Programming Throwdown - Digital Marketing with Kevin Urrutia

Episode Date: March 31, 2021

We chat with Kevin Urrutia about why marketing is so important to any project, how digital marketing is different than traditional marketing, and what tools we can use to market our ideas.  Thanks for listening!Show notes: https://www.programmingthrowdown.com/2021/03/episode-109-digital-marketing-with.html ★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★

Hey everybody, so we're coming off the heels of our first duo episode in a long time. We've had a lot of really amazing interviews and we took a little break to do a show with just the two of us, but we have an absolutely phenomenal guest on and I wanted to get Kevin on the show and get this episode out to folks because it's something that is so important. Ultimately, when we build software, most of us, we're building it for other people. I mean, even if you're making a compiler, you have an audience in mind.

And so how do we sort of reach that audience? How do we learn more about what we want to build? Marketing and digital marketing is a huge part of that whole experience. And we have Kevin Rutia on who is the founder of Voi Media, who's going to teach us all about, you know, marketing and digital marketing and the ins and outs of it. So thanks for being on the show, Kevin. Hey, guys, thanks for having me. Super excited to be here. Cool. So we kind of asked everyone, or at least in the past year, how they're holding up with COVID

and how their sort of job has changed with the lockdown and everything. Yeah. So funny enough, yesterday was our company's one year anniversary of working from home. So it's been one year. Yeah. It's been one year since. It's funny because I was like, so I have a cleaning company too here in New York City. And we're like, oh, whoa, crazy. It's been a year. And then I was like, oh yeah, it's been a year for my other company too. Because we have like a shared office in New York City. And we're like, oh, whoa, crazy. It's been a year. And then I was like, oh yeah, it's been a year for my other company too. Because we have like a shared office in New York City that we do for my cleaning company and then the marketing company, Waymedia, right? But yeah, it's been a year and it's kind of crazy because I was in the office,

I guess last week doing recording for a course that we're coming out with for marketing. And it's like weird going into the office and I'm like, wow, it's crazy. I used to come here every single day. I was like, why did I do that? We're just like, why did I do that? Because now it's so much easier just to wake up and go to your office space and inside your room to do the work. So I love it. It's so much better, I think. Yeah, I feel the same way. The only thing that I think about is, would I want to come to the office like once a month or once a week or something like that? That's really the only thing that I kind of mull back and forth because yeah, going into the office every day makes zero sense now that we've seen, you know, another way of

doing it. Yeah. And that's the thing too. And that's why I think this working from home thing is great. And at least for me, it's funny because I used to work home all the time because my background is programming, computer science. I used to do like remote stuff all the time. It was only until I started doing like more corporate jobs. That's when I started doing like, oh, you have to be in the office. So it's funny because now I'm like, oh yeah, like this is so great. This is why I love doing programming before when I was like, because I could just work from my apartment and then do jobs for other people without ever seeing them or even meeting them. It's just like talk over the phone or through email. So I think, at least for me, I think it's great because you guys probably know like

these big companies are always were like, no, you need to be in the office all the time or else you're never going to do anything or getting work done. I'm like, people that don't do any work, it doesn't matter where they are, office, not in the office. They're not going to get any work done no matter what, like no matter if you have 10 cameras on them. And they might make the busy people not do work too if they're in the same office. Exactly. People don't realize that because it's one of those things where you see someone not doing anything, that really permeates to the company saying, oh, if they don't care, then why should I care? Right. So it's like pretty dangerous sometimes too. Yeah. Patrick and I worked at the same company a really long time ago and at a company where they asked everyone to be in at 7.30 AM for no reason. I mean,

we were just dropping code. I mean, it was, and I couldn't, I honestly, I couldn't do it. I mean, now because I have kids, you know, Patrick has kids who were probably up at 6am just because of that. But, but as someone who was in college, I just could not do it. And I remember getting in trouble and like, I just didn't have the willpower to really do that. And finally, I think they just kind of swept it under the rug. It's like, okay, this person's going to come in at like 830, nine o'clock and we'll just deal with it. But yeah, a lot of these rules, you know, when you really step back and this has kind of forced us. But yeah, a lot of these rules, you know, when you really step back and this has kind of forced us to step back,

you realize that the rules ultimately were made by regular people and often, you know, 50 years ago. And so we really need to revisit them. Yeah. And that's the thing, like all these rules of like, hey, you got to be working nine to five. It's just like crazy because,

I mean, similar to you guys, programmers, like sometimes like you work better at night when it's just like better time for you to think, better time for you to do whatever you're in the day. And it's kind of crazy because you always hear about people with like productivity. It's like, hey, you got to be like productive in the morning and, you know, work out. I'm like, if you're working nine to five, like you can't do that. You need like a good three hours. Like why doesn't it work? Like maybe you start work at 12, you know, and then end at eight. Because that way in the morning, you can get all this stuff that you need to get done. Like, you know, working out, eating well, cooking for your family, all the stuff that you need in order to like

have an actual productive day because you work nine to five, you wake up at six, commute for an hour, and then you're back home at 7 p.m. And you're like, okay, what am I supposed to do? Cook, work out, talk to my family, watch TV, like, and then be bed by 10 p.m.? Like, how is that possible in like three hours, right? Yeah, and what am I supposed to do? Cook, work out, talk to my family, watch TV, like, and then be bad by 10 PM. Like, how is that possible in like three hours, right?

Yeah, and everyone else is trying to do it at the same time too, which makes everything harder. It's like, you go to the grocery store, it's packed. You know, everything's busy. Yeah. The other thing too is, and you know, I'm sure it's the same with marketing, is it ebbs and flows.

Like there's maybe a month where you just got the API from the customer and now you have to implement it. And, you know, they're waiting on you. And then there's maybe a month where you just got the API from the customer and now you have to implement it and, and, you know, they're waiting on you. And then there's a whole month where you're just waiting on them. And so, and so, you know, being able to be flexible over the span of months where some weeks you work 30 hours, some weeks you work a hundred hours. Now that, that I think is much healthier than, yeah,

you come in nine to five and you still are under the gun when things are really busy, but when they're not busy, you just have to come anyways, right? Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And it's funny because I think even for my company, I see that some people are like, some months they're just like crazy productive and some months they're just kind of like, just working like what they need to work. And then I'm just like, yeah, people have their moods. I mean, you guys probably know, like when you're working on a new programming project or a new idea, you're just so excited that like, you just want to keep working on it all the time. And then you go into that hump of like, oh, should I do that project anymore? And then you just like lose motivation for a little

bit and then you get excited and then you buy another domain name. You're like, okay, this is the project. And then you're like, this is the project I'm going to do. And then it's like that whole cycle. Yeah. I mean, oh my gosh, you hit the nail on the head. I then you're like, this is the project I want to do. And then it's like that whole cycle. Yeah. I mean, oh my gosh, you hit the nail on the head. I have so many, I bought juggler.ai the other day.

And yeah, I have so many, every domain name, every idea costs me, you know, I don't know, what is it? $10 or something?

Because I'll come up with a domain name and then, you know, 90% of those ideas, nothing happens, but you end up with all these domain names. The best is like, at least for me, like I see a domain name, like Namecheap, like your domain name expired. I'm like, oh yeah, that was a good idea a year ago.

I was like, I still do that. Nice. So tell us a bit about your story. So you used to be a programmer and you're running, you know, Voi Media and I think you said a laundromat or a cleaning business. So, yeah, tell us that whole story. I mean, that sounds like a really, really interesting story. Yeah.

So basically, I guess you guys do programming. My background is actually in computer science. So I went to school in upstate New York and I did CS. Basically, the reason why I did CS was because growing up, I was really big into video games. I love playing video games, like I guess most people. Yeah. So wait, what games did you play? I'm curious.

I used to play this game called Secrets of War. I'm not sure if you guys heard of it. Oh, I've never heard of that one. Oh, it sounds awesome. This game was awesome. Like it was literally the game that got me into like thinking about what programming or computer stuff was. Because at this time, it was like 15, 15 16 years ago like i just got my first

computer it was like a old compact like you know those massive screens right oh yeah yeah yeah and i got that because my neighbor purchased it for us uh this is like a long time ago we were pretty poor and then i was like oh this is so cool like internet just came up we learned aol you got those discs right it's just like oh yeah it's like I love this game because it really showed me like what was possible online I never I never knew about that until like I was playing this game and I emailed the developer and I guess this shows you at least for me kind of how the developer community was I emailed him and he was this guy in I think Netherlands or and I was like hey how do you make this thing this game and he's

like oh i programmed in like c sharp that was like a thing back then right c sharp oh yeah that's right yeah so i was like oh my god this is crazy i was like and then i was like he's like but you should probably learn like html first so then i started learning html for dummies and that's really kind of how i got started in and then i got really big into like just learning photoshop right because i was on the forums and like i'm not sure if you guys remember forums used to have of how I got started in. And then I got really big into like just learning Photoshop, right? Because I was on the forums and like, I'm not sure if you guys remember forums used to have like signatures where you can add like custom stuff. Oh yeah. I remember that. And then there would be the, uh, the automated signature where it would take like your level from wow. And it

would make a image out of it. Yeah, exactly. So that stuff was so fun for me. So I started doing those for people. And that's when I learned about Photoshop. And I was like, okay, well, I got to learn how to crack Photoshop. And then I learned to Torrents. And you go into this world of stuff that wears that you're like, oh my God, this is so crazy. This is so fun and exciting. So that's kind of how I did it. And I remember going to this website called Komodo Media. I'm not sure if you guys know, but this guy named Raji King.

No, I never heard of it. His name is like Raji on Twitter. And he made this really cool website that was, it was like jungle theme. And on the sidebar, it had like a little toggle that if you toggle it back and forth, the leaves on his website would grow. And it was like very like animated. I was like, whoa, this is so cool. Yeah. That sounds similar to another website I saw, which like right when flash was becoming like pretty popular, like you'd go to the website and it was just a blank screen. And all of a sudden a logo would just appear out of the screen and start spinning. And when you're used to like, you know, PHP, like zero JavaScript websites,

or like you'd, you'd click a checkbox and the whole website would refresh when you're used to that. And you see this, it's like, holy cow. I couldn't believe that was possible. Exactly. And that's, it's so funny because flash, I remember learning action script and that's how you made like flash stuff. And yeah, it's like so crazy. Like all, so basically like, as people see like this stuff really excited me. And then that led me into, for anyways, back to Raji. This is like crazy because I emailed him when I was like maybe 17 years old and he actually responded to me. And I was like, whoa, this is crazy. He like literally taught me like, Hey, yeah, this is a great career field for you. And you should learn HTML and CSS.

And I actually like maybe a few months ago, I actually messaged him on Twitter and say, Hey, by the way, like you kind of helped me start my career in programming. And it's crazy because he probably didn't think about it. A random email could really shape someone's future. And I think that's kind of what you guys are doing too. Sometimes you just need to hear somebody tell you, yeah, go do that. And it's crazy because he literally just told me, yeah, go learn HTML and CSS. And that's kind of how I got started even more into doing it because I saw his website. Yeah. That's, that's a really, really touching story. Yeah. It shows how important like every single interaction is. Yeah. And it's like, you don't even know it because he probably didn't know it. And then

it was like, oh yeah, like this is, and I, the reason why I found out was because it was like, oh yeah, I like emailed them and I looked through my old Gmail account. I was like, oh my God, like this grammar and English in this email is so crazy. I don't even know why he responded. But anyways, that's kind of how I got started into programming. But this sort of programming led me into learning more about startups in general, because at this time, Silicon Valley was a thing, right? Facebook was just coming out. Google was this massive company. MySpace, right, was really big at that time. And that's kind of how I started learning more programming because I was like, oh, MySpace, right? It was really big at that time. And that's kind of how I started learning more programming because I was like, oh, all these tech companies are making all

these money. I remember, I'm not sure if you guys remember, like Dig just came out at the time, right? Kevin Rose. Oh yeah. I remember Dig. Are they still around? So I think they got acquired by another company, but they're not like the same Dig as before, right? So like, yeah. But this is like that time that error of like i guess i guess you probably remember i think it was called like web 2.0 right like web 2.0 yeah yeah it's like that yeah that's right so it's like like 1.0 was the you know yeah click a checkbox whole thing refreshes 2.0 is where you really have this kind of like flash javascript kind of revolution yeah and yeah now we're in 3.0 where it's like you're just sending data over the wire. Yeah. Yeah. Maybe. Yeah. 2.0 was like, what's it called? Ajax just came out. Remember? Like,

people were like, oh my God, Ajax. Yeah, that's right. Ajax is so cool. It was like a thing that jQuery made it so easy to do. And like, you're writing jQuery code and it was like spaghetti code, like just calls everywhere. Just like crazy stuff. Yeah. We had Guillermo Rauch on the show to talk about Next.js and we were kind of reminiscing of Web 2.0 and what a total disaster it was. In a way, it's like, it actually made you more valuable as a web programmer because it was so hard. Oh yeah. It was so true. I look at programming now, I'm like, people don't realize like back then we were like coding for like quirks in the browser.

Like that was a crazy time. Yeah. You know, someone mentioned this the other day, they were talking about how they felt like, oh, I wish, you know, I was born earlier so I could work on the Atari games by myself and like release the game, which is me and an artist. But, but the thing is, is yeah, you would spend, you know, you know, maybe a 1500 hours trying to get the game to fit on the cartridge. Whereas now it's like, you just open up unity. Yeah, exactly. But anyways, so that's kind of, so basically with all this stuff, like, as you can see, I was like, so I was interested in so much stuff back. And I think as when you're young, you should be interested in a ton of things because you don't know what you really like until later on. And even then, like, it's always good to just know more than

people tell you you should know, right? I was just curious. So I was really starting to do startups. And that's when I was kind of just building things at this time. I was making my own Twitter clone, my own MySpace clone. And I was like, oh, if I build this stuff, maybe I'll get people to use my products, right? And that's kind of where I started just building software. And really, what I've learned around here was that I was really big into this mantra of, if you build it, they will come. And that's kind of what tech people were saying, hey, if you have a great product, customers will find you. Never into really marketing. I was like, I always thought marketing was bad as in, hey, if you do marketing, that means your product sucks. Because that's what I read online. And

that's sort of like, just like the theory. Yeah. I mean, that is a very, like, that's a very natural impulse. It's like marketing feels like, and I felt the same way, you know, until I really learned more about it is marketing feels like, you know, convincing someone to do something and it's like, well, people should do what's natural to them. And so that's, that's kind of your first instinct. And then you, then you kind of think about it and you're like, well, think about all the things you do and where you found out about those things. Right. And doing and and honestly if you think about it too like like slack for example everybody this is like a common slack almost a lot of people use slack and everybody's like oh slack so dominant because it's like natural effects and it's like network effects and oh yes all that's true but if you think about slack too they have like maybe 50

marketers on their team they're not doing nothing they're not doing nothing. They're like doing the branding. They're doing the outreach. They're calling big companies. They're calling small companies. So even big companies that somehow seem natural, they know that in order to truly grow and get their business out there, you need marketing people. And Slack does a good job of like conveying

that it's just like a natural growth, but any public company or Slack's a public company, I think they're acquired by Salesforce. They know that they need marketing. And of course, then say, so I don't know. That's why, that's why I think about it. It's like, if you truly want to grow your company, you sort of need some sort of marketing. At least it doesn't need to be scammy or anything like that. It just needs to be predictable for you as a business owner, because you want to be able to know, how can I bring in new customers in order to maintain my business and my employees?

So that's sort of like, but anyways, going back to like that story of me doing marketing, I moved out to Silicon Valley and then I started working for mint.com. So I was at mint doing front end development, not marketing at all. I was there for about less than a year. And the reason why I was there for less than a year is because I didn't like what I was doing at mint. I thought it was going to be like a tech startup. It was very corporate for me at that time. Mint got acquired by Intuit. And I just felt like this isn't what I came out here for. So then I left after a few months and I went back to work to Zarly. And Zarly was like a tech startup that raised a bunch of money.

And this is where I kind of got more into marketing because I was put into the marketing department in Zarly. So I was working with this lady called Lou Chen and she was like, hey, we need help installing all these tags for tracking, for marketing emails, for personalized stuff. And this is when for me at that time was like, oh wow, it's crazy that this is marketing. I was like, this is kind of just like programming, right? It's like personalization is kind of like you're programming some of the stuff, the database, you're pulling out the usernames, you're seeing what they're interested in, and then you're pulling into like an email, which is just like HTML, like a webpage, right? And then that's why I found interesting was that like, oh, all

these marketers, like they're really limited by their ability because they don't know how to program it, right? So that was like my thought, right? And that's how I got into. How is that different than like digital versus regular? So, I mean, I imagine even with regular marketing, you have a database and you have some kind of personalization. It's just that you have maybe this extra step where you have to like print a letter and send it to somebody. What would you feel like is the real big difference there between, you know, the kind of marketing that we get, you know, on our doorstep and digital marketing?

Yeah, I think the biggest... Yeah, that's a good question. With digital marketing, it's sort of like, I guess, mail or direct mail marketing for your mailman. I think what's the difference is that there's not that much personalization. And that's something that's a big thing coming up right now. You guys have heard a bit, the new iOS update, Google and Facebook killing all personalization ads. But the biggest difference is in a good or bad way, it just depends on how people think about it. Ads that you see online right now are more personalized to you. So it's stuff that people think, it's stuff that we think, hey, you might like this, or we think

you might be interested in this versus like mail on the door. It's kind of like, it's a, it's a free for all where it's like, Hey, maybe you'll need this thing. And so that's why people associate marketing with spam because they're used to like the mail coming in with like all sorts of offers that you might not know about. Yeah, that makes sense. I guess you, you need like a certain economy of scale, right? Like you have to, um, if you're going to print out, like literally print out the marketing and mail it to somebody, you're going to print out, like literally print out the marketing and mail it to somebody, you can't have the printer do something different for each person. It's just not cost effective. And so you end up just like everybody gets diapers. Like, does it matter who they are? They get a coupon for diapers.

But yeah, exactly. And that's the biggest difference between digital and physical mail. And that's why like Facebook was so revolutionary when it first came out because they were just tracking everything from a long time. You guys remember when Facebook first came out with like likes, remember that like button or whatever? Oh, like on different websites, you could like something. Yeah, yeah. That was like their first sort of like insight into personalization.

And that was a great Trojan horse, if you think about it, because they're just like, hey, let's get this button every page and people will tell us what they like. And then we'll use that to build a database, a data set, right? Yeah, that makes sense. And so, yeah, I mean, since it's just like, you know,

crackles of energy and not ink on paper, you could just, yeah, as you said, you could send a different ad to each person. Yeah, exactly. And that's why digital marketing is, that's the biggest difference between digital marketing and like the other marketing. But going back with like, kind of like just thinking about marketing in general, like the marketing that you would get in the mail, those guys doing those type of marketings

were great marketers. If people are thinking about studying marketing, those are the people you want to study because that copy and that sort of artwork that they send you needs to convert because kind of what you just said before, it's a spray and pray. So you're writing some of the best copy because you're trying to convince somebody they need this

even though they think they might not need it. Yeah, that makes sense. So you're at mint.com. For people who don't know, Mint was, I think, correct me if I'm wrong, but it's some way to like track your finances, right? Yep. And so they got acquired by Intuit.

And now actually I recently completed my Turbo. Actually, I was helping out my parents complete their Turbo tax. And at the end, there was sort of like a plug for Mint. It's like continue on Mint. And so, yeah, that acquisition actually makes a ton of sense now. But then you went to,

can you remind me the name of the startup after that? It was called Zarly, Z-A-R-L-Y. So what did Zarly do? So Zarly was kind of like, basically in the beginning, there were this platform for, you could request anything on them. Think about it as kind of like Uber Eats for anything back in the day. Oh, interesting. So is it like carpenter, painter type stuff or is it food delivery? perfected those and then gone on to more. Kind of like Uber's trying to do Postmates. They're all trying to build this network. And then it's like, hey, by the way, look, we can do everything.

Kind of like the Amazon model where they start off with books and then it's like, now it's everything, right? Yeah, that makes sense. In Zero to One, Peter Thiel talks about this, how you want to have a... It's better to have a small monopoly than to be... I think in his example, he says it's better to have a small monopoly than to be, I think in his example, he says, it's better to have a small monopoly than an airline. Even though an airline is giant, because it's not a monopoly,

there's so much competition. They actually don't make that much profit. So yeah, I think that totally makes sense. And so you were in the marketing department, but you're an engineer. And that's really where you got your first kind of deep dive into marketing. Yeah, exactly. And that's kind of where, your first kind of deep dive into marketing. Yeah, exactly.

And that's kind of where... And that thing for me too, it made sense because... And there's a few things that I think I made connections in this because Zorli was a well-funded company and we got tons of money, I think over $10 million. And I was just like, wow, this product's pretty good, right? I was like, what we have is good because we were making it. And I would say maybe I was biased, but I thought what we had was really good. Good website, good designers. We had a good checkout, but we couldn't get customers.

So then that kind of like dispelled the myth of, hey, you have a great product, people will come. And I was like, oh, maybe it's not true, right? And then that's kind of when I started learning more about like, what is this marketing thing? Maybe we do need it because I started looking into competitors. Like for example, a competitor of us was like Thumbtack. And I was like, wow, these guys are really growing really fast with like SEO. Let me go read about it. Because people, I tell brands all the time, if you want to see how companies are growing, just try to Google the CEO's name. Sometimes they do like talks about how they're growing. So that's a great way to get insights into how the business is doing. So the ceo of thumbtack

i think was like talking about seo and i was like oh maybe we should look into seo and then that's kind of that's like that was like i first like deep dive into like what is a marketing tactic or marketing thing to do right yeah that makes sense so just some background for folks seo is is search engine optimization and uh that's about where my knowledge ends. So maybe actually, Kevin, we have you on the show. Can you dive into like, yeah, how does SEO actually, I mean, I understand the point. The point is to kind of when someone searches for maybe food delivery that they would get Zarly first, right? And not Uber Eats. I mean, that's the premise. Like how does that actually work?

Mechanically, what is done to make that happen? Yeah. So yeah, SEO is basically, for people listening, it's kind of the top 10 links that you see on Google. So Google essentially tries to rank the top 10 websites. And it's crazy because there's tons of websites for a certain keyword, and Google only shows 10. But basically how it works is Google will rank you depending on how many other places link to you or other places are talking about you. And that's sort of like the basics. But then obviously the algorithm is so complex because it uses like links is the big one where let's say you have a website that's about a food blog. You can say, hey, go check out Kevin's delivery service if you want my food delivered to you. And then we would rank up for that delivery keyword. But in theory, how it works now is that Google's taking into account

all the social shares too, right? Your Twitter mentions, because people aren't linking that much anymore because no one's really has blogs, right? You've probably seen, it's kind of like personal blogs have gone away and it's more about Twitter accounts, Medium accounts. Google is developing like what people call like ghost signals where it's like branded names. So like let's say your website's called like whatever, Kevin Store. If someone says, hey, Kevin Store is really great, Google will now sort of extract that sort of brand term and say, hey, someone's talking about this. Let's give it more weight into their algorithm about where to rank up. But that's sort of like how the algorithm works. And of course, one big part about this is making sure you have content on your website that talks about that service or product that you're selling. So if you're talking about food, your website should

have content about food, food recipes, anything related to the space. That way Google can really index your website. Index just means like having Google sort of like having your site into their database and then maybe adding some categorizations of it. Like, hey, this website's about delivery and food and food recipes. So whenever we're thinking about search terms right to this sort of category, maybe let's try to rank this website and see if it should be a top 10 spot. Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, you really hit the nail on the head. I think having really good content and having the right sort of meta tags and getting the right social signals out there is super important.

Yeah, so you saw that Thumbtack was doing this really well. And even though, you know, Zarli might have a super slick product, they might be, let's say the 11th entry and Thumbtack is just killing it and they're getting all the top 10 entries. And so that made you realize just really how important marketing is.

Yeah, that's exactly what it was. And I was just like, wow, this is crazy how, at least for me at the time, was like, oh, it's crazy how the marketing team is... We had people, I'm like, how come it's not half the company, right? That's for me because I'm like, we're not getting any customers. How come we're just like, no one cares about this, right? Yeah, I said there's an interesting story about, actually, the founder of Zappos, the shoe company, he actually died tragically from a suicide this year. But actually, the story about how he started Zappos is really inspiring. He literally just started it with sales. So you'd go on Zappos.com. He had a website that he built himself in just pure HTML. And when you bought a shoe, he would actually literally walk over to Payless, buy the shoe, and then mail it to you. That was his entire business. And so people look at that and they say, well, he did nothing. But no,

he did all the sales and the marketing so that when you went to look for shoes online, you found Zappos first. And it turned out that was actually more important than warehousing or handling dropshipping or anything. Like once he had the right marketing, he could just go to the store, buy the shoe and then mail it to you. Yeah, exactly. And that's why I think marketing is so important now

for people to, and really what marketing is kind of like a research of saying, hey, can you market this product? And with marketing, at least with SEO, this is the great thing about SEO. And I think people should always be thinking about SEO when starting any brand is because Google will literally tell you the search volume of a product or keyword that people could be searching for. So if someone's searching for a product, you know that there's demand and that you know that you can sell them something. And now you just need to show up first, but at least you know that there's some desire to buy the product. Where I think, at least for me,

one of the mistakes I made when I was first programming was I would just come up with ideas myself and be like, oh, this is a great idea, but nobody wanted it. So that made marketing even harder, right? Yeah. It's a really, really good call. I did the same thing. I made a hockey game when I was in college. And, you know, growing up in Canada, I loved hockey. But I wanted a sort of really kind of like extreme hockey game. There was like skeletons in it and landmines and it was crazy. And I thought it was actually pretty fun. And actually, I think it did have actually a good premise. But where it failed is was in all the details. It's like,

I didn't really know just broadly what people wanted to get out of a video game. And so yeah, knowing your audiences is super, super important. And even if you might have the right sort of overall vision, you still need to know your audience to get all those details right. Yeah. It's so important because once you sort of get that right, you know kind of how to market your product, you know what they want to buy. And I think too, I want to tell people is just like making something unique and custom, you always make a ton more money. For example, like Airbnb, right? That's an idea that people are like, why would I ever let a stranger into my home? But if you really look at the story of Airbnb, and I think people should study those, is the founders struggle for years because you're basically making a market. You're sort of trying to generate demand. And for those type of companies,

it depends on where you are in your stage of life or what you want to do. You need to raise funding because you need to educate the market. And when you need to educate the market, that's always more expensive. So now when you think about Airbnb competitors, they're like, oh, hey, look, they can piggyback on Airbnb's market demand and desire that they've already created. So it's easier for them to go start a company versus before it was a crazy idea to start something like Airbnb. And they got very lucky that they made it. Kind of like Peter Thiel says, that's when you can kind of essentially make your own monopoly because they just created the market, they created the demand and they, Airbnb is now like a verb, right? Yeah, that's right.

I mean, also, I mean, the iPad comes to mind. I remember when the iPad came out, there were all these memes, like someone took nine iPhones in a grid and they duct taped them together and they're like, I have my own iPad, you know? And now it's kind of obvious. It's like, especially for kids and for people who don't have laptops, you know, who don't want that kind of, who need something sort of ultra portable. It's a no brainer now to get an iPad, but yeah, Apple really made that market. Yeah. And I think what you said is so important. Like when it's obvious, that's when like, you know, you've made it like, oh, Airbnb is so obvious. iPads are so obvious. And that's like, as a marketer, that's like the dream, right? made it like oh airbnb is so obvious ipads are so obvious and that's like as a marketer that's like the dream right oh when it's so obvious because it wasn't

obvious three years ago right yeah yeah totally so yeah so so at what point did you say like did you become a marketer at at zarly or or at some point you just said no i want to go into marketing and did you leave zarly at that point like how did that story unfold? Yeah. So at this time, I didn't think I was going to be a marketer, but what I wanted to do was I still wanted to do my own company. So I was still competing in stuff while at Zarly, like hackathons. I was competing in Startup Weekend San Francisco. I was at the team there and we won first place and then we went to qualcomm ventures to pitch them our product it was a great trip like we went to san diego for free pretty much we didn't win like the whatever half a million but yeah that was a great experience though so that sounds

awesome yeah it was so fun i was like oh first time in san diego i was like oh like this is an awesome place i want to live here that's like i want to live here yes it is beautiful they have um yeah lego land is there so we go go there for Legoland and it's great. I was like, oh, this is awesome. I want to live here. And we didn't win. But by this time, I was like, I was like trying to still try to do my own startups and stuff. And then I was like, oh, at this time I was at Zorley for about three years now. And then I was like, oh, I want to come back to New York. And basically I left Zorley. I came back to New York. I was living at home with my mom because I was like, I didn't know where I wanted to live yet. And this is when the idea to start Maid Sailors came, which is the cleaning company. And the reason why I started the cleaning company was because similar to when I was at Zarly, the businesses that I was doing really well on the Zarly platform at the time were the home cleaning companies. But the issue that we were running when we were running the company, when I was working at Zarly, was that the maids could only take so many jobs at a time before

they were booked up. And usually the best maids were booked up and say, hey guys, the platform's great. I just can't take any more cleanings because essentially it's recurring now, right? People just want the cleanings with the same person all the time. Oh yeah. You kind of work yourself out of business in terms know, in terms of Zarly, they do such a good job that people don't need them anymore. Exactly. So then for me, my idea was this. What if I make like an Uber for cleaners

where like they hire me, the company, and then I'm finding these sort of like cleaners to come in and I'll rotate people back and forth. That way, basically, that's literally what's called like Uber for cleaning. That's literally what my tagline was. Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, I think because the people too, that's good for them because they don't have to deal with, oh, you know, my cleaner moved and now I have to find another cleaner.

So you kind of take care of all of that, let's say, risk, for lack of a better word, and in exchange, you're able to provide kind of more value. It's exactly what you said. It's like, basically, we as a company now take the risk of, hey, did they show up on time? Did they clean properly? The refunds, right? All this stuff that could potentially go wrong with the cleaning. We as a company now say, hey, look, we'll guarantee this for you. And a big thing that I wanted to do at that time, which is kind of obvious now, was that we put our pricing online. So basically we have like what we call flat rate pricing, where I say, you have a studio, it's going to be like 110. You have a one bedroom, it's going to be 130. Where previous before how cleaning companies work,

like let's say Molly Maids or maids.com was that you would call them and then they would send some sort of rep to your home and say, hey, based on your size, this is how much it's going to be. And in theory, it's great because A, you charge the true price that it might cost. But B, it's also, if it's too expensive, you just wasted someone's time and you wasted the company's time about essentially getting a lead that didn't close. So for us, it's like, we didn't want to do this sort of like back and forth to the clients, like you're there. It's like this awkward conversation.

It's like, hey, I want to price it like SaaS companies at a time where SaaS companies now hide pricing, right? Because it's like, hey, put a demo with us, right? Where back then everybody had their pricing online. Yep. Yep. Well, yeah, I think SaaS is interesting. If you look at like the actual cloud stuff, there's like a race to the bottom.

But then when you look at the people who are in the middle, yeah, they're charging like unbelievable amounts. And sometimes it ramps up exponentially. So it's fine in the beginning and then you get here with a huge bill. Yep. Asana is like that too. We use Asana here and it's like, okay, it's great. We just little upgrade it.

And they're like, you need to buy 10 seats at once. And I'm like, I just need one more seat. They're like, no, you're above the plan. I'm like, this makes no sense. So anyways, that's how I started the cleaning company. And that was my unique way of cleaning. Hey, let's just put our pricing online and then you can book online. And this is, for made sellers, this is where I truly learned how to do more marketing. Because at this time, I quit my job and I was like, I want to make this

company successful. I want to go all in on marketing. And that's when I started reading books, SEO. I started learning how to rank stuff. I started learning about Google My Businesses. And really for me, when I started SEO and sort of marketing, I wanted to see how are people making money online through some sort of like cutthroat industry. So I was looking into like how affiliate marketers were ranking their stuff because these guys are taking like a small cut of a cut. So then I was like looking at what these guys were doing and sort of kind of reverse engineering their tactics. Yeah, that makes sense. And also, as you said, by starting that, there are all maids.com, there's a lot of companies out there. And so the way you differentiated yourself with your pricing

model, that needed to get out there. Like people need to see that, oh, I don't have to call this company and let them do an inspection and take a day off work. And then, oh, the price is too expensive. Like they needed to know that your alternative existed. And so you needed to get that word out there. And especially in the beginning, get that word out there in like a cost effective way,

or at least measure the ROI and everything. So I think that's a really good way to really dive into the deep end on marketing. Yeah. And that was a big thing for us. It's like, Hey, come to us because remember, like we didn't want to waste time. We want to, and the reason too, with marketing is we want to be able to track the conversion directly and then say, Hey, was this effective? So if someone could book directly online, then you know, it works. It's kind of like, you like now if someone says, call to book, it's like, okay, what's the sales cycle? You have to hold, you have to CRM, you have to track them. Okay, what's the sort of process? It's so complicated. Digital marketing has made it so easy where you can make it so someone can

literally give you their credit card right now. You can say, yep, this thing was profitable or not profitable. Yeah. Did you use any software to help you with all of that? Like Salesforce comes to mind or SugarCRM or these things. A lot of them now have some forecasting built in where they'll kind of replay what happened and they'll give you advice. Like maybe you should have emailed this person more or things like that. Have you looked into any of this? And even through to today, have you looked into a lot of the sort of automated marketing or ML marketing? What's kind of your take on that? Yeah. So basically in the beginning for made sellers, I wanted to do like my own custom

website, like Zany Developer, right? Where it's like, hey, I can make my own custom CRM. I can make my own custom checkout. I was like, I know Stripe. I know APIs. I know how to track all this stuff, right? So I was like, I'm not going to I know APIs. I know how to track all this stuff, right? So I was like, I'm not going to use WordPress. WordPress sucks, right? So that's really like what... So basically in the beginning, I built it all. And then when I was basically doing marketing, I was like, okay, I need to create landing pages. And I was just like, oh, okay, now I got to go into my code editor. I got to go deploy it back to GitHub. I got to push it to Heroku. I was like, I just want to make a simple text change. And then that's where I was like, okay, I can see why marketers

now get pissed off at developers because they don't want to do the simple stuff because it's like tedious, but it's so necessary for marketing to maybe change the headline, change the image, because you want to see if this is going to give you a different result. And pretty much after a few months, I was like, okay, I don't want to be doing the coding. I really want to be doing the marketing and I want to be doing all the tests. And then that's when I reconverted the website into WordPress with like a custom theme. And then that's when I started using the software platform called Launch27 that allowed us to take bookings online, but at the same time, manage all the cleaners, manage all the customers and emails.

And really at that point, I was just completely focused on bringing in new customers, changing the marketing and messaging and the language of the website. And Launch27 is sort of like that CRM that you're saying that gives us all these analytics of how much revenue you're bringing, how much customers you're bringing, who's booking, maybe what are some of the best upsells, et cetera. So yeah, I haven't heard of that one. Is Launch27, so just a bit of background for people. So CMS is Customer Management System. And the difference between a CMS and like a database

is that you have some business logic. You know, at the simplest, you have more advanced fields like zip code, which, you know, if you put in someone's zip code and you want to get back their city, if you just use a regular database, you have to do that by hand. A CRM could have some logic. It could know about the relationship between zip codes and cities. And so you can imagine a whole bunch of other business logic, especially around pricing, maybe in taxes. And so it really helps you a lot more than just using MongoDB or something. But traditionally CMS is where these

monolithic things where the CMS would have its own website. And so you would go into the CMS website and put in all this information. And then if you wanted to show that information on your own website, they would provide some kind of API. It usually wasn't very good because that wasn't their real business. So then what ended up happening was people started coming up with these things called headless CMS. And a headless CMS is one where they say, we're not going to do a front end at all. And we're just going to focus 100% on writing the cleanest, nicest API. And so we're going to let you take this customer data and render it or put it on a phone or do whatever you want. And so that's become a big thing

nowadays. And so is Launch27 like a headless CMS or what category does it fall into? Yeah, it's essentially like a headless CMS thing where basically, yeah, it's exactly what you said. It's kind of like a database with just like more advanced logic. It'll tell you like, you know, your customers, how many times they're booking, who's your best customer, you know, where they live, are they in your service area? We use it all for almost everything. It allows us to charge people, to refund people. And yeah, Launch has really developed for services businesses. And the founders started their own cleaning company. So he basically built it out of a need, which is great because he knew all the pain points. And CMS or some sort of CRM system,

I think is so key to a lot of businesses just so you can have all this data. And then you could use it later on to see like how to upsell, how to downsell, how to market better. So yeah, I think that's exactly what Launch27 is. Cool. It makes sense. And so, yeah, I mean, I'm sure every developer has the same story where, you know, you come out saying, oh, this has 99% of what I need. I'm going to write it from scratch. And that is super, super fulfilling. And I don't discourage people from doing that at all. But as soon as you go into maintenance mode, that's when you realize like, oh, as cool as it was to build that,

it's not really cool anymore. And now I'm still spending a bunch of time on it. I was actually thinking the other day about what to do with our blog. We're on, we're on blogger and yeah. And it's, it's, it's tough because building it yourself really opens up a lot of doors, but the maintenance is, is a big issue. So the, you have the, um, the site up and running, you have, you know, really solid marketing, you have WordPress, um, you have this launch 27. And so my guess is on the marketing side, uh, on side, on the outbound side, let's say you're doing Facebook ads, Google ads, SEO, emails probably, like you have email lists. Can you kind of walk us through what your marketing kind of looks like nowadays?

Yeah. So marketing for local businesses is, I think, so great because at least something like Google has made it really easy for local businesses to get in front of people. So when I was first starting, Google Maps, you guys, obviously everybody knows Google Maps, but you know how now there's those listings of businesses? Yeah. When I was doing the made company, those just came out. So that was a crazy boost for us in traffic and sort of calls that we were getting. So we were optimizing to be basically number one there. Is that sponsored? I don't actually know where that data comes from. So Google just added the sponsored stuff maybe a year ago, but for almost a few, two, three years, it was great for people like us where it was free

or quote unquote free, right? Where basically Google would just give you the one or two spots for free. But now it's sponsored. But now instead of seeing three, you'll see five, but I think two are sponsored. Oh, I see. And the other three come from, do you ask Google to put you on the list or are they just scanning businesses? How does that work? Yeah. So you basically just confirm with Google that you're a real business. So they have this thing called Google My Business where you apply and then they make you upload like your business license, your phone number. They'll call you.

The program is really designed to get local businesses traffic, right? So they want to make sure that you're legit. And the reason why is because there's a lot of companies, obviously, you know, with any sort of business out there, there's people that basically made fake listings in order to just control the market. Yeah. Yeah. Totally makes sense. Cool. So my business, so that was, I think, a big part of it. A big part of it. And then also another big one for us, it was Yelp.

People use Yelp here in New York City a lot. And so basically for any business, the way we thought about it was trying to think about where your customer is potentially going to find you, right? So for right now, if you're like a local food company, you probably need to be on Seamless. You probably need to be on Uber Eats. You probably need to be on DoorDash because now these are just sources of traffic for your business. And you need to be on there because they just have so much users that probably want food and you need to at least show up somehow, right? I think sometimes businesses make mistakes where it's like, kind of what you said before, like, Hey, people will just find me.

I'm like, that's not how things work. That's not how things work. Yeah, totally. So you mentioned a lot of different things. There's Yelp, there's Google, there's, there's my business, there's a different part of Google. Like, how do you, as this is getting a bit more in the technical side, how do you as a developer or, you know or a marketer, maybe if it's a smaller company and you're the marketer is also doing some development, how do you talk to all of these different systems? Is there a middle layer that you use or is it really just going through looking at the My Business API, looking at the Yelp API and just doing it one at a time? Yeah, that's essentially what it is. There there's some services out there

that are trying to make it all like into one, especially because there's Yelp reviews, there's Google reviews, and you have to like basically manage all these platforms. So now there's APIs getting built around a central like database or some sort of central platform where you can like talk to people on here. But yeah, for right now, how we do it is

we just have people just log into these accounts one by one and respond to people one by one. It's just like manual work. And that's what we've seen the best. But even with Yelp, for example, Yelp doesn't like, Yelp will notify you of, let's say a new request. So we have like a Zapier that will ping our Slack that says, hey, look, someone on Yelp sent you a message, log in now to check in and respond. Oh, that's a really good that says, hey, look, someone on Yelp sent you a message. Log in now to check in and respond. Oh, that's a really good idea. So yeah, let me cover that real quick. So Zapier is this awesome product.

Actually, we should definitely do a show on Zapier in the future, but there's other ones that are starting to come up, but Zapier has really taken the market, at least for now. And the idea is, similar to what we were saying, you might want to do marketing, multi-channel marketing, but you don't want to be an expert on the Yelp API, the Google API, right? Or you could be a developer

and have many different platforms you run on, like you could have Android, iOS, et cetera. And so what Zapier does is it basically allows you to pass messages and notifications between all these different systems in a WYSIWYG kind of way. So you could just say, and actually we have a Zapier for the show where when someone ats us on Twitter, Zapier goes and writes the tweet onto a channel in our Discord. Of course, now that I said that, we'll probably get, who knows what will happen, but it's a really cool feature where people can just go to this

channel on Discord and just see what folks are saying about the show. And it allows them to kind of like start threads and conversations. So yeah, Zapier is amazing. And so I think what you're saying, Kevin, is Zapier has connected your Yelp and your Slack so that you can get notified right away and you don't have to be monitoring two different things. Exactly. And like, yeah, Zapier is like awesome. Like we use it for like almost everything here for like the cleaning company or for like, let's say, Void Media when we're onboarding new clients, there's some sort of zap there. It's one of those companies that like, at least for me, I'm like,

why didn't I build this, right? Why didn't I build this? Yeah, I know. Well, probably, you know, the challenge, like you said, not only building it, but you have to market it. It's like, how do you market?

Like, I don't even know what the market is. I mean, obviously it's software developers, but like within software developers, I don't really know like how I would market Zapier. I mean, you'd probably be a good person to answer that one. Zapier probably, I've studied Zapier's marketing. They have the best SEO strategy of like ever seen. They have millions of organic visitors a month and their marketing strategy is this. So let's obviously we're using Zencaster, right? So let's say you also have like Anchor to like, you know, whatever to host your podcast. They have a page called Zapier Zencaster to Anchor.

And basically, they just generate all these variations of marketing tools, tools, software tools. And they have tons and tons of these SEO pages that people will search for. People probably search for how to integrate Zencast with Anchor. And Zapier probably ranks number one. Oh, my gosh. I mean you you really just opened it up completely because that's exactly what happened i looked up how do i send messages from twitter to discord and and it just happened yeah you're right so so they've

gone through and done the n squared thing right of all the different things you can connect to them and they've built landing pages for all of them yep and their landing pages are like and i think too for people listening like their landing pages are really well thought out they have like reviews they have like the connections they have like sometimes they have like editorial comments of like why the software is good or bad right so they've done a really good job of like educating the user and this shows google like hey we should be number one yeah i mean this is a real i'm so glad we brought this up. I mean, this is such a good call out because Zapier from a tech standpoint, I mean, it's laborious to integrate all these things,

but it's, as you said, it's not hard. And so people might look at that and say, yeah, I could have built this when I was in high school and I'd have a multimillion dollar company. But no, it's like, it's the SEO and it's getting to the top of the list and everything. That is what separates Zapier from all the other people who have the same idea at the same time.

Yeah. Zapier is awesome. And yeah, there's a ton of competitors now, but it's going to be a while to take them down just because this organic flywheel that they built is just crazy. Yeah. So let's jump into that. So what is a flywheel and why do marketers keep talking about that? So basically, a flywheel is just a way to just generate traffic or generate

customers in a repeatable fashion, right? So for example, if we're talking about Zapier, Zapier probably found out that, hey, if we're building these sort of like comparison pages, essentially, or integration pages, I think that's what they call them, integration pages. They basically said like, hey, and basically how it starts off with any business is you kind of have a hypothesis or a test, say, hey, let's make 10 of these, right? And that way, kind of what you said before too, it's like, this is a lot of work, right? It's developing all these pages, tons and tons of work. So you don't want to go and just like have a whole strategy of building this and you

don't know if it works. So basically, Zapier probably did. I think they did this because I was listening to one of their top marketers and he was kind of talking about this. They had this strategy or this theory, okay, if we make these integration pages and we can rank organically, will that increase the user signups or will that increase trials, you know, trials essentially. Right. And pretty much what they said after a few months of testing this, they saw that organic traffic was bringing them tons of qualified leads. And now they stay pretty much said, Hey, this, this sort of integration pages is working well. So then they basically now can,

we said went to the database and basically looked at all the top integrations and started making integration pages. And then this basically generate this huge flywheel of organic traffic for people looking for these sort of integrations for their system and then that's sort of now where they're getting they said that they're getting most of their leads and free trials from organic now because this system has just worked well so well for them yeah so if another company has done this really well too is i think we mentioned them before, Airbnb. So Airbnb also has these travel pages that they are using now to rank above Expedia or all these Travelocity companies. Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah. And imagine just all the different things that Zapier tried that

didn't work, right? I mean, that's another thing that we don't really think about, but not only do you have to do good marketing, but you have to have the velocity to try a lot of things, to pivot a lot. You have to have that synergy between your marketers and your engineers, or if you're doing it all, you have to be able to build systems

that can be flexible and that have that velocity. Because I'm sure they probably tried Facebook ads. They probably tried Google ads. Maybe they set up a My Business for SF, right? If they're an SF. And then they settled on that one thing that works. Yeah, exactly. And that's why, going back to marketing,

sometimes what you read online or what you see from these companies, they're only talking about the things that worked. And a lot of times stuff doesn't work, but they don't post that. People aren't posting all the failures. So this is why sometimes for marketing or people thinking about marketing is think about this as a successful experiment that they did, but this might not work for you. It might don't get demoralized by this because like, hey, it doesn't mean that you suck or your company sucks. It just, maybe this isn't the way that it's going to work for your brand or your service.

Yeah, that totally makes sense. And I believe, correct me if I'm wrong here, but I believe the flywheel comes from like actual, like motor engines where you have this wheel and when the wheel is spinning, so just like a bit of physics stuff to geek out on, you know, if you have an engine with a piston, the way the engine works is when the piston is like in the right spot, it's kind of like pushing a swing, right?

Like you want to push a swing at the right time. If you push the swing when it's coming back to you, it's just going to slow it down, right? And same kind of thing with the piston, you want to make a little gas explosion at the right time to kind of push the piston the way you'd push a swing on a swing set. And you can't do that if the piston isn't moving, right? And so a flywheel is kind of similar where, you know, you have to, you know, for old motorboats, you'd have to actually pull a cord or, you know, if you have one of those like gas powered lawnmower or something, you would pull a cord to start the wheel. And then once it's going, then the small bursts of energy can kind

of keep it going, but it needs you to kind of kick it off. And the same way, you know, we've talked a lot about this, you know, you might have really great ideas or great companies, but you need marketing to get that wheel going. And then if it's, if it's a really solid plan, then through word of mouth and through things like that, the wheel can even just go on its own, but you need that initial push. Exactly. And yeah, I think marketing just helps you get that initial push. And then once you have marketing, like kind of like we're talking about Zapier right now, right? Think about it. Like they're just getting free press because we love the product. You have a great product plus great marketing. People are going to talk about it and you're going to get tons of more customers. Yeah, that makes sense. So actually, I want to talk about ROI. Before we go into that,

what happens with Zapier now? So look at Facebook, for example, or Google. What do their marketing departments do? Because I mean, clearly the brand is ubiquitous, right? So are they done? What did they do at this point? I think what happens with every company is, at least for something like Zapier, it's initially kind of what we said before, Zapier was pretty much like the only one out there. They're the only one that's doing this sort of integration. But now you're probably seeing it too. There's so many Zapier clones coming out now that's pretty much saying like, hey, look,

we're Zapier, but cheaper, right? It's like the typical SaaS thing. We're Zapier, but cheaper, right? So I think right now what's happening with api is they're probably at least from what i've seen is like they're just doing like deeper integrations with certain businesses like enterprise companies uh what i've seen companies do now is like companies like godaddy for example massive like domain name provider so basically what they do is they basically try to get into these backends of these

systems to sort of have like these third party relationships, like deep integrations to like, hey, when you have a new website, by the way, also install Zapier for your company. That way you can do all this crazy stuff. Kind of like themes do that in like WordPress where like they're prebuilt, right? So like now it's like more of like these like customer, more like business to business marketing relationships. Yeah, that totally makes sense i mean i think a good parallel to that is the iphone where and this is a bit of speculation so take this with a grain of salt but you know an iphone came out like it was it was the smartphone i mean it just totally dominated like no one was ever going to use a stylus again for their phone oh i guess unless you unless you have the Galaxy Note. But yeah, so they came out and they were just ubiquitous. And now I think you're starting to see, and this loops

back to what you said earlier with the iOS, I think it's 14, the tracking, disabling, and all of that, is Apple's going to start positioning themselves as like the Ferrari of smartphones because there's so much upward pressure from, you know, cheaper phones like Android and the Xiaomi and all of that, and all of the hardware that supports those OSs. And so, yeah, Apple is becoming more of like a luxury brand, which is kind of how they started.

And so, yeah, I think Zapier might do something similar where they'll get more into enterprise and they'll be kind of like the IBM, because like the IBM because it's very, very hard to, even if you can compete, it's always a race to the bottom. And so you have to change your business model once you're no longer kind of novel. Yeah. And that sucks too, because like Zapier is great for like regular consumers like us. It's pretty cheap.

It's pretty affordable. But kind of what we were talking about earlier, this podcast, it's like eventually you move up market and then it becomes way too expensive to sort of even use this platform. It sucks because they kind of leave like users like us behind. Yep. Yeah, totally makes sense. So before we get into ROI, maybe it's good to just kind of give a background on, you know, if someone's out there, maybe I'll say there's two kinds of people out there in the audience with respect to marketing. There's people who, let's say they're in high school, they're in college, and they might have a cool idea, but zero, you know, capital. And so

they want to, you know, get their idea out there, start that flywheel and kind of really kickstart something from the ground up. And then there's also people who might work at a small business or even a large business. And they feel like they've listened to you and they want to do marketing better. What sort of advice would you give to those people? It could be the same or it could be two different sets of advice. Yeah, I think like, let's say someone wants to do marketing or wants to test something out. And basically, I have a friend right now that wants to sell a product product and she's like, oh, I want to sell this product. It's going to cost me like 150K to basically get it produced, manufacture it, and then also get the labeling. And really

what I told her was this. I was like, hey, think about what would you do if you had that product or service and pretend that you have it. Get your website up, get your Twitter account up, get your Instagram account up, get the videos up, creatives up, and then actually try to market it as if you had that product or service. Because really what you want to do now is learn, do people actually want to buy this thing or not? And that's really where I tell business owners or founders right now is try to see if there's actually demand for this. And you can run ads, Facebook ads or Google ads to see, can you do this? And the thing about this too is if this sort of frustrates you and you can't do it, then maybe you can't sell the product. Because even though we're an ad agency and we do ads for founders, the best founders

that we work with are actually doing the marketing themselves with us. And we're there to help them because we always tell people, you know your business better than we will ever do. You care about it more than we'll ever do. Like, yes, we're working with you. But I mean, you guys probably know it's like you as your company, it's like your baby. You think about it more than we'll ever think about it. For us, okay, let's think about it for two, three hours a day. For you, you're thinking about 24 hours a day. So there's something to be said about you also helping the agency or anybody you're working with, with the marketing and also learning about marketing. That way you truly understand A-B testing, creative testing, angle testing, landing pages. And really for you, someone starting out, do all this stuff first and see if you can try to get some sort of demand for your product or service. And this way,

you don't have to spend all this money on something that potentially you know that you can try to get some sort of demand for your product or service. And this way, you don't have to spend all this money on something that potentially you know that you can't sell or that you essentially just maybe figure out that there's no angle or market for. Yeah, totally makes sense. So I mean, I don't think you need a lot of money to get this started. So let's say you're in high school, you have some idea,

you set aside maybe $50. You say, I'm gonna run Facebook ads or maybe you even just look at for free, you can look at, Google trends or try and look to run Google analytics on your landing page. And you could try to, you know, climb your way up to finding that niche that people really want. And it doesn't take a lot, a lot to do that. Yeah, exactly. And I think that is the best way to start too. It's like, use that money to test your product or service because the worst thing that could happen is, and I've seen this before too, it's someone invests 10 to 20K on a product, like an e-commerce product, and then they can't find people to buy

it. And then they're stuck with this in their garage for like a year, right? Yep. Yep. Yeah, exactly. I mean, we've seen, and we've seen like even more stories than that. I mean, look at like Juicero. Yeah. I was crazy. Yeah. Oh my God. So just some background, Juicero, it was like a juicer where you would have to buy these very specifically. So you'd pay a ton for the juicer and then it would arrive at your house. You'd buy these like weird looking packets and the juicer would basically squeeze out these packets. And there was also like DRM. So they had protection.

Like if you bought someone else's packet, you know, the juicer would like, you know, wag its finger at you. And like it provided like zero value over just like taking an orange and squeezing it right yeah you know and actually what you know i don't even know how how to relate that to marketing because in one sense it was a huge marketing victory that they were even able to get to where they were but on the other hand it's like yeah i mean i think starting small and

realizing that yeah that that market just really isn't there organically. I mean, you can get people excited about just about anything, but, but you know, the product market is just not there. Just figure it. You can figure that out for 50 bucks and have saved Juicero millions. Yeah. The Juicero story was so funny because like, I guess people listening right now that literally shows you that marketing works for a product that's like a dud. It's like literally someone made a YouTube video, right? That was just like, hey, why do I need you, Sarah? Why can't I just squeeze the bag?

And people are like, oh, yeah, you can just squeeze the bag. That was so funny. But yeah, that kind of shows you marketing could be used for good or evil, right? And they used it to raise, what, hundreds of millions of dollars, from like one of the top vc firms yeah that's right i have a story i mean this is a this person won't get offended i don't think it's a friend of mine and i won't say who it is but they were working for pebble and uh pebble you know went out of business i think they were acquired but it was kind of a fire sale you know they're kind of lamenting that they joined pebble it's like oh i kind of made a bad decision.

And I was telling them, well, you know, there's nothing you really, it's totally out of your domain. I mean, he's a hardware engineer, so he's not too plugged into the product. And then he told me, and this was years ago, and he told me, oh, but I got this good gig,

so I don't feel too bad. I'm like, oh, where are you going? He said, Juicero. Oh my God. I was like, oh no. Jesus. That was so crazy. Yeah. So that shows you marketing works and they did it. I don't know what the team was like. I would go find those marketers on the Juicero team. Like, Hey, can you market my product? Because you did something right. Yeah. Yeah. It's so true. So how do people,

you know, let's say that we, this, this let's say we do that. And, and so whether we're spending $50 or we're spending a hundred thousand dollars, um, you know, how do we measure if we're getting kind of a return on that? I feel like that question is actually difficult to answer, right? Because it's totally counterfactual. Like you would have to say, you know, if I didn't run this ad, would these people have come to my website anyways? And, and, and because I ran the ad, how many people have come to my website anyways? And because I ran the ad, how many people came to my website not using the ad because they talked to somebody? It's this partially observable, counterfactual evaluation. It just seems almost impossible to answer that, right? That question is so hard to answer because for every business, it depends on kind of like what they're trying to do. Right. So for example, we work with some VC funded companies

and like you already know, like all they care about is growth and ROI is not really a number they care about. They just want to say, Hey, we just want to acquire more customers that are competitors, but later on we'll sort of figure that out. Right. So depending on your business, depending on basically marketing is kind of like how much money do you want to spend to acquire a customer and how much can you stomach before you become broke? Right. So that makes sense. So basically, but the way you should be thinking about ROI, because we do work with a lot of founders that it's their own money. When it's your own money, you want to make sure that you're profitable. about it is calculate all your operating costs. Okay. How much are you paying yourself? How much are you paying your staff? How much are you sort of maybe for your warehouse, for your shipping, right? If you're doing e-commerce, what are the raw costs of goods? And then figure out what those

raw costs of goods are and then figure out how much you want to sell it for and then find your profit margin. And then that's sort of like the number that you can say like, hey, let's have a $100 widget. It cost me $50 all in to manufacture and ship it. So that means for marketing spend, you can only spend $50 to acquire a customer. And if you spend 50, that means you broke even. And that means you sort of got one customer, but you didn't make any money. Now, if you spend 30 bucks to acquire a customer, that means now you made $20 in profit. So now you can say, hey, this is great.

This marketing channel is working for me because I'm acquiring customers profitably. But other times you might want to spend $50 to acquire the customer and not break even because you know that down the line, you have another product that you can sell to them. So then this is really what more SaaS companies do is they will sort of try to hire customers that break even

because they know that later down the line, they can upgrade them to more plans or add some sort of upsells. But really becoming ROI profitable, it depends on your business model and sort of how much money you have in the bank to sort of afford marketing or what stage of growth you are. Because even if you're a bootstrap startup, sometimes you want to grow faster because you could be selling your company. So you want to show growth numbers, right? And get a higher valuation and stuff like that. Yeah, it totally makes sense. I think another thing too is, you know, it's another thing that's probably really difficult to measure, but really important is the marginalization factor, right? Like it's, you probably get

more value out of spending $10 and out of spending, you don't get two times the value for spending $20 all the time. Right. So like as you start spending more and more, my guess is each dollar will get you for like less and less. Like that's just true when you buy almost anything. That's very true. Yeah. As you spend more, like in the beginning, it's like you get lots of great wins, very high ROI.

And then as you spend more money, it becomes like less and less, right? Yeah. Are there any tools to measure that? Or is it on a case-by-case basis, like global? Have you developed any like global insights or is it just something you have to measure each time and see what happens? For us, like we've been working with some companies, at least for here that like spend over a million dollars a month on Facebook ads and it's still pretty good. Whereas for some companies it's not good. It just really depends. And this is why I think

for people listening, it's very important to just be thinking about different channels. Like SEO, for example, we talked about SEO, but that, I mean, you probably know that's a channel that maybe works year two or three. So the first two years, you don't expect any ROI on that because you're not going to get any. So this is why developing this muscle for channels makes sense. As you make more businesses, you say, okay, let me start SEO now because for my previous business, I know it took me a year and a half. So let's start Facebook ads for the next year to bring in customers while that SEO flywheel kicks in. Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah. I mean, this is super, super fascinating.

So for people who are just starting out and want to try some of this on their own, I mean, we mentioned Zapier and we mentioned, what was the headless CMS that you mentioned? So we use Launch27. Launch27. What are some good marketing tools for folks who are, maybe they have built their first app and it's an app that provides some value that is missing and really can add value to people. And the people just have to kind of know about it, you know, and they might have zero background in marketing. So, you know, some of this, like running a Facebook ad, you don't really need a tool for that. I think, as you mentioned, Photoshop is probably really important to make sure you have a good, a nice thumbnail and everything. But beyond just like the text editor and the photo editor, like are there tools that you recommend for people to, you know, market their app or their site and especially do the

tracking and all of that? Yeah, I would say one of the best tools that I love using, it's called Ahrefs. Have you guys heard of it? A-H-R-E-F-S dot com. It's like kind of like the anchor thing for H-R-E-S-S. I know, I've never heard of that. It's called Ahrefs. Ahrefs.com. Ahrefs, yep. It's my favorite marketing tool. It's pretty pricey just for people to understand. It's about 180 a month. But really with this tool, it basically gives you like, it's like business intelligence tool. If you have a competitor out there, if they have a website, you can plug it into their service and it'll tell you how much traffic they're getting, what keywords they're ranking for, what Google ads are running, the text of the Google ads.

So you can see like how they're marketing the product, what landing pages they're running, and it gives you insights into how they're growing. So you can see like their growth trajectory as well up to like a year or so. So this is probably one of my favorite tools out there that anybody could use. And literally like you can spy anybody, right? So you can look at like apple.com and see like, oh, wow, they're growing so fast, right? Oh, very cool. I've seen one that's very specific to software. It's called BuiltWith. And you can go to BuiltWith and see the trends and everything. Yeah. BuiltWith is awesome. But think about it like, yeah, this is kind of like a BuiltWith.

I think Ahrefs, it's more user-friendly. I think BuiltWith is like super developer. So yeah, I use that. And then the next best tool I think is just Google Keyword Planner. It's a free tool by Google. And it basically allows you to plug in whatever keyword and it shows you the volume. I think the biggest thing that I want people to understand is understanding search volume of a business, of a product,

of a service will really allow you to know, should I build this or should I not build this? If search volume is like 10, maybe there's not much demand, but it could be going up, right? Which is great. So track that over time. And then again, you could use this to sort of see like, for example, made service NYC. I think we get about 500 searches a month. And then we're like, Oh, this is pretty good. Like people are searching for this service. I can make a product in this space because there's demand for this service that I want to sell. Yeah. That's a really good point. So it's how is keyword planner different than Google trends? I think Google trends is more about, I think they're pretty similar actually, but I think Google keyword planner has more data because it's based out of Google AdWords data.

Ah, got it. Now, the other thing too is you might have an idea and you often don't know the right, let's say, language to express that data. For example, Zapier, you might say something pretty technical like API joining platform. And it turns out even though you have the right idea, no one's actually, the customers aren't actually using that language, right? And so you could play around with like adjacent terms and kind of climb your way up to finding out like, what, when my customer, you know, is searching, like, what are they searching when they actually

want my product? Exactly. And I think what you said, Jason, is so important because us as developers or creators, we want to name things our way, but no one calls it that. And it's like, sometimes you just got to go back to the basics of like, what are normal humans calling things, right? Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And I think sometimes the value, especially in software, sometimes the value of something

is that you're kind of like making something complicated, really simple. So like imagine if you're using like some really complicated, like long-term, short-term memory, you know, neural network, but you're really trying to do anomaly detection. Also, if you start plugging in like LTSM neural network, it's're, it's like you're, you're missing the audience. Like the whole point is the audience doesn't want to think about that. They want anomaly detection. Yeah. It's amazing. Sometimes you put things into keyword planner and you realize like,

Oh, like this is the most popular way to call something. Yeah, exactly. It's so, it's so good. It's so awesome. I love using keyword planner.

Cool. Yeah. I've never heard of that. I'm definitely going to check it out. And I think, I think you're, you're, you're spot on that the Google Trends

is probably more something they did from scanning news pages and stuff, which is going to be pretty biased to news and things that make the news versus Keyword Planner is really going to be more connected, like correlated to what people are searching for, which is really what matters when you're doing SEO. Yeah. It matters so much. And I tell people all the time, you search for things all the time. Think about it. How do you find things? And that's where you want your brand to be or service be because people search every single day. Yeah. That makes sense. And so besides the

made business, you have Voi Media. And so is that like a solo operation or do you have a team of folks? How does that work? Yeah. So for Voi Media, we help like other businesses with ads. So yeah, Voi Media right now, my company, we have about 40 employees that work for me there. So cool. And so what's that like?

Well, I mean, no, now, now it's with COVID. So, so let's, let's rewind the clock and go pre-COVID. And so what is a day like? If it's in New York City, it's probably like maybe in a high rise or something. But what's it like to work at Voi Media? Yeah, so for working at Voi, really, we help clients with a bunch of their Facebook ads. That's like the number one thing that we do for them. It's when we say Facebook ads too, really what we're doing now is really managing all the creatives for them. It's when we say Facebook ads too, really what we're doing now is really managing all the

creatives for them, how we're going to sell their product creatively with videos, images, and then we upload that to Facebook to market to them. But usually what we're coming up with for clients is different hooks, different angles. And we're also thinking about different ways for them to sell a product with funnels. Like maybe they need a sales page. Maybe they need like an advertorial. Maybe they need a quiz funnel. Maybe they need like an advertorial. Maybe they need a quiz funnel. So that's kind of what we do here at Voi is really thinking about them. But really for us,

the brands that we work with are more like, hey, we have a proven product that we've sold before. How can you guys make it better? We don't really work with too many brands that are just kind of brand new because we just know this, that we can't help those companies at the moment with the way we do things. That makes it, that really resonates with me.

My day job, I do, I do machine learning and decision-making AI. And so occasionally we'll get people like, you know, other people in the company, other teams coming to us, you know, asking for our help. And the first thing we tell them is do something simple by yourself. Like before you bring in the AI department, do something really simple and let's see what happens. And I think, you know, that sounds like that kind of translates here as well. Like there's a lot that people can do, businesses can do, or even people can do on their own and a lot they can learn. And that might not take a lot of money, but it definitely takes a lot of time. And so I know, I mean, from the podcast, I mean, we went something

like two years where it was just our moms listening. And actually, I'm sure there were other people too. So I don't want to, if you're a long time listener, it's not like a shove or anything. But there was definitely a chunk of time where the podcast was just getting bootstrapped. And I don't think that a huge marketing push on episode number three would have really made a difference. So definitely, folks out there, there's so much that you have to do on your own,

but that also means that the flip side of that is there's so much you can do as an individual. And then once you have that flywheel going, once you kind of understand your market and your audience and what they're looking for, then if you're making, as Kevin said, if you're making money on each acquisition, then you can give Void Media a call and they can take it to the next level. Yeah. And it goes, yeah, I think people all the time, it's really, when people do it themselves and they kind of learn a little bit about it because it makes just working with that marketing or freelancer so much easier. And yeah, there's so much more

that you could do. And I tell people all the time, if you're going to make some sort of channel, like the main way to acquire customers, I think that you should probably want to know how it works. That way you're like, you truly understand how your business is growing. So I think it's so important. Yeah. Yeah, that also resonates. I think a lot of people want really complicated AI, like Salesforce has Einstein, they have the Einstein platform and everything. But the thing is, at the end of the day,

like you need to be able to know what is going on. Like you need to have something that's interpretable and you can't just throw everything into a machine because as soon as that machine stops working, which doesn't mean there's a bug per se, it could be maybe people lost interest, but for whatever reason, as soon as that machine stops working,

you're going to be stuck. Yeah. And you're not going to have gained those insights you really needed to make that pivot earlier that would have prevented that. Yeah, exactly. And the thing too that I'll learn is that like anything, you guys probably know, some of this stuff sounds scary.

Like, oh my God, we're saying Zapier, we're saying this. Once you dig into it, you're like, oh, this is really easy. Yeah, and the other thing too is don't get really agoraphobic. I see so many threads on either Stack Overflow or Reddit on, I can't decide what game engine to use for this game or i can't decide whether to use ruby or flask and and it's like i've spent like 200 hours and here's my blog post on it and it's like i mean that's that's cool it's it's a value that you're providing but but you can also just pick anything and just run with it

and uh you will learn so much no matter what. I mean, even Kevin and I both built things from scratch and went through all that pain. And sure, in hindsight, it would have been much easier to use WordPress, but we learned so much from that experience. And so you can always just pick up anything and run with it. And one thing that Kevin has provided as a really good product is this Digital Marketing Made Easy, which is a book that's, is it on Amazon? Yeah, it's on Amazon. Yep. Cool. Yeah, it's on Amazon. How does that book kind of, where does it start off?

Does it kind of explain like Marketing 101 and kind of dive in from there? Yeah, basically the book explains Marketing 101. It talks about, you know, kind of why you need marketing, like what's, what's a growth strategy, what are the different channels you could use, right? And the basic kind of talks about like SEO, Facebook ads, Google ads, content marketing. It kind of just tells people like, Hey, here are things that you should be thinking about when starting a business. And then we kind of like dive into like each of these tactics that you could do. And then overall it says like, these are all things that you could do, figure one out that you want to try. And then if it doesn't work, move on to the next one. Or if it does work,

keep the other one running and then move on to the next channel. It's, it's, that's sort of like the book is about. Cool. And so is it, actually, I don't know, you would definitely know this, but does Amazon automatically take your book and I guess they can't make an audio book out of it automatically, but is it on like Kindle and paperback and hardback, like hardcover? Is it all those formats? I wish it was audio. Cause I want the audio, but they're like, Kevin, you need to record it. I'm like, okay, this is like four or 500 pages. I was like, yeah. There's this Amazon Polly, which is amazingly nice to listen to. But I think the challenge would be, there's got to be a few words that it would get wrong and it would kind of throw

you off if you were to just Amazon Polly the whole book. Yeah. So basically with the Amazon, we have it in Kindle version, which is like whatever Kindle readers or any sort of e-reader, but then we also have like a book version. So it's like a soft cover book. We don't have it in hardcover yet, but that's basically how it works with Amazon. It's pretty nice if people want to do their own book. Amazon is pretty much print on demand. So Amazon just has our PDF and whenever someone orders,

they have a warehouse that prints it for us and it's all Amazon based. Oh, very cool. Very cool. Yeah, so check that out. What is a way for people to reach you? What is a good way for people to do that? Yeah, so you that out. I think, what is a way for people to reach you? Like, what is a good way for people to do that? Yeah, so you can always email me, kevinatvoymedia.com.

And for anybody listening, if someone wants a copy of the book and you can't afford it, I can send you a free copy. So just shoot me an email and I can do that. Cool, great. So kevinatvoymedia, we'll put that in the show notes. And yeah, I think that's amazing.

Yeah, it's another great benefit for students out there and for people out there who are just getting started. So take advantage of that. I think I've told this story on the podcast before, but one of the most powerful things that I did in my life was, it was kind of serendipitous. I went on, I went on BitTorrent talking about, you know, we were younger and going on Torrent. And I just said, what are the most popular book Torrents? And, you know, some of them were kind of obvious. So there was the Bible, there was the Quran. I mean, they're very popular, but then after like on the entry, like three or four, it was, it was something like 150 dummies books Torrent. And, you know, I started reading through, you know, things that were outside of my wheelhouse.

So I started reading up on negotiation. I read up on economics and that really shaped a lot of my interests for my whole life actually. And so if this sounds even remotely like something that you would be interested in, or even if you need this to finish your app, or you're wondering how you can get more folks to your app, take Kevin up on this offer or go on Amazon and grab a copy of it. And it could be a really great opportunity for folks out there. Cool. Well, I think this is a good time to sort of put a bookmark in it. I really thank you, Kevin, for coming on the show. Absolutely fascinating. I think you really kind of opened up a new dimension for a lot of the listeners out there.

And I'm sure they're going to love it. I really love talking to you. And so thanks for coming on the show. It's been awesome. Oh, thanks so much for having me. I appreciate it. I love the conversation too. It was really good.

Cool. All right. Thanks, everybody out there. music by eric barn dollar programming throwdown is distributed under a creative commons attribution share alike 2.0 license you're free to share copy distribute transmit the work to remix adapt the work but you must provide an attribution to patrick and i and share alike in kind