[00:00:00] Lucas: Juan, Welcome back to the “Building and Growing Podcast”. It's a pleasure to have you back on board.
[00:00:07] Juan: Yeah, thanks for having me again!
[00:00:07] Lucas: You're most welcome! Today we're going to talk about marketing and how Rebank used a team of non-marketers to create a killer marketing strategy.
[00:00:20] Lucas: For those who may not have seen the last episode, do you want to give a quick introduction to yourself and then we can dive into a few questions?
[00:00:29] Juan: Sure. I'm Juan, I'm one of the founders of Rebank and Rebank was started in 2018. Before that, I worked mostly in financial services going from insurance, digital cash, cards and then worked for a travel start-up, a Google Ventures backed travel start-up right before starting Rebank.
[00:00:53] Juan: That's where I found the problem that made me want to start a company. It's been a couple of crazy years! We got into Y Combinator; we were one of the first start-ups to be authorized with some new regulations. A lot of stuff was happening, least of which marketing,
[00:01:12] Juan: marketing is something that definitely didn't happen until recently.
[00:01:15] Lucas: Yeah. Thanks so much for that introduction, and it's interesting, I've been following your growth over the years, and this year I think in particular, if not late last year, you went on this rocket ship trajectory with content.
[00:01:32] Lucas: That all happened I think, without hiring any full-time marketeers.
[00:01:37] Juan: Yeah. Well, I guess I could tell you more about it. Essentially, I just remember a lot of late nights realizing that we weren't growing. Growth was flat! When growth is flat, a first-time founder like me
[00:02:00] Juan: thinks “I need a growth person.”
[00:02:02] Juan: So, that's where it started. Where it ended up is us just rolling up our sleeves, creating a content team. Now, where we are up to is just a completely different place, where all of our customers come from content and community and we've got now about four and a half thousand
[00:02:28] Juan: lead signups. We've figured stuff out, how do we actually convert? So yeah, a very different place now to where we were over a year ago.
[00:02:41] Lucas: Excellent. Could you talk us through the thought process behind hiring versus building out all of that content in-house?
[00:02:53] Juan: I think most decisions are bounded rationality, is what led
[00:03:00] Juan: me to believe that it was a growth person that we needed. Because I'm not a marketer and there was no marketing expertise in the team. I interviewed 60 different types of marketers and well, marketers are all like sales focused and what not, and so on.
[00:03:17] Juan: I ended up not hiring anyone and I learned a lot and I also whilst trying to hire was asking for advice, and I guess where I ended up was, I realized that I had to figure this out myself before I could bring someone on. I think the risk, well, there's a trade-off and there's risks both ways.
[00:03:43] Juan: So, if you hire without really knowing what marketing means for your company, you are basically handing over the keys to your house, to your car, to someone that you have no relationship with. You don't know sort of their effectiveness, and they could take it in a different direction and you wouldn't understand.
[00:04:01] Juan: So that's one risk. On the other side, you don't figure out marketing, you take too long and you die. So, I guess that's what was running in my mind. I was like, well, I don't want to die, so I better hire someone. But then I went back on myself.
[00:04:19] Lucas: Incredible! So, you've got the first option really of hiring someone and losing control of where marketing goes or do not hire and
[00:04:28] Lucas: then risk the company collapsing. So, the third option that you chose was, do it DIY!
[00:04:36] Juan: Yeah. What I learned from interviewing so many marketers is that everyone said the same thing. I just thought we could do so much more.
[00:04:48] Juan: Everyone was like, okay, you are B2B; we do Google Ads, we do LinkedIn, we do this, that and the other. And that just sounded so boring to me. I'm
[00:05:00] Juan: not a marketer, but I am a consumer of advertising in market like everyone else, and I just felt like companies were doing just far more unique, exciting things and I guess that made me feel like, well, why can't we do that?
[00:05:15] Lucas: Could you talk about the channels that you ended up choosing to work with or create content for?
[00:05:22] Juan: Well, the channels themselves are sort of, it's all inconsequential in a way because really, it's the process that we followed that got us to that. So that's more important than the actual channels.
[00:05:36] Juan: I mean the channels now are content and community. But the way we got there was through experimentation, through reading a lot and doing a lot of research and getting a lot of advice from real marketers. We decided we needed a
[00:06:00] Juan: process for experimentation and marketing because marketing isn't like product or engineering.
[00:06:06] Juan: There is no stack overflow for marketing where you can just, you have a question and you get an answer. It's all a bit nebulous. So, we thought well, what if we run a few experiments a week, we can find the right channels. But anyway, so we experimented with every single channel, but we ended up with content and community.
[00:06:26] Lucas: What was your favourite experiment?
[00:06:29] Juan: My favourite experiment are the ones that have the best results. I think one of our earliest wins was just a post in a community of YC Founders talking to them about a problem that we discovered that they tend to have. We added in scarcity to the offer,
[00:07:00] Juan: to the thing that we were saying.
[00:07:01] Juan: We basically wrote a post and said, hey, if you want some advice, we're going to give 10 companies advice for free! That instantly, like in minutes, got all these companies contacting us saying, oh yeah, we've got this problem, we don't know what to do. So that was really exciting, because when you discover, well, when you go from
[00:07:22] Juan: like someone telling you, oh yeah, some companies are talking about this, to doing the first post or initiative and getting some kind of pull. That was really exciting. So yeah, I think that's my favourite one. The Product Hunt launches which we did we came a second, in one of them second product of the day.
[00:07:43] Juan: Those were really, really exciting as well. But, I think for a different reason.
[00:07:47] Lucas: I don't have a product background, but I've heard about Product Hunt before. Could you talk a little bit more about the launches, because I guess you did the launches as a company that had
[00:08:00] Lucas: almost been trading for a little while.
[00:08:04] Juan: Product Hunt is just a community for founders, mostly US focused founders and builders. Every day companies launch their products there and every day the Product Hunt community can upvote these products based on their value or how much they like it. And then you get a “Product of the Day”,
[00:08:28] Juan: “Product of the Month”, “Product of the Year”. That is Product Hunt. It is one of the many communities we experimented with and most of them went nowhere.
[00:08:37] Lucas: You've almost got to plant quite a few seeds and see, which one sprouts In order to understand what's working.
[00:08:47] Juan: I think so. Yeah.
[00:08:47] Lucas: From the content side I have seen lots of fantastic videos that you've done on LinkedIn. In our previous podcast you mentioned
[00:09:00] Lucas: calculators, which are also I suppose a form of content, but perhaps a more interactive form. Could you talk a little bit about the content side of things?
[00:09:11] Juan: Yeah. Well, it all boils down to our betting table meeting and our betting table meeting is where we get together and put our initiatives forward, we justify them and so on. I say that because we didn't intend to create a content strategy, really.
[00:09:39] Juan: We were just trying to find the best initiatives that were going to help us grow that month. But looking back now, yeah, we've basically built this full content, the suite of content calculators, videos like landing pages with
[00:10:00] Juan: stuff and we've got newsletters and other things coming out
[00:10:02] Juan: to nurture, to get people familiar with. The problem that we solve, our solution, our brand and so on. But it was definitely not like a formula. Well, the only formula was the experimentation. Well, I did say we need a content strategy, but I didn't know what I was talking about.
[00:10:24] Juan: We just ended up figuring it out.
[00:10:26] Lucas: So, the betting table has led to the videos, the content calculators. newsletters are soon to come, you've got the communities, that's excellent. Is there any other channel that we haven't covered?
[00:10:44] Juan: Well, I think what's interesting for us is how channels evolve or
[00:10:49] Juan: sorry, community meant something very different to us at the beginning. Community
[00:11:00] Juan: now is finding a group of people that are dedicated to a thing. Finding a tribe and gaining trust from that tribe. But not just like a pedestrian level trust, like to be a key partner in that tribe.
[00:11:23] Juan: So, what the reason I say this is, is that, initially we were just posting stuff on Reddit, posting stuff on Indie Hackers and other communities and be like, Oh yeah, that's kind of okay. But like to do community, well, you have to invest fully and you have to aim high. You have to be the thing that people talk about on a weekly basis or that you can help people on a weekly basis.
[00:11:47] Juan: But, there's elements of outbound in our community. You see what I mean? So outbound is one of the ways that content and community
[00:12:00] Juan: then converts but, it's just those two.
[00:12:05] Lucas: Oh, okay. When it comes to tracking and metrics, what are the key things that you would look at?
[00:12:15] Lucas: Are you looking at impressions, clicks? Can you tell us more about that?
[00:12:19] Juan: We look at all of it. We go from organic impressions all the way down to new companies sending their first payment right per week. I think the important thing is the cadence, so it has to be weekly. I think for most products, it should be weekly.
[00:12:39] Juan: Obviously for bigger consumer products it should even be daily. But for us, weekly is good. Every Monday we review all of these numbers. We move back and forth between what we want to focus on right now. We're really trying to find the most direct
[00:13:00] Juan: path to revenue. But previously it was more about engaging with communities and impressions or sort of like clickthrough rate (CTR) of a promotion or something like that.
[00:13:14] Juan: But now it's very much directly focused on revenue.
[00:13:18] Lucas: Fantastic! I remember, back in the day I looked at a case study of Wise and their SEO and organic search strategy and they built almost this huge mountain of backlinks that have come through. I know you guys are focusing a lot on video. What are your views on the backlinking side of things?
[00:13:47] Juan: We do some backlinking. We get companies contacting us and saying: Do you want to do a little swap and things like that? But it's not really our
[00:14:00] Juan: focus. I mean a lot of this is still experimentation.
[00:14:09] Juan: Our eyes aren't completely closed now, they're half open, but we're still feeling around trying to feel where the right market pool is and the right channel mix and so on. So yeah backlink links are not the thing right now. But what is for us it's just content and using it. So again, like I talked about the evolution of community,
[00:14:35] Juan: now I can talk about the evolution of content. Things that on their own look shady, sometimes have other purposes that help the overall strategy. You asked about, is backlinks important? It isn't. But I'll tell you what is. We've been doing maybe 150 shorts
[00:15:00] Juan: form videos now, almost on a daily basis.
[00:15:02] Juan: We don't have a million followers or anything, but what that has taught us is that, is the different velocities or the different rules of each platform. Then you use that to your advantage. So, where before we'd be like this customer was curious about FX margins,
[00:15:30] Juan: we should write an article and then we'd write it and then we'd wait four weeks and we'd be like: Oh, that's a shitty article! Didn't do anything! What we can do now is just post 4-5 videos in 2-3 days about different topics and they're not going to give you 400,000 likes or anything.
[00:15:50] Juan: But what they will give you is some data as to what people find interesting, and then you can double down on that into more.
[00:16:00] Juan: Invest more into it, write an article which will take a day, but those videos would take me 20 minutes or less. So that is what is important to us.
[00:16:10] Juan: It's not like how do we double down on content as a product in itself versus the SEO stuff. We don't understand SEO and we’d probably do really well if we got it right. But I feel SEO is like a old game. I don't know what else there is to do there.
[00:16:30] Lucas: What you said about the fact that with videos you can record them quickly and then be led by the data is a fantastic learning, something which certainly I will take away and I hope the viewers will be able to take away as well. So really, I liked that idea and hope actually to test it.
[00:16:52] Lucas: But in terms of other learnings beyond that one, what would they be?
[00:16:59] Juan: Well, maybe instead of a learning, I'll tell you what I'm trying to learn. It's really how I can, what we've been very data led with marketing. We always like to analyse one area that we can't do that easily is with branding.
[00:17:21] Juan: One thing I'm trying to figure out is, what is the value of managing a brand? What I mean by that is, keeping your assets consistent at the lowest level, but also making sure your tone is consistent across all your channels and so on. That's something I'm trying to learn more about.
[00:17:49] Juan: So, we're moving into the softer side of marketing now and
[00:18:00] Juan: I will find a metric that it's going to help us, but I haven't quite figured that out.
[00:18:04] Lucas: From what we've covered today, it seems like one very important takeaway is to be data driven.
[00:18:11] Lucas: So, produce content quickly, and then see what resonates with different clients. The next one is in terms of communities and content or just channels in general. Try as many as you can and don't be discouraged if one community doesn't pick up because another one will.
[00:18:38] Lucas: Then the third one which is one that you referred to as one that you are still learning, is all about that consistency in branding. So maybe it is worthwhile people having an idea about that, trying to learn a bit about what tone is before pushing everything out.
[00:18:58] Juan: Yeah.
[00:18:59] Juan: I think the biggest thing that kind of wraps all of that up from an individual's perspective is the journey that I with the team have been on is, we were so afraid to launch at the beginning. Because we knew in our heads the product wasn't ready, but what you learn is that the market doesn't give a fuck to what you think or feel.
[00:19:27] Juan: If you listen to me like where I am now, where we are now is we're trying to do multiple things and expecting most of them to fail and fall flat. I'm telling you like: oh, we don't have a million followers, and that's fine, most people would be a little bit sad about that!
[00:19:45] Juan: So, I think if you can focus on moving to that point where of course you care about the work, but you understand that 90% of it is no one's going to even bat an eyelid about.
[00:20:00] Juan: That unlocks you mentally to then be able to do all this other solution.
[00:20:04] Lucas: Very, very interesting! Perhaps the most important question of this podcast is, are you going to hire someone for marketing?
[00:20:14] Juan: Yeah, I'd love to! Right now, we're looking at two kinds of hired people that we want to work with; one on the sales or marketing side and one on the product side.
[00:20:26] Lucas: We touched upon learnings before, but do you have any sort of closing remarks or advice for founders who maybe they don't think that they're able to do this or maybe they're sitting on the fence, worried!
[00:20:43] Juan: When I talk to founders about marketing it always strikes me how completely clueless
[00:20:56] Juan: they are of their plight, their
[00:21:00] Juan: position. At least I was completely clueless about marketing, but I was not clueless about the fact that we had a problem. “Only the paranoid survives”, is a quote I'm thinking about, which is not mine, but maybe that's not the right kind of tone to finish it on.
[00:21:20] Juan: But truly, you have to be paranoid because that's what's going to lead you to change and focus on growth.
[00:21:27] Lucas: Yes. Yeah. That's a very good quote, the one that you mentioned and there's another one that comes to my mind. I think it's, “if you walk a hundred feet in the dark, you don't necessarily know what you're going to see, but you'll see new opportunities and
[00:21:47] Lucas: more once you start walking”. Would you say that your journey on marketing has been similar?
[00:21:54] Juan: Yeah of course. We just try new things and anytime we are spending more than
[00:22:00] Juan: a few days planning; we're like, we need to always set hard dates for ourself to take that next step.
[00:22:07] Juan: We want to take more steps. So, yeah, a 100%.
[00:22:11] Lucas: Fantastic! Juan, thanks so much for joining us again. Fantastic insights and hopefully you've inspired a few people to give it a go. Excellent! Thanks for joining us.
[00:22:23] Juan: Thanks!
[00:00:07] Juan: Yeah, thanks for having me again!
[00:00:07] Lucas: You're most welcome! Today we're going to talk about marketing and how Rebank used a team of non-marketers to create a killer marketing strategy.
[00:00:20] Lucas: For those who may not have seen the last episode, do you want to give a quick introduction to yourself and then we can dive into a few questions?
[00:00:29] Juan: Sure. I'm Juan, I'm one of the founders of Rebank and Rebank was started in 2018. Before that, I worked mostly in financial services going from insurance, digital cash, cards and then worked for a travel start-up, a Google Ventures backed travel start-up right before starting Rebank.
[00:00:53] Juan: That's where I found the problem that made me want to start a company. It's been a couple of crazy years! We got into Y Combinator; we were one of the first start-ups to be authorized with some new regulations. A lot of stuff was happening, least of which marketing,
[00:01:12] Juan: marketing is something that definitely didn't happen until recently.
[00:01:15] Lucas: Yeah. Thanks so much for that introduction, and it's interesting, I've been following your growth over the years, and this year I think in particular, if not late last year, you went on this rocket ship trajectory with content.
[00:01:32] Lucas: That all happened I think, without hiring any full-time marketeers.
[00:01:37] Juan: Yeah. Well, I guess I could tell you more about it. Essentially, I just remember a lot of late nights realizing that we weren't growing. Growth was flat! When growth is flat, a first-time founder like me
[00:02:00] Juan: thinks “I need a growth person.”
[00:02:02] Juan: So, that's where it started. Where it ended up is us just rolling up our sleeves, creating a content team. Now, where we are up to is just a completely different place, where all of our customers come from content and community and we've got now about four and a half thousand
[00:02:28] Juan: lead signups. We've figured stuff out, how do we actually convert? So yeah, a very different place now to where we were over a year ago.
[00:02:41] Lucas: Excellent. Could you talk us through the thought process behind hiring versus building out all of that content in-house?
[00:02:53] Juan: I think most decisions are bounded rationality, is what led
[00:03:00] Juan: me to believe that it was a growth person that we needed. Because I'm not a marketer and there was no marketing expertise in the team. I interviewed 60 different types of marketers and well, marketers are all like sales focused and what not, and so on.
[00:03:17] Juan: I ended up not hiring anyone and I learned a lot and I also whilst trying to hire was asking for advice, and I guess where I ended up was, I realized that I had to figure this out myself before I could bring someone on. I think the risk, well, there's a trade-off and there's risks both ways.
[00:03:43] Juan: So, if you hire without really knowing what marketing means for your company, you are basically handing over the keys to your house, to your car, to someone that you have no relationship with. You don't know sort of their effectiveness, and they could take it in a different direction and you wouldn't understand.
[00:04:01] Juan: So that's one risk. On the other side, you don't figure out marketing, you take too long and you die. So, I guess that's what was running in my mind. I was like, well, I don't want to die, so I better hire someone. But then I went back on myself.
[00:04:19] Lucas: Incredible! So, you've got the first option really of hiring someone and losing control of where marketing goes or do not hire and
[00:04:28] Lucas: then risk the company collapsing. So, the third option that you chose was, do it DIY!
[00:04:36] Juan: Yeah. What I learned from interviewing so many marketers is that everyone said the same thing. I just thought we could do so much more.
[00:04:48] Juan: Everyone was like, okay, you are B2B; we do Google Ads, we do LinkedIn, we do this, that and the other. And that just sounded so boring to me. I'm
[00:05:00] Juan: not a marketer, but I am a consumer of advertising in market like everyone else, and I just felt like companies were doing just far more unique, exciting things and I guess that made me feel like, well, why can't we do that?
[00:05:15] Lucas: Could you talk about the channels that you ended up choosing to work with or create content for?
[00:05:22] Juan: Well, the channels themselves are sort of, it's all inconsequential in a way because really, it's the process that we followed that got us to that. So that's more important than the actual channels.
[00:05:36] Juan: I mean the channels now are content and community. But the way we got there was through experimentation, through reading a lot and doing a lot of research and getting a lot of advice from real marketers. We decided we needed a
[00:06:00] Juan: process for experimentation and marketing because marketing isn't like product or engineering.
[00:06:06] Juan: There is no stack overflow for marketing where you can just, you have a question and you get an answer. It's all a bit nebulous. So, we thought well, what if we run a few experiments a week, we can find the right channels. But anyway, so we experimented with every single channel, but we ended up with content and community.
[00:06:26] Lucas: What was your favourite experiment?
[00:06:29] Juan: My favourite experiment are the ones that have the best results. I think one of our earliest wins was just a post in a community of YC Founders talking to them about a problem that we discovered that they tend to have. We added in scarcity to the offer,
[00:07:00] Juan: to the thing that we were saying.
[00:07:01] Juan: We basically wrote a post and said, hey, if you want some advice, we're going to give 10 companies advice for free! That instantly, like in minutes, got all these companies contacting us saying, oh yeah, we've got this problem, we don't know what to do. So that was really exciting, because when you discover, well, when you go from
[00:07:22] Juan: like someone telling you, oh yeah, some companies are talking about this, to doing the first post or initiative and getting some kind of pull. That was really exciting. So yeah, I think that's my favourite one. The Product Hunt launches which we did we came a second, in one of them second product of the day.
[00:07:43] Juan: Those were really, really exciting as well. But, I think for a different reason.
[00:07:47] Lucas: I don't have a product background, but I've heard about Product Hunt before. Could you talk a little bit more about the launches, because I guess you did the launches as a company that had
[00:08:00] Lucas: almost been trading for a little while.
[00:08:04] Juan: Product Hunt is just a community for founders, mostly US focused founders and builders. Every day companies launch their products there and every day the Product Hunt community can upvote these products based on their value or how much they like it. And then you get a “Product of the Day”,
[00:08:28] Juan: “Product of the Month”, “Product of the Year”. That is Product Hunt. It is one of the many communities we experimented with and most of them went nowhere.
[00:08:37] Lucas: You've almost got to plant quite a few seeds and see, which one sprouts In order to understand what's working.
[00:08:47] Juan: I think so. Yeah.
[00:08:47] Lucas: From the content side I have seen lots of fantastic videos that you've done on LinkedIn. In our previous podcast you mentioned
[00:09:00] Lucas: calculators, which are also I suppose a form of content, but perhaps a more interactive form. Could you talk a little bit about the content side of things?
[00:09:11] Juan: Yeah. Well, it all boils down to our betting table meeting and our betting table meeting is where we get together and put our initiatives forward, we justify them and so on. I say that because we didn't intend to create a content strategy, really.
[00:09:39] Juan: We were just trying to find the best initiatives that were going to help us grow that month. But looking back now, yeah, we've basically built this full content, the suite of content calculators, videos like landing pages with
[00:10:00] Juan: stuff and we've got newsletters and other things coming out
[00:10:02] Juan: to nurture, to get people familiar with. The problem that we solve, our solution, our brand and so on. But it was definitely not like a formula. Well, the only formula was the experimentation. Well, I did say we need a content strategy, but I didn't know what I was talking about.
[00:10:24] Juan: We just ended up figuring it out.
[00:10:26] Lucas: So, the betting table has led to the videos, the content calculators. newsletters are soon to come, you've got the communities, that's excellent. Is there any other channel that we haven't covered?
[00:10:44] Juan: Well, I think what's interesting for us is how channels evolve or
[00:10:49] Juan: sorry, community meant something very different to us at the beginning. Community
[00:11:00] Juan: now is finding a group of people that are dedicated to a thing. Finding a tribe and gaining trust from that tribe. But not just like a pedestrian level trust, like to be a key partner in that tribe.
[00:11:23] Juan: So, what the reason I say this is, is that, initially we were just posting stuff on Reddit, posting stuff on Indie Hackers and other communities and be like, Oh yeah, that's kind of okay. But like to do community, well, you have to invest fully and you have to aim high. You have to be the thing that people talk about on a weekly basis or that you can help people on a weekly basis.
[00:11:47] Juan: But, there's elements of outbound in our community. You see what I mean? So outbound is one of the ways that content and community
[00:12:00] Juan: then converts but, it's just those two.
[00:12:05] Lucas: Oh, okay. When it comes to tracking and metrics, what are the key things that you would look at?
[00:12:15] Lucas: Are you looking at impressions, clicks? Can you tell us more about that?
[00:12:19] Juan: We look at all of it. We go from organic impressions all the way down to new companies sending their first payment right per week. I think the important thing is the cadence, so it has to be weekly. I think for most products, it should be weekly.
[00:12:39] Juan: Obviously for bigger consumer products it should even be daily. But for us, weekly is good. Every Monday we review all of these numbers. We move back and forth between what we want to focus on right now. We're really trying to find the most direct
[00:13:00] Juan: path to revenue. But previously it was more about engaging with communities and impressions or sort of like clickthrough rate (CTR) of a promotion or something like that.
[00:13:14] Juan: But now it's very much directly focused on revenue.
[00:13:18] Lucas: Fantastic! I remember, back in the day I looked at a case study of Wise and their SEO and organic search strategy and they built almost this huge mountain of backlinks that have come through. I know you guys are focusing a lot on video. What are your views on the backlinking side of things?
[00:13:47] Juan: We do some backlinking. We get companies contacting us and saying: Do you want to do a little swap and things like that? But it's not really our
[00:14:00] Juan: focus. I mean a lot of this is still experimentation.
[00:14:09] Juan: Our eyes aren't completely closed now, they're half open, but we're still feeling around trying to feel where the right market pool is and the right channel mix and so on. So yeah backlink links are not the thing right now. But what is for us it's just content and using it. So again, like I talked about the evolution of community,
[00:14:35] Juan: now I can talk about the evolution of content. Things that on their own look shady, sometimes have other purposes that help the overall strategy. You asked about, is backlinks important? It isn't. But I'll tell you what is. We've been doing maybe 150 shorts
[00:15:00] Juan: form videos now, almost on a daily basis.
[00:15:02] Juan: We don't have a million followers or anything, but what that has taught us is that, is the different velocities or the different rules of each platform. Then you use that to your advantage. So, where before we'd be like this customer was curious about FX margins,
[00:15:30] Juan: we should write an article and then we'd write it and then we'd wait four weeks and we'd be like: Oh, that's a shitty article! Didn't do anything! What we can do now is just post 4-5 videos in 2-3 days about different topics and they're not going to give you 400,000 likes or anything.
[00:15:50] Juan: But what they will give you is some data as to what people find interesting, and then you can double down on that into more.
[00:16:00] Juan: Invest more into it, write an article which will take a day, but those videos would take me 20 minutes or less. So that is what is important to us.
[00:16:10] Juan: It's not like how do we double down on content as a product in itself versus the SEO stuff. We don't understand SEO and we’d probably do really well if we got it right. But I feel SEO is like a old game. I don't know what else there is to do there.
[00:16:30] Lucas: What you said about the fact that with videos you can record them quickly and then be led by the data is a fantastic learning, something which certainly I will take away and I hope the viewers will be able to take away as well. So really, I liked that idea and hope actually to test it.
[00:16:52] Lucas: But in terms of other learnings beyond that one, what would they be?
[00:16:59] Juan: Well, maybe instead of a learning, I'll tell you what I'm trying to learn. It's really how I can, what we've been very data led with marketing. We always like to analyse one area that we can't do that easily is with branding.
[00:17:21] Juan: One thing I'm trying to figure out is, what is the value of managing a brand? What I mean by that is, keeping your assets consistent at the lowest level, but also making sure your tone is consistent across all your channels and so on. That's something I'm trying to learn more about.
[00:17:49] Juan: So, we're moving into the softer side of marketing now and
[00:18:00] Juan: I will find a metric that it's going to help us, but I haven't quite figured that out.
[00:18:04] Lucas: From what we've covered today, it seems like one very important takeaway is to be data driven.
[00:18:11] Lucas: So, produce content quickly, and then see what resonates with different clients. The next one is in terms of communities and content or just channels in general. Try as many as you can and don't be discouraged if one community doesn't pick up because another one will.
[00:18:38] Lucas: Then the third one which is one that you referred to as one that you are still learning, is all about that consistency in branding. So maybe it is worthwhile people having an idea about that, trying to learn a bit about what tone is before pushing everything out.
[00:18:58] Juan: Yeah.
[00:18:59] Juan: I think the biggest thing that kind of wraps all of that up from an individual's perspective is the journey that I with the team have been on is, we were so afraid to launch at the beginning. Because we knew in our heads the product wasn't ready, but what you learn is that the market doesn't give a fuck to what you think or feel.
[00:19:27] Juan: If you listen to me like where I am now, where we are now is we're trying to do multiple things and expecting most of them to fail and fall flat. I'm telling you like: oh, we don't have a million followers, and that's fine, most people would be a little bit sad about that!
[00:19:45] Juan: So, I think if you can focus on moving to that point where of course you care about the work, but you understand that 90% of it is no one's going to even bat an eyelid about.
[00:20:00] Juan: That unlocks you mentally to then be able to do all this other solution.
[00:20:04] Lucas: Very, very interesting! Perhaps the most important question of this podcast is, are you going to hire someone for marketing?
[00:20:14] Juan: Yeah, I'd love to! Right now, we're looking at two kinds of hired people that we want to work with; one on the sales or marketing side and one on the product side.
[00:20:26] Lucas: We touched upon learnings before, but do you have any sort of closing remarks or advice for founders who maybe they don't think that they're able to do this or maybe they're sitting on the fence, worried!
[00:20:43] Juan: When I talk to founders about marketing it always strikes me how completely clueless
[00:20:56] Juan: they are of their plight, their
[00:21:00] Juan: position. At least I was completely clueless about marketing, but I was not clueless about the fact that we had a problem. “Only the paranoid survives”, is a quote I'm thinking about, which is not mine, but maybe that's not the right kind of tone to finish it on.
[00:21:20] Juan: But truly, you have to be paranoid because that's what's going to lead you to change and focus on growth.
[00:21:27] Lucas: Yes. Yeah. That's a very good quote, the one that you mentioned and there's another one that comes to my mind. I think it's, “if you walk a hundred feet in the dark, you don't necessarily know what you're going to see, but you'll see new opportunities and
[00:21:47] Lucas: more once you start walking”. Would you say that your journey on marketing has been similar?
[00:21:54] Juan: Yeah of course. We just try new things and anytime we are spending more than
[00:22:00] Juan: a few days planning; we're like, we need to always set hard dates for ourself to take that next step.
[00:22:07] Juan: We want to take more steps. So, yeah, a 100%.
[00:22:11] Lucas: Fantastic! Juan, thanks so much for joining us again. Fantastic insights and hopefully you've inspired a few people to give it a go. Excellent! Thanks for joining us.
[00:22:23] Juan: Thanks!