Young and Profiting with Hala Taha - Josh Fechter: Growth Hacker Marketing Secrets | Marketing | E13

Episode Date: December 27, 2018

The internet and evolution of traditional products has given rise to a new discipline in marketing called 'growth hacking' or "growth hacker marketing." Products are no longer just physical things, they are software products like apps, platforms and podcasts that have the potential of spreading themselves and playing a role in their own adoption. Growth hackers understand this power of virality, and use a combination of marketing, analytics and engineering to acquire and engage users—with the ultimate goal of users becoming brand advocates themselves. A growth hacker is a creative rule breaker. They must continually think of new and innovative ways to drive growth. They are masters in things like social media, blogging, A/B testing, copy wiring, UI/UX, automation, email marketing, SEO and more. While this might sound similar to a digital marketer, the main difference is that digital marketing is focused on brand and positioning, while growth hacking is all about testing and perfecting different tactics and strategies to achieve one thing and one thing only—GROWTH! In this episode, Hala interviews Josh Fechter, CEO and founder of BAMF (Badass Marketers & Founders), a growth marketing agency and exclusive Facebook community with over 30,000 members. Josh is the former head of growth for several venture-backed companies who rose to fame this year on LinkedIn by starting a viral storytelling trend that broke the professional social media network's algorithm. Growth hacking is not just a 2018 buzz phrase. Tune in to learn how Josh overcame early career failures, unlocked growth hacking secrets, and became one of the top growth marketing influencers in the world. Download Josh's BAMF Bible here: https://www.producthunt.com/posts/bamf-bible-2018  Want to connect with other YAP listeners? Join the YAP Society on Slack: bit.ly/yapsociety Follow YAP on IG: www.instagram.com/youngandprofiting Reach out to Hala directly at [e-mail] Follow Hala on Linkedin: www.linkedin.com/in/htaha/ Follow Hala on Instagram: www.instagram.com/yapwithhala Check out our website to meet the team, view show notes and transcripts: www.youngandprofiting.com

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If you didn't catch that, we have the link in the show notes and on young and profiting.com. You're listening to Yap, Young and Profiting Podcast, a place where you can listen, learn, and grow. I'm your host, Halitaha, and today we're exploring the new age concept of growth hacking with the number one growth hacker in the world, Josh Fector. I would say growth hacking is a mix between marketing, engineering, and data analysis with one goal and one goal only. to grow a startup or business with a predictable, repeatable, and scalable growth process. In this episode, we're speaking with Josh Bector, author and CEO of Badass Marketers and Founders,

a growth marketing agency and Facebook community with over 30,000 members. Josh got his fame through LinkedIn by starting the storytelling trend and was hands down the marketing it guy of 2018. Hey Josh, thanks for joining Young and Profiting Podcast. Thank you for having me on. I appreciate it. Of course. I'm super excited. excited for this interview. You are literally one of the top marketers in the world. You have a laundry list of industry awards. Most recently, you've been named top product marketer of 2018 by product

school. And I'm an upcoming marketer myself, so I look up to everything that you're doing. But like most successful people, it did take a lot of work and struggle to get to where you are today. And so I think it's important for my listeners to understand that there's really no such thing as an overnight success and that failures are inevitable. I heard that four or five years ago, you were only making $12 an hour. So let's talk about how much everything has changed. And, you know, I think you had eight startup failures. Can you spend a few minutes on your come-up story, touch on some of your favorite failures and share with us how you ended up where you are today? Yeah, definitely. So I started interning for startups when I was, I think, a sophomore,

college, so very early on, and interned at a couple startups that had failed, and then even work for startups, I promised would pay me and then just didn't pay me. You know, the founder would dip, whatever it may be, one startup. I didn't see the founder for two weeks and everybody that was there just got an email saying, hey, we didn't raise funding. I got to let everybody go. I was like, well, that's odd. Is this how it works? And, you know, in startup life, that's how it can work. Because founders don't necessarily know how to handle those situations. And they're not the most empathetic people sometimes because they're just human right and i think people forget that they like to say oh well this founder's vision i believe in it but they're human at the end of the day

just like you and me and i had my own startup and this was you know my final year of college there was publication online i found a couple of growth hacks to recruit writers we could basically message anybody on facebook as long as we had a friend in common and we used well at the time this Facebook graph that allowed us to narrow it down by job title, interest, and location. So we mess with like 100,000 potential writers and got 150 people writing for our publication. I was teaching myself like web development at the time, trying to figure out how to scale it, but kind of figure out how to monetize so eventually went broke. College budget and we were working from college campus house, just a bunch of us.

And then I got a job as VP of marketing at a mobile app. It's more of like an acquisition specialist type of role where my job was just to get users on board. But the product didn't have any product's market fit. So, you know, if your job is to get users, but you're selling something that has any product's market fit, you're putting not the best place to say to least. And I knew that actually the first week there. And the reason for that is my mentor at the time was Scott Case. He was a founder of CTO price line. It was one of the fastest companies to reach a billion dollar valuation, which was super cool.

He was very smart guy, but he was also very honest. So one of the things he told me is he basically said, hey, this company is going to fail. And that was in my first week at this mobile app startup. And he gave me a number of reasons. One is he just was a little bit more of an insider. He was friends with the founder of LinkedIn at the time, Reid Hoffman.

He said, hey, they're going to shut off their API. So you won't even be able to use your API to log into your app and get all your users' details. So just cross that off your map. second of all, you know, why would someone come back to your app if they got a job? Because the app was Tinder for jobs. Not the best idea. It seemed pretty simple.

You know, Tinder was popular at the time. So why not do Tinder for jobs? And there just wasn't a lot of thought behind it. There was just a viral Reddit post that got us around 10,000 users. And we're able to use that to raise funding. So what's funny is, you know, you have these momentum within the economy. And one of those moments at the time was investors were just, throwing money at mobile apps startups, whether they had products market fit or not.

And it just happened to be that time, right? And we just happened to be one of those startups. But two months in, we were pretty clear that this wasn't going to work out. And we went through multiple pivots over the next several months. And then I left. And when I left, I interviewed at companies including Gramerley, Looker, and Marquetto and Dr. Krono. I didn't get a job of any of them.

And it's a little bit of a bummer because almost all those companies had around 20 people at the time. And three of those companies are worth over a billion dollars today. Well, everything happens for a reason, right? Yeah, I would say so. It's, it's funny. You don't see it at the time. And I was like, wow, I was there in that room with that company when they only had 20 people. I was so close. And part of it was also the same thing. Like, you're too entrepreneurial. We don't want to really understand your background. And I guess a startupy background wasn't very accepted at the time. This was still a little bit earlier on and people are like, why would you only work for

startups? And foolish enough on my part is the reason I actually got into startups was I had a roommate in college who was making over six figures working out of startup. And this is one of the first jobs he's ever had. And he was only two months into his job when he was making six figures. And I thought, wow, this is what startup life is like. You just go in and you make it rich. And little as I know, he was an anomaly.

And he was actually brilliant, but I just had no idea. All I thought was I can be like him. And then I jump in and start up after startup fails. And I'm like, what's going on here? Like, how was he successful right after that? And what don't I have? And part of it was, you know, he was really smart with marketing automation, understanding how to automate workflows.

And I was very new to that world, to say the least. So I still had to adopt that engineering mindset and also find something to sell that had product market fit. So when I got rejected by all these companies, I moved back in with my dad in San Diego and I took a job as a copywriter, the job that paid me $12 an hour. And I hated that job. I mean, I absolutely hated it because one, my boss didn't really care for me or check my work.

And no matter how much I asked for feedback, I just never got it. And the good news of that job, though, is it ended up being the best experience in terms of what would help me later in life, which is I learned copyrighting. And I spent a good deal of time just practicing copy until years later, I'd be known for that. Whether that be telling stories on Facebook, LinkedIn, Quora, et cetera. And I didn't really see that, you know, future coming out of it. Once I got out, I was just happy to get out. And smart enough on my part, you know, I sort of asked myself, I was like, okay, well, you've read a lot of books on

business, what did they say you should do? They say you should go somewhere where you can learn some very valuable skills that are transferable that can go across multiple industries. So that's when I applied to a Facebook marketing software company based in San Diego. They're actually the first company to do live streaming on Facebook, which was pretty cool. And they're explained to me what they did at the time, which all of those relatively new. So I wrote, I think it was like a 20-page guide on how I could help them grow their company just so I could get the job. They had already hired someone, which is funny. So they end up hiring me and it was like for $12 an hour or two.

It wasn't like I was getting a pay raise or anything. But six months later, I ended up becoming their head of growth just because I was very passionate and I was learning. And once you go through some struggles, you begin to see what opportunity looks like and you begin to value opportunity a lot more because you've been on the other side. So being there and seeing that opportunity helped tremendously. And it also taught me what good bosses do for their employees. Like my founders, Renee and Andrew Lane, were both brilliant people in design and coding and in business.

And they helped mentor me. And I was like, wow, I just wasn't used to founders actually helping me. All the companies I had been at before, the founders either left or basically would not answer my questions. If I said, hey, I'd love to learn that, they'd say, okay, well, that's nice, but I don't have time to teach you. These guys walk me through everything. And because of that, I was able to then become the head of growth for a venture-backed startup based in San Francisco. Very cool. And so then how did you start BAMP?

How did that come about? Yeah, so the early stages of BAMP were actually at that Facebook marketing software company. And it started as a community called San Diego Digital Marketing Experts. And I started hosting events. I think I did around maybe like 20 to 30 events. And just like, I think it was maybe 30 of us would come. Not a lot of people.

I'd always have like good beer. We had Corona. We had also a great office that overlooked San Diego ballpark. So people loved coming. Partly because of the beer, in part because of the view. And then we all had a good time and talked about marketing. And I would always get a different speaker each time. And doing that, I ended up learning a lot about marketing.

And I learned a lot about different topics. And I said, wow, this gives me an opportunity to network with really smart people because, you know, if you could promise that people will be somewhere, you can get a great speaker to come. So just by reaching out and say, hey, you know, we're going to have X amount of attendees. I would love for you to be here and for me to interview you. It gives you that opportunity to also learn from some of the best and brightest minds. And when I moved to San Francisco, I didn't have a network.

I didn't know anybody. And I said, well, how did you build your network in San Diego? hosted events. So I started hosting events again, just at my new company, Upout. And funny enough, Upout was actually an event subscription company. So I was learning all these event marketing tactics from them and applying it to help grow the events I was doing. And then we quickly expanded until, I think, like four months in, we were getting 200 or 300 people per an event. And we were doing events almost every other week. So that was super exciting. I said, okay, well, We're doing events. How can we transfer this to be online? Because obviously, events are a lot of work to say the least. And that's when I started the Facebook group. Honestly, the Facebook group was initially just for small community of growth hackers. I think it was actually called San Francisco growth hackers originally. It's really funny. Because I said, this is a testimonial. It's the first post I put up. This is a testimonial to the best growth hackers. Drop your guides here. And that's all that I'm going to allow to get posted. And of course, nobody put anything in the group.

It was just me posting for, I think, around two months, putting out tons and tons of guides. But people were really amazed. They're like, wow, this guy's sharing all the secrets that he's been learning. So it attracted a lot of people. And then, you know, I also growth hacked the group a little bit by scraping email lists at scale. And this was before it became super, super popular. So this was right before everybody started doing it with hyper-targeting via email. So luckily or fortunate for me, I had a lot of friends within the startup scene who gave me

the list of everybody who went to Ycombinator, 500 startups, whatever it may be. And I would email them saying, hey, we have like a mentor from 500 startups in our group. He said he loves it. I'd love for you to join as well. Here are our moderators and I'd list three really cool people. And I'd say you could join the group here. And I'd send that email out at scale to them. just with a little sequence, you know, where, you know, if they don't open that email or maybe if

they don't reply, then I sent them another email. And that did really well. I sent out like 50,000 of those emails. And that got, I think, around 6,000 members into the group. It was a perfect audience as well. And I laugh about it because people do this all the time, but the hard part about it is you can get people somewhere, but if they don't have an experience at that place, and it doesn't matter. So fortunate for me, I had sort of hone that skill of how to create marketing tutorials, how to create little growth hacking tips and engage people in a group. So when they actually did join, they had a great time. Now, I think when it really took off the group itself was when I started releasing books. And that was maybe a year and a half ago at this point.

And part of it brought the community together because people started releasing their own guides. I mean, it's still like 70% my stuff, but being able to take their content that they put in the group and then put into a book made the community feel very empowered that they're also part of this bigger mission. And what we've seen is as soon as we started releasing the books, we quickly went from like 10,000 members to a little over 23,000. And if we release a couple more books, I'm sure like we'll be over 30,000 pretty quickly. That's awesome. So this really all happened in such a short amount of time. Can you give our listeners an idea of the time frame of all of this? Yeah, I'll tell it. And the funny story too. And I can't believe I'm putting this story on there, but it's probably the first time I'm telling it. It's hilarious. Yay.

So when I got to San Francisco, I've been working about for, I think, six months before I was approached by BC firm GrowthX, who wanted to hire me. And they want to bring me on. One is because also I had a big community and they're looking to start an educational program for people who are growth marketers, U.S. Designers, and salespeople. And events are very good at recruiting people for educational programs because a little bit of a higher price point. And you need that in-person interaction. So when I joined them, I was really excited until day one when they're head of growth quit. And I was actually planning to learn from their head of growth. was one of the big reasons I joined.

But as soon as he quit, because I joined on board, also I had double the responsibility and it wasn't a lot of fun anymore. And it seemed like, you know, working crazy amount of overtime hours. So I ended up leaving around three months in, left on a positive note just to become a mentor for them. And then I got this contract job over at autopilot, which had the possibility of turning into a full-time job. So this is literally like nine months into San Francisco.

And I wasn't getting paid that much when I was, I had a growth for an upout, to be frank. I think it was getting paid. It was a young startup, maybe like 50K. And then when I worked at the VC firm, I was getting paid a little bit over 80K. And then I was over autopilot. And at autopilot,

I realized one of the things in the negotiation process, so you can really ask for as much money as you want, as long as you make it sound believable and there's a good reason for it. So at the time, I was like, okay, well, how does this work? And I studied the interview process, and I applied to a bunch of companies. is I got interview with Uber and Facebook.

And honestly, I didn't think I was going to get hired at either one. One is because I was applying for their growth team. And their growth teams are not necessarily strategic growth teams or more tactical, per se. They're very data driven. So they spent their entire days using Python SQL. I had no SQL to an extent, but I'm not like a genius with SQL. And it wasn't something I was particularly interested in per se, but I was also just like curious at what opportunities could come my way.

So when I'm talking to the autopilot guys, I say, hey, I'm interviewing with these two companies, you've got to let me know by tomorrow. So I throw out a crazy offer. And I also asked for a full-time videographer. So I was like, hey, if this works, I want to go Gary V-style on it. And so this is almost like double what I'm getting paid over at GrowthX. But because I put those two competing offers on the table, the next day they told me that I got the job. and I would be able to bring a full-time videographer on board. So that was a big learning lesson for me.

I was like, oh, wow, you can do stuff like that. And when that happened, I had a really good experience over at autopilot. I love their software. The one thing that's hard is that I would say in the marketing world, CMOs are a bit outdated. So there was a little bit of hesitancy with implementing things. And at the end of the day, I did feel like some things were just moving too slow. So I ended up leaving the company to go full time in advance.

And it was actually an autopilot when I named the community, badass marketers and founders. In part, it wasn't any inspiration where I was like, oh, my gosh, this would be genius. I just thought it was funny. We had the name became marketers and founders. And I said, you know, what would make us really stand out? And I just threw out some words and some adjectives. And one came up, which was badass. And I was like, oh, badass marketers and founders.

And then I realized it's also an acronym. I was like, oh my gosh, this would be hilarious. And then, of course, I say something like, it would be even funnier if it became a company one day because I never thought it would become a company. And then two months later, it did. So you'd ever know. That's incredible. It seems like we have a very, very similar background.

So I started a blog in college around 2013, I think same time as you. I recruited 50 female bloggers. We got super popular really. The same thing you did on Facebook with bloggers sharing your posts, I did on Twitter with mass hashtags. And we couldn't monetize it the same way you couldn't monetize your blog. We were hosting parties and throwing concerts and hosting events to make money. But long story short, I shut that down.

But I just think it's so interesting how we have such a similar experience. And similar to you, four or five years ago, I was making nothing, you know, and just being strategic negotiating like you said. I personally got into corporate and got my MBA and things like that, but that has like quadrupled my income in like three, four years. So just want to highlight to people that it does take a lot of struggle and failure, but things can change very fast if you're motivated and you've got the right mindset. So something that you touched on before is the fact that CMO is kind of a fading, obsolete title. Can you talk about modern marketing and kind of set the stage as far as is the evolution of marketing as a science and how marketing is changing overall?

Yeah, 100%. I think once people realize there's actually a framework to grow, that that's when it started to click and said, hey, you know, marketing is not guessing. There's actually a framework here that says you should test A first before you test B. It's very similar to what consultants use. So they have often what's called like the ICE framework, investment cost expected result. Now marketers from the longest amount of time were just given the freedom to do whatever. But now you can measure the result, right? So the investment cost part was always there. But the result part and measuring it was not necessarily there. So they're always free to not have to implement those type of frameworks. But because everything is measurable today,

they have to. Now, CMOs don't necessarily want to do that because they usually go out punches, right? And part of it is the CMO on average is a much older person. They're between like maybe over 40 years old. I don't want to say much older, but they're not in the weeds anymore, to say the least. And I see this time and again. I mean, I must have seen this in the last three years with around 50 companies, like companies that are series A, series B, and their CMOs are completely useless. Because the CMO will go and hire an AdWords agency, but they can't do AdWords themselves. And how do you know if that agency can get great results if you can't even go and do it yourself to an extent. The whole point of outsourcing and scaling is to do it yourself first,

and once you get it, you hire someone who's better than you. But if you can't even do it in the first place, then you shouldn't be making those hires. Now, what CMOs do is they make you sign year-long contracts with a lot of these agencies, which then the founder is forced to sort of keep them on board as well, which becomes a whole scary situation for the founder because then he's realizing he's like, oh, wow, I'm paying a CMO. Maybe it's 150K.K. a year to be on board and now I'm paying their agency that's not getting great results 12k a month that's a lot of money out the window in just a short period and it will often bankrupt the startup and send the company to its ultimate demise and it's sad that that's the case so I really wish it

wasn't people need to be focused on hiring people with a growth mindset to understand growth frameworks as well as execution there's no excuse not to understand execution whether Facebook ads, core ads, LinkedIn content. Reason is, you know, you got the internet today. If you want to understand it, just watch a tutorial. It was a lot harder back in the day when you didn't have access to YouTube, Udeme, et cetera, but today, there's no excuse. Just over the weekend, I went through a bunch of tutorials

and learned how to do videography. And like a five hours on a Sunday, right? It's crazy what you can do today if you just put your mind to it. So when people make excuses and they're like, I'm not in the weeds anymore, but I can still make decisions, can't trust those people at all. And not every CMO is like that, but the majority are. And I'm very confident that the majority are just based on my experience. And even though, you know, I have one person, I talk to marketers and founders every single day. Oh, yeah. I totally agree. I feel like, you know, they're all about high level setting strategies and not really

getting their hands dirty as far as the tactical stuff. So what is your definition of growth marketing exactly? What do you think growth marketing means? Yeah, growth marketing is just implementing a framework for testing. So testing different marketing strategies. And that can be, hey, here's a framework, investment costs, expect a result, time frame, the owner of that experiment, then you have your hypothesis, which is what you expect that outcome to be.

And then you have the actual results, which if you can, go further and categorize them, you could say, hey, this is a compounding result. So compounding result would be like something like building a social profile, where step one, if you have a good piece of content that goes viral, it doesn't necessarily mean your next piece of content will go viral. But it means it'll do better because you now are building an audience. So being able to outlay the assets that you're building and the type of assets, I think that takes a lot of experience with understanding, hey, what does a Facebook group having value compared to running a Facebook ad to get an email.

So I'll give you an example is a Facebook group is a transferable asset. So that means I've been able to take it from almost across like four different jobs per se because it just has gone with me. It's online. But if I host an event or I build an email list that's tied to a company and then that company has it once I leave. So, you know, what are transferable assets? What are compounding assets?

and which ones are you building? Ideally, you always want to build transferable and compounding assets. And if it's not in that class, then it's worth less. But you have to have that understanding to be like, this is what we should test first. Because even though the result may not be as good as the second test we can run, and the long term, it will be better. And yeah, I would say, gosh, it's very hard to teach this stuff because it takes a lot of experience. And sometimes it just takes a lot of failing and learning at the hard

way. I often say that most people will learn all the business principles there are if they really want to be a successful business owner, but they'll still have to go and make all the mistakes and then go, oh yeah, that's why I read it in that book. I mean, this is great advice. Just those two pieces on compounding and transferable assets. I feel like people don't really talk about those things or give advice on that. So I love that. One of the funnier things that you're known for is breaking LinkedIn's algorithm. LinkedIn noted your work as one of two factors that influenced them to change their newsfeed algorithm. And that just happened just earlier this year. Can you tell us about that story?

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And I think it got around like 30 to 50,000 engagements. And I sort of stood there in shock. I was like, wow, I haven't really used LinkedIn at all. And I have maybe 500 followers at the time. So not even that many followers. And all of a sudden I have a post that gets close to 50,000 engagements. And then I look back at my quarter profile and I have 400 posts there that are just all waiting to be repurposed.

So I take another one of my viral posts and I put it on LinkedIn and it gets 90,000 engagements. Wow. And I'm just thinking to myself like, what did I just come across? And it was like, this is crazy. Like how come nobody's doing this? And then I started looking through my LinkedIn feed and I noticed two things. One is everybody is sharing blog posts or sharing event invitations that nobody's actually storytelling or writing good status updates.

I don't know why nobody thought about doing that. To be honest, it still strikes me that it took. It has been like 10 years before someone was like, hey, you should write stories and your status updates. And I just happened to be one of the first people to do that. And then when I figured it out, what I've known is in the startup world, if something works, you 10x it because it's not always going to work forever. So I went as hard as I could and posted as many stories as I could,

resulting close like 200 million views over this short span of time. And then I was also ghostwriting for people on LinkedIn as well. So a lot of people who became sort of LinkedIn implementers, it was just all my work because I was just ghost writing for all these people. So it's so profitable. Imagine if you could promise someone like, hey, I'll write something for you and I'll go viral. Yeah. And people are paying an enormous amount of money to go viral on LinkedIn.

in and I was having a great time. I was like, this is super cool. And we had just started BAMP, so it was perfect. We were getting a lot of clients for the agency. We were rocking and rolling. And then LinkedIn was like,

okay, we need to figure out what's happening here. So they changed their algorithm. And they changed it around, I think like three different times. And I knew it was in response to what we were doing, but I didn't really have any confirmation until they put out that engineering blog posts that linked to the router.

feature that was in. And part of it was to go through that big of a change as a social platform after so much time where all of a sudden there's content on your platform that people are engaging with and people are not just coming to your platform to look for jobs and try to find leads, but are actually there to read the content in the news feed. That was a big aha moment for them. And now they had to figure out, okay, well, if people are actually joining our newsfeed, what does that even mean for the future of our business? And it's great for them, right? because it makes it more attractive to run ads. And it also means that there's going to be a lot more people buying sales navigator,

whatever it is. So they've been able to adjust to it. But it's been, I'm sure, very, very difficult on their part. Like I have a call with their product manager tomorrow to talk a little bit about what's happening. That's crazy. I can't believe that you're saying that you didn't do anything fancy and that you literally were writing stories. And just I can't even believe that's really.

all it was. Yeah, I know. It's so funny. I laugh about it too because I think people just struggle to be vulnerable. One of the things that I've noticed is there's definitely a degree of copyrighting skill that you need in order to tell stories that pop. Now, when I look at the writers on Quora, there is around, I would say, 10 to 15 writers who can write stories that pull people in and stories are good enough to build an audience for a personal brand. So, and there's maybe a home 100,000 writers on Quora. Like, who knows? But only 15 can do that.

That's not a lot of people, right? And same with LinkedIn, Facebook, is people aren't the best storytellers. It's hard for them to become vulnerable. They forgot, you know, all their grammar rules since reading the elements of style back in high school. And this goes for most people.

So in order for them to write a good story with good copy is nearly impossible. Even founders who are making lots of money are poor writers. And it's sad that that's the case, but it's great for the people who have really invested in that skill. Yeah, definitely. And we'll get into your tips for good writing in a little bit. So something I wanted to touch on before that is, you know, there's really a window of time where smart and tech savvy users can have unfair advantages and beat the system with social media. So for example, different automation tools like LinkedIn helper or Instagram back in the day,

different Chrome extensions. And I really see like today, growing an online community is based on two things. You've got to have quality content, but then you also need to growth hack the distribution of that content. And paid social media for the average person has kind of been priced out. The price of social media advertising has risen so dramatically. So automation tools for me seem to be the answer for up and coming influencers building a community. Based on your blog posts and your Banff Bible and different resources, I know that you're into this sort of thing. too. So can you talk about how automation has supported your growth efforts in the past? And can you give examples of how people use automation? Because I think most people do not use these tools. Yeah, definitely. I mean, we automated sending out 50,000 emails to get people to join the BAMP group, right? And we did that through a combination of using Hunter.io, which would scrape LinkedIn at scale for emails. It doesn't really do that anymore. One is because LinkedIn Bandit, of course. And then we use MailShake for email That's still a great tool. We'll use it today. Now, for LinkedIn automation tools, there are tools getting banned left and right. And it's a little frustrating. Can we helper still works? There has been a

warning that was sent out to most of their users though. And with that said, you know, they updated it. So LinkedIn wanted to detect it again. So you're always fighting that battle. You know, we've used it to expand our network with the right people, but you have to have that end goal. Why are you expanding your network with particular sets of people? So for example, we did. people in growth because we wanted people and growth to join our Facebook group. Or we did founders because we wanted to work with founders for our agency. Now, it also depends on what you're selling, right? So if you're running automation to connect with people at scale, no matter what social channel,

like if you're selling something at a high price point, that may be step one out of 25 steps before they become a client or a customer, right? You have to know that. And if you don't know that, then you're going to get disappointed right away. So you talked a little bit about paid advertising. I'd agree with you to a large extent that most people have been priced out. But what we found is that the new type of paid advertising is micro-targeting. Because if you can collect data that's very specific on your customer, then you can market

to them exactly where you need to and exactly at the right time and knowing that they're your perfect customer persona. So early on, you can get emails from your LinkedIn contacts and basically all their personal emails at scale. Now, there are tools that still allow you to do this today. The issue is a lot of these tools have been banned or are not accepting new accounts. And I'm sure there are still a couple that will add, you know, new accounts. You just got to go find them. I know duck soup. You can still get personal emails out from sales nav searches at scale, which is pretty nice. And then there's another one called, I believe it's linked connect, I think it is, which allows you to download personal emails.

So with that, if you only connect to your target customer personas on LinkedIn, let's say I connect to 10,000 people who work and grow. Now, I can get all their emails or send them ads on Facebook, Instagram, core, AdWords, wherever, and know exactly what copy to use. Because I know that they work in growth. I know that they may have X people in their company, whatever it may be. And if I'm producing a lot of content on LinkedIn, then they probably already have had a couple touch points with me.

So by the time they see my ad, I have some authority of presence or at least some branding out there. So they're not like, who is this guy? They're like, oh, that's the guy I saw on LinkedIn. Let me read this story. And by doing that, I can close that sales cycle much, much faster. And other automation tools that I'm using right now, honestly, there's not a ton. I wish there was more.

Yeah. You know, it's sort of funny how that works. I think at some point, a lot of them have been banned. I think the ones for LinkedIn still work really well. But at the end of the day, you also have to start not first with the automation tool, but start first with the skill set. I like to say if you don't know how to design, write compelling copy speak or shoot video, then you can do all the automation in the world,

but you're not going to keep people there once they go to wherever place you're taking them to because you actually don't have content creation skills, right? You have to have content creation skills before you do growth hacking and distribute the content. Otherwise, you're sending someone someplace where they'll just want to jump out of right away. Yeah, I totally agree. So I know that a lot of the automation tools have shut down, but I just want to point out to our listeners that I still think there's so much things that we could take advantage of. Maybe in like 10 years, I really feel like they'll really have cracked down and figured out how to stop letting people use the social media platforms to their advantage. but I think right now we still have this window of time to like take advantage of things.

Would you agree? Yes. I still think we have, you know, maybe it's all like two to three years. And it's not necessarily, you know, if they crack down on automation platforms. But some of it is just how people on the platforms perceive automation. So for example, if everybody's using automation and you get lots of lots of connection requests on LinkedIn from people you don't know, and it starts to be clear that everybody's using automation, you might just be more exclusive with who you add to your network.

So in general, it just hurts people using automation because now even though they're using it, their acceptance rate on that connection request is lower than it would have been. So people's perceptions on platform change very, very fast. The content that went viral on LinkedIn a year and a half ago doesn't go viral today. A lot of it doesn't. People's expectations of the quality of content

is a lot higher to say the least. And it seems with how they perceive connection requests, messages. And it's like if you were to auto-fram people at scale on Facebook, right? People may see it's a little bit weird. It just depends. If you could really target it, then maybe not. But for the most part, people think it's weird. And LinkedIn may come to that perception at one point in time.

Yeah. And I think people just don't even realize that many people are using automation. Would you agree that you've got to balance it with being personal with people as well? It's okay to use automation to support the things you're doing, but you still have to be a human and have those connections. Would you agree? 100%. I always think you should, the main goal of every company when they're starting out is to invite people to a community, not tell them about their product, not tell them about their service, but say, hey, join this community where we provide value. And from there, you can educate them on what you guys do.

most people just don't do that though and that's what i think really hurts automation at the end the day is that people just don't understand sales cycles and they don't understand selling in general or how to provide value so it hurts all the people who are actually doing that now from what i've seen is that you know if i shoot out some automation where i ask people to join a facebook group and i may get 50% reply that say hey i'd love to join but if i ask them to hop on a sales call I may get, you know, 5%. Now, the problem with that is all of a sudden I'm losing a huge chunk of potential prospects and customers. If I were to take it slower and educate a lot of these people, show them what we do, how we provide value, then instead of 5% of people wanting to talk with us,

it may be 20%. Okay, so one last question on distribution. Can you talk about creating your own custom extension and how you did that and why you did that? And then also how you use virtual assistance to help you? Yeah, definitely. So I've created a lot of extensions, and it's funny because people think I'm an excellent coder, which is not true. I went to a coding boot camp five years ago, and I haven't coded a line since. So I can design things in Google slides. It's about how far my skill takes me. But that's enough for a good coder off of Upwork to be like, okay, you know, I can turn this into Chrome extension. You used enough scraping tools,

then you can probably understand what goes into building a scraping tool. And it's just understanding that ecosystem in that world. So for example, I created a Facebook auto adder tool. And this is actually what I used to get a job at that BC firm that I worked at early on is I found a group that had a lot of growth markers in it, BCs and founders. And I scraped that group using a tool called Jarvie.

and I was like, oh, I wish I could just add these people at scale to my Facebook profile. And then outsource that tool, which cost me probably like $100. It was super cheap. I mean, just to have one simple function like that. And then I shot out close to 1,000 friend requests. And one of the people who answered was Will Bunker, who was the founder of what became Match.com. And he replied and said, hey, we're looking for VP of marketing. Do you know anybody?

And that's when I got hired on as their VP of marketing. And eventually they're head of growth because you quit on the first day. Wow, that's so interesting. Yeah, I think people really underestimate how easy it is to outsource some of this stuff. Even for virtual assistants, like I have all my virtual assistants manage all my Facebook group member requests. So I never look at those. They reply to lots of people for me being a messenger.

And then also on people on LinkedIn in the comment section. I wish I could do all that stuff, but it's just very unrealistic, especially with the job that I have is like, Josh, go and come out with new things. That's what I'm tasked with. I'm not just taking some content that's been on the internet and reformatting it per se into video or from video into blog posts. I actually have to come out with a new strategy to acquire users or customers that nobody's ever done or only a few people are doing and then exposing it from there. So it's not the easiest job in the world. Yeah, so you could use all the support. 100%. So let's get into content. I've heard you talking about the importance of being a helper. Can you

talk about that a little bit? It's just this idea that in order to provide value and build a brand, all you're doing is helping people. People will say you're a great marketer if you provide a lot of value. It's sort of funny how it works. If you just think of providing value and helping people, the outcome will be a personal brand. The outcome will be people saying you're an entrepreneur, you're a great marketer, but it just starts with helping people. That's it. And then you have to ask yourself, how can I help people at scale? How can I help people more effectively? Don't ask yourself, how can I market to people more effectively? How can I market to people at scale? That's the wrong way to think about things because people will eventually buy from you, work with you based on how well

they know trust and like you. And to know trust and like you, you have to provide them value. They're not just going to be like, hey, here's $8,500 a month because you marketed really well to me. They're going to be like, wow, you provided me with a lot of value. I don't think I can implement it all on my own. I think it's going to take a lot of work. But I want to hire you guys to do it for me. You were known as one of the early adopters of a writing style on social media called broatry. Can you explain to our listeners what a broom is and how to write one?

Yeah, I don't know why it was called broatry. You know, like it is what it is. and you can't really. It's funny. I was wondering, too, like, what does it have to do with bros? What about I write broatry and I'm not a bro? That's what I was thinking too. I was like, it's a little unfair that end up getting labeled like that.

But once something's funny, it tends to take off. Now, at first, I think the first three pieces that came out were on like ink and four of talking about the style and talking about how it was just men being vulnerable and how that was becoming more popular on LinkedIn. And then broatry was the phrase that came. out at the end, which is okay. You know, it is what it is. But there is a reason that these stories are written within this format. And what the format looks like is, one, it's mobile optimized. So you don't see a lot of sentences stuck together, you know, see spacing usually between each

sentence. And that way, if you're skimming on mobile, it helps your eyes go from sentence to sentence rather than you having to really dig into a paragraph makes it much, much easier. And then it's also just great copy. So there's nothing special about it per se. So if you look at the stories that are told on Quora, the stories that go viral on Facebook, it's literally the same type of stories. It's like it started with vulnerability,

maybe something controversial, and making it a little relevant to the platform. So for LinkedIn's case, you may open up with something controversial about your career. And then you may dig into some pain about it. Young and Profiters. I know there's so many people tuning in right now that end their work day wondering why certain tasks take forever, why they're procrastinating certain things, why they don't feel confident in their work,

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The pain shows that you're vulnerable. And when you're vulnerable, people get more attracted to you as a person because they can trust the story. And I want to say there's something magical about it, but this is the same copyrighting principles that have worked for like the last

a thousand years. People are just, us awful copywriters. It's little mind-numbing. I think part of it is the education system that we have today teaches you to write in these chunky paragraphs. They're like, here's your introduction, here's three paragraphs in the middle, and here's your conclusion. So people are so used to this format that they don't know what good copy looks like or even how to write one compelling sentence of copy. And if they just read that book again, the elements of style from high school and looked at what I was writing, then they go, oh, this is literally just a book. And they go, oh, this is literally just a

find, you know, all these principles that are in basic grammar books. And it's funny because my friend came to me, who's ahead of growth for this big company, and he says, Josh, you know, I read this grammar book. And you basically just do everything that's in that grammar book. And that's it. And I said, yeah, it's pretty much what I tell people, but they don't want to believe it's that easy. Yeah, I was just about to ask, like, how can we get better copywriting skills? But I guess you're saying read the elements of style? Yes. It's a short book. I think it's maybe like 100 pages, is probably even less, you know, because it's just a bunch of principles in there. And the one thing it doesn't talk about is being vulnerable, which I think is pretty important

to say the least. One of the things that it also doesn't talk about is that in order to make stories pop online, all of that has to work. You can't miss out on, oh, I'm going to use adverbs because that's just who I am. And I think people will like it. Adverbs will always make your story worse. And there's no exceptions. Everybody wants to believe they're the exception when it comes to grammar and telling great stories.

But the principles are out there. Just apply them. So can you give us an example of using something with an adverb and the knot and how you can make it more powerful? Yeah. Staying away from words like very really words are blanketed adjectives. So if I said I went to great events, like what does that mean? What is a great event?

If I said that I went to event that brought me a smile, I met so-and-so, now it's descriptive. Now you know why it's great. And I can boil it down to something as simple as I was really tired when I woke up this morning or I could barely roll out of bed this morning. And when you hear I can barely roll out of bed, you can actually picture it. But if I say I was tired this morning, you can't picture it, right? Because it's not descriptive. And by using that descriptive language, all of a sudden, there's a motion that comes out of it because the reader can now imagine it. And if you're leaving the reader to imagine everything, well, it's going to give them a lot of thinking.

It's going to be hard to read the content and pull that emotion, right? And as soon as you let their mind wander and you give them tons of room to think, you've lost them. Got it. That's such great advice. So happy that you cover that. So I was doing a bit of research and I read that you don't follow anyone online. So, for example, you're not following Gary V or Grant Cardone to get your inspiration or motivation. You also don't have any social media apps on your phone.

So how do you get inspiration and get your creative juices for the types of content that you're posting? Yeah, I think you just have to know yourself very, very well to say the least. So, for example, I'm working on a writing software to help writers author books. We just released it. Actually, it's called Squibbler. So if you go to squibbler.io, you can actually check out the very first version, which is crazy. Cool. That's been works for, I think, like, 11 months.

and we're just finishing up the onboarding flow. Now, if people said, why are you going to create content and videos and blog posts around how to tell stories better, do I really need to get inspired by someone to go and do that? I mean, I like writing. I know I love writing and I can do it every day. It's just something that's a natural extension of it. So I think it's about knowing what you want to do every day. I think when I was 23, that's when I decided that I want to write every day for the rest of my

And if there's one thing that I could pull content, that would be it. For many people, they just don't know themselves well enough. So they try to find themselves in other people. And when you do that, that's when you follow people like Gary Vaynerchuk, Tony Robbins, whoever it might be. It's important to take some time and look in words and say, what do I like, what do I want to do? And how can I create content around that? And just test things out, right?

He doesn't have to be anything crazy, but see if you like rock climbing or see if you like swimming or whatever it may be, right? And if you like it, then create content around it. And if you like it enough, then create a business around it. Yeah. And from my understanding, after some of your failures, you kind of hit a slump where you read 120 books to get out of it on marketing, business, psychology, in just one year. Do you have any favorite learnings or books from this time period that you want to share with our listeners? Oh, that's a great question. I would say a lot of the books that I really loved actually came after that. Anything by Jim Collins is great.

One of the things that I've learned is that it's super helpful to read biographies to understand who you are as a person. There's, I believe, two types of people when it comes to entrepreneurship. There's an entrepreneur who wants to build a great company. And then there's the entrepreneur who wants to come up with innovative ideas. And give you an example of both. So the innovative ideas is like Albert Einstein. And the person who wants to build a great company is like Jeff Bezos.

Two different types of people, but both had a fundamental change on how the world works today. And you have to side with, you know, one of those types of people. And in order to do that, you have to read their biographies to understand who they are and see if you can see yourself in them. For me personally, I think I associate more with like the Albert Einstein's of the world. I don't think I'll ever be great at operations in a business. And I'm totally okay with that. I just find people who will be great at that and I partner with them. But knowing that about myself has helped me become a lot more successful

because I know where I'm both happy at. I know that I don't want to be talking to hundreds of employees trying to get feedback, but I'd rather be talking to hundreds of customers and trying to find out what the next thing I should build is. and the only way to really find that out is either do enough life testing or just read biographies, which will help you skip a ton of time. You've built this huge LinkedIn following. You have almost 70,000 followers and just, I think, less than two years.

So what are your tips for building an online community? I've heard you in the past say that you need to be best friends with your customers and the people in your community. Can you talk to us about that? Yeah, if you do anything long enough, like you have to really enjoy. I've been running this community and doing events for marketers for at least four or five years at this point. And the only reason is that I enjoy it. If I always thought about how I was going to make money, I would never become friends with any of my customers. I would never relate to them.

I'd never be able to dive into their problems or even just go over their house and have dinner, right? And being able to have those relationships is key to coming up with new things because then I can talk to all these people who are experimenting and seeing what they're working on. If it applies to what I'm working on. I feel like that's a big part of what people miss when they start companies. I talk to so many people who start companies because they're like, well, this looks like a successful business model. And I'm like, are you actually passionate about the industry?

Do you actually want to talk to the customers every single day for the next five to 10 years of your life? But you have to ask yourself those questions. And if that's not the case, then don't do it. and you should be able to know those answers before you jump into it. Like go and attend the meetups, you know, try to make friends with them beforehand and then do the company. The best part about doing it that way is, you know, once you make friends in the industry beforehand, if you really like it, all of a sudden you have that initial movement for a community.

Yeah. And so let's say you start an online community. You've generated thousands of members. Let's say you don't have an actual business yet and you just started some sort of a Facebook group or Slack group or something that gained momentum, how would you suggest to monetize it? I would ask the community members. I don't think I'm smarter than them. They're the customers at the end of the day. And I would just do a poll and say, would you like me to release a course? Would you like me to release an ebook? Would you pay for it? And your community members will tell you. I'm working on a B2B course right now because I pulled the community and they said that they're really interested in it. So it's on the list. And I like to say,

founders with visions run nonprofits, but founders who put their customer first actually build real businesses. So if you look like the Elon Musk's of the world, they basically run nonprofits to some extent. And then if you look at like the Jeff Bezos of the world and then the Sam Walton's of the world, who always focused on customer first, they're the ones that build the real businesses of that. That's great insight. So if you had to suggest one social platform to a millennial listening to this podcast to invest their efforts in, which one would you suggest right now? I would say if you're more of an artist type, definitely focus on YouTube.

YouTube is great for B2B, B2C, whatever it may be, and it's evergreen. So you can build a great brand there. And there's almost nothing more valuable than understanding video production and storytelling using videos. Now, on the other side, if you're less of an artist and more focused on just building a business, LinkedIn, because the one-on-one connections are going to help you a lot more. and it's also going to help, you know, in terms of trying to move up in the business world, it's very targeted.

Like, you get in touch with exactly who you need to get in touch with. So I say, gosh, I like all of them, to be honest, but it makes it really hard. Don't you feel like Facebook and Twitter is dead now? Like, nobody I know is on Facebook. I used to be really popular on Twitter back in the day. And like literally, my Twitter is dead. now. Do you feel the same or is it still bustling for you? I would say Facebook is probably one of, maybe the best source for me. Like I have a messenger list that's around 20,000 people. And if I

send out a question, like I'll get around 5 to 6,000 responses. So I can only do it once a month. So it's very, very active. People, even though they may not be active in the news feed as much, they're still extremely active on Messenger and in Facebook groups, very much in Facebook groups. Facebook groups are pretty much the only place to build online community today. So there's no other options. Like you can't use a LinkedIn group because the features are so outdated. Even meetup is a lot worse than it used to be. You don't get that organic traffic from meetup anymore.

And then your only option left after that is Twitter chats. Yeah. So Facebook groups are still super, super important. Twitter, it just depends how you use it. It's very much like a war zone. Like you have to go on there with. the mindset of going there to create controversy. Personally, like, that's not me. I like controversy to an extent, but I don't want to build a brand on it. So I rather not. Cool. Okay. So last question

before we ask you, you know, where we can learn more from you. What is your marketing prediction for 2019? What do you think is going to be the game changing element of the year? Yeah. Businesses are going to flock to YouTube to pump out B2B content like crazy. And one of the reasons is that it's the most unsaturated platform. There's so much open space there and you can almost rank for anything. Like Google is getting so saturated in terms of content and YouTube is not even close. Like you can rank for keywords in just two days. Like very competitive keywords like startup pitch deck.

You try doing that on Google and it's like good luck. So nobody's really seen this right now, but I think there are going to be a couple people that really push for it and are going to change a lot of minds. And by the end of the year, people are going to be shocked that they didn't consider YouTube as one of the best channels for B2B content creation. Very interesting. Well, thank you so much, Josh. This was such a helpful interview. And where can our listeners go to learn more about everything you do? And what are the different resources that you have available out for people to learn more?

Yeah, definitely. You know, people can go to my Facebook group, badass marketers and founders. They want to learn more. Just say, Josh, refer to you. and then my assistant will go ahead and let you in. Besides that, if you want a lot of details on my life, you can go to my core profile where I've written, I think, like, 500 stories about my life. So if you want to dig in very deep.

Yeah, I'm coming out with a bunch of new stuff, which is exciting. So I got a new book coming out in around three weeks. And then we just came out with the software products, so a lot going on. I'm super excited. Sweet. And is there any exclusive resources that you can share with me to post? on our show notes or in our Slack group? Yeah, I would say you could link the BAMP Bible.

So the Procton page specifically, because in three weeks I'm updating it with a new book. So if you link to that page, it will have the new updated version there. Perfect. Which would be awesome. Awesome. Well, thank you so much for your time.

I really appreciate it. Of course. Thank you for having me on. Thanks for listening to Young and Profiting Podcast. Follow you up on Instagram at Young and Profiting. And check us out at young and profiting.com. And now you can chat live with us every single. day on our new Slack channel. Check out our show notes are young and profiting.com for the registration link.

Follow me on Instagram at Gap with Hala or LinkedIn. You can search for my name, Hala Taha. Wishing everyone a happy holiday. Catch you next year. This is Hala, signing off.