Right About Now - Legendary Business Advice - Radical Podcast - Ryan sits down with Logan Brown From GVL TODAY ( 6 AM CITY )

Episode Date: October 8, 2019

In this episode of the Radical company podcast... Ryan had the pleasure of speaking with Logan Brown the growth manager for 6 AM City, They speak about marketing and email targeting tactics, alongside whether if in a fast paced digital world print and old fashion newspaper can hold up against immediate email newsletters. They also spend time diving deep in what it takes in regards to the groundwork to create a successful team and business. - If you enjoyed listening to Logan Brown be sure to follow him at @logan.b.brown and check out @GVLTODAY and sign up for Daily information and news and keep updated on the rest of the publication team and our city! If you enjoy this episode please check out the rest of our information and nugget filled episodes on our channel. Please share, review, and subscribe so we can continue to bring the radical ideas from our amazing guests for both your #business, #marketing and #lifestyle needs. . Have a great weekend Rad Fam! #NowThatsRadical🤙 #YeahThatGreenville 🌿 - Radical Podcast is always looking forward to meeting both aspiring, and grounded professionals across the country! Feel like you have something to say? Slide us a Dm and let's make it happen! @radical_results @ryanalford www.radical.company [phone] [e-mail] 25 Delano Drive, Greenville, SC 29601, USA Do you need an amazing co-working space, filled with like minded passion driven individual who value community and passion!? Then look no further. Radical has now created its very own HQ located right off the swamp rabbit trail and is inviting every scrappy, aspiring, and driven creative individual in the Greenville area to come be close, interact, and learn from the fastest growing marketing agency in the upstate. You can learn, schedule, and contact us all at Comraderycowork.com If you enjoyed this episode and want to learn more, join Ryan’s newsletter https://ryanalford.com/newsletter/ to get Ferrari level advice daily for FREE.  Learn how to build a 7 figure business from your personal brand by signing up for a FREE introduction to personal branding https://ryanalford.com/personalbranding.  Learn more by visiting our website at www.ryanisright.comSubscribe to our YouTube channel  www.youtube.com/@RightAboutNowwithRyanAlford. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hey guys, it's Ryan Alford for the Radical Company podcast. Really excited to be back. It's been a few weeks on the podcast. We're here at Comaury in our new podcast studio. Comratery is our agency location where radical is housed, but it's also a co-work space here in Greenville. So if you are looking for someone where to work and want to come work with some cool people, you need to look up Comraderycowork.com and check everything out. We're actually, Logan and I, who I'll introduce shortly,

are having a tasty beverage here straight from the kegator. Another benefit of camarader. Shameless plugs all around for the co-work space. But Logan around, really excited to have you, man. Growth marketing manager at 6am City. Really excited to have you here, man. Yeah, thanks for having me. This is awesome.

Yeah, so I'm actually really excited. Logan emailed me a couple weeks ago. and it's like, hey, man, you know, following stuff, have a few topics. I think this would be cool for a podcast, and it was really kind of near and dear to my heart as far as just trends and different things that I'm following with local news and marketing and journalism and is journalism dead versus, you know, you see the decline of newspapers and all these things and, you know, it really kind of hit at a core, I think, a really interesting topic. So really excited to kind of get into that.

And really, you know, Logan, I think, you know, People in Greenville know GVL today, which is one of your core foundational products and the newsletter and things like that. So I know that, but 6 a.m. City, I'd love to kind of start there. You know, let's give everybody that's listening, you know, kind of that historical background, you know, what problem were we trying to solve? Why was 6 a.m. City started Greenville today, I think, was one of the first markets, but maybe not. that shows not all of my knowledge, but maybe just give everybody a little bit of that background and maybe some of your background, you know, previous to 6 AM City. Yeah, totally.

So I kind of came on board almost three years ago now. GVL today was started under 6 AM City as an umbrella. The whole idea was delivering email newsletters that aggregated and curated local news and events. The whole idea there is that local news and media was a little fragmented and broken. We kind of have this idea that everyone creates content in some way, and they share it in all different forms. So some people read the newspaper. Some people watch local TV and some just stick to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram. We thought what we could do is kind of listen on all channels, find the best of the best,

and then bring it to you in one certain channel, which right now is email and a cool succinct newsletter. Yeah, for sure. So talk to me about you're not just in Greenville. What cities are we covering right now besides just Greenville? Yeah, it's actually a really fun time that you brought me on because we're, so now we're in seven cities total. So we're all in the southeast, everything from Lakeland, Florida, Charleston, Columbia, here in Greenville, Asheville, Chattanooga,

and now we're in Raleigh, North Carolina as of this morning. So definitely a southeastern footprint for the most part right now. Yep. But ambitions further west and north, I imagine? Kind of. You know, I think the furthest west we've looked at currently is maybe like an Austin. Yeah. We kind of like what's going on there, but there's still a lot of opportunity here in the southeast. You know, places like Birmingham, Richmond, Knoxville, all have vibrant communities that are growing and a lot of people are flocking there. So I think we'd probably stick to that first before going too far away.

Yeah. What's been, you know, some of the, you know, being a new, newer concept. business, maybe talk a little bit about some of the ups and downs, you know, both thought, you know, the great things coming into a new city, you know, maybe just some of the challenges of a new business model, you know, can you talk a little about that? Yeah, totally. I mean, the cool thing about being close to all of our cities, Greenville being the center of the hub and spoke model of sorts. Yeah.

The founders and members of our team can go and kind of be boots on the ground there, meet the community make handshakes that need to be made. And a lot of hype kind of gets built right there. When you go meet with the Chamber of Commerce and you meet the mayors of all these cities and you kind of get them behind the product and let them know what you're trying to do and the success stories that have happened already in Greenville and Columbia in these different cities, that's probably a lot of fun. I'd say what's a struggle on my end is, you know, from marketing is how do I get as many people as possible to know about this product and get them amped for it, especially pre-product.

Because as you know, there's always product launches in marketing and for any business. So when we decide 60 days we're going to go to some new city and we're going to launch the newsletter, well, how do you get somebody hyped about a product that doesn't exist yet? And how do you get them excited to sign up? And then when it does launch, get them sharing with their friends and get the entire community behind it. So the good there is that we can be there, boots on the ground, the bad is that, or the struggle is that, how do we make this the coolest thing possible? than on day one, we're sitting in a good spot.

It's interesting. My mind went down two paths. I'm going to try to remember the second one as I go down the first. But I see it, you know, from a marketing perspective, you've got B2B and B2C, don't you? I mean, it seems like for you guys, you know, any media company, you know, survives on, you know, working with businesses and selling advertising in some way, shape, or form. and then the content side, which is consumed by consumers, the local people. So is it, in fact, a two-fold marketing challenge of B2B and B2C at the same time when you're kind of coming into a new market? Oh, yeah, absolutely.

I think the positive where we are currently as an organization is we have a lot of existing partnerships that have gone really well. And we have all of this content and we have all these case studies that we're able to kind of curate and make so that when we go to this new city, It's not just this brand new thing that no one knows how it's going to happen. We just know that we have a playbook. This is the content we make for our partners. On the B2B side, we can really prove to them and show them how we've worked with others in their industry. And on B to C side, we create content up front to kind of get them excited about what we're doing. And we have other newsletters we can show them.

So there's other models out here like this where they understand the concept. They just need to see it for their city. So that's how we kind of try to tackle the B to C side of that. Yeah. How's, what are the tactics, if you will, you know, that when you're coming into a new market and trying to get consumers and trying to, you know, it's all about reaching frequency in marketing, you know, as far as telling the messages or conveying to them what, you know, what's in it for them a number of times. What are some of the marketing tactics that you kind of, you guys deploy or, you know, how do you get in front of people? Yeah, totally. So, I mean, you're kind of hitting on the spot. I think for in the growth marketing side of things, what we try to do is create more of like a strategy overall because, as you know, there's a zillion different buckets you can kind of go into. So we develop a strategy with certain buckets and there's tactics within all of those. I would say that the core ones that work well for us is that, especially in a city like Raleigh, we'll use them since they're the newest market. We know that there's a lot of young folks that are on social media already there. So first thing we do is a content strategy that gets distributed. organically and paid through the social platforms, right? Because we know that's where they're spending their time.

We had Boots in the Ground film video, and it's you guys are really into video content. You know, kind of pushed that through the social networks as well to build buzz. An organic referral is a huge thing. And then we have, like, more giveaway referrals, so it's incentivized a little bit. And that's not to mention the partnership.

So when we go Boots in the ground, we're meeting with the movers and shakers and trying to get in touch with their networks. A lot of those folks, the major businesses, those if you think about a Michelin or BMW here in Greenville, we can go talk to those folks and we feel that there's an impact when their employees are reading GVL today or some major company in Raleigh, when you get your employees kind of investing in their city, they're happier and they want to be here longer and there's retention. So those are the kind of partnerships we try

to work on and utilize as a growth mechanism for us. Yeah, I love that. Is there any blowback from other local media outlets when you guys come into a market. You know, that's it. It's, media's competitive. Local media can be hyper competitive. You think about the news wars of, I mean, they still do it, but of the 70s and 80s, you know, like news channels back and forth and trying to get the story, and all those things. What's the, what's the temperature, if you will, with other media outlets when you guys kind of come into a market? Yeah, sure. It's a good question. And actually, the founders are pretty good. They've had a really good success rate just reaching out to all the major media players in a city and they go meet with them face to face and kind of explain the product. I would say the

good thing is if you think about Greenville News keeping it local, those guys are doing really good investigative journalism and trying to create stories about the community. When you think about GVL today as a newsletter and an email product, we kind of send a lot of traffic to them. You know, we're not a social platform in the sense that people are maybe engaging right on it like you with a Facebook or Instagram, but since we're sharing these stories and aggregating them, someone who may have not seen a Greenville News article because it was lost in their feed, we're putting it right there front and center. So at the same time, we're not kind of competing with them on the content play.

We're giving them a place to push their content. Yeah. What's funny, I think, of that push-pull. You are more of a poll medium because you aggregate it, and you put it in a newsletter form and you put it in an email box. And, yeah, if I'm on my phone or computer desktop, the people still do that. Yeah, 80% of all our analytics, so our client says it's all mobile. Yeah, it seems probably right for you guys to the, but it's really just kind of there that,

because I go look at it every day. I get it. I'm a subscriber. I appreciate that. Proud GVL today, subscriber. And it might be funny enough, and I know it's a lot of today's stuff and news, but it might be 4 o'clock in the afternoon. And I can say that it goes to like one of my folders of stuff that I actually still read. And I do want to get to the jail mail of email here, topic here shortly.

But interesting enough, in that push-pull aspect, it is kind of more of a poll. You guys aggregate it. You put it there, and people can kind of go to it when they need it. whereas other medias, you know, they're kind of push, push, you know, radio, TV, other things. But I do, I did wonder, you know, maybe just some of those dynamics, you know, as you go into a market. But it's probably smart getting in front of them, you know. You can only talk about you so bad when they're face-to-face with you. No, yeah, I mean, sure.

I think all those, funny enough, all those folks are trying to better themselves and everybody's trying to work together towards a common goal. Yeah. You know, we've talked to folks here in town. Like, we've talked to some major players in the media world that want to partner with us. Yeah. We want to partner with them because they have an audience too and they have people that are paying attention. And I think any time we can all come together, I'll kind of get to that.

I know we're going to talk a little bit about the local media space. Yeah. But I think some consolidation and I think it's going to happen nationally. So it's definitely going to happen on a local level. Yeah. Well, let's go down that path as we're kind of getting right into it. I mean, I'd love to know your perspective. of, you know, they've said forever, newspaper's dead.

I'm not here to crush anyone's media if you're listening and your newspaper journalist or anything like that. But newspapers are almost dead if it's not dead. I mean, the numbers don't lie. You know, when my parents aren't getting it in the driveway anymore, it's real close. You know, not that they don't have online products and other ways to get media, not saying as an entity of bringing news in some format,

but the printed media of local news seems to be fading fast. You know, it's interesting to me. It seems like on one hand it's going away, the printed media, local media. But then on the other, it's like hyper-local stuff seems to be still relevant. You know, I get like Augusta Road, you know, journal in the mailbox still. I read that. So it's like it's gotten real hyper-local. but I'd love to know what you guys' perspective and your perspective just on, I don't know, the overall media landscape of local.

Yeah, totally. I mean, so, I mean, I have a lot of opinions on it that are definitely mine rather than 60s. All right. That's good. We get on a couple of different paths. Like, I was thinking about this question. And we're, you know, maybe 30, 40 years ago was someone having this exact same conversation when the 8 track came out. You know, cassettes and are in the cars.

And it's like, oh my gosh, what am I going to do like vinyl? And now you see, you know, Jack White in Nashville creating a vinyl shop that he can't even keep up demand with. So on one side, I do think there's going to be like a come-up of this. Like, people are going to want the nostalgia of the paper in their hands. You know, an interesting perspective, though, is a lot of these newspapers locally don't really control their own destiny. If you're a Gannett product or, you know, locally, like Gateway or something like that,

Gatehouse, sorry. I mean, that company in general could be sitting at their headquarters and just say that they're going to close Greenville and Nashville and whatever paper products they have because it's just not working for the bottom line. So that's when local communities kind of struggle and it impacts us pretty hard. But I do think the niche thing, you're on par with that. Even if it were to shut down across the board and more more local cities lose their paper, I think that brings on independent people who can sustain something that's not this. massive product that needs to make millions and millions of dollars, they can create little niche products and have people on the ground that help push it for them. And all of a sudden, you've now got a paper that talks about your neighborhood and your street. And you kind of get

excited for that and want to go pick it up again. Yeah. It could work. It could live in a digital world. You know, with Apple News aggregating all the paper products and putting them into a digital marketplace, it's helpful as well. Yeah. But still, you know, and you guys, I think, are living and breathing this. I want to talk about how you get your, you know, some of your content and those connect, you know, with journalists and just, I know they're not probably called journalists with you guys. I don't know what you call them, content curators or, you know, some other, editors, but that's fine. Editors, okay. Well, all right. Then it's pretty standard in, in industry terminology. But, you know, to get that local news, you still have to have boots on the

ground, you know, like all these national entities and, in all these, you know, back to the newspaper discussion and, you know, AP news and all this stuff, but you're still, you still got to have feet on the ground and connectivity to that local community. Yeah, I think that's important. I think it's just one of those things where, like, how big of a team do you need to accomplish it maybe? I think it's interesting. Me, I'm not a journalist. You come into this world and you kind of start to see how it works and you see the funnels. So there's information from someone that gets sent through some sort of like PR push to another. Now the newspaper gets all the exclusive rights to a story when it breaks.

Now, this is not talking about investigative journalism, but when a development like TopGolf comes to Greenville, do we need a major company to break that story? I don't know. Yeah. You know, and you probably need some people on the ground to be relevant, especially in these smaller cities. But yeah, I don't know if local media shutters if a newspaper goes out.

definitely impacted, but I think that we can all work together to come up with other solutions so that people stay informed. You guys have gotten to a scale now in Greenville, it's one of your more seeded markets and things like that. I would think where does the machine feed itself? Like, are you guys, people, they want their content to be seen and heard, you know, whether it's events or local things happening, or is it now to where, the machine kind of feeds itself because people are sending you things.

And so versus, I guess, back to that, I guess we'll go down that push-pull analogy again. Like, are your editors, how much polling are they having to do versus the community now feeding you? No, because they know that you can help get their stories out. Yeah, totally. I mean, I think it takes a little bit of time for all those cities, each individual city to get to that point. But like I was talking about, those playbook that we go into each city with, that's a part of it. So all the teams try to make their partnerships. And that's not an advertising thing,

but they're going out and working with the who's who of each town and letting them know who we are and how you can contact us. And yeah, it becomes that because they have a relationship. And people are sending us stuff. And, yeah, it takes a while to create a relationship like that. But the good thing is, is that over time it develops. And we end up getting some great content out of it. And we're bringing value to the end user and those folks as well.

well. Speaking of value to the end user, right now we're newsletter-based, but we've got some new things we've talked about that I'm aware of here in Greenville, but let's talk about like, what are those future products, what are those future added value features that, you know, 6 a.m. City's kind of bringing to both the consumers and the businesses in the market. Yeah, definitely. I mean, so the values of the company is always educating the market, number one, Right. So we want to give them the information they need. We try to stay as positive as possible. We think that specifically in somewhere like Greenville, or we've been for three years, we've been able to accomplish that. So part of my job is kind of working on special projects. How are we going to develop our product further and do different things?

So that kind of brings along GBL Plus. And the idea there is it's like a separate subscription product. And the other side of our value proposition is activating the local community. So how do we activate these folks and getting them spending money locally, learning about new things? and the idea with this product is that you pay $10 a month or $100 a year, and we give back $20 towards local restaurants and a free gym class trial. And so what we found out is that a lot of people kind of stick to their neighborhood. And so if you live over here, you have your spot. And you know, your wife says, hey, I want to go out to eat tonight and you say,

well, let's just go across the street. We got our tried and true. Our whole goal is to kind of push people out of those little neighborhood pockets and get to try something new. Work with Belle Thrifty next door. Not that this is out of the way, but for someone who doesn't live on the side of town or doesn't frequent the trail,

it's just not something they may have gone to before. So that's kind of our goal with GBL Plus. So is that in every one of your markets the plus feature, or the one that are live? Not yet. It's kind of working as a beta in Greenville. We're trying to figure that out and understand what the value prop is.

And do people understand it as the messaging right? How are we going about onboarding partners and are they getting value out of the program? Once we nail that, we'd love to scale it. Yeah. How do people learn, you know, more about that product in specific? I know that specific to Greenville right now, but if someone has interest in that, that's just GVL today, the typical outlets, but how does people kind of learn dig in the more of the Plus product? Oh, yeah, totally.

I mean, GBLplus.com, PLUS.com is a site on its own. But, yeah, I mean, we've been trying to grow it through our own. I owned and operated channels. But, yeah, if you want to check it out, gblplus.com is the spot. That's cool. I know we've had a couple clients at Radical that have utilized it and saw good pops from it. So a lot of new customers and different people, which is exactly what you said. You know, there's kind of your everyday, trying to get new people in.

I think it's a great outlet for that. It's a great for businesses to kind of get people samples. something different because it's so funny you talked about the local thing my I mean my wife and I and boys when we live downtown and we're the worst at that like you know but but but our excuse is you know we have uh four boys under the age of 10 so uh you know our excuse for not venturing out might be greater than most but uh but but we try to do we try to at least push it you know once a month go somewhere different you know I think it's good to do that I mean we all kind of get stuck in our neighborhoods, but every now and then it's nice to pop into another shot of town

and do something you've been wanting to, but just haven't had a chance. Absolutely. So what, give a little bit about your background, you know, on the marketing side, you know, what got you into marketing? What do you love about marketing? What's, you know, just a little bit background on you? Yeah, definitely. So, classic marketing major in college, right? But from Virginia, I went to school in Mississippi, found my way here through the closing. living industry, a local spot called Coast Apparel. This is back when they were independently owned. And so I kind of helped manage some of their social.

I was doing sales. We were a three-man band, so everybody was kind of holding different hats. But in college, I was an ambassador for a company called Chubby. So we have something in common. I used to work for the most radical shorts company in the world. And you own a company called Radical. So I knew there was a connection. Absolutely.

So, yeah, well, I tried to stay in contact with those folks pretty regularly. And so we kind of reached a point where they wanted to build out their customer service team. And so I was like, I wanted to jump on board with those guys. So that's what I started doing for two years. I was still living in Greenville,

but I was working for them. And they were based in San Francisco. And that's when, like, the marketing thing started really ticking. And they were doing crazy cool stuff on the content side and just really understanding how their team was thinking

was very different than what I'd seen before. And unfortunately, just like I didn't really have the opportunity to go much further with that company without moving. So I tried to find something locally. That's when GVL today came around, started writing for them. We were only three people deep at that point. Now we're at 28, so it's wild. So yeah, I was writing for them and then slowly moved into this marketing role because we were trying to expand all these different cities. I needed to understand the data behind the subscribers are bringing in and the churn and the acquisition

strategy. So, yeah, that's been a lot of fun. I think what I love most about marketing that maybe doesn't get talked about as much as the user psychology. Yeah. I just love trying to do tests and learning how people think and using science that's decades old, centuries old,

that still holds true with the way that people interact with anything, even though its media wasn't around back then in digital form. Oh, yeah. It's, you know, we talk about it here radical and it's like equal equal parts art and science and you know all the art kind of gets the buzz and you know we're pretty good about putting our own art out there it's harder to put the science out there we've tried to try crack that code a little bit of making the

the data interesting beyond saying oh we had more sales and that's good that shows it but there is and Josh and I one of my digital media managers we're we're probably the marketing geeks of the company overall. And so we geek out on, you know, Facebook data and all the analytic stuff looking at, well, why, you know, time on site go up here and just go down there and, like, you know, trying to get behind it. But there's a lot to it. Totally.

Just understanding how they're behaving and then how you can alter that behavior just on small tweaks and changes. And that's a lot of fun to do. Any podcast, books, forms, or recommendations for things or people you keep up with that kind of keep you sharp or of interest? Yeah, well, I listen to a lot of stuff and consume a lot of stuff. I would say that, so last year I was able to, the company put me through this cool program called Reforge. Okay. The guy who's behind it was the former growth marketing lead at HubSpot, which a lot of people use.

And then his partner, Andrew Chin, is a partner at Indreason Horowitz. It's a pretty well-known VC company at a Silicon Valley. So following both of them in general, you're going to learn a lot. There's this guy named, I'm probably going to butcher his name. His name's Gualaame. They call him G. He was the growth marketing manager at Drift. Follow any of his stuff, listen to as many podcasts from him as you can.

And for anybody listening, Drift is a chat. They do a lot of things now, but they do a lot of things now, but they started, I believe they started. That's how I know them, at least, is, you know, website chat. Kind of really making it more conversational and more interesting. It used to just be, you know, hey, you can ask a question and hope you get an answer, and I think they've made it a little bit more conversational, both in UI and in, I guess, application. Yep.

So, yeah, interesting. I've followed a lot of his stuff. Interesting. It's really cool. And Drift, I got to see him talk at this conference last year. and one of the coolest things from a growth marketing perspective, he was basically at a sales team, and they're very B2B,

so they're trying to sell their product to other businesses that might need a chat bot to help with their sales kind of meta there. But he actually built a bot that would mimic what the sales team would do physically as a human, and he would kind of compete them together. And so if the bot were to actually get more conversions, he would increase the amount of leads that come to the bot versus the salespeople.

So on growth side, you think B2C, a lot, but it's interesting, like, as people are trying to sell a product on their website, how can you use, you know, technology to help with that? And he's a pretty smart guy when it comes to that. Yeah, it is funny. I, I joked with Logan a little bit on, you know, we're talking about topics for the podcast. And, you know, I see the growth marketing, you know, lobbied about a little bit. And I'm like, isn't all marketing trying to grow something? I guess I'm the, but I've never understood exactly what the difference between growth marketing and marketing in general. Yeah, totally. It's a buzzword for sure. I mean, but at the same time, when you look at the

marketing landscape right now, you kind of have your performance marketers, you have your content marketers, you even have just like your media buyers that simply know every place you can buy and they're trying to figure that out as best as possible for a company. But on the growth side, I've learned a little bit about it over the last couple of years, and I think Facebook might have been the first company to kind of build this team, which started the, the buzz. Does it just mean you're responsible for sales? Well, maybe the opposite.

For me, you can definitely focus on the B2B side. I mean, for us and for GVL today and all the other brands that we operate, I'm way more B2C. And I think a lot of people just think of, you can call it top of funnel, but now they're trying to push loops, what they call it. So there's like linear channels and there's loops for acquiring customers. And I think with growth, it's all about, it's thinking holistically about maybe the customer, the subscriber, like what's leading to your churn? What's your churn rate? People talk about

it's great, hey, I'm getting all these new leads from whatever channel. Maybe Facebook's bringing all these folks in. A growth marketing manager is going to look at the cohort analysis to understand how valuable that channel is. Because up front, you may get somebody in your site for two cents. What's the value of that over time? Yeah, lifetime value. And, you know, that's why the funnel went away and then McKenzie's, you know, customer loop or circle or, I don't know exactly, I can't remember. I've all used different stuff. Exactly.

Yeah, exactly. But it's true, though, because it doesn't end at purchase. It almost begins. It's not supposed to. It's not supposed to. Unless you're selling, not to be morbid, but coffins. Yeah. That's right.

I thought about the same thing. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Is, what are, like, talk a little bit about like day to day for you. You know, like what's the, what's day in the life? Yeah, totally. Well, right now it's been a little messier than normal, I guess, from someone who I try

to be as organized as possible, but I kind of manage a little bit of tech support for the company. Okay. So I am managing the relationship with one of our agencies in Charleston who manages the website. Everything's on their server. And so if anything's ever wrong or down or we need to make a change, I'm working with them. I help manage our creative folks. So we have somebody in house that does all of our

creative. And so day to day for me is basically trying to figure out how is growth, how are we performing, right? So we have all these different channels that we're utilizing and people are coming in and they're working with, they're in the product. And we want to learn more about how they're using the product. And if there is churn, why is their churn? And so I'm kind of analyzing and then coming up with a strategy to say fix that. Or we're going to to improve a certain piece today. So I'm doing a lot of analyzing there and Chinatopo a strategy that'll fix that.

And then working a lot on GVL Plus recently. I'm kind of doing that on my own because I feel pretty passionate about it and wanted to kind of scale. But that means I've got to go get the partnerships and try to acquire customers. So it's a true test to marketing for sure and what my capabilities are, I suppose. Do you guys segment your customers?

at all as far as like within a market. I imagine now that with the plus product and other things, some of this becomes more relevant. But, you know, you get, you know, you have a newsletter product. You got your subscriber base. Is there any, back to that kind of lifetime value and different ways of looking at customers,

are you guys doing much segmentation within that customer, the subscriber list? Yeah, it's a good question. There's a lot that's possible. I would say that I'm analyzing a lot of... Or is it just so... We got to get more to the top of the... I mean, you know, you guys got to have so much...

Sometimes you don't have headroom like in a market or like in a industry, and it's like that back, you know, obviously turns important in any business, but like sometimes it's just feeding the top as fast as you can because you've got so much headroom available. And I don't... And maybe that's more of the focus. Well, you bring up an interesting point. I would say that because we're so hyper-local,

there may not be as much headroom. Yeah. Greenville, and let's just use Greenville as an example, there's only a finite number of people who live here. Now, we have new people moving here all the time. And that's a whole new marketing thing on its own. How do you actually get in front of those people immediately? But then there's people leaving town as well, I'm sure, moving away. So I would say that pouring the top of the funnel is maybe not my first priority.

I think you might have mentioned it in one of your other podcasts about retaining what's already there. I think that if we could retain a higher percentage of people that come in, then you don't need to fill the top of the funnel as fast or as frequently. So as far as back to your question about segmenting, we're always segmenting the ways that people came into the top of the funnel. So the best growth strategy, in my opinion, that you can get to, here we go. You never know.

That's a good song. I know. That's my Skype thing. it's all good um yeah so so of course you're always segmenting where people are coming from at the top of the funnel um but i think it's it's understanding where they came in how they came in and who sticks around the longest um and so that's a segment of its own right what channel you came in but then there's an activity channel so immediately as soon as you subscribe i already have already segmented you based on whether or not you opened the welcome email did you even take an action within the welcome email a week

Did you have you opened an email from us in this seven days? So if you send daily? So have you opened one? Have you opened five? That's great. You're a power user. What happens after three months? I'm sending you a follow-up campaign to make sure that things going well.

Maybe a survey involved. Did you take the survey? Now I've got all this interesting data on you because I know how you want to interact with the company or with the brand, who you are, what makes you tick. So all those things are possible. And kind of what we're, that's, I guess, how we're segmenting. but we're not sending campaigns based on any sort of data and changing the content within your campaign.

And a little bit of the reason behind that is kind of these, what are they calling it on Facebook now, the different, you get in these pockets of information that you can't ever get out of because you like certain things. We don't want to let people decide what they like because we want them to be open to anything we can find, even if it's maybe not their interest today. think it could be of interest to them in the future.

And if we let them decide, they don't want that. They'll never know about it. Yeah. So anyway, that's kind of how we're using it currently. Love it. I love it. What's, we kind of wrap up. I mean, you know, talk about, we talked about some of the future products, the here products with the plus.

What's the future like, you know, holds for 6 a.m. city. You know, and you're growing, privately held. you know, where are we headed? Totally. I mean, right now, first and foremost, it's new cities. So next year, we're kind of, we're working towards four, six, eight, as many as eight. And like I said, we're sticking to the southeast. So I think that right there in of itself is a big task for us next year that we want to tackle. And I think the teams work really hard to create a playbook that'll allow that to happen.

It'll be fun to activate on. But yeah, I mean, I think you asked a question about his email. dying and doing, you know, what's happening within email because there's a lot of people playing in that space and my email's getting full. I don't want to say, I don't, email is our first distribution method, but I think what we do is as a newsletter. And I think there's something about the way that people create content that email newsletter has become synonymous with, but it's really about the way that you're writing and how concise it is and how it flows, how it feels, and who the writer is behind it. So we're trying to try to do that. So we're trying to be. You're

to take out the fluff and just give you what you need and make it fun. And so I think we create a newsletter right now, but to that question, email's working currently. I don't think it's off the table that it could live in a different medium in the future. Yeah. Maybe I'm kind of high on, not high on anything, but this beer. Right, right one beer. We're playing around a lot with Facebook Messenger. And, you know, chatbots kind of leaning into that and just the notion that,

that everybody has it on and is a medium for information and for another type of inbox of both content. And we're looking heavy in that and heavily into text because the text is really opening up as a marketing vehicle. People are getting more accepted. Like, you know, it's been around for 10 plus years, but it was really taboo. Like, nobody wanted you in their text chain or text box. it seems to be loosening up as long as you can send them relevant in relevancy as context is everything

you know that's that's why you know people hate advertising because it's not contextual if you make contextual they suddenly like it and so we're playing around in those spaces so i could certainly see those being channels for information and content of other things so there will always be a place for delivery yeah um so sounds like you guys are at least staying I tell people, I have clients all the time, they're always looking for like, they want to go farm somewhere else. I'm like, dude, let's farm right here. You know, Evo's not dead. You sit on the newsletter.

You know, or we can still serve a lot of tacos. I mean, to focus on enchiladas yet. No, I get it. Yeah, I mean, I think as long as, as as as this may sound, I feel pretty strongly that folks like to be distracted at work. Yeah. And as long as email is their primary communication and as long as businesses, allow any emails like ours to come through and others like that. I mean, I think people will continue to subscribe to email products just because it's an

easy way to remind yourself. There's not a lot of programs out there, platforms where you can mark unread and kind of come back to it later. So that's kind of a nice feature. But I'm kind of into this product. It's maybe a whole different subject. But there's a product called Stoop and a product called Substack. and substacks making it very easy for people to create email newsletters,

just like they are for folks are doing for podcasts. And Stoop is becoming a platform to house all of those emails, or the newsletters, rather, without having to worry about inbox deliverability or anything like that. So I think if you think about the world of podcasting and how many platforms and networks have been created to house podcasts, there's not really anything that lives yet to house your newsletter. And if something catches on, you know,

longer really need your inbox anymore. You use that platform and that's your go-to space to consume and deliver newsletter product. Interesting. Yeah. Check those out. The one thing I do love about email is you don't have to have an app or you're not locked into a platform. You know, it's just, it works. It goes to one mailbox, you know, that's whether it's even if it's Gmail or different brands of it, you're just, you have an email address and it goes there and you're not, it's kind of like, The problem now, sometimes I have. Some of my friends, we message all the time in Instagram. Yeah, and then I've got friends that aren't even on Instagram, you know,

and it's like, you know, some messaging within, you know, six platforms. There's something about the greatness of email, just being able to jump on and know it goes without someone having a platform or different things like that. So everybody's got an email. Exactly. Well, Logan, man, really enjoyed having you on. Thanks for having me. Let's do it again.

Let's wrap on some of the latest, marketing stuff maybe down the road. Sure. Really, you know, GVL Today is growing in Greenville. It's been a really good part of the community. It's really informative. So if you have it, check them out. I definitely recommend subscribing.

You can find them on all the social channels and online through 6amCity.com. Yeah, GVLTay.com if you're local. But if you're not, like I said, we're in seven cities. So just go to 6amCity.com and you can find all the places that we're living. Logan, where can people follow or keep up with anything that you're into? Yeah, well, I'm pretty heavy on LinkedIn these days, even though maybe that's not preferred channel. It's growing. Logan Brown on LinkedIn and just Logan B. Brown on Twitter.

My Twitter steers a little different, but it's fun. A little business, little sports. I don't know. I love it. Thanks, though. Cool, man. Well, appreciate Logan being on and really appreciative of the partnership that we've had with GVL today and these guys. and we'll continue to have really enjoyed today's podcast.

Keep up with everything radical at radical. companney online at Radical underscore results on Instagram. We're active there all the time. You can find me at Ryan Offord on Instagram. That's probably my biggest channel there or LinkedIn. And would love to hear any feedback on the podcast or tips, recommendations, or just if you want to come have a beer here at Comradery with Logan and I, check us out. Thanks.

Thank you.