This Week in Startups - Social Marketing | Scaling Your Startup S2 E2 with Mehak Vohra and Kate Bradley-Chernis | E1202

Episode Date: April 21, 2021

Jason is joined by two outstanding CEOs running marketing companies, Mehak Vohra (Skillbank) & Kate Bradley-Chernis (Lately). Mehak shared the strategies she used to drive signups for Skillbank on TikTok(2:57). Kate shared her top business writing techniques (18:48), how to create engagement for B2B sales on LinkedIn (24:15), and more! To see the deck discussed in this episode go to https://bit.ly/3tA7sVb

Season 2 of scaling your startup is brought to you by Our Crowd helps you invest early in pre-IPO companies alongside professional VCs. If you're interested in investing, you can join Our Crowd for free at OUR, CROWD.com slash twist. NetSuite. Don't let old software and spreadsheets slow you down anymore. Upgrade to NetSuite, the world's number one cloud business system. Schedule your free product tour right now at netsuite.com slash twist. And Silicon Valley Bank.

For over 35 years, Silicon Valley Bank has been providing banking and financial solutions for every stage of the startup journey. Learn more at SVB.com slash twist. Hey, everybody, welcome to scaling your startup. This is our second season and our second episode today. We've got a real treat for you. two of the companies I've invested in that are focused solely on growth. Kateley is here from Lately and Mehek is here from SkillBank.

She teaches people how to be marketers and Kateley teaches people how to write better copy and to manage their social media presence through AI. And they're going to teach you a ton in today's episode about being a better marketer and growing your business. Stick with us. Thanks, Jason. Today I'm going to talk about TikTok and how we leverage TikTok to grow our startups brand. My name is Mehek Vora, and I'm the founder and CEO of SkillBank.

And I have been making content since I was nine years old. I was a content creator way before I was a startup founder. And naturally, over the summer last year, whenever we realized that we needed to start doing more marketing stuff for my company, SkillBank, we decided to go over to the content side and create content on TikTok. And in three months, we grew from zero to 30,000 followers. and today I'm going to show you exactly how we did that. But first, I want to touch on what Skill Bank is

because a lot of my examples today in this presentation have to do with how we built the Skill Bank brand. So Skill Bank is a career accelerator for marketing that's completely free up front. And in 15 weeks, we help people land a marketing job making at least $40,000 a year. So if you make under that, we did a really bad job as a company and you owe us nothing.

The average salary coming out of our program is $70K a year And our next cohort is starting on May 10th. So if you want to work at an agency or out of startup, head over to join skillbank.com and apply. And we'd love to see your application. So to get started, we're going to be talking about how you can leverage TikTok to grow your startup and your business. And we're going to be touching on why you should be on TikTok,

how do you define your brand, the trends that you should be looking out for, optimizing your videos, testing and repurposing your content as well. So, why should you be creating content on TikTok for your startup? I personally believe that TikTok is the easiest video platform for business owners. And that's because there's a little bit less creativity involved compared to creating content on YouTube or Facebook. Instead of having to come up with a large majority of the ideas on your own, you want to look at who are the trendsetters within your space and copy their content or copy their trends. and make those trends your own.

The really nice thing about the TikTok algorithm is that it does the work for you if you create really engaging content. Engaging content will get people to stay over a long period of time and TikTok will show that content to more people. The way the TikTok algorithm works is they're taking bets on what you're going to be watching as a user. This is very similar to how YouTube's algorithm works

and how Spotify's algorithm works. They're going to serve you content in hopes that you click on it. And TikTok wants to see that you're going to actually be watching that video the whole way through. It's going to start off with showing your video to 100 people. If those people like, comment, engage, or just even watch the content the whole way through, they're going to be showing that to more people. They're then going to show it to 1,000 people, and then slowly that video is going to go viral. And you can see here with my TikTok views, it goes down and TikTok is testing different audiences.

And then once it hits an audience cap, the video drops again. And they're constantly testing out these new audiences to see. see who's going to engage and who isn't. Before we move into actually creating your TikTok content, it's really important to understand how the platform works. On TikTok, there's two main pages that you want to look out for. The following page and the for you page. The four you page is the bread and butter of what TikTok's platform is. They're serving users new content from different creators on the platform. And the nice thing about the four you page is it's conditioning users to look out for new content. You're not just looking for content from people that you're following. But let's say

you like a piece of content, you can then follow that creator and then that creator moves over into the following tab. Very similar to Instagram or Twitter or Facebook. On the following tab, you just see a feed of creators that you have followed. At the bottom of your page, you're going to have a sound. And every video has a sound, whether there is music involved with it or whether it's the creator just talking. And if you click on that sound, especially if it's a song, you'll be able to to see all of the other videos that are using that sound. And then lastly, we have a text box. And this provides context for the video.

And this is where you can also include hashtags to give TikTok an easier way of categorizing your videos and also figuring out who to be serving your content to. So going into creating content, we want to first of all define your brand. And this is where it's really important to get this down very clearly. Because if you don't understand who you're creating content, content for, it's going to be a lot harder for TikTok to define who they should be serving your content to. So for SkillBank, what we broke our brand into is a Y statement and then also our user persona. Our Y statement is to motivate and empower individuals to define their own path so that they can

empower others to define theirs. And our user persona is people that are interested in entrepreneurship, people that are self-starters, and people that are really interested in marketing. And how this translates into SkillBanks brand is our videos are motivating content. We're showing zero to hero stories. We're showcasing our students. We're showing inspiring content to get people to realize that they can take their own path and put their life into their own hands. After you have defined what you want your brand to look like and who you are trying to serve your content to, you want to identify seven to eight creators that are within your space that are creating content that is hitting the audience that you want to hit. And you're going to identify.

going to use these creators to help you to define the trends that you should be creating content around. What you're going to see on TikTok is they have a search page where you can see content that's trending. That is going to be no help to you when it actually comes to building your brand on TikTok because what is growing on the platform as a whole is not going to actually be maybe what your niche is watching. So that's why you want to look to those seven to eight creators that are creating content for your audience and copy their trends and make their trends your own. So different trends to be looking out for. There's advice content.

Sandy Lynn with Small Business Tips is a really good example of this where her content is a lot of pointing and showing different types of pieces of advice. There's Haley Hoffman Smith that's creating storytelling content. Her content's all around manifesting and sharing her story about how she's trying to become a talk show host. And then we have Pick and Peel Stone. And this is a product. And they have lava rocks that they put latex into. And it's for people that have dermotillomania.

And they're just showcasing how their product works and where you can buy it. For SkillBank, we were following a few creators that were prominent in the marketing space and in the entrepreneurial space and then in the life manifestation space. So naturally, Sandy Lynn with small business tips was an account that we were looking for to get ideas from. Follow Mario is another example of a creator that we were taking a look at. He's a marketing executive at H&M, and he also gives career advice to people that are looking to break into the marketing space. And then lastly, we really liked Haley's content because she has that storytelling element that not a lot of TikTokers have. And she's also talking a lot about how to chase your life path and make a life for yourself. So this is just an example of how we took trends that we were seeing and we started to make it our own.

So we saw Sandy was creating a lot of pointing content. We saw Mario was doing the same thing. So we decided to do something very similar. And a lot of our content is just using this formula. After you've defined that formula, you want to now look into optimizing your videos. And you want to use trending music. And like I said earlier, if you're using music that other creators are using, it's a lot more easier for TikTok to show your content to audiences that really like that music.

It just gives them an opportunity to categorize it and push that content out. You want to use hashtags. So that way TikTok, again, their algorithm has a little bit of an easier time categorizing your content and showing it to the right audience. And then you want to optimize for sharing and watch time. So if you're posting content and you're seeing overall that people aren't watching your videos the whole way through and your analytics, you need to rethink how you're actually pushing that content out because if people aren't engaging, TikTok is not going to show it to

anyone. After you've defined the content formula that works for you, you started optimizing your content, you want to start pushing out content regularly. And I think Charlie DeMilio is the best example of someone who has created a content formula and then just started testing and iterating. She didn't come up with the dance moves that she posts on her TikTok on her own. She found really prominent dancing TikTokers in the space, started copying their dance moves, maybe making them her own a little bit, but because she's not coming up with those ideas on her own, she's able to post two to three videos a day and constantly show up in the feed. The thing with TikTok is, and this is actually just with any social platform in general, you are a video in a feed, right? People are going to be

scrolling through, they're going to forget about you as soon as they're done watching that video. So you want to make sure that you're constantly pushing out content so you're staying top of mind for the people that are watching the platform. After you've started to see videos performing really well, you want to start repurposing that content on other platforms. So paid media is a really good place to turn to. With our first video that hit a million views, we decided to take that video and retarget people that visited our website on Facebook and Instagram.

And we figured that if people were coming over to our website or we're seeing a spurt and we're also seeing a large growth in views on TikTok as well. They're most likely very correlated. So that gave us an opportunity to retarget people that had visited our website, but didn't actually hit that application button. You can also take this content and repurpose it on Instagram Reels. On TikTok, instead of saving and downloading the video like it gives you the option to, you can actually save the video as a live photo and then convert it to a video in your photo library.

And instead of having a big TikTok logo on the side of the video, it'll actually just put a little logo at the bottom. And that makes it a lot easier to share it on other platforms like Instagram Reels or on your Instagram Story. Instagram Reels is very similar to TikTok. It'll show content in the same way to people that are viewing that platform. And it's just another place to post content. Some other resources to check out here.

CreatorLibrary.com is a really great resource for helping you define your brand with coming up with ideas and creating your video content. TikTok also has a small business resource center where they're pushing out articles and content around getting more views towards your product and what you're trying to sell. So that is how you can build your brand and leverage TikTok to grow your startup.

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but only one or two percent past their diligence process. So as far as crowdfunding goes, our crowd is the cream of the crop. They've designed it that way. They say no many, many, many, many, many, many, many more times than they say yes. And that benefits the people who are investing on the platform, the accredited investors. So they've recently invested alongside Jeff Bezos, SoftBank, and other tap to your firms. And the investment professional is, that Our Crowd have already invested hundreds of millions of dollars in over 200 companies with dozens of exits. Our Crowd is investing in medical technology, breakthroughs in ag tech and food production, solutions in the multi-billion dollar robotic industry and so much more. The R-Crowd

is free. Just go to OU-R-C-O-W-D.com slash twist and check out how great their filtering is. Read the deal memos. It's always free to do that. And you're going to get a free education. Highly recommend, R-Crowd.com slash twist. I'm Katie from Lately, and I'm here today to talk to folks about how to use writing in their social to scale the bejesus out of their startup. Are you guys ready? All right. So it starts like this. First thing we're going to do today is really just talk about who I am and why you should bother listening to me.

Number one, I used to be a rock and roll DJ. So my last gig was broadcasting to 20 million listeners a day for XM satellite radio. So I certainly wrote a lot of commercials. is and then of course, you know, learned how to turn listeners into fans, which is a big difference. That's exactly what turning customers into evangelists is about. And that's what we do, you know, at lately now, using writing to do that. I was also a marketing agency owner, so I got Walmart 130% ROI year over year for three years out of spreadsheets. Yay, you guys have all probably been in spreadsheet hell before.

So I know the pain. Fascinatingly enough, what I learned about the nerds, neuroscience of music when I was a rock and roll DJ and the spreadsheet system that I created for Walmart is the bedrock of Lately's AI. So I'll just talk about that for a quick second. But the way that you listen to new music is your body, your brain has to access every older song you've ever heard before. And then in order to place that new song in your brain's index, it's looking for familiar touch points. And so nostalgia and memory and emotion pile forth when you listen to music, right? And so,

writing is the same way, especially in sales and marketing. My job is to get you to accept and understand and like a new idea and to give you familiar touch points so that you trust me and you feel comfortable in the end giving me your money, right? So that's some of the ideas that we're going to touch on today as well. So lately is software that does this, right? So we're actually the only social media management platform that creates content for you. Lately.a.i is where you can learn about us. And we use the AI to automatically atomize any long-form content. So podcasts and webinars just like this or written as well.

So it could be blogs or newsletter articles. And the AI brain starts to learn from every social channel you connect to it. And what it's doing is it's looking for all the content that you've gotten comments or shares or likes from. It considers that good. And it creates a writing model based on what it learns your audience already likes. So that when you feed the brain, it can place the same writing model on top of that content and look for those hot quotes that it knows you're going to get the highest engagement from.

So Gary V, you guys all probably know Gary. If you don't, I will point him out for you here. This is Gary. He actually launched an entire new channel, a Twitter channel that's fueled 100% by Lately's AI and nothing else. And these ideas, these copyrating ideas that are the bedrock of our AI, get Gary a 12,000% increase in engagement. I'll say that again, 12,000% right? Because they work. And the good news is you don't need to have lately to do this.

You can do anything, the manual hard and long way, but we'll walk through the processes of like how the AI is learning and how you can do it yourself. So why do you care? The reason you care is because bad writing skills are incredibly expensive. in social and everywhere. Companies waste 400 billion with a B dollars in the U.S. alone on bad writing each year. And that's not just outwardly in social and any kind of marketing or sales, but also the internal message. So just thinking about how you communicate with your employees and how much back and forth there is because people aren't communicating or writing, you know, very well. And while video, yes, is prevalent today, really everything comes down to the text,

whether it's the transcription of the video and then the headlines that people use to describe it or write over it or text messaging, writing an email, even leaving a sticky note to get your husband to take out the garbage for you. Everything boils down to text and it's really the DNA of how we all communicate, right? When companies are feeling this pain, they're actually sending their employees back to school for remedial writing training, which to me sounds like horrible torture from hell. You don't want to be in a remedial writing class or any writing class. So just thinking about how this little soft skill, people think of writing as a soft skill, actually now has become one of the most important skills that anyone across your team,

whether it's marketing or accounting or HR, can have. So the tricks we're going to talk about today can be used not only in social, but pretty much everywhere. I call them Caitlinly's social writing rules. So my team calls me Caitlin. I'm Katie from lately. they all have to use these rules. They shame each other when they forget to. So it becomes addictive pretty quickly.

In fact, my customer service head, Lauren, said that she recently outwrote another customer service person from a company and got $1,000 in credit for a return that they originally didn't want to give her by using these rules. So these rules are the same rules that are the bedrock for Lately's AI that we discussed earlier. They're also the same rules that get us a 98% sales conversion, 98%. And that's with no paid ads, no cold calls, and no cold emails. This is what we do for ourselves. These are also the same rules that got us from 24,000 MRR to 95,000 MRR in 12 months. So it's all about how to use writing to scale your startup. Are you ready for the rules? Here we go. Number one is a great rule that

actually, Jason, you were reminding me how valuable this was when we were pitching. And I was thinking about the word think and how weak that can sound, especially when you're pitching to investors. And other female advisors remind me of this as well. You know, right? And so I feel like my female friends are most guilty of this. But when you're writing, you want to use powerful words that credit you as the authority of the subject, whatever it is.

So don't undercut yourself with weak words. So weak words are need. The needy team needs, right? We need your money. Think, like I said, you want to do no. I just wanted to say something, something, right? See how that's a little fluffy there? Probably, maybe, possibly.

These are all kind of teetering words. Now, there are places for these words. Sometimes in customer service, when you want to put yourself on the down foot to, you know, make yourself feel more accessible. But this is a general idea. You want to be the boss of what you're saying and be the authority. This one's my favorite.

So I'm probably going to make a lot of people blush right now because most people get red in the face because we're all guilty of this. Check out is easily the most vapid, lazy call to action on the face of the planet. You should all 86 it from your vocab immediately. And think instead about what active verbs really define the call to action you're intending, right? So check out is meant to be like go and see or go and look or learn more, which are all, you know, not the most ideal verbs either because they're kind of general. But what you want to do is think about what's the value behind what you want someone to do and try to pull that value out front so they can get an understanding if they were to click

to check out my link, right? If they're to click it, what's going to happen? So I'll show you some examples of how to use better call to actions here. So this is my LinkedIn feed where I do a lot of my social. and I'll walk through each of the parts of this. So the call to action here is it's not even really a verb. I'm just saying more real talk for entrepreneurs and underdogs with my Radpals, Jim and Chris. So I'm sort of even avoiding a direct call to action and making it more a little bit tricksy here.

Like I like this technique a lot because I feel like it's subtle. It's not selling, but it's selling, right? A couple of other things that I do that I'll break down. in the slides as well, but just to go over them while we're here. So is a tactic, right? I'm trying to make you feel like you know me already. I'm bringing you into my orb for trust. We're talking about the book, the secret.

I'm using the word barf, which is fun to say. I love onomatopoeia. People hear what they read. So they're hearing that and they're laughing. I know they are because they've all responded to me. And then I'm giving some advice. This is that authority piece we talked about before. So the secret isn't a secret.

at all. I'm not saying I don't think it is or maybe it is. I'm making as though like, I know it. And then it's a mindset. So I'm being very clear about what I believe is true and really commanding you into believing me. If you're a business owner, you might be making running your business harder than it needs to be. Don't let old software and spreadsheets slow you down anymore. It's time to upgrade to NetSuite. No matter what industry you're in, whether it's health care, manufacturing, advertising, hospitality, SaaS, or dozens more, Netsweek, can streamline your workflow and improve your productivity. And that's what it's all about efficiency. So stop paying for multiple systems that don't give you the information you need when you need it. Ditch the old

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So the other one I wanted to touch on was another way to use that call to action without saying check out. So in this case, again, I'm using that subtle thing more on why the hard ways work with my pal, Mark Evans. We talked about what's the value behind clicking something. So right here I'm saying why the hard ways work. So what are the hard ways? That's what I want you to ask yourself. And I'll read this out so you can hear it. In the beginning, we didn't think so much that we were building a company,

but that we were building a community. So all of that is also meant to be controversial, right? Because, you know, why wouldn't I think I was building a community, which that's what everybody thinks you're a company when you're a startup, right? It should be focused on building this company and having this vision. And what I'm saying, we're all that our vision was more of like a culture, a hangout place, right? And it turns out that this was SMOT AF.

So I'm using my vernacular, how I talk here, smart. and then AF because I like to be a little bit rogue, right? And then I love using the parentheses as well, because this is a statement under the breath, if I don't say so myself, with a little rock hand. So visually, you have the parentheses, you've got the ellipses, and then you've got my arrows here that are all pushing you,

like a very visual call to action to click this and find out, you know, what are these hard ways. So I'm going to go back to some of the rules. And you'll see that a lot of the rules are, bind in the things that I'm saying, and you'll see why they overlap. So another one is don't bury the lead. Do you want to ID that call to action right off the bat? Everyone is very impatient. And in school, they taught us, if you'll remember, when we're writing an essay, for example, that you have this long introductory paragraph or two kind of laying out, you know, some preparation

of when your ideas are going to come together. And then at the end, the very end of the paper is when like the whole, you know, exciting revelation comes. So that's not the way people write or read anymore. You have to put it all up front. So what I like to say, actually, is that writing is four parts editing and one part vomiting. So you vomit first. You get it out all in the page and then you want to spend the hard time editing, right? And the reason that you want to do that is because most people do bury the lead right away. So you want to think to yourself, okay, the first two sentences, the first five words can probably just be 86 altogether. and then you'll get right to the meat of your message faster. So, for example, I'm a Tom Petty fan.

I get my hair cut like Tom Petty by accident all the time. And so I'm saying, here's the difference for you. You have to see the last dance now versus see the last dance now. So do you see how I don't need this in the beginning? I can just get rid of that. And then here's the bonus. I'm actually creating a call to action out of a sentence because when you push the verb first, you get that command vibe going on. You're the authority, right? It's all about getting people to do what you want them to do. So the next one I wanted to talk to you guys about is using negative calls to action in the place of positive ones. This one is pretty tricksy, but it works super well. And it doesn't mean having a negative message like, I don't like you. It means just taking.

the verb and turning it into the negative form of itself. So remember to follow these rules versus don't forget to follow these rules. What's great about don't forget is it shames people. It's this terrible thing that kind of keys into the little child and all of us to go, ooh, did I do that, right? And it makes you check yourself pretty quickly. And it's something that I use all the time with my team and even customers as well. But it's a good way. You can test it to see how it works with yours. I mean, it's pretty easy to AP test,

don't versus the positive version of it. But you'll notice that there's a lot of tricks that we're going to go over here that are on the psychological testing side. And that's one of them. Another tricky thing that I love to use is why and because. So there's the journalist questions, right? Who, what, where, how, why, when, right? All of them are great because there's a question mark.

And a question mark is always super handy in any social writing because when there's a question mark, it's a visual cue that there's an answer coming and everybody wants the answer, right? That's our default. So why and because are especially great for that. Why wants to be resolved and we expect why to be resolved with because specifically. So we're innately, instinctively looking for that resolution. Now, it might be in the copy itself or it might be they have to click the copy. to get the resolution, extra trixie, right?

So you can use that either way. Trust is the big thing here because as a word itself has been known to instantly imbue trust on the user because when you resolve because you give someone a reason because I said so or because, you know, the milk in the fridge is stale. You don't have to, you just have to say, you know, why. And by giving people the why, like I think about this with my team all the time, my tech team especially, they're very empirical. And so if you say to them, I need an answer for this customer now that doesn't fly with them. But if you say, I need an answer for this customer now because it's a $20,000 MRR sale that we're going to lose, then they respond to that, right?

So you think about this with because as well, it also, by the way, causes a pause at the start of a sentence, which is generally where we use it when we're we talk. And the more you write like you talk, again, more people will trust you and we'll focus on that one a little bit more in a second. The other benefit, the question mark that we talked about before, any time you can give any visuals that aren't just words, aren't just letters, you win because you want to grab the attention to people and you have to use all kinds of tools to do that. So I'll touch on that as well. Another sneaky little trick is one we learned from Shakespeare. It's called the Royal Wee, the Royal You. And that has to do with sort of forcing people into feeling there on your team or to put themselves in your shoes, right? So number one,

you want to avoid I whenever possible. And this is hard to do. And it's a good part of that vomit edit rule. So once you vomit things out, you want to go in and look for, have you used I all over the place, try to 86 that and replace it with we or you or just start with the verb in the sentence altogether, right? I makes people feel that it's all about you, the talker and not about them and sales are all about other people. Marketing and lead gen is all about listening and putting the other person up front. We is very inclusive and you can do we when people aren't exactly a we.

So it makes them feel like they're a part of your team when they aren't officially yet. And the other thing about you is that you is actually empathy, which is even better than sympathy, right? Because that's like right imagining yourself in the mix. This one's my favorite one. It comes from radio and it's read what you write out loud. It's the best trick in the book that anybody can do anytime all the time. When you read, as we were talking about music and how the neuroscience of music works, I want you guys to think about your voice as a note like a song, right? Because it is. it has a frequency. And when you read text, you hear the voice of the person on the other end. So it's my job as the writer to make sure that the voice you hear is the what I want you to hear,

the one that's going to make you buy my stuff or share my message or comment on my link, whatever it is. For me, for example, I have what I call resting bitch voice, like when I write, so I constantly have to use a lot of emojis to tamper that down or to lend some humor to it. One key test that you can do is by reading out loud is thinking about, literally how your mouth feels when you say words. So I love this example. This is, I shop at West Elm. And they sent me this coupon in the mail. And it says, this certificate is issued for reward purposes and is a duplicate of the certificate you've received by email. Kill me now. Right. So what they're really saying is like, hey, dingling, we sent you a copy of this coupon via email. You can't

use both. Right. But instead, duplicate of their certificate. You guys can hear me having a hard time saying that. And when you slow people down, when you make it harder for them to get annoyed, then they don't trust you and then they don't want to give you your money. This week in startups is brought to you by Silicon Valley Bank. What's next? What if? Are we ready? Now what? These are the questions that can keep a founder up at night and no one understands this quite like Silicon Valley Bank for over 35 years. Silicon Valley Bank has helped thousands of high growth companies by providing scalable financial solutions, along with the insights and expertise that many other banks just can't.

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bank with SVB. Learn more at SVB.com slash twist. Silicon Valley Bank, built for what's next. So you want to think about what's human, what's that natural language, what feels comfortable to you, and then also it's a great way to catch mistakes because when you read out loud, you get embarrassed quickly and you're like, oh, no. I want to show you an example of that here. So I'm writing sales peeps, mold your scripts to your own voice. Otherwise, you sound fake ass and untrustworthy. Plus other tips I learned from a former life in broadcast radio page all the way down. So a lot going on here. Some of the tips we touched on before. I'm saying mold your scripts into your own voice. So I'm starting this sentence with a verb. I'm commanding people. I'm using. I'm using.

using my own voice here, I say fake ass. I'm not saying everybody can do this, but, but I do. I'm having, I'm emojiing it. So it's clear that I know I'm using a word that's a little bit maybe wild for LinkedIn. And I'm justifying what I said, like, because isn't here, but the because is implied, right? So that again gives me that authority. I've used the, um, parentheses for some visual cue that under the breath thing. And then I love to use the deep, do to keep that ball going. So there's a motion towards clicking the link. So along the note of that visual cues, so I've touched on the parentheses and the ellipsis and of course the emojis, I want you guys to really start thinking about how you write the same way you think about food,

right? So how it looks on the plate totally is part of the appetizing, you know, process. And writing is the same way, how it looks on the screen. We often forget that we have some amazing tools, all of us do in our toolkits on the keyboard or the keypad. So whether it's numbers, so using the number itself, you don't have to write out 23, use 2,3, or m-dashes or brackets, slashes, all capital letters, all these things, italics, give you the ability to really wield the power of that keyboard over the pen, so to speak,

with that authority we were talking about before and to communicate your voice, the persona that you want people to understand and trust and, you know, open their wall as too, right? That trust thing, we've talked about it a few times here and I'll keep bringing it up because trust is the commodity that we all wield, whether it's on social or when you're slacking with your team. And so it's really important to think about how people are perceiving the words that you write

in order to get them to do what you want them to do. This rule is one of my favorites. It's the golden rule. Hopefully you learn this in elementary school. You want to have compassion to everyone, your community. communicating with on social or anywhere else. And remember that they're humans just like you. Maybe they, you know, got into a car accident the other day or maybe their daughter is

giving them a hard time about doing homework or maybe their boss is, you know, driving them up a wall. People have lives and you're not the only thing in it. And when you go at them in your social marketing with empathy, with sympathy, you give them permission to be themselves and then you make that line between trustworthiness tighter, stronger, and of course, faster. You just get there quicker. The sale goes quicker. So you want to put yourself in someone's shoes whenever possible. This is why that reading aloud tip is so important so you can really feel and hear how you sound to others and think about

really what you want to be understood on the other. What's your, what's your objective on the other and we're going to touch on that shortly as well. But I think about this, like, when, again, whether I'm asking my husband to wash the dishes or I'm asking a team member to do a task that they've forgotten about, or if I'm on social and I'm trying to get you to come to my webinar, I'm trying to think about who are the people that are reading it. What's going to turn them on? What's going to be the spark that lights them up that makes them do this thing I want them to do? right? And what's the, what's the emotion and the value behind that? What's the win for them, right? And how can I communicate that? So one really super easy way to do that is to think about

time zones. So what we find is that a lot of people can't do math. I was a fiction writing major. I can't do math either. And just the simple act of giving people more time zones to choose from is a huge way to just say like, I get it. You know, I want to be helpful. to you. By the way, all the tips we just talked about are here as well. Do you know the 56, the number actual magic words? You can hear me saying this. I got the magic hat in there drive sales. Word's so powerful. The United Nations consults this guy. So I'm now giving him some authority. So you guys want to, why would you bother listen to this name that you don't even know? Well, because the United Nations pays him to tell them what to do. That's kind of, kind of awesome.

and then all the other little tricks that I talked about earlier. So this is the one. I always save it for mostly last, even though it probably should be first, but it's the idea of writing with a clear objective. You want people to do something, and there's no shame in that. And I find especially women that I know do have shame about that.

So stop that. There's no shame in making a sale or using marketing for a lead gen, which is what you should be doing, right? There's a reason why you're writing this social post, and it's not to share with people what breakfast, serial you're enjoying or not enjoying. It's for lead gen. I mean, really should be.

So you want to identify what the objective is and work backwards. I like to think of the macro goals first, right? So in social, there's only two objectives. Their conversion, which means like a click or reach, which is a share, right? So it's very easy. Click or share. That's all I want you to do. As a smaller company, it's much harder to get people to actually click any content

because they don't trust you yet, but it's very easy to get them to share. when people are sharing, they're doing it because it's about their ego. They're taking credit for what you said, really, right? So it's kind of like when someone recommended you a great album in college and then you share it with your friends, you get the credit, not the friend who started the thing, right? So think about that. Is what you're writing, touching on the ego enough to give someone a reason to reshare this and look good because you're giving them, you know, that little golden nugget?

And then clicks, by the way, like I said, it's harder when you're a younger business, but in the case, except for in the case of how-toes. So how-toes click galore. So anytime you can write a blog that's like a how-to do your hair or how to write copy smarter and more effectively, whatever it is, videos, podcasts, whatever, how-toes are super win there. The last thing I wanted to remind you all to do is to dog food your own marketing. And that means that everyone in the company should be sharing and liking

and following your brand on social and wherever. can't get your own employees to do that. You're hopeless. They're the most powerful and strongest advocates that you should have. And really thinking about how we're stronger together is the easiest way to get the largest and most exponential reach as possible, to use like everyone in your entire network to help you lift that message up. And so on that note, I want to leave you with how we exactly did this recently. So I put a video up on LinkedIn not that long ago when people were saying that videos could never thrive on LinkedIn. I ended up getting 18,000 views. And the reason I did is because I have a channel that I started inside our company Slack,

where I will post a link to something that I wrote about and I asked my team to go and comment on it. And then we ask other people to comment on it as well. It's super unscaliable, right? Scale the unscable. It's hard work. You've got to go and by hand ask other people to help lift your message up. But as a result, we got incredible leads from just this, right? And it made it so that we hit our $1 million a or our goal in January.

All right. Great job, Mahak. Great job. Kate Lee from Lately. So, Mahek, let me start with you. I have a technical, tactical question about TikTok. How do you convert somebody from TikTok into a funnel? Because I've only used TikTok a couple of times,

but I don't think the videos are clickable. So how does somebody get somebody into their funnel if you can't click on it like you can on Twitter or I guess link in bio on Instagram? Yeah. So TikTok is primarily. primarily for Top of Funnel. We have a link to our website in my profile, but that's it. So really what you want to do is, or what you have to do is you have to tell a very compelling story to get people

to want to go and search your product or what you're trying to sell after seeing that video. So if I'mcom.com, I have to remind them, hey, download com in the app store or search for com online or whatever it is. Exactly. TikTok also gives you the opportunity. So not just to add your URL, but to also connect your Instagram and your YouTube accounts. So every account that you're connecting should be directly correlated to your business. So you want to give people no excuse to be able to say, oh, I couldn't find your website or I didn't know where to find you or where you are. But it's on your profile page, to be clear. Exactly. Yeah. So you, and you want to, And you want to tell people that,

that, hey, you go to my profile and you'll be able to see it there. I notice a lot of it seems to be around dancing and maybe wearing outfits that are a little bit revealing or risque or flamboyant. How do you think about that in a business setting? And, you know, figuring that piece out. I mean, listen, if I'm just doing it for fun with my friends,

I could be, you know, wearing my, baiting suit and have my shirt off as a guy dancing around or a woman could be in a bathing suit. But do you worry about doing business in that context? And how do you think about that? This is such a common misconception with TikTok. TikTok is so much bigger than just people posting dancing videos while it's a really big part of the market and how it blew up. There's so many different niches now on TikTok. There's people posting makeup videos. People showcasing their SoundCloud music, people that are promoting their startups.

And what you'll come to find is, regardless of what industry you're in, there are content creators in that space creating content. So really, I think it's important that you create content that's true to yourself and true to the brand that you're trying to create. And as long as it's engaging,

and as long as it's keeping people around and wanting them to come back and view more, TikTok is going to find that audience for you that really enjoys your content. I've found that if you can take a more personal approach to how you're sharing your content, so not just, hey, this is skill bank, and this is what we do and apply here, but instead it's, hey, this is a student that we've taken from point A to point B and actually made a compelling story that was engaging fun to watch, that's going to actually convert people.

So you want to really use that storytelling element. How many seconds is a TikTok video on average and what's the max? and is there like a recommendation you have for the proper length? So TikTok gives you two options. You can make a 15 second video or a 60 second video. And then, I mean, you can stop it anywhere in between, but you have to select that at the bottom of the screen. So yeah, there's really no recommendation.

It really just depends on the type of content that you're creating and following the trends that are within your niche. So like if you're creating content that no one else is, creating content around, it's going to be really, really hard for TikTok to identify that audience for you. So it's a lot easier to actually start off just copying what other people are doing and just making that your own. What's with that robotic voice on TikTok where they say, tell me you're a marketer without telling me you're a marketer. Yeah, the Siri voice. Yeah, what is that voice? You know, I, how do you do it? I don't know why it became a thing. But yeah,

it's a trend and it's I think it's just easier to understand but yeah I don't I actually I don't really have an answer for you there are people typing in the text and then it makes that yes yes yeah you can type it into I think you can type it into Siri and then have her repeat it um I think is my got it oh is that how people are doing it interesting do people create their videos on TikTok in the TikTok app or do they make the videos you know on their digital SLR with a high quality camera edit them and then upload them to their photo album and then put them into TikTok. The really beautiful thing about TikTok is, is there's people doing everything.

So like with me and my really well edited videos, I'm just doing those in Imovie and cutting them together. But even those clips, I shot on Instagram stories, on Snapchat's and I'm just downloading them and then splicing them together. TikTok's editing platform, like any platform has a learning curve that you need to learn and you need to understand how it works.

But yeah, I mean, once you've created the clips in the way that you want them to and you get them to come together, TikTok's platform will let you do voice editing, those voiceovers adding in music, adding in text. So, yeah, I mean, it's definitely really important to learn that. And I'd recommend using TikTok's editing platform for including text, including music. So that way, TikTok can help with categorizing it. But actually putting the clips together, I think you could do that anywhere. All right, final question on the TikTok front. Do people get annoyed when somebody hijacks a meme or a trend? I don't know what they call the different devices,

but the Busset or Busset challenge or something where you're kind of like uglyed up and then you drop down and you dance and you're in like a really like going to the club outfit. But if you took one of those and then you did it about business, would people be kind of like you're a dork or they'd be like, oh, that's kind of funny? Oh, no, not at all. I mean, we're seeing this even on marketing TikTok right now where people will take, we'll take trends that we're seeing blowing up in the modeling industry and the influencer industry and then recreating that and making it our own.

And I think especially with like the dancing, we're seeing a lot of marketing TikTokers that will take those dances. And then instead of putting their hips out or doing something crazy, they're pointing to things instead and like trying to give advice. So you can take it and make it your own and for the industry that you're in and who you're trying to entertain. So this means when I give founder advice on how to raise money for your startup, I'm going to have to dance and point to don't apologize in your video and examples. matter and get to the product in 15 seconds. Yeah. Like, I can't do that as a 50 year old guy. Really?

I just can't do it. I'll do one. Now, when I do it, would I do it under Jason Calacanis? Would I do it under a brand like this weekend startups or lunch? I think you should do it under Jason. You do it under your personal account. Yeah. That's what we're doing with Skill Bank too.

And it's, yeah, it's under my account, but I'm pushing primarily skill bank content. All right. Katie from lately. What do you think about being cheeky or spicy or confrontational even on like the Twitter or LinkedIn as a brand? Thinking of like Steakums, the, I've never had a Steakam. But apparently Stakem's is like interjecting itself into, you must have seen this where they're like talking to Neil deGrasse Tyson.

Like, oh, science is whatever. and then Sakeham started dunking on him. What do you think of when brands start acting cheeky and confrontational or otherwise mixing it up on social media? You know, it's weird because I mean, I think we're, I'm hesitant just like you are, because if it feels awkward to us, it has to, it's not working. I mean, right? And I feel like you can't make a brand, a human.

You can't do it. You can only do, as, as Mahak was saying earlier, you can, use the human to talk about the brand, right? So I feel like they're cottoning on to it. They're trying to, they're Johnny Cum Lailies, right? They already realized that like, oops, oops, we bored you guys to tears with our brand, brand, brand. Now we're going to try to inject some human in it.

Yeah. Yeah, it's, uh, we'll have them cut it in, but this like steak I'm saying, log off bro to a Neil deGras Tyson tweet. It was just, I found it kind of, uh, weird and, but, but interesting. because here we are, we're talking about it. So to a certain extent, it did capture some imagination. And I wonder, too, Jason, who's the audience, right? I mean, if the audience is like a 14-year-old boy,

then maybe, you know, a talking piece of bacon is a good idea. I don't know. I'm compelled to buy a Steakam now because I don't know what it is exactly. I think it's a frozen Philly cheese steak. But anyway, I'm intrigued by what even a Steakam is. But I don't know if it comes with the bread or it's just the meat or it's It's frozen. I have like a lot of questions now about Steakums, as it were. You're making me hungry.

Exactly. I will say though to cheek, by the way. Like I'm pro-cheek. I mean, that's my brand, obviously. And it's because we knew to leverage what we already had. So, I mean, I came from a land of 20 million listeners. Why would I flush that down the toilet? Let's take the brand of Caitlin that I already made and use it for lately, right?

which I think is a mistake that a lot of entrepreneurs make right off the bat is they hide themselves behind the curtain and they think that the brand has to be everything. But when you're starting out, you don't have anything except for your own network, right? Yeah. So when you think about the frequency at which you should be engaging with your audience, and what type of content, if you were working and consulting with somebody who had a startup, How would you advise them as to the frequency of tweeting? There are some people who write one tweet a day and they just craft it really perfectly. And then there are other people who are up in people's replies and tweeting 25, I'm a 20 time a day tweeter, just randomly talking about stuff that comes to mind. What do you think?

Is it the sniper approach or the machine gun approach? It depends on the channel that you're in because the algorithms will prevent you from being, noticed if you're going crazy in some places. So like LinkedIn, for example, they just changed a lot of their rules. And we know that it's once a day is when you can publish there. That's it. Whereas on Twitter, you can easily get away with 10 or 20. As far as the feeling or from the person reading it, I mean, so I'm not glued to, I'm sorry, to your Twitter channel all day long, right? So the chances of me seeing all 20 messages are almost none. And it's the same idea like in in radio, right? So we used to play the same song 300 times in one week, hoping that you would hear

it once, right? So that's, I think, another misconception that people make is that just because you push it out there doesn't mean people see it. In fact, mostly they don't. So you have to do it often, but you want to do it with a lot of variants. So people, the few superfans you do have, don't feel, to your point, over-saturated. Do you like the idea of, um, Katie, having the entire message exist on Twitter in a tweet storm or in a long

LinkedIn thread and into the comments? Or do you like the idea of something short and punchy and getting people to click over to your website, to your blog? Which is the better practice? For me, it's short and punchy. Because that's just how I think.

I also like that I like that I like, the tease. I like the idea of a tease in anything, whether it's a movie trailer or, I mean, I'm the kind of person that totally reads the last sentence of a book and then tries to figure out how the whole thing unveils, right? Because I think that's more compelling. It's more human nature. Also, I'm busy and I don't have time for the vomit, other people's vomit, right? I mean... That was a really interesting metaphor. Vomited all on the page and then at the times. It was quite graphic, but I do to a certain extent agree with, just let it all out, and then you can always delete stuff as opposed to forgetting some great idea. I also do like

your read it out loud. And I have a little habit that I do, which is not only do I read it out loud, almost every app now has built in text to speech conversion on a Mac, a Windows, your iPhone. You know, you can just highlight something and say speak the text. And sometimes you have to go to accessibility features to get that, but it's almost universally, you know, available or there's Chrome extensions for it. And I find you don't have any typos. And you get to really hear what it's like in somebody's brain. Also, if you've got writer's block, what I always tell people is just put on your phone recorder and start talking. or there's this really cool app called Otter, O-T-T-E-R-A-I,

which you can use in Zoom for a transcript, or you can use it on your phone for a transcript, or in a meeting. If you just start talking to it and get the transcript, you might find conversationally that you say it more elegantly in conversation than you do when you're trying to construct a sentence, if you're not great at sentence construction.

Mehek, what is the proper amount of text to put on an image? and is there any secrets to the copy? Because it is really brief. It seems like two or three words, but I saw it summon yours where there were like two or three sentences. Is there like a best practice around that? So some people will put closed captions on their videos where, yeah,

they'll just annotate what they're saying. When I'm including texts in my TikTok, it's to actually just bring main points home. So it's like, hey, I dropped out of college. So like, then like I go and tell a whole story, but the text is going to show I dropped out of college. Just try to like, the thing is, is people are scrolling through TikTok, usually listening to

audio. So you don't need to annotate it. We're starting to see people doing that to help out with people that are deaf and can't hear. But if you are going to put like minimal text, I think it should just be short and punchy points to bring the video home. Do you guys have any questions for each other? as marketers who one has a school on marketing and the other one has tools on marketing.

You have questions for each other. I'm curious. Was there anything in each presentation that you wanted to ask each other about? Yeah. I'm curious how Kate, you think about LinkedIn as a platform for marketing and how you look at your like you're scheduling for LinkedIn. For context on me, I actually used to run a LinkedIn marketing agency. We would pull in between two to five million views a month in the platform.

just pushing out content. And I know the algorithm has changed quite a bit in the last, like, few months. So I'm curious to hear how you think about your cadence with LinkedIn now. Yeah, so thanks. You know, we, it's our primary source of legion right now, just because it's so easy to connect with people and relate to them. I mean, so many walls are immediately broken down. You've got a million comma denominators thrown right in your face, right?

And we found that people are more social on LinkedIn than ever before. And in fact, we feel like they're starving for it. So I shine well over there because, as you guys know, my filter is broken. So it's easy for me to be a little bit stand out, right, just by being unpolished. But yeah, so the recent changes have shown, for example, if you publish twice a day, your second post will get like no, no views at all, right? We game the system to, mehack. So like we, almost everything we post, we have an army internally that's kind of. commenting and liking and helping, you know, push it up.

That's how we got Gary V as a customer is the same idea, you know, just gaming it. But yeah, it's interesting to me about the video piece that we talked about earlier. So I was told forever, like, video isn't playing on LinkedIn. No one should try video. And then I used to do a video a day, like similar to, and I should do TikTok. I really need your help. But like I would do a 60-second thing of a day in the life of a startup entrepreneur. And what was amazing is people love it when you cry.

So those are the months that got the most, you know, anything I could talk about that was like upsetting about startup life whatsoever. So that video of me smiling about hitting a million ARR was shocking to me that we got so many views because it was like the opposite of all the data that we had before on LinkedIn. So the answer is really, I don't know. We're, we're totally experimenting and seeing how it works. You know, what I would ask you is, I think Jason really touched on it. Like, I'm putting my toe on the water on TikTok. And the only reason I'm not doing it more is because, frankly, I don't have time to edit and do all those components.

I mean, a lot has to go in for what you're doing there. And I'm not sure, again, who the audience is on TikTok because my audience is generally seasoned marketers who are long out of school, generally. right? And I feel like TikTok is younger except for apparently Stevie Nix. Yeah, no, TikTok is great. If you're trying to reach a consumer audience, there are people that are creating content for marketers that are a little bit more seasoned. I think it just comes down to the type of content that you're creating. And then you're probably going to see people that are making more serious content, not following the like rap trends or the, you're dance trends because those trends are going to people that are younger and are more,

that's more consumer friendly. We are seeing a trend, though, towards people making meteor TikToks. So it's like, this is how you do X, Y, and Z and how you set up a funnel. And people are starting to look at TikTok as being an avenue for sharing those tips and sharing those ideas. I think there's an audience for everyone on TikTok. It's just about finding them and then creating that. brand for yourself on that platform. The really nice thing, too, is you can actually take that

TikTok content and repurpose it on LinkedIn. We've gotten like a few thousand views just doing that on TikTok and repurposing that. And it's interesting because it's like with TikTok, as long as you're telling a story, it's engaging, people are going to go through and watch it. And if people are watching it there and you're making them stop and actually engage with it, it's a pretty good test to actually see that it's going to do well on other platforms like LinkedIn and Instagram and Facebook and Twitter. Do either of you have thoughts on, you know, Clubhouse, casual audio, Twitter spaces, and the new spaces that are coming.

Reddit is launching one. Slack is going to have one. Obviously, it's built into Discord and racket.com, which you can follow me at racket.com slash Jason, Austin's new company. Yeah. What are your thoughts on these platforms as marketing or top of funnel or middle of funnel. I wonder if we're the opposite. But so my thoughts are I'm completely allergic to it because I already did that career. You know, what do you mean? Well, I mean, I was on

radio before, which is what it is, you know, and I don't, for me, it's not a value to sit around and listen to other people talking, because I don't have time for that personally. And then to actually be on stage, because there's no content for me to repurpose, it evaporates. It's not a huge. It's not a win. However, every time I am on, we get instant leads and about 95% of them have all converted. So what's wrong with me? I should figure this out. Well, yeah. I mean, I think the difference is if you look at it as I'm going to just start a casual room and leave, that's one thing. But if you plan to have an event, then it's more like a web. I think if you plan it ahead of time and you create structure and you record it, it's a webinar. Right. Yeah. So,

So depending on how you use that new medium, it could be like talk radio or it could be a webinar. So I'm noticing people are, I'm getting asked to speak at specific clubhouses at least 10 times a week. And those used to be podcast requests. So I almost feel like producing a podcast like this takes, you know, a couple of people and, you know, a lot of friction. Yeah. But producing a clubhouse takes zero friction. So maybe people are now starting to make these more planned events. Mehek, you had a thought?

Yeah, I mean, Jason, I think you hit it right on the head. I think I think Clubhouse is a really great place for podcasts, for scheduled events. I think Clubhouse, we saw a really big push towards it in the winter in the beginning of the spring because it gave everyone an opportunity to access people that weren't accessible before. It was. Because the pandemic. Yeah, we got, we were able to get access to conversations with VCs, with influencers, people that you wouldn't usually be in a room. with hearing having a conversation. And now that we're out of the pandemic or we're getting out of it and people are moving off of Clubhouse, I'm starting to see that Clubhouse is kind of dead compared to where it was a few months ago because people are actually having those conversations in real life. So I think Clubhouse is good if you're trying to schedule out events and you're trying to get people engaged that are within your community.

But I think Clubhouse as a way for discoverability is not a place that I'd be turned to. I'd be turning to places like TikTok, LinkedIn, where it's more of a community-driven platform. It feels like it's dying. Every time I go in there, it's just less and less going on. And you know that it was working, though, for Top of Funnel, because Katie, you're saying you did get leads from it. And so there is something about that format that I do think is good for Top of Funnel and conversion, because when people hear your voice, I think it does build trust. And maybe you're just burnt out from radio, but you're obviously good at it because it did convert people. And I think that's why all those coaching scammers and MLM scammers were in there for 24

hours because it was actually working. So there is, there's definitely something to the format, but this has been great. You want to add something, Kate, as we know. Oh, yeah, I was just going to say, I think, like, you know, for people with established following, like you were, like Brian Fanso I see in TikTok, in Clubhouse all the time. And Brian has, I don't know, what is it, 40,000 million listeners, followers everywhere, all of the world. And then I think it's super valuable. But, you know, if I'm going in there and there's like maybe 30 to 100 people showing up, that's when I, that's like, that's an hour of my time, right? So as an

entrepreneur, if I'm just thinking about scale, I'm thinking about, is that hour even worth a couple of sales, you know? I don't know. It depends on the size of the sale, yeah. Yeah. It is interesting. There are so many platforms now that just even creating a, I'm finding this with this week in startups, as this podcast goes, just there's so many different ways to connect with people. So I just try each one of them. But you only have so much time in the day. And we have a Slack instance, a Discord instance, a Telegram group, a mailing list, and Twitter and LinkedIn.

I mean, I'm having to build an army just to put clips everywhere. And then it's kind of worth it because, you know, getting three or four thousand people to watch a clip or your 18,000 person clip, like these things can add up and become material. So it really is, I think, a pursuit worth pursuing. It's worth putting some focus on. The one thing I will say is that what I love about the medium, and sorry, meheck, because I love video too, but specifically about audio only and text only is there, the theater of the mind is required, right? So that means that the listener slash reader has to do some work in order to participate with the message.

So it's generally a more, I find the conversion is higher because there's some commitment on the other end, right? So I think what Clubhouse got right in the beginning was something that everybody wants is that the pull back of the black curtain, that's people were not peeping Tom's, but what's the audio version of that, right? And so that's sexy and interesting. I think what it tells us, and this is what Mayhawk was pointing out earlier, is like, take what you learn in one medium and use it on the other. others. Yeah. Repurposing content is clearly a huge win. So we started doing podcast notes for This Week in Startups, which were basically, what did you learn in the episode? And since we started writing these up, we posted them to our Notion instance, This Weekend Startups, Notion,

that we put it on my personal blog, caliccannis.com, LinkedIn, Medium, and the blog's website This Weekend Startups.com. And it's really starting to get like low thousands of people or hundreds of people looking at each one, but they get knowledge out. of it. Now we've got the community activated. And somebody in the community wrote three sets of pod notes based on episodes. And I was like, oh, whoa, that's interesting to activate the community to start figuring out what the knowledge was. Also, I don't know if you guys saw this. LinkedIn now has an email newsletter competitor to Substack. And yeah, just type in LinkedIn newsletters. And I started getting it. We got to 65,000 subscribers in a week, in under a

week. The problem, we're a beta tester. The problem is you don't actually get the emails. They obscureify the email. So they send the email out to people's inboxes from, which is a feature for users, I think, they don't have to give up your email to get these newsletters. So I feel like newsletters are the next big thing too. So it's like whitelisted because it's LinkedIn. So everybody is opening it already, right? I think so. I think you don't have to worry about giving your email to a marketer or to a website that then just start spamming you too much. And LinkedIn becomes the way to manage all your newsletter subscriptions. So I think it's going to do very cool. They told me they have like CCPA, the California Privacy Act and the Euro Privacy Law to contend with, which I understand.

So it's kind of like you write an article and it gets sent to people's inboxes, but it's sent from LinkedIn. Why would a marketer want to do that though? Because they wouldn't be able to own the asset of the email. So it's like it'd be harder to retarget them. It'd be harder to get a hold of them after. So what would be the the reason you'd do that? I think it's similar to YouTube in that, you know, when you're on YouTube, you don't get the email address of the person, but YouTube has so much volume of users that you kind of get caught up in the algorithm. And if you get lucky, you might get swept up into search, et cetera. So I think because LinkedIn has so many users, they have 700 million users across the world, that maybe you'll, you'll get some users that you wouldn't normally be able to get access to.

And then you can try to convert them over time. So that's my goal on YouTube, Clubhouse, and all of these things. But then at Inside, the other company I run, I realized we were testing Clubhouse rooms. And I was like, these Clubhouse rooms are getting us like 50. We tracked it. We would have like 50 people. I'd have a thousand people in a clubhouse room and I'd get 50 people to sign up for our email newsletters. And I was like, okay, that's nice.

but not game-changing. Then we started doing free events, which was similar amount of content, but we did them on Zoom and in a Slack room, and you had to sign up for them, and you had to put them on your calendar because they were occurring. And we had 5,000 people sign up for an NFT event.

And we got 5,000 emails. So now I said to my team, do an event a week. Every newsletter should have a monthly event. We have 15 newsletters, so we could wind up having 15 events a week. So maybe it's every two weeks for each event. But we're going to start doing these events

in parallel to the newsletters because people sign up for the events we get their email. On that note, Jason, one of the things that I don't like about Clubhouse is that you can't, there's no chat, right? So you can't really have background conversations. It's so annoying.

And so what we do for all of the, any podcasts that I do that are live or webinars or any that we host, my whole team seeds the chat and gets people, their job is to get other people to actually be chatting while I'm talking. How do you do?

We do, we start with the simplest thing. Where are you from? How's the weather? Oh, wow. So that's a great prompt. It's so great. And I do it throughout. And so I, I do, this is old school.

Remember how when you used to go to South by Southwest, they would have Twitter a whole screen on next to the panel on stage, right? And people like Gary Vee would address Twitter during the conversation. So back channel. Yeah. We do the same thing. And we found exactly what you said. So like the, we get way more leads when we have that conversation going. the background that was it the third party in the room. I don't know what it is.

Third voice in the room. And just also by acknowledging people's names, you know, oh, hey, what's up, Mehek? How you doing, Nick? Hey, Jason. People love to hear their names. Yeah, people love to hear their names. All right, listen, this has been amazing. Your great marketers. Great to be in business with both of you. Thank you for letting me invest in your companies. Continued success. You can follow Mehek and Kate Lee. You look at the show notes. You'll find it all there. And then this podcast is that this week in startup. dot com slash schau. All right, we'll see you all next time.

Bye-bye.