S3 E21 - Building a Demand Engine from Scratch | MJ Smith - CMO @ CoLab

Welcome back everybody to Second Growth. This is Cassidy, Carl, how you doing? Oh yeah, doing good Cassidy. Thanks for asking.

You always do. You're so kind. I feel like it's necessary. I don't really care how you're doing.

I know. Ask it. That's what's so funny about it. It's like deep down.

I know that you could care less how I'm doing, but you ask. And it's just like it's good. It's good. It's good.

It's polite, you know, for the audience. So Cassidy does like me, everyone, sometimes. And I'm in the audience to think I'm empathetic. And I'm a good leader and I care about my employees.

But right. Those are the memes and you play the role Cassidy. So I appreciate you. Hi, digress.

You've already introduced our guests. Let's do it. MJ Smith, y'all. I'm speaking to the audience here.

First of all, let me just MJ. Hello. How are you? Hi, I'm good.

How are you? I'm doing it. I'm going to ask too. I'm super pumped to have you.

I've been asking you to do this for like, since like the day after you started in a collab. And there's some reasons why we push this off. And that's what I respect about you so much. I've been begging you to do this.

And you kept telling me. So everyone knows like, Carl, we're seeing some amazing like positive signals and traction and some good stuff from all the things that me and the marketing org and sales are doing a collab. But I want sticky, consistent results. So once I feel comfortable, like what we're doing really works, and we haven't just seen a temporary spike on the proverbial, you know, HubSpot reports, we're going to talk about it.

So that time finally came like Christmas. So today we're going to unpack man, just the beginning to the current state of what you did, why you did it. You actually built a demand engine from scratch, the early stage company. And this is like, it's so elusive.

Like, there's no playbooks out there for doing this. And it's so difficult. Like, there's anecdotal information out there. Yeah, do this.

Yeah, do that. But you bucked a lot of conventional advice that you might hear on LinkedIn. You chose a different path for certain things. And I'm just really excited to break it all down.

This is going to be a longer episode than usual. I'm just excited to get into jumping to the deep end with you and really get granular with what you did and why you did it. So before we jump into it, I also wanted to congratulate you. Brand new, CMO, chief in the house.

So congrats. I called it. I think you called it that I called it. I was like, I'm just going to be a CMO for 2024.

And dang, you beat even that estimate by like two quarters. So awesome. So congrats. I did call it.

And when it happened, I was like, you called it. But yeah, hopefully today we can give people the episode I wish I had when I started, which is like everybody says that this works, but here's some stuff that actually works. And maybe some things you might learn from having actually done it. But I like to try to make all my LinkedIn content and all that good stuff pretty practical and give real examples.

So yeah, that version of it. I cannot wait. All right, let's jump in. I actually don't want to start with where you started.

And yeah, I want to start before that. One of the decisions that just plagues marketers a lot of times and they struggle with is a decision to choose a company. So can we start before you even got hired by Colab? And can you walk me through like walk us through like how you were thinking about your next role moving on from refine labs, how you vetted out Colab as a product as a company, and then how you vetted the executive team, right?

To make sure that there was alignment and all the things, right? So can you walk us through? And can we start in the very like the pre-beginning? How did you select Colab?

And how did you work through that decision? Yeah, so I don't know if I would have this much clarity. I don't know if I had this much clarity going in, but in retrospect, you know, you always kind of hindsight 2020. And I had a lot of clarity about the two things that I would look for next time, having kind of gone through this process and having it had worked out as well as it did, obviously.

And the two things that I think made the difference for me are number one, I was super aligned with the things that the CEO wanted most from my role. And two, I was super, super impressed with the CEO, the co-founder CTO. And at the time her title was head of business development, but it was less of a title than she deserved. And her current title was chief strategy officer.

So those three key people that I met in the hiring process. So the two things, the CEO wanted and he was able to articulate very clearly. I don't know that every CEO would necessarily be able to articulate as clearly as he did, but it was definitely product marketing. We need to get the right message that really resonates with our audience.

And Dementiaan got to put some points on the board and make that repeatable and scalable and product marketing and Dementiaan are the two things that I love to do. I think you could probably argue that every CEO of every early startup, everywhere wants Dementiaan wants you to put stuff in the pipeline repeatedly. But I don't think that every CEO is so clear about their desire to have a message that resonates in their real commitment to like fundamental product marketing. I think that is a side effect of having a serial CML on our board who's a very good product marketer.

And then in terms of the being really impressed by the C-suite, it sounds stupid. Like of course you want to be really just like blown away by the people you're gonna work for. But I've been in a number of hiring processes mostly before I joined Refine Labs for marketing leadership roles at early stage companies. And I haven't been like blown away by the founder and the people I meet in the process every single time.

And I think that's a mix of two things. Sometimes I think maybe the startup isn't the top tier, the best, the most impressive. And you know, probably at that time that I was interviewing neither was I. But the other thing is sometimes I just like, I don't think they're trying that hard to impress you, which is probably a reflection on how excited they are about you as a candidate, right?

So you want to be impressed by them and you want to know that they're trying to sell you really hard because they're impressed by you too. And I think so being so excited about the people, I think is a real signal of mutual fit. How did you like pressure, like really pressure test? Because again, to your point, any CEO that wants to court somebody like MJ, I mean, like look, before Colab, who are already at a status of legendary, right?

So of course, like I'm sure you had a million opportunities and CEOs are just tripping over themselves, trying to get the MJ Peters at the time to come and build their marketing engine. How did you pressure test that they were authentic and they weren't just, yeah, whatever MJ, like whatever you want to do. And they were going to like flip kind of the narrative once you got in. Because again, to your point, I'm sure every CEO was like, yeah, we want to demand you.

How did you pressure test that wasn't lead gen demand gen? And that was good demand gen. Like how did you really push through the, you know, just kind of being courted, right? And get to like the truth, what were some tactics maybe that you kind of deployed or some questions that you asked that really got to the heart of the matter?

Yeah, I appreciate you, Carl, but the truth of the matter is that I was definitely a stretch VP when I went to Colab. I had never led marketing at an enterprise software company before. So, you know, they definitely took a chance on me. Also, I don't think most people know this, but I reached out to Colab, not the other way around.

And I had a double text added before he responded to me. So I actually reached out to him, did not get a response, I reached out to him again. So, no, no, I just used to turn double text. I like that the end of, as the R like cold outreach, I like it, okay.

And on the second time I made a loom video and dissected the homepage of the website, which apparently got circulated internally to the people who are now on my team. And apparently right before they push play, they're like, who is this person? How dare they? And at the end of the video, they're like, okay, all right, she made some fair points.

Well, like pressure testing of the authenticity, right? Like how do I know I'm not stepping into like the CEOs and just telling me what I want to hear versus like, okay, this is real. And I guess you just brought up an interesting nugget of like you chose them. So, it's to begin with at least, and then you blew them away and press them.

And they chose you, even though, according to your words, you were risky. But like, I guess we have to even go there, right? Like, why did you choose them? What did you see in them before you'd really talk to anybody?

Yeah, so Adam does have a personal brand on LinkedIn. So I knew that he was aligned with the like measurement methodology, which does drive a lot of, you know, thinking and decision making as trivial as it might sound. They also had, I don't know if I can't remember if I saw this before or after I joined, but they had a marketing plan before I got there. And the serial CMO who's now VC and is on our board, he like, you know, gave them a lot of ideas on how to structure their marketing plan.

And one of the slides that he really told them they should have in there, which I love, is like our marketing principles or our marketing philosophy. And I think they had like five points on them. And one of them was embrace the dark funnel. And it was like, you know, a lot of stuff happens that you can't see.

And if you just measure MQLs and force things to be plain and in the open, you might incentivize the wrong decision making. But I have left that slide of marketing philosophy. I've made some adjustments, but I left that slide in our marketing plan. And my philosophy aligned strongly with their philosophy.

And I could tell that in the interview process. I think Refine Labs and Chris's content had a massive impact on CoLab. And then I also think that serial CMO's on our board is like product marketers, product marketer. And so am I, like I consider myself a product marketer turned CMO.

And I did speak to him as part of the interview process as well, which I think is, I don't know, maybe that's unconventional, maybe it's something that often happens. But from a product marketing perspective, he and I aligned really strongly on how to approach product marketing messaging, positioning narrative. And I think he strongly influenced the CEO. And so in turn, Adam and I have a strong alignment around that.

And Adam was like very open and transparent around like, I didn't even know what marketing was until like six months ago. And I've learned so much. And like, and so just having like that, just even him taking me through his own thought transformation, it's like, okay, this guy's open minded. He's willing to change his mind.

And he might have started with some of the more conventional thinking that a lot of CEOs might have a really stage companies before they've done a lot of marketing or worked with a strong marketing leader. And he was already starting to evolve. And I was like, this is someone that I can like build trust with. And he's open minded and we can work together to align our philosophies and build something great over time.

You mentioned it, one of the draws was the quality of the leadership team and the CEO. But you, I wanna hear on this point, Carl mentioned, why did you reach out to this company? Was it something about what they did, tied to your background? Like what drew you to them?

Was there something in addition to the people? Yeah. So my background is in industrial. And I kind of always knew when I went to refined labs that I wanted to go back in house eventually.

I do like being accountable to 100% of the results and having all the letters. And I also, I come from a background where marketing is like very overlapping and extricable from product and product roadmap, probably even more so than it is intertwined with sales in the manufacturing world, which is my background for this. And so I like being in house because I think you get more of that cross-functional work as well. I did think I was gonna be at refined labs longer, but this role came up when it came up, right?

Before I even joined refined labs, I knew if I was gonna make the jump into tech, that my best shot would be industrial tech because I had an unfair competitive advantage, having been the customer for six years. So at that time, I went and found like all of the industrial tech startups that I could find and I followed every single one of the founders on LinkedIn. And so I had seen Adam's content like for over a year when he finally posted the VP of marketing role. And like I said, I loved my job at refined labs.

I was expecting to stay there longer. And so I like for a while, I like agonized over whether I should even apply. And so it was the only job I applied to. And I eventually was like, you know, I'll do the interview process because I can always, if, like, hey, I might not get an offer.

And I could always decline it if I wanted to and stay here. But I found myself through the process, wanting to join the team more and more. And so that is what ultimately drove me to accept the offer at the end of the process. Yeah, I really appreciate that.

And the reason I wanted you to outline that is that over my lifetime, I've kind of working at different companies. I've found somewhere to you, really only two things matter. The quality of the people you work with or for and the passion you have for the thing that you do, i.e. the company, the industry, the product, et cetera.

So I think, at the that, I just love the fact that you, like your process for how you got the way you've gotten it should be something everybody should be doing. Here are the type of places I want to work. Here are the type of people who want to follow. How do I get ahead of this and start doing that research now?

So it pays off in the future someday. Well done and thanks for sharing that. That's awesome. Yeah, again, capstone on top of that was like, I just, what sticks out to me is how this proactive you were, right, in reaching out.

It wasn't a reactive thing. And I just, I wonder how many folks do that. I don't know, you know, you always hear, like, the platitudes on LinkedIn, I'm like, oh, you should be being proactive and make a dream list of companies you want to work for the next 10 years and start to nurture them. But I don't think a lot of people action that.

And it's just refreshing to hear kind of how you went through that. That's awesome. I didn't know that part of it. I mean, I know a lot of like your story and actually like that's new information to me.

So thank you for sharing. Okay, let's jump in to, you got hired. Congrats. It seems like you beat a bunch of people out like late stage two and you just snuck in as a stretch VP.

So RIP to those other candidates. Hope you're doing well. You have a lot of decisions to make in the very beginning. I mean, there's so many things that you can do.

And I know like me and Cassidy were on these sales calls all the time, I have refined labs of like marketers that are in your position where in your position early, they're like, I just got brought on to just make miracles happen. Where do I start? So let's start there. What did you feel like you needed to do?

What are you doing? You're back to week one, teleport back in time, week one. What do you do clean slate? What decisions are you making?

So every time I start a new company, I talk to customers for the first couple of weeks. And it's not like I've seen a lot of people be like, oh, you know, the new VP, the new CMO, they're like, I'll talk to customers and I'll talk to the team. And like, they don't do anything. Right?

I've seen that point of view. I've seen the other point of view, which is like, don't just start doing stuff without understanding what's going on. I really firmly believe that you can both talk to the customers, talk to the team, and do stuff fast. I also believe that the number one reason that people don't talk to customers is because it's actually not that easy.

So I had a huge competitive advantage of I had personally worked with several directors of engineering that I've never heard of CoLab and ever spoken to CoLab before. And however, I had a professional relationship with them and was able to just cash in on that and say, hey, can I have 30 minutes of your time to talk to you about what the priorities are in your role? Float this software by you, get your response, talk to you about some of these business processes where I know that people use CoLab. And I just got a bunch of yeses.

If you were new in a role with no contacts like that, it would take you a lot longer to line up those conversations. And I paired those conversations with gong calls. So I call my process for customer research marketing discovery. It's like sales discovery, but it's a little bit more open-ended.

In sales discovery, you basically ask questions to learn about the customer so that you can position your product for them. Marketing discovery, you ask questions to learn about the customer for a whole variety of purposes. You could be doing messaging on the website. You could be feeding that into product roadmap.

You could be doing win-loss analysis. So it's more open-ended. You kind of got to define how you're going to do it. The first application of marketing discovery for me at CoLab was I need to define the three or four business processes where CoLab is most commonly used.

And I need to build value props through the lenses of each of those business processes. And I need to turn them into solutions pages on the website. Because at the time, we had top-level brand marketing messaging, which is like the type of messaging you have on home page, for example. And we had bottom of the pyramid, like product features and what those benefits are.

But we had nothing in the middle about like, if you use CoLab in this business process, then you will have X better results. And so there was some ideas. That's basically product market fit, right? What does the customer use your product for so that they can transform their business results?

And we had product market fit in a couple of use cases, but we hadn't translated that into our go-to-market, our product marketing messaging. Not in sales dev, not in sales, and not in any of our marketing. So we started there. And in my first two weeks on the job, I researched one of those use cases thoroughly, wrote the website copy, worked with our digital marketing manager, put that first solutions page up there and then worked through the next two in the next two to three weeks after that.

And I remember our CEO saw that I shipped a page in two weeks. And that was a big deal for him, because he really wanted somebody who was not just going to build the team and stay up in an ivory tower, but World Air Sleep is up in New York. I love that. I want to come back to that.

But first, in your mind, you proposed a solution. Somehow, you were like, hey, I see this gap of like, I don't know, middle funnel solution page. Let's go backwards a little bit though, of all the things that you could do. I'm sure that you uncovered, you said this is a number one priority.

Why? Well, I think it's just that is how, that's the easiest, fastest application of customer research. So I always have a bias towards, I need to talk to some customers and understand why they would buy CoLab. Like I need to rationalize it for myself.

I think I almost go into a new role, like thinking like a salesperson almost. Like if I had to go convince somebody to buy this software for $50,000 to $100,000 a year, how would I justify that? And I am not a salesy person, not in the traditional salesy sense of the word, right? Like I need to be able to like, basically sit there and build a business case, which is what a good salesperson does too, by the way.

But in order to build a strong business case, you need a lot of inputs. Like you need market knowledge, you need to understand context, you need to paint a picture of the before CoLab and the best way to tie the before and after two dollars in dollars out and build a robust business case with a strong ROI is to apply the use case or business process lens to it. Because once you contextualize how the customer uses your product in their business, then you can actually start to calculate those kinds of things. So if that layer of your messaging stack is missing, then there's really no way to have a strong foundation for demand-gen sales enablement or quite frankly sales.

Why? I'll go ahead, Cassidy. I was gonna ask, was it clear to the rest of the company that this was a gap? Or is this something based on your experience?

You're like, oh, we just have this obvious gap here. Let's go knock that out right now before we can, that's kind of a foundational element to all the other things that you talked about. Was this kind of on the minds of everybody else? Or was it kind of like a new insight that you just figured out quickly?

Yeah, I don't think that this was on the minds. If everyone else, when I took Adam through it, he was like, yep, that makes sense. And he latched on to it. And this is part of the reason it's so successful.

It's he was like, whoa, use cases. We need this middle of the pyramid messaging. Like we're gonna build sales deck, at least a slide about it. Like we're gonna train people on it.

I'm gonna talk about it at the all hands. Like the light bulb went off in his head immediately and he helped me propel and get momentum. And still, honestly, this use case mentality is probably one of the best things we did in the entire 15 months I've been here. It did come from past experience though.

And it's interesting because in my past lives, as an in-house marketing leader, I was at manufacturing companies that were like 20 to 40 year old manufacturing companies. So they were established businesses. But what often happens with technology companies as they grow older and more successful or more established is like they almost forget that initial insight that gave them product market fit in the first place. Because maybe the founder moves on and maybe you just had established relationships with these distributors and they just buy from you every year.

And you don't, like it's almost like you forget how to market and you forget how to sell and you forget what made people buy from you when you were a nobody, right? And so in my past lives, my job has been to like rediscover that so that the company can continue to open up new lines of business and grow at a pace that is faster than the underlying market growth rate. Because if you don't know how to do the work of discovering a value prop and scaling a GTM motion around it, then the only growth you're ever gonna get is just riding the coattails of the underlying market growth rate. If it's 3% you're gonna grow 3% if you are in a 5% market and you wanna grow 20%, then you have to create more value and be able to scale more value than like the typical business.

So that's what I used to do. And I approached it the same exact way. It's like what's the business process? How do we positively impact it back in a number of ways so that the dollars in or dollars out are bigger than they would be without our product?

Do you find that like, first of all, I mean, that was incredible. It was awesome. What do you find, like have you already been at CoLab like for forever? Are you in your, you've studied, you're in your two?

Yeah. Have you already gone through a second cycle? Do you feel like of the rediscovery? When is it time to, like now, so we're talking about to the more mature SaaS company now slightly more mature?

Yep. When is the time to do the second kind of round? Like how often do you revisit in your perspective? Yeah, I mean, I think some SaaS companies they'll hit like 10 or 20 million ARR and then they'll hit the second cycle because we're enterprising, we wanna sell the SMB or SMB and we wanna sell the enterprise.

Or like we started out in this like kind of small TAM that was this little slice of a much bigger TAM and now, you know, we raise money you're saying we're gonna go after this huge TAM. So now we gotta build a product and go to market motion around the big goal, even though our initial success was around, you know, the small goal, right? Like, you know, you see all the sales tech companies doing it right now, right? Like GONG was called recording and now they also wanna kind of move into clarity space and do forecasting or they wanna move into sales, loss space and do, you know, sales engagement, right?

And so I think it depends on like the growth trajectory of the company, but anytime like you're moving outside of where you have true product market fit and go to market fit, then you need to be able to do this stuff. I wanna take this conversation in two directions. One, I wanna hear what else you did, right? What else question for you?

Because you're talking about content on the website. What I haven't heard yet is like, how did you get that in front of the right people, right? That's face to right, like distribution. So if you could tackle that, also keep in the back of your mind, I'd love to hear what you might have done different mistakes that you made or what surprised you about the kind of like the journey that you went on in the first 90 days.

So let's start with distribution. What else did you do in the beginning in those really early days to get quick wins into kind of accelerate growth? Yeah, well, so when I got there, Adam was like, we budgeted for two headcount. So you tell me how you wanna use that, right?

Which is great because on the one hand, I think I'm staking a lot of CEOs make is they like, open up all the marketing roles at once, including the leadership role. And then they hire other people and then just hire the leader on top of them. It's like hire the leader first, let the leader hire the people. So he did that or the team at CoLab did that.

So I had two headcounts, I hate the word headcount, but you know, before you find the role, I guess that's what it is. But I opened up a designer role, because we were sharing a designer with a product design team and for accountability purposes, I just, that didn't make me feel good. And we fully utilized that person immediately. So we hired a brand designer who got promoted to senior brand designers, she'd been awesome for us.

And then I made a series of like, not terrible mistakes, but I was like, okay, I need to see your content role. And then I interviewed all these people for the senior content role. I was like, I don't need a senior content role. And so I actually ended up like getting all the way to the offer stage with this person and not making an offer, which sucks, right?

Why we stood that for some time. I sent him a gift card. I referred him to another marketing leader in that marketing leader hired him. So it all worked out in the end.

But like I had a hard time figuring out what that second role needed to be. And so I just never hired anybody. I decided to see your brand designer and I brought on an agency for demand gen, which is I knew I always wanted to bring on an agency for demand gen to start. And then later down the line, after we kind of proved out that go to market, like that we could reliably generate pipeline through paid circle, mostly, then I made that somebody's full-time job.

But I think there's a lot of risks inherent in trying to prove out paid social for the first time. And I think it's important to like prove that it works a little bit just through kind of like elbow grease and scrappiness, throwing some tests together. We're working with an agency who obviously have a resource more resources that can scale up and down before you make it someone's full-time job because you're asking that person, who you bring in as a full-time hire to take a huge risk with like A, their primary source of income, and be their career path to come join your company and to plug someone into like a motion that you don't even know is gonna work for your company. I think in a lot of cases it's very unfair, but I think a lot of startups do that to good people.

What, so you brought on an agency to help you with the demand gen side to prove it out. Like can you define, I think a lot of companies are in that mode, right? We talked to them at Refineless, we're trying to prove out this motion and that's kind of our role. Like how do you know that it's proven?

What were the things that were like, all right, these five boxes need to be checked and this is when we're gonna be ready to now to staff this function or resources function internally? Yeah, I mean, two things. Number one, you have to be generating hand raisers and pipeline from the motion, maybe not a huge amount, maybe not even enough that you're gonna completely break even on the investment after accounting for sales overhead and close rates, but you do need to be generating real hand raisers that really are serious about evaluating your product, that are ideal customer profile fits for you. And you need to be doing that several months in a row.

It can't just be like one random person here and there. So I think by the time we made it some of the full time job, we were generating four to eight inbound opportunities a month and at least a couple of them are really good fits than some of them have closed since then. The second thing is we broke the agency model, right? Like we just got to the point where we were throwing way too many requests at them and we wanted to move way faster and we could move way faster than they were able to go, just, you know, because of how much we were paying them and how big of an agency they were and all these things, nothing wrong with them.

Like that we broke their model, right? And actually this particular agency is kind of a design to be broken model, they specialize in C to C to C to B and they help you get off the ground and then you're supposed to graduate out of it, right? So once it felt like we have broken this system and what we need now is to plug in a full time person and not an agency that can give us, you know, five to 10 hours a week, it was obvious we felt the pain but it was just easy to pull the trigger on the full time higher at that point. So you used again the high and 10 inbound and then just the working relationship became kind of burdens and we're like, all right, we're ready to kind of scale on our own and we've squeezed all the juice kind of from the agency.

Let's talk about measurement really quickly. Like, right, it's tough. Unless you were running like things that were gated and everything was like, you know, last touch, kind of conversion driven advertising on LinkedIn, maybe that's what you did, I guess. How did you measure again to prove it out?

How did you measure that LinkedIn was viable, like really tactically here? Like in CRM, how did you know? Yep, so it was self-reported attribution. How did you hear about us?

The only channel we were running with the agency was LinkedIn and that is because paid search does not work for Cola because nobody is searching for what we sell. We are creating a category and I know saying that you're creating a category is controversial, but we are creating a category, I understand what it means and it doesn't mean like, and so one sign that you're creating a category is that paid search does not work for you at all in case anybody's wondering. So yeah, so we were only doing LinkedIn and you know, somebody fills out the get a demo form on our website, we have multiple get a demo forms at the bottom of each solutions page and also we have a main CTA get a demo form and then that comes through on, we copy it to Slack. Here's a new inbound and the person has to book the meeting, and then the A has to have the meeting and accept that opportunity into their pipeline and we will then create an op, we're on top of Salesforce and we'll create an op and then there's also, so the form field, self-reported attribution, how did you hear about us?

That'll become a contact property when we create the op, we copy the contact property into an opportunity or a deal property and then we build all of our dashboards based on that. So I call the field in HubSpot deal source and deal source detail. So deal source is just inbound, outbound expansion and deal source detail, LinkedIn, Facebook, search, word and mouth, customer that left their job and went somewhere else and now wants to buy coal out again. So yeah, like the deal source detail has like, I don't know, 12 properties.

And yeah, we can build reports off of that. So my dashboards like, you know, qualified dollars have been bound by deal source detail, number of SQLs by deal source, you know, those are all things that I look at on my inbound dashboard. I do everything in HubSpot, our sales team is operating on Salesforce, so we map everything and I did rip out what we were using. We were using the Salesforce marketing cloud and I ripped it out and put it in HubSpot because and I know a lot of people are like, don't change the text app, that's so tactical.

For me, it was purely like, I know how to use HubSpot. So I asked. Like what month do you remember? Like how should you do that?

I think I started getting it going in like May, like April, I started in March, I think I started the buying process in April, I got it there and I got it up and going in May and then I was like fully like really confident in the dashboards, I kind of tweaked them over time by July, I think, but yeah, the decision purely 100% came down to, I do not want to learn a new marketing automation platform. And from a strategy perspective, I was like the marketing ops strategist, like how do we tie together the data with the strategy? We have a digital marketing manager who's really good at can figure out any marketing ops challenge. So I worked really closely with him, but I was like the dashboard needs to show me this so I can make this kind of business decision.

I was a marketing ops strategist and I just was not a good use of my time to learn a new MAP. And so it was worth it for the company to rip out Salesforce marketing cloud and put in HubSpot just to save my time. And I would make that decision every single time again. Yeah, that makes a ton of sense as a previous HubSpot seller.

I mean, marketing cloud is brutal. So, there it is, Carl, there it is. I had to plug it every single podcast episode. I plug it, right?

It's like right here. I want to ask about timeline, right? Because again, it's like, okay, you updated product pages, you're doing some stuff really fast, you brought it in agency and you mentioned some really great results. But I'm going to put myself in Adam, your CO shoes.

And I'm like, how much time is passing while all this stuff is happening before we start to see like high intent inbounds? So what ad spend I'd also love to know tactically, did you kind of start with if you're comfortable sharing that? Where did you start from a budgeting perspective on LinkedIn only? And then how long did it take for you to start to how many months, weeks?

I don't know, this is MJ, maybe it took hours, I'm not sure. But how long until we started to, you know, like you take a breath of fresh air and you're like, okay, I just spent a lot of money over the past whatever time and we're starting to see some results. Time scaling spent, talk to me. Yeah, so I'll start by saying, I want to go back to the two things that the company wanted when I started.

Wanted the product marketing to be there for the messaging to really resonate with the ideal customers and to put points on the board. So there's two priorities. And the customer research that I started doing on day one and then shipping to the website on day 10 was like clear and obvious progress on that product marketing piece of things. And you know, after we worked through that middle of the period of messaging, we went up to the top of the pyramid and we revisit strategic narrative, we redid the homepage as an output from that.

So we like did all the messaging strategy stuff like piece by piece and then we shipped it to the website and we shipped it to sales decks and things like that. But like we did the marketing strategy work or the messaging strategy work and immediately shipped it somewhere. So there's like clear and obvious progress on the messaging stuff happening. And I think because of that clear and obvious progress on priority number one, the pressure on the demand gen priority number two was drastically reduced.

And so I was like working as fast as I possibly to put points on the board. But I probably like got less scrutiny than I otherwise would have because I also was making progress on this other messaging thing. Yeah, you built up really fast. It gave you some more runway, sounds like.

Yeah, definitely. And so I could see a situation if a CEO didn't have messaging as a priority, then you might not have that almost like pressure relief valve of like we're making progress on your other main priority. And the scrutiny would be on demand and maybe the timeline would have been condensed because of that. But I think if you have the, if you, if there are two priorities, right, if there's a second priority besides just put points on the board, I would encourage any marketing leader to think about how you can make clear intangible progress on that other priority, maybe it's sales enablement, right?

Maybe it's getting product launches to be super consistent and make clear and obvious progress on that priority to relieve the pressure off the demand gen because I know every freaking marketing leader says this but demand gen does take time. And so anything you can turn on as a pressure relief valve, you should do that. So that's one piece of it. We have this interesting thing when we first like turned on demand gen where like we had a like spiking in bounds immediately and then it like went down for a little while and then came back up.

And I wonder if other people see this because I think it makes sense to be rationalized. It's like we put our messaging out there and people heard about CoLab and like the use cases we saw for for the very first time. And inevitably in that audience of hundreds of thousands of people, there were people that like had that problem viscerally and like we're ready to buy right now and it just never heard of us before. And that was all they needed to do was see one ad on landing page and those people came in about immediately.

So we saw that spike, right? But then you get those people, right? And then they're gone, right? So then it kind of drops back down.

And then from the baseline that you go back to, you need to like build up steadily by like improving messaging, by improving creative, by improving targeting, by shipping experiments more frequently, by figuring out that these couple of messages work and then you leave those on and then you stack some more experiments on top of them, right? So what we observed was like an immediate spike. It went down to a baseline and then steadily rose from there. So I'll pause there.

Yeah, again, still trying to get a sense of like a lot of, a lot of VPs and marketing that are evaluating refinance asked me like, well, how much spend do you start with? Are you comfortable sharing like sort of where you would start from a spend perspective and how you thought about that, right? I'm sure Adam was like, cool, you wanna spend 5K or 10K or whatever, like why that number? I guess, walking through your decision again.

And then again, the timeline, what kind of timelines are we talking about here? Are we supposed to sit in or like, how long, how much time has elapsed? Yeah, so I think one thing that impacts this a lot is whether or not paid search is gonna work for you. Because paid search is a lot more straightforward, I think than paid social.

And it didn't work for us at all. We tried, I would love to have paid search as a channel, but we just, we really tried and it just, there's nothing there for us. But like, if you're in an established category, like paid search could be really predictable. It's like people search this.

This often, this keyword works for us or it doesn't. We can spend this much. If you're getting opportunities at a reasonable cost from paid search, you should get as many of those opportunities from that keyword as you possibly can before it becomes economically like not feasible. So I don't know, depending on your market, like that could be 10K a month on paid search, it could be 25K a month, it could be $1,000 a month, right?

For us it is zero. So like I would tap that first and that's just sort of like that's the paid search pool. I think your paid social pool needs to be separate from your paid search pool. And I mean, depending on how many people are in your audience or in your total addressable market, the fit your ICD, you're gonna reach X percentage of them based on how much you spent.

So like we have several hundred thousand people in our audience. And if we spend 10K a month, we reach like 30% of them at the frequency we want. We spend more, we reach a greater percentage of them. And if you're reaching everyone and regularly getting messages in front of them, that's when you have, you have hit the ceiling, right?

So if you have an enormous total addressable market with like millions of people in it, you might need to spend $100,000 or $200,000 a month on paid social to reach all of them. And as long as you've put in place a framework where like you have good at creative, you are shipping messages that resonate, you're sending people a great landing pages, like you can continue to scale up your budget all the way to that ceiling and your results should continue to scale with you. But look, I think if you have an audience to give people some really pragmatic practical advice, if you have like 50,000 people in your total addressable market, think you could probably test a man-gen for five K a month. If you had 100,000, you'd probably test it for 10K a month and it's just the paid social piece of the equation.

So I'd say $5,000 for every 50,000 people in your audience should give you enough data to test. Awesome, love it. Okay, let's talk about the timeline piece then and then we'll move on. Because you also ran kind of a wild ABM experiment that you talked about on LinkedIn and I want to get into that.

Timeline to results. Are we talking about 90 days? Like, okay, so you kicked off, you saw a spike, did you see that spike like in month one of like running demand gen or how again, how much time has it probably elapsed here? And how are you communicating with Adam on expectations etc.

throughout this process? This is the reason, as is an area that a lot of marketers just struggle with navigating this period of time where there's not explosive results, but there is significant investment happening and there's this pressure, right? So how'd you navigate that and how much time are we really talking about here? In your case, in your specific instance?

Yeah, so first of all, there is one variable which is in your control, which is how often do you ship good stuff? Like marketing is about shipping stuff at the end of the day. So if you're gonna agonize over the creative and send back 18 revisions and you're only gonna ship a new set of creatives every six weeks, then your time to results is gonna be a lot longer than if you do your customer research, you develop your value prop, you make your copy, you put that into creative and you're shipping new creative every two weeks. So we got online with our agency and we shipped our first creative with them, I think after two or three weeks and then we continued to ship at least monthly, sometimes twice a month after that.

And now we ship weekly because we have a full time person doing it. And so our time to results is probably faster than most companies. I think we were probably, I don't know, at least 80th percentile and just like pure velocity because we're focused, we're good customer research, we just made it happen. And our agency was a good part of that way.

So assuming that velocity, yeah, we did get in bounds like the first time we turned on LinkedIn ads. I think we got one or two and that was that initial spec, right? And then in month two or three, that was when we kind of stabilized back down to that baseline of the number of amounts. And then in month kind of four, five and six, we progressed from the benchmark all throughout here is dollars of pipeline per dollar of spend.

So like in month two and three, we're probably only generating like a dollar of pipeline for a dollar of spend, which sounds okay except for then at your close rate, it's probably only gonna be 20 or 25%. So you're only gonna get 20 to 25 cents back for that dollar. So in order to break even, you need to get to at least $4 of pipeline for $1 spend. So I would say in month like four and five, we probably ended up around $4 or $5 a pipeline for dollar of spend.

And then in month like nine or 10, we had another huge jump where it was $4 or $5 up to like $10 a pipeline for $1 spend. And that's, you know, that's when you start making two or $3 of revenue for every dollar you're putting into your ad channel. And the difference there was going from agency to a full time hire. Also our full time hire Roman is freaking awesome.

Nobody tried to coach him. But yeah, he did a number of things like increasing the velocity of how fast we should creative as well as like going really deep on targeting and how campaigns were set up. So he made a number of improvements to our audiences. And he just like his testing stuff all the time.

That, and that was the difference like between $4 and $10. But I think if you're doing it with an agency it should be creative kind of like once a month. You should be able to eventually get it to break even for a pipeline for $1 spend before you make it somebody full time job. Let me double click on this for a second.

I love this idea of like the cycle time early on to get up and running in the creative at two weeks, et cetera. Did you find that it was a speed of the creative or was it the accuracy of your message that made the difference in that? I often say you should go fast at the beginning because you may not know what works. But it sounds like you had a pretty good idea of what works.

So it was a frequency because you had a lot of messages you want to get in the market quickly in terms of like frequency and reach. Or was the speed, the importance of the speed of your creative velocity because you're testing messaging if that makes any sense. Yeah, no, it's a really good question. So I'll go back to the use cases.

We picked three and with a creative was like based on one of the three use cases at any given like launch. And then based on what the creative said, we directed them to the corresponding use case landing page on the website. So it was like, add creative, same, the messaging on the website is just like an expansion of what they would have already seen on platform. And so we did like one per use case every two weeks.

So we were like cycling through the use cases. And so we figured out was like, some use cases resonated better than others. And like some, even it was like to the level of like some words or like acronyms like works better than others. And then we started to figure out like across the use cases, like if you did the creative in a certain way, one thing that worked really well for us, for example, was taking like the most interesting word from the copy and finding an image that matched the words.

So like we had run this one ad that says, when you say design freeze, do you really need it? The most interesting word is freeze, right? And so we put a melting ice cream cone next to that, right? So if you can like tell us part of the story visually, like that worked really well.

And then we like started just like ripping off ads from people in adjacent industries. Like, oh, that's a cool creative. What can we make that relevant to this use case? And so we started testing all of those.

And so yeah, the beginning, it was just like put the use case messaging into the market. And then, you know, round two, three and four was like double down on the messages within that use case that worked the best. And then five, six, seven was like double down the creative trends that are working the best. And then we just kept going from there.

And every time you found something that worked, we just left that on. So we have a campaign called Evergreen and a campaign called Experiments. And Evergreen, like all the good stuff just goes into Evergreen in this one all the time. And you kept, so I kind of delve into detail here, you kept the thread early on use case.

So you're like, we think our hook is we have these unique use cases that we want to get in front of our audience. Some of them will resonate more than others, depending on the audience, the situation. That's our bet. It wasn't necessarily social proof.

It wasn't necessarily more brand kind of like problem statements, you know, like I've seen that work as well, you honed in on that high level, it's not low level, it's like use case. So kind of tied back to your pyramid, the thing that you observed from the beginning, to kind of make this thing come full circle. I would say we went, we went like a hundred percent use case for like five months and just boom, boom, boom, iterated really fast. And like the interesting thing is at the beginning, you're not just like getting used to and learning about the messaging.

You're also getting used to and learning about the entire emotion itself. So like you're just getting used to like, how does my team work through like making copy, like taking the value, probably turning it into copy, turning it into ads, building the ads, getting them out to the door. You need to, you gotta go through that motion a couple of times before you're used to it, right? So if you're like trying to learn how to do that and try to test like use case messaging and try to test brand messaging and try to test case studies and try to test social proof, like you're, it's gonna be hard.

Like the progress is gonna be really slow. So we only did use cases for a while. And then now we layered in a lot more stuff, right? Content, we do a lot of the retargeting layer with social proof, but like we kind of, to the refined loves concept of stacking growth, we stacked those things on top of the use case thing once we got that working.

I love how like you just dispel myths here, M.J., right? Like first of all, you did some stuff that like you just told not to do online, right? Like ripping out your tech stack. I think you revamped your website too really quickly.

It's like, I mean, you're just gonna make a whole bunch of LinkedIn marketing influencers, hair stand up with that one. And like you saw results, what I would think are like pretty fast, right? Everyone thinks it like takes years, but really it's like when you do it really well, you get results. When you turn on ads with the right messages, you get meetings similar to turning on, it can be almost as transactional as turning on an SDR team, right?

Once they start dialing with the right message, you're gonna get meetings, right? And so you've broken down like I think a couple of these and you've really challenged some of these myths. I wanna hear about, so you did do it experiments. I don't know if it was successful or not.

Maybe you can unpack it for us. You unpacked it on LinkedIn. Tell me a little bit more about this ABM experiment that you did. You shipped it like in one day, you did like a Friday sprint with your team or something like that.

Like describe that experiment. And I guess fast forward, tell us like what you learned, what it produced and what were some of your takeaways from that experiment. You're still doing it. So yeah, pack it for us.

Yeah, I like, I always thought the concept of ABM made sense, but like I kind of wanted to strip it back to the fundamentals. It's like, it made sense to me because I was like, okay, you just zoom in on like a small part of the market. And because you zoomed in, it's the same way we zoomed in with use cases, right? Like we can make our messaging more relevant because you zoomed in on this use case.

You're zooming all the way into like the account level. And in our case, we picked actually five accounts that all are kind of lookalikes to each other. They're all in the same vertical. They're all about the same size.

And so we zoomed in and we made messaging that's like hyper relevant, next level of relevance below use cases, like specifically use case vertical, like what is the most relevant to these five companies. And then we put all that messaging on a landing page and then we put all the messaging in creative. So it was really just plugging in all the stuff we were already doing with our use case demand gen motion and zooming it into the account level. And yeah, it was totally a test.

It was like, does this work better than the higher level use case messaging or the broader use case messaging? And it is more expensive, that's the first thing I'll say, because LinkedIn is gonna charge you for that level of precision in the targeting, the CPM goes up. However, it's more effective because the messaging does actually resonate more with people. Even just the simple act of like throwing their logo into the creative does like jack up the click through rate way up.

So more people consume it and more people click through to the landing page when it's hyper relevant is what we found. And so the CPM like cancels out with the click through rate and you end up getting a very similar or even sometimes a lower cost per click through to the landing page. So what you're doing is very effectively getting a lot of people to consume the message that you want them to consume. So it's really effective if you do it right and you execute the messaging well, it's a really effective way of getting targeted messages in front of the right people.

Now from a pipeline creation perspective, the overall we've found the broad base use case stuff more effective, we get more pipeline from that. And we did we thoroughly tested the same thing. We did like seven more times in Q1 with all kinds of different accounts. The reason I think this.

Did you have SDRs in there as well? Was that a part of the play like SDR outreach? Was that a part of your play or was it just purely like a marketing? It's a good question.

We should come back to the SDR piece of it. It was mostly a marketing thing, but the SDR piece of it is actually the one exception to everything I'm about to say. So yeah, so ultimately we turned it off. It doesn't generate enough pipeline.

And I think the reason that is is just because you are, you all of a sudden are fishing in a much smaller pond. So like you have a great fishing rod or whatever, maybe I'm killing this analogy, but you're fishing in a much smaller pond. So it's like, you know, if your product is relevant to 250,000 people, all of a sudden you've narrowed the pond to 1500 people, and then you apply the lens of only 3% of people or 1% of people at any given time are actually willing to take action and talk to sales, even if you are creating demand. Like just a lot of people are not in the mood to like go be the champion of a software product on any given day in the week.

And some in the math at a certain point and a certain audience size, it just stops working. So actually for us at the end of the day, given the math of all of that, the broad based stuff works a little bit better. I can see that being different for different different company sizes and some companies don't have a choice. They just have a small town in a huge ACV and they have to do it that way.

But we ended up not pursuing that anymore after Q1. Now, sales dev had a very focused account list in Q1 and Q2, and it worked better than having a less focused account list for sales dev. So that was an interesting takeaway. Why do you think that is?

It may seem like an obvious question, but was there messages, like, did they take the message that you developed on the marketing side and it was like, the message was better? Or they were spending more time on fewer accounts? So there was just a time phishing aspect of this. So they were just, they had their line and their bait in the water for longer because they kept working it or like, I don't know, is there a nugget there you can hone in on why you think that that that was just simply like calling.

It's just maybe just a more direct channel to get somebody in into a conversation than a more passive channel where you're waiting for somebody to respond to an ad. What's your hypothesis on what you think is more effective there? As crazy as it sounds, I think list building is hard. And so if you have a really tight target account list and you put actual strategic energy and thought into that, you've been equipped yourselves to have came with that, they will produce better results than if you ask them to go build their list on their own, which is what we were doing before.

List building is hard. And if you help your SDRs with it, they will have better results. Man, I want to do like a whole, like run a time, I want to do like a whole tangent here on how you build a list because it is, I say this all the time. Like list building is the most painful exercise that any company can go through.

And it's just not easy. It's not just about putting filters in Zoom info, you know. So I'd love to unpack why you chose the five or seven companies and how you chose those. But I think we have to table that for now.

I want to keep going. Okay, so you're, I don't know, six, nine, 12 months into the role. So that's, I don't know what is that December or something like that? No, it's February, you know, things are starting to move.

You've got your performance marketer now in house. You're not using agency anymore. You're seeing good results. How are you thinking?

What's the conversation like with Adam and the team? What's next? If you're thinking, if you're going back in time, like, where were you in that headspace? So good traction.

Now what? So I started doing a pretty focused like marketing planning approach and I do it quarterly. And I started usually if I'm on top of things on the first day of the last month of the previous quarter. So on March 1st, I started planning for Q2.

And I will start by doing this like brain dump with Adam. It's like, I will put everything into use big jams like a digital whiteboarding tool for Sigma. I'll put like all these sticky notes on there. Like these are all the things I think we could improve like pretty qualitatively like high level objectives, right?

Get more consistent about product launches. Like, you know, help our sales team overcome the late stage buying objections that this particular person and the buying process tends to have like things like that. And I'll just throw all my thoughts down on there and then I'll use it as like a starting point to have a one hour discussion with Adam. Here's all the things I think.

What am I missing here? What do you think? And basically I just use that session key like events. Okay, this is all the stuff I really want to see for marketing, right?

And this I think is an excellent way to tap into CEOs that care about marketing and have a lot of strong opinions and ideas. I think this CEO archetype can either be a marketer best friend or their worst nightmare because they're also the kind of CEO that's going to be like, oh, let's do this. Like let's do this and it blows up your plan, right? A marketer's getting frustrated by this.

So like it's again, this concept of pressure relief valves. Like if you do this thing with the CEO at the beginning of your quarterly planning process, they'll feel like they can get all of their ideas out there. And also you get some great ideas about like directions and things that you're not working on. And so that's the first thing I do when I do my quarterly marketing plan.

And so. Yeah. One of your sticky notes was a very sales, sales type of thing. And so that stuck out to me.

Like I don't think that marketers are like, oh, I want to help sales with like late stage objections and helping them close those deals. It's typically like, you know me or Cassie, I could say I was thinking about those things. What gives you the right? Okay.

But no, like more seriously, like you care about that obviously. Obviously you see accountability and ownership even over things like that. I like tell me like, tell me about that a little bit more. Well, one thing I like to kind of think about is there are some functions in a business that are like operational, like I don't want to say reactive because that's almost like a negative connotation, but like they have like a bunch of things to do every day.

Right. Like sales has calls, they have deals, they need to close, they got to keep the stuff moving. And because of that, like it's not like they have huge chunks of time in the day to go out and be like, I'm going to do a bunch of research and develop messaging that addresses like this particular objection like like they get that objection, they just got to handle it, right? Like you've trialed by fire.

That's kind of like how sales is, right? Customer success too. Like you're just on calls every day. Like if the problem comes up, you got to handle it.

Marketing and product, I think are two functions where like you have like large blocks of unstructured time and you need to go structure them such that you're like solving a business problem. And so I think the like advantage or what marketing can bring to the table is like, if the same problem keeps coming up across sales and like sales are just handling it, like the best they can, which is sometimes very good, right? What you can do is actually apply some of those large blocks of unstructured time that you have at your disposal to put a ton of thought into that objection or positioning that feature or what have you that sales doesn't necessarily have because they got to keep the numbers moving, right? Like they got to fly the plane.

And so I think if you can take some of those problems that are persistent across the whole team, take them away, apply some real deep thought to them and come back with like here's some thoughts that we would like to test and you work with the sales team on that and then you get their feedback on it. Like, hey, did the messaging we developed actually worked over come to the suggestion? If you get a few wins and we've had a couple of wins like that where hey, try this tweet to the messaging and like keep working, they'll keep doing it. If you give them something good, they'll just, they're like, great, now I don't have that problem.

Now whenever this comes up, I'm gonna use that messaging again and again, I think that's a value you can add. You can use those large unstructured blocks of time to your advantage. So I like to brainstorm like what we have that, like in our arsenal, like where should we apply it in terms of relieving sales bonics? That's awesome.

I mean, it says so many things, right? You're trying to align with business problems and not just thinking in the silo of marketing, right? You also like obviously this speaks to the fact that you're close to sales conversation still, right? Like obviously you listen to gong calls or you know you have a pulse of what's happening.

So you're very, very involved, which is I think, you know, to anyone listening, like that's a takeaway that I hear, right? Is that you're super involved and I don't know how many marketers, hey, maybe all of a matter listening to this are super involved like that, but I think that's pretty powerful. So okay, let's keep going. So you're doing Fig Jam with Adam.

What's the output? What did you do next? I guess, because I mean, this was like, if you did a Fig Jam earlier this year, because you haven't been in Cola forever, what was the actual output of that? What did you prioritize?

What did you do next? Yeah, so going into Q1, we like transitioned from agency to full-time demand-in marketer. And so the main thing was like, get to the next level and bust through the next ceiling for demand-in. And we pulled that off.

So Q1, it was like, boom, we got for $4 per dollar of spend, $10 per dollar of spend, like demand-in. It's crushing, firing on all cylinders. Like that team operates very independently. I'm not like super in the weeds on that anymore, which is awesome because that's a VPN marketing.

I think what you want to be doing is like figuring stuff out and then just like backfilling yourself, you know, and that so that you can deal with more ambiguous stuff and you can backfill yourself and you can operationalize the next thing. So that's we kind of like got that done in Q1. Going into Q2, I really wanted to be super consistent about product launches and also backfill myself and operationalize that. So we promoted an SDR into a product marketing role.

And he and I worked super closely together in Q2 and now he owns all the product launches and I don't really have to be that involved in those either. So that was like a big way in Q2. Next, I think a lot of people will be surprised that they haven't really done this yet, but like I would love to turn just like organic into more of a consistent, great demand channel for us. Cause like Adam is a personal brand and it kind of generates a little bit of pipeline and Colleves a decent company page and Gus Messio, has he has kind of a separate topic, but like, you know, we are number one sources right now are paid social and word of mouth.

And I would love to like blend in some more organic demand creation into there. It's a big project. It's gonna take a long time, but that'll drastically bring down our, our CAC. And I see the webinars that you guys do or the, I don't know what you call them.

I know webinars is like a ugly word live event. I don't know. Is that new? Is that a part of like this organic play?

And how I guess is that it's a tactic I've seen your strategy, I've seen you execute lately. How's that working? Yeah, totally. So it's a good call out.

So the toughest part I think about building an organic demand gen engine is the original thinking, right? Like it's not a content repurposing, it's not that hard, right? Creating a piece of content that is worth repurposing is really hard because oftentimes there aren't that many people inside your company that are like generating a stream of like true insights, right? That your ICP is like, I will follow this person to get these insights.

Yeah. And so what we're trying to do through that motion, we call them keynotes, is like put together a huge like jam packed one hour thing with a ton of insights. And then we can use that event for repurposing. So that one event might give us, you know, five blog posts, 25 social clips, whatever.

But like Adam and I both invested huge amount of time into making the keynote like really rich with original insights and something that Chris does really well, like on his own, he's just like coming up with crazy original insights all the time. And so we're trying to like, you know, basically replicate, I think what Chris does very well naturally with some systems and processes here at Echo One. And that's been going for how long, a few months now? Yeah.

I think we did our first one in Q4. And then in Q1, we did two. We actually did a keynote style, which is just Adam talking. And then we did a panel with people from the industry.

And since Q1, we've been alternating keynote panel, keynote panel, two quarter. So you could have done a million things, and Jay, you know, I love this question. You know what's coming. But like you could have done a million things, but you chose a keynote, right?

You chose the specific topics. Why? Why? The keynote?

Why not a podcast? Why not some of any of the other things that you could have done, you chose this. Like walk me through your decision making progress and how you kind of landed on my same words. Well, there's some really good ideas that we're kind of left on the cutting room floor that you'd like maybe revisit.

Yeah, we I literally have ignored our podcast, just like completely not put any energy into it. You have one is what I'm hearing. I didn't know that. OK.