making cool shit.
(05:28):
You published that video with our friend, Miranda Levers from Thinkerrithic the other day.
You didn't fucking shout me out in that episode, but you did reference the photo walk that I led where you all met back in.
I feel awful about that. Man, I just look for any chance I can to buck.
And I try to let my guests do the talking, but I'm terrible for terrible.
(05:51):
One of the things I like about Jordan is that as I gone deep down this rabbit hole of cycling, I've been able to see his competitive spirit come out.
Yeah. Hell yeah. Yeah. A little bit of his like good natured arrogance.
Like I'm fast. Try and catch me. Heck yeah. I actually have four pairs of socks that say exactly that.
(06:12):
Catch me if you can, which is like humble brags. Right. If you can. Great. Good on ya.
If somebody catches me, it's like you give them a shout out. There you go. Your brags are harder, dude. They're harder.
I was watching a podcast of yours, the founder recently, and I really appreciate the tone you had with him.
You were both friendly and wanted to hear his story, but you're also challenging him and stuff professionally.
(06:34):
But then at the end, you got into the part where you were comparing times and making sure that he knew that he couldn't get ya.
Rick, who the top dog was. To be fair, Rick, he's a spectacular athlete and we've always had that kind of chat in common.
It was the gross grind. We were bragging about gross grind times.
Go ahead. Let's go ahead. I did a 37 minute gross grind the other day and that tends to like water people's eyes a little bit.
(07:00):
And it was fun because I was like, hey Rick, what's your gross grind PR? He said, I don't know what my PR is.
But I was up there the other day and did a 38 and I was like, oh, is that I'm sorry, ladies and gentlemen, Jordan is not available.
Yeah. Disappoint all three people. I'll take you through. Paul, I had one more point.
Actually, I still had the mic. I forgot the photo walk with Miranda and that story being trapped in there and my comments and my engagement in your podcast.
(07:30):
That was a story that has never been told.
And a whole bunch of people hopped on your comments after that and started to share photos and videos that I had never even seen from that walk 20 years ago.
And it ended up being a sweet little community wander down every lane.
I think about the value of my network to come at it from 50,000 feet.
I have an incredibly valuable network and this conversation is evidence of that.
(07:55):
But to quantify the value of that network, you take a look at a photo like that one that you shared of all of us.
All right, everybody stand shoulder to shoulder in an alley in Gastown and we're going to get a photo of everybody on this photo walk.
And you think about everything that has happened to everyone in that photo in the 18 years since that photo was taken.
And it is mind blowing. Founders of Hoosely, founders of Thinkerific, influenced the...
(08:22):
Yeah. And Jocely Rockefeller. Yeah.
How close a lot of us have remained to over the years.
The fact is there was a handful of people that had technology in common, but I was a marketing guy.
I came at it from I'm on to this social web thing that seems really cool.
And I want to surround myself with other people that understand what that is.
(08:44):
And that was the technology community, which is how I ended up here.
That was like the 30 people that had social media in common.
We care enough about this thing that we're going to gather, we're going to walk around taking digital and film photographs together and sharing them and then tagging them and creating these like folksonomies.
And it was that what I had in common.
(09:06):
I have a hypothesis about that actually.
And you know, this is the toughest, it's near and dear to my heart.
I just moved back to Vancouver and taking a look at the scene and seeing where it's at and what it needs and where I can plug myself in.
OK, so we convened that community around the Northern Voice, which was a blogging and personal publishing company, social media word.
(09:29):
And I remember that Kim Bray and Forest Man, Brian Lantz, Sipri and Lomas and a few of the other core organizers of that Northern Voice conference had a commitment from the beginning.
The late Darren Barefoot?
The late Darren Barefoot.
Yep.
Open source, non-commercial.
So from the very beginning, it didn't have a core for vibing and people weren't all just there to make money.
(09:52):
It was truly our passion and enthusiasm for technology and writing and photography and building community that brought it all together.
That's why it has stay in power and why it's transcended just a professional network and ended up as a friend network of people who considers themselves colleagues and a part of the same community.
It's been really cool.
(10:13):
It's like a ground up ad hoc community where if you're a part of it, you're part of it, if you feel like you're a part of it, who else is a part of it?
It's inclusive.
It's not necessarily money focused, but there was a lot of people that built at least two billion dollar companies out of that group.
I didn't want to interrupt you, but I did say Darren's name and I'd be remiss if I didn't also mention his wife, Julie.
(10:37):
And I went to his memorial service and it was like a class reunion.
Everybody was there.
I saw Miranda.
I saw our good buddy, Matt, who I'm riding with on Saturday.
Yeah.
Yes.
Yeah.
Todd ceiling, James and Manic.
The old band was back together and it really did feel like a high school reunion.
Hugs all for years.
(10:59):
We couldn't meet and hug one another and stuff.
It was Darren getting us all back together again one last time, but certainly not the last time that we meet because long term bonds were formed, man.
A lot of us are still in touch.
I think about that all the time.
How cool it is to know all of these people and to have everyone has their little areas of expertise and influence.
(11:22):
And I do feel I can call upon that if I have to.
And occasionally I do.
Yeah, we got John Beeler in that crew and Ryan Holt.
A whole new job.
Yeah.
Like you say, the ball wits.
The particle accelerator.
Yeah.
Wild.
I saw that you commented on his thing and said, can I have a tour?
(11:44):
I'm interested to know the answer to that because it might be no.
And that's who knows.
It was like, oh, you can't go anywhere near this piece of friggin Iron Man technology.
That's you hired the wrong guy for the job.
You don't want John's friends coming by because he's got a lot of friends.
He's the communications guy for the kind of thing that an evil villain would make in a superhero movie called Triumph.
(12:07):
Yeah.
Yeah, you're right.
John is the perfect guy to get the word out about that for real.
Oh, man.
He's got to legit tinker and hackers and so fun watching him build all these synthesizers and this weird 3D scanning and printing technology.
Talk about a guy who's gone down the techno maker creative rabbit hole.
He was the guy that printed all those heads for that Douglas Copeland thing.
(12:30):
He scanned and printed out.
He was scanning people on his iPhone.
Yeah, my kids met him when when they were really young.
We went to the Maker Faire and a highlight was always John's booth and the 3D printing that they were doing on site and handing out little trinkets and toys and Enderman from Minecraft and things like that.
They're handing out to the kids just to show what was possible.
(12:51):
I remember my son made a little necklace out of it.
And then John is somebody that we would see once a year, but it was super cool visit, right?
For the kids to meet.
And yeah, lest we sound like complete grandpas and not just the uncles that we are.
Let's prove to the youngsters that you're still relevant.
Take us into these tools and stuff that we want to dive into.
I come at this from a perspective of wanting to promote my agency and demonstrate that I'm following best practices about thought leadership and talking heads founder type.
(13:25):
So I have only last year I started I realized I should have a podcast.
I record similar to what we're doing here with Riverside long form 30 40 minute conversation with a founder where I throw 12 questions over the fence to them a couple of days before and then send them the Riverside link and then we roll tape.
Why 12 and are they always the same?
(13:47):
Some of them are the same 12 roughly equates to 30 to 40 minutes of talking.
Because your process driven and repeatable.
Right.
I look at the 12 I wrote for the last guest and I augment them a little bit for the other guests.
There are things I always really liked the forget his name James inside the actor studio or he's okay.
Now I'm just going to ask you the same 12 questions.
(14:08):
I got what's your favorite curse word that kind of and so I like the idea of having a certain number of baked in questions that you ask everybody.
I start with tell me the story of how we met.
That's a good one.
Actually, I in general don't like asking everybody the same questions as a format but I do like you asking everybody so yeah we met.
(14:29):
It's a more exciting way to kick off the conversation than why don't you recite your bio or why don't I give this long winded explanation.
Yes.
While you're here and psychologically and philosophically it points you right at something that I find fascinating which is friends are key because they unlock memories or areas in our brain that we don't
have about experiences that we both went through together.
(14:52):
I love hearing this.
Tell me how we met because I think I know but it's probably a lot different than what you're about to say.
It's my job to try to recall how you and I met.
I was just saying I said no that's fine but I hadn't thought about it in a while.
We probably met because I just showed up to a barbecue at bright.
(15:13):
Yeah, that could be very well we're having those rooftop barbecues.
I say we met outside workspace with you smoking one of those big cannons you used to roll back before you became a healthy guy.
We probably met before that.
I recall that happening.
But I think we met before that.
(15:34):
Didn't inhale.
Never.
It just reminds me too that we another shout out to James share it at one of those bar camps.
James had a tool called ad hack and it was like in an hour we're going to make a commercial for something.
We're split into groups of six and go make a commercial we made a commercial that was a circle of people similar to that 70 show or the camera scans from person to person.
(16:01):
And the suggestion was that everybody was exhaling like steam off camera or whatever.
Then the payoff is at the end, we were all passing around a fatty, but it was a slice of Uncle fatty's pizza.
That's the sort of thing that we did for fun back then man.
That was a riot.
I think that it's still online somewhere, we're gonna have to dig that up.
(16:23):
Yeah, share a fatty today.
Yeah.
I was still talking about the podcast I record my 30 to 40 minute interview.
And this is the process part of it kicks in, because my biggest concern was always, if it's too much work, I'm not going to do it.
And so I have to pass that work on and essentially pay to have people do it for me or it's not going to get done right at those episodes are just going to sit there on my drive and nothing's going to happen.
(16:52):
So my next move is I download the file from Riverside, I upload it to Google Drive.
And then it's actually a LinkedIn messaging conversation, which a lot of my conversations happen you and I plan this thing through what's we went bounce around the apps but that's our nature.
I tagged my guy in London, Sammy, and he edits the episode for me. He uses D scripts like I do.
(17:17):
He creates six to eight clips, based on his intuition. What's good. Share the clips, some of them are one minute some of them are two always emphasizing focusing on the get the guest and what they have to say.
And what I get back is a drive folder that has all these clips.
And actually, in my mind I'm thinking about better ways to automate this, he should be tagging assistant to say that the stuff is ready so that she can move it into notion and put it on the calendar for me.
(17:47):
But even since I had that conversation with you now it's a notion content calendar, where she'll tag me right now how it works is he says here it is it's uploaded, and then the invoice comes through PayPal.
I tell my assistant that stuff is in the folder, she schedules it onto a calendar, I go in and write the blurbs for each one of those clips that she then logs in and schedules directly into my LinkedIn, there was a fun moment at breakfast the other day, where
(18:19):
my phone started buzzing, and I showed it to you and it was my assistant saying that my social media was scheduled through December.
It's incredible.
It's something.
There's more to it than that.
Think of things and then go put them in and then push. Yeah, yeah, it occurs to me that I can remove a little bit of friction in that process. And the more I do the faster everything gets because it might be a half a day between me saying thanks Sammy that's great
(18:48):
and then going into slack to tell Daniella that the stuff is ready for her to schedule and to write. I'm sure the speed part is really nice, but my real interest in it is this pre enough creative cycles, I want to be able to sit down and talk to you and record one of these
and then get up walk away and go do something else and not spend the next two and a half days editing audio video writing up social posts blog posts all that of this that the other thing.
(19:13):
Yeah.
I'm going to cut down the amount of cool creative interviews like I did a podcast test the other day with a buddy of mine where we're talking about cycling. He wants to do a cycling podcast and I was like okay, here's what I do.
I started telling him and he was whoa. I thought we were just going to be having like, I was like no man I don't fuck around. This is legit. I started showing him I do this and this.
(19:34):
But there's a guy who was a guest on my podcast Trevor Longino and he put me on to this tool called Opus and I tested it since you and I talked last week.
And it is mind blowing and you definitely want to check it out. So, how it works is you put in a link to something posted somewhere it can be a publicly available Google Drive link or a YouTube video link.
(19:59):
Do these things need to be edited? No, not really. Like, this is the raw conversation. There are people who who care enough to watch this to watch our fuck ups to what if we're awkwardly fumbling our words whatever else that's part of the charm or what have you.
I don't think this needs to be heavily edited and my instructions to Sammy are not to like we have the AI tools will remove the filler words and stuff like that but we don't go crazy with that. It's the clips that have the value. That's what gets shared on LinkedIn.
(20:29):
And that's the way people consume most of my content or in YouTube short. So you look at a YouTube episode and it's what the fuck this podcast has 35 views or 55 views. I'm going to mention that I got tic tocs that have thousands right or and that's that's the secret.
So when I say that my assistant schedules it into LinkedIn I didn't mention the fact that they also become Instagram reels and talks and and now I'm fiddling with the idea of doing text based posts based on the transcript.
(20:58):
That's where this opus tool comes in, you throw it a link, similar to Sammy the human who's selecting what he thinks is good, it finds stuff that it thinks is good and it gives you the transcript of what is being said in that clip.
It throws the clip, and then it gives you its argument for why it received the score it did this clip starts with an interesting hook where the host says, yeah, and then it concludes with a minute or two minutes, and it throws the captions right on there for you.
(21:30):
And it's free.
So it's 30 minutes of upload time per month, and teen clips or something for free, and then whatever 3550 but I don't know what the hell these tools are I've got, I got a list as long as my arm of things that I pay 35 to 50 bucks a month for that I'm automating
(21:51):
with. This is the business that I'm in is helping a business owner to convince another business owner or another worker within a company, a user, if you like, that it's like paying that $50 a month will make you better at what you do so part with the 50 bucks, get the job
that save yourself hours and hours like you say freeing up creative cycles to do the high impact work we're still figuring out what the high impact work is, but we're going to be free to do it.
(22:17):
It's the systems right. Everything that I've just described is a system that I had to create there's an SOP and notion that says when this happens.
Here's the series of things that you do in order to get that done.
My assistant knows this stuff by now she's been doing it for two years. Should she be replaced or some ill fate befall her, we hand that list off to somebody else when you get the slack message from Jordan that an episode is ready.
(22:46):
Follow these steps. And as an agency owner, my highest value work is sales calls, I've got to avail myself to sales calls as much as I can.
Then everything else that I do is enabling sales cost to happen. So recording the podcast, high value work at the moment at least and AI can't replace me in that capacity.
(23:08):
Practically can I could build a Jordan podcast host tool. It's not that easy. I'm like 60% of the way there. I would. Yeah. I got the voice part down and I got the image part down, but I can't integrate the voice with the skills and I don't quite got video.
I mean, surely somewhere there's a model or the tool where you could train it using all of the recording hours that I've put up on YouTube. I say recreate this guy and animate him to match the, what I keep thinking about actually.
(23:43):
One thing that really bugs me about my podcast is that I'm looking at you on the screen here, which is a disconnect from looking into the camera of my, but they have AI tools that fix that right. Live.
I look here and it puts my eyes up where they belong. It says Teleprompter AI. You can read off your Teleprompter, but it moves your eyes over. I should have that by now. In fact, OBS should have it.
(24:07):
You said, what is OBS? And I was like, it's a virtual camera, which is one link in the chain of virtual cameras that I'm using in order to speak to you today, which is its own rabbit hole. We can go down.
Is your virtual camera better than my physical camera?
No, and I still have the physical camera. What the virtual camera does is enables the green screen technology. This brick wall does not exist in the real world. This is a green screen. It would allow me to superimpose graphics over top.
(24:40):
I noticed a little logo at the corner of your podcast. Yeah, I don't know if it appears. I'm going to do that. Hopefully there'll be one right here. Okay.
There is a logo in this image too, but the way I'm cropped from the riverside, you can't see it, but there is a logo here behind it. No pre-branding opportunity.
I don't have an amazing webcam. I would prefer to have a mirrorless digital camera as my webcam, but I don't. I have my iPhone SE.
(25:10):
Is that the state of the art?
No, it's a piece of...
No, is the state of the art to use a Canon mirrorless as your webcam?
State of the art would be like a full mirror DSLR, but they're just heavier to pack around and whatnot. So like a proper mirrored. You'd never learn about that stuff than I do, but...
(25:31):
I've never live streamed with mine. Yeah, yeah. I'm going to try it. I'm going to try it.
Absolutely. So that would be... That's the high watermark of YouTube live streaming is to have the DSLR mounted and then of course to have others on the side or whatever.
And this is a lesson in itself, right? I try to tell people not to get stuck on the need for all these tools and shit. I had a guy on my show named Stephen Pope who has all the tricks and tools, and then I had another guy called Daniel Kating, and he was like iPhone and wired headset.
(26:10):
And one respects the other and they're like, they're both doing it their own way or whatever. I got my iPhone hooked into a needed, got the MacBook Air. So I need an external dongle receiver daily. Oh, here. What do you call that? A hub?
I've got a key light here. Elgato key light. Really love that. But that goes into a tool called Camo Studio. So I've got a Camo Studio app on the phone and a Camo Studio app on my MacBook. And those are saying, hey, take this camera and display it in OBS where the green screen effect happens.
(26:47):
And then that's going into Riverside saying, okay, the camera is OBS. The mic is the Audio Technica ATX 1200 whatever.
Not touching your mic Jojo. I know it sounds like shit. I do it. I kick the desk. I'm terrible. But the yeah pretty good microphone, decent, decent video quality with my iPhone.
(27:09):
And I do have a little audio reflector here, but I don't think it does a damn thing. It just takes up space on my desk. It's only you sound great. I'm glad to hear that this this microphone was on sale for $65 Canadian dollars and prime on prime days the other day.
So I told my friend Wyatt to go out and buy one.
I have a bit of an acknowledgement to make on this on this topic. For gosh, 20 years I've been published YouTube these one take videos or I just point the camera at me and whoever I'm with and we do our spiel and if we messed up, maybe Jojo keeps going.
(27:41):
And that's always been my jam and it's worked well enough for me and it's helped me get stuff out there. And I've always been like pretty proud of that way of doing things.
With all these cool new tools and stuff like script and other opus and other editing tools and stuff. I felt the need to like out my production values and make things look better and sound better and keep up with my peers or whatever it's stuck and so I it's been a cool learning process.
(28:06):
I've got to learn new tools I feel empowered and like I am able to edit audio video in a way that I wasn't able to before and stuff and and there's been some hiccups along the way I've released stuff that sounds a little glitchy or weird but that's been a part of the process.
I've got to deal with it but the acknowledgement is I've let that stuff prevent me from getting episodes out so I got an episode with Christopher Rillo that's still in the can I've got one with Thomas Gerard that's still in the can and these are the types of things I would have published the day of or day after I recorded them but because I'm trying to make them better or perfect or something I have held them back.
(28:44):
I don't think that they haven't gotten twice as good by being waiting twice as long as published them or whatever. I'm just trying to figure out what that balance is for me of great production values.
I want to have an intro and outro and background music and this that and the other thing but yeah I'm just trying to figure out that balance between production values and also like the whole authenticity thing.
(29:05):
You know, people responded really well to those truck pods I was doing or I was rolling around in my truck making video blogs and podcasts there and I think that was just because they looked and sounded so different than everything else that you right now.
Your content is definitely a lot better live than it is in draft. That's something I tell my clients all the time too as we're back and forth haggling about grammar or like what word to use here or whatever and we should have published yesterday.
(29:36):
Stop worrying about it just publish and I think you're onto something there where authenticity and and the availability of the content is a hell of a lot more important than polish and coming back to the opus thing which is at the extreme end of automation where you're just giving it a link and it's spitting out clips.
You're still at least with me and with this test that I ran I'm leaving it up to the machine to make those decisions. I'm not going to jump in and be some strict arbiter of quality and say you should have used that clip or this clip or I want to edit the top or tail or whatever else.
(30:06):
It's still somewhat raw somewhat off the cuff the source material is still. Now, if you really want to geek out, you can get in dscript and you can do removing filler words and things like that that I consider that table stakes you get just run the tools, remove the 33
um's and ah's or 333 I should say and then you have a slightly better you got those funny jump cuts or whatever so your authenticity takes a bit of a hit.
(30:31):
Maybe the quality is worth doing.
But what that it actually can do is what I like about that tool in particular.
You can just like once it's transcribed the audio, you can just delete sentences in the audio and it does the edit for you. But better than that you can actually do word substitution.
(30:53):
I know I meant to say this and because you've trained it with more than 10 minutes of your voice, it will actually fill the gaps in with a read from your own voice that that matches the audio so it sounds somewhat seamless and I guess that's the overdub function in
dscript. Yeah, yeah. And then I think that's probably your best bet tool for having those intros and extras just sitting in a template.
(31:19):
But, but I think there's a place in the world for the, the kind of like raw unedited, particularly shorter form stuff where you're just in your truck and rolling.
And I think you can deviate from that just because a tool exists that allows you to polish it to the. Yeah, I am trying to find that balance. Yeah, there might be like one or two gold nuggets in this whole fucking hour of us talking about the technology community
(31:48):
and me talking about how fast your legs are when they're shaving and stuff. There's a lot of bullshit going on to get the good gems of the overdub function in the strip.
I guess I just want to like for anyone listening when I really get into the weeds of all the different things that I've got going on here. Like I consider this actually to be like Bush League to like this, there's nothing especially advanced or out of touch here.
(32:12):
It's just a bunch of in many cases open source free tools that I'm using. I do think that the formulas and the recipes are novel. You're not necessarily inventing new technology but you're bringing to bear software as a service that's never been used or in conjunction
with other things. Yeah, for the DIY punk rock approach to him. Sure, but I guess the point I'm trying to make is don't feel like you even have to get to this level in order to get out and make something.
(32:39):
Roll, put your, roll your camera, set it up, prop it up somewhere and record yourself doing something.
And don't be afraid to suck and make some stuff and then figure out what you don't like about it. The other day I realized holy shit I smashed my desk and my microphone a lot I gotta stop doing that I still haven't stopped.
(33:00):
Just make something and don't let the process get in the way of creating. Let your process of all over time. Yeah, make the stuff and share it with people, because what we have to say is a hell of a lot more important than the hours of editing involved with getting it in
front of somebody. Now I appreciate the encouragement there I definitely want to keep quality high but I also want to make sure that the friction is low so between now when I get a team to keep things on the shoestring.
(33:29):
For me, yeah, removing friction means leveraging team.
Yeah, and you gotta give me that that guy's number there man Leo Sammy's super suit media in London, he is a proper music producer.
And I like to say he's like slumming producing my podcasts.
He was introduced to me by a mutual friend of ours ding zang, who's the sales rapper on LinkedIn. He made my podcast has a fancy intro with an actual song like a rap song that's like inspired by Jurassic five that is this whole story where ding and I
(34:03):
collaborated on that and Sammy produced it and just do typical like LinkedIn connections where we all met one another and where each one of us has our strength and there's this like collaboration going on and
that actually sounds really fun where I've looked at it as like a task or to do I think if I can, I'm going to get my friend MC Benny and Uganda to help me make sure.
(34:26):
And, and I'll do the creative project instead of something on my to do list, what you could do for fun is if none of you are going to chat GPT and write a prompt that says, My name is Chris Krug, I'm a futurist and technologist, live in Vancouver, BC.
Act like a battle rapper and write me a two minute battle rap.
(34:50):
You know what I mean? Like, the, get the output and then it's then have your buddy record the now, a little bit of human oversight oh no change this wording or whatever or whatever but chat GPT is not a bad rapper or country music writer.
So it was like early on when I was monkeying around with chat GPT my favorite thing to do was to have it write poems and songs with really basic prompts and now my prompting skills have leveled up considerably.
(35:21):
I was thinking about this morning because I was doing some work and it was like, Jeez, this prompt, I wonder if it would be faster for me to edit this document myself because this prompt is 200 words.
Document length wrong.
I learned chat GPT prompts from TikToks and stuff too.
The same way I learned how to cook salmon, or it's not TikTok. I will, it's Instagram reels because I'm a grown up.
(35:45):
Like you get these expert creators and they're like you're the reason why your chat GPT results suck so bad is because your prompts are bad and so here's how you do it's well hey.
So now it's you think through these problems, think deeply about how to all of this thing feels like an elaborate excuse to justify scrolling fucking Instagram reels all day long.
(36:06):
You're like no I'm working. I'm working here. I'm up to my skills.
I hate that I doom scroll Instagram reels. I wish I spent less time doing it. I don't actually even think of myself as somebody who does, but a couple of times a day I find myself like, I know that if I click that reel, and then I swipe, I'm going to get another one.
(36:31):
And every once in a while you get something of value, nine times out of 10 is cycling meme shit which entertains the hell out of me and I love it. But every once in a while you get somebody who, that's the other thing too, is you swipe three or four times and you're going to see like an ad or, hey are you a course creator or coach who's trying to sell more?
And I was like yes, how did you know and then I actually listened to what they have to say. This is something that I do all the time, which is, I try to learn from experts, stand on the shoulders of giants,
(37:00):
and to learn the content that they're trying to teach me. But way more fascinating to me than that is, what are you using? How are you targeting me and what are you using to sell to me? How did your Instagram reel ad end up in my
front of my eyeball? And what you're saying and the information they know about me. Have you ever been scrolling through and it's, hey if you were born in 1976, I'm like, how did you know? Like, you're not supposed to know that. Or like the custom t-shirt, this is a being thing.
(37:31):
Yeah, I was going to reference the t-shirt when you said yeah. Anyway, there is some science to the targeting, but I am fascinated by how people go about using, not just targeting, but the psychology of what they're saying, what they're selling, and then I sign up for things so that I can consume their content and receive their emails and all of that stuff so that I'm constantly studying like how do I get better at this stuff. Yeah.
(37:58):
Maybe that's a good place to jump into next. Maybe talk a little bit about how you're targeting your content and some of the tools you're using under the hood there and how you get your stuff in front of the right people.
Sure. I tend to focus my time on LinkedIn. I did talk about how all of my content gets distributed on all of the other platforms, but my personal Instagram is cycling related and I share some cycling stuff there, but there's no business, other than I linked to my website and my bio.
(38:27):
There's no direct connection between Jordan's cycling shit to my work stuff. So I focus on LinkedIn and trying to network there, share content there. That's where I think the business value is.
We could talk about how some of the other platforms are a dumpster fire and then anything that is trying to come along and replace it is like tumbleweeds of a lack of engagement or these tiny sub communities that haven't expanded to.
(38:58):
LinkedIn is the crown king of business networking. So I'm not going to talk about anything else, but what I do is, and really what I'm training founders to do is to use LinkedIn sales navigator.
So you can use the various radio boxes of the people that you want to network with and understand and create these accounts lists and leads lists and like really drill down into the weeds of like company size, age, maturity levels, technologies used, things like that.
(39:30):
And then on the personal level, it's what's your job title and your duration in your job and have you posted to LinkedIn in the previous 30 days and things like that. And then you can generate these lists of people. If you're so inclined, you can reach out to and connect with.
And where did you go?
Back and if you really wanted to as well, you can leverage tools to increase the volume of those connections. I'm not going to advocate for that on your podcast and a public forum, but I know there are people who do.
(40:07):
You can reach a lot of people and have a lot of conversations. And then you can also structure your network to look the way you want it to. Right. If I'm trying to talk to more SaaS founders and everybody in my network is like a, an old school social media person from back in the day.
I need more founders.
I need to search for them, filter them out, find them and actually connect with them.
(40:30):
And so that's what I do. And then of course the content that I share is relevant to them and hopefully some of them see it.
But it's if you want to have, if you want a network that looks a certain way or is a certain type, there's a very specific niche type of person or people that you're trying to reach. That's a good way of going about it. And what is it? Like 80 bucks a month or 60 or 70 bucks a month.
(41:01):
You're using it with founders and you're using it yourself, but you actually think that it's like a tier one tool for anyone who's doing any sort of like targeting or sales people. Is it something I should be using?
I suppose it would depend on what your goals are.
It's
if you were
(41:23):
if you were trying to reach out to other futurists, podcasters, things like that, certainly I'm dancing around the subject here, but it's we deal in high volumes, right?
Like we build lists of hundreds, thousands of contacts and we put them through a tool like Get Prospect and then go into cold email. And actually I don't mind admitting that yes, my agency on behalf of our clients is sometimes the people who are pitching you in your inbox.
(42:00):
That is the nature of business to business sales.
Yeah, absolutely. You generate a list of the people that are relevant to try to sell to and then you try to show them value. And if there's a if there's a differentiating piece or if there is a silver bullet, it's like we try to say the right things to the right people and to actually show them value.
(42:23):
And the rest of it is
yeah, blunt force, high volume.
In many cases, automated drip. And so if you aspire to reach a lot of people with a seemingly personalized but actually mail merged message, then my answer is yes.
(42:49):
Yeah, if you prefer to be a little more ad hoc and to reach out to people one to one, then you can do that with your typical like LinkedIn people search for free.
Right. This seems to be a good point to say, this is the stuff that you do day in and day out. This is what your podcast is about. So why don't you talk to people a little bit how they can get in touch with you or who you want to get in touch with you here.
(43:11):
Sure.
I deal with business to business software founders, ideally post revenue, post a little bit of funding.
I'm early stage guy, we, we operate like a fractional marketing department or fractional marketing executive, so it would be like pre like before you hire a full in house marketing team maybe you've got a handful of juniors or whatever.
(43:41):
But my sweet spot is, you got a founder sometimes a technical founder sometimes a business founder who understands the value of publishing on social media, creating a bit of a narrative and using that to help facilitate founder led sales conversations.
So if that sounds like you, or you are a marketing executive for an early stage startup that wants to put this stuff on turbo.
(44:12):
You want to put this stuff on social media and enabling sales through LinkedIn conversations. That is the sweet spot I'm niching down, even like even further all the time and just that niche is the way it's where business happens.
Leveraging the platform for like content sharing personal stories, talking about the business problems you solve so that people get familiar with that.
(44:42):
Everything from fundraising to actually selling things like that is where it's at. That's what happened a lot about niching down lately which is interesting because I think it comes from maybe like your cycling background around gearing down or whatever.
I've been thinking about it a lot as like discovering your unique Venn diagram that with the advent of AI and a bunch of kind of pablum vanilla stuff being put out there is like your really unique five overlapping circles in the spot right there in the middle is more valuable than ever.
(45:14):
And so I'm trying to figure out exactly what that is for myself and really continue to niche down, find my unique Venn diagram and share that bit with the world that seems to be where the real value is.
Yeah, I it's like one of the most important lessons that I teach clients is, let's say you've built, I guess, project management or customer relationship management software tool or whatever and it's any business could use it.
(45:46):
And often founders often think about, oh, this is great because now my total addressable market is every business in the world right I'm going to be a multi billionaire and it's no you're not because there are 800 other tools just like yours, and there is nothing unique about what you're doing.
And so you have to niche down, even if you have, let's say for example, it's like, we built it for construction companies. It's great still not niche enough you have to niche down even further and the reason for that is because those emails that I'm sending to people's
(46:21):
boxes still sound too generic, you have to go laser focused and be like, No, this is for the one man band handyman type business where you're working from your truck, and it broke down last week, and you're managing your entire business from this one app in your phone,
it does your payments, it does your bookings, it does all of that like really focus in on the psychology of what it's like to be that one person in the world whose life is going to be made better by this technology, instead of thinking about the masses of people,
(46:55):
you can't afford to reach the masses until you've got like series D funding, you know you've got now is five months of runway before you're fucking dead. And if you don't do anything you're going to die. That's the reality. So get off your fucking hands and do something for someone, but make sure you know who that someone is, and, and be able to communicate what it is that you're going to do that's going to make a difference.
(47:21):
Give me a reason why your my $50 a month is going to free myself up for my high value work which might be building stairs outside of somebody's house or whatever.
But it's
niching down is like a survival tactic. It allows you to matter to somebody, instead of being like this nebulous I don't understand what the hell you're doing. So it's not an accident that I say, I deal with pre or post revenue, because they can afford a little bit of funding
(47:55):
and a full marketing department yeah maybe as some junior yeah yeah totally yeah so that when I when the person hears that they're like, that's me okay yeah yeah I've got oh I did hire a marketing person and they aren't a gray haired executive with 18 years of experience
doing this stuff. They are more like the guy that needs to be told what to be doing day in and day out or what have you and it's like, that's how my message resonates, and how I'm able to actually sell against my competition, because nobody is doing this as
(48:28):
biased as I am, nobody is like getting down into the weeds of your problem. Like that. When I really got hyper there about the how you're running out of money. That's the part that makes you sweat a little bit and we pick up the phone.
But the passion for it is clear and so is your expertise like I can tell you actually genuinely care you really know what you're talking about and so I'm sure if there are people who fit that description that you just gave I bet they're going to be pretty inclined to get in
(48:58):
touch with you after yeah guys look me up on LinkedIn Jordan being or narrate creative calm.
So that's where people can find you professionally hey what's up with that. I don't know. Yeah, you triggered like a balloon effect in Riverside or something or weird.
The fingers. That's cool. So that's the people can find you professionally, but what if someone wants to challenge your grouse grind times or see if they can beat you in your age bracket on a bicycle.
(49:31):
You could follow me on Strava to Jordan being on Strava.
There, and Instagram I guess is a good place to DM me about cycling related things if you're into cycling I'm also Jordan being on Instagram one word on Instagram button.
Nobody can beat you at.
(49:52):
Nobody can beat me at. Nobody watching this can beat me in a cyclocross race.
From where to where.
That's like a three and a half kilometer loop through a park like it's a very. Okay, how about the okay so I know the alley cat race, not a cyclocross. I probably can't be an alley cat either because I'm pretty like brave when it comes to riding in traffic.
(50:17):
I used to be a messenger.
Nobody watching this can beat my Mount Seymour time of 44 minutes.
All right, all right, we'll see what happens man, and I, if there's somebody out there that can get up the grouse grind faster than 37 minutes I'd like to hear from you too.
I know you will.
I love you brother it's so great to be back in Vancouver it's great to be back in touch and you've really been teaching me a lot. And it's nice to just be like rubbing shoulders with someone who's on a similar trajectory and stuff so thank you Chris it's really cool to get
(50:51):
reacquainted. I've been talking about.
I talked for years about I gotta go over to Galeano and visit Chris. I never made it, and I regret that.
We can go over there together anytime man there's all sorts of fun things coming up I got involved if I had to do a Halloween party yesterday so we can still go to the islands.
Cool. Thanks Chris. Yeah, pleasure chatting with you man. Yeah, talk soon. Thanks Jordan. You got it. Bye.
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