Latest / Content, Briefly / The Content Studio: Tommy Walker on hard work, perseverance and creating luck

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The Content Studio: Tommy Walker on hard work, perseverance and creating luck · Content, Briefly

• 0:00
  But when we looked at that, I said, "Well, they're not publishing case studies on a regular basis," right? Because they're too big, they have too much weight to carry to do that.
• 0:12
  So I said, "We're small, so if we publish on a frequent basis, we're gonna have a couple things done. One, we're gonna look bigger than we actually are- Yeah... because we're publishing these things more frequently."
• 0:24
  But two, the stories that we were telling were, you know, not company X works with company Y and sees Z results, but it was Jimmy started using this software, and here's how Jimmy's day changed as a result, and here's your personal satisfaction, and this is why you got into the game to do all of these things.
• 0:40
  [upbeat music] Hey, folks, and thanks for tuning in to another episode of Content Briefly. I've got a real one for you today. We're talking to Tommy Walker, one of my oldest content marketing friends.
• 0:52
  We go back to two thousand and twelve or so was the earliest we could kind of pin getting to know each other. We talk a lot about Tommy's early years.
• 0:59
  He tells a really profound and inspirational story about his start in content marketing, which is, is really worth listening to.
• 1:07
  We talk about the early days of content, sort of a, kind of a history lesson of B2B SaaS content in some ways, all the way through till today.
• 1:14
  We talk also about Tommy's upcoming course that he's putting on, four-day intensive course called Advanced Content Development for Series A and B Startups. Would really encourage folks to check that out.
• 1:25
  I'll leave the link to the Maven course in the show notes.
• 1:28
  There's also an accompanying year-long cohort he'll be running, so if you wanna learn from Tommy, learn basically everything he's learned over the past eighteen years working in content marketing, then I would encourage you to check that out.
• 1:40
  Tommy also runs a YouTube show called The Cutting Room, where he brings in content marketers to do live edits on a piece of content.
• 1:46
  I was a guest at one point, but there's a bunch of really smart people who've been a part of that, including folks like Tracy Wallace, Rand Fishkin, Margaret Jones, Aaron Orendorf, among many others.
• 1:55
  Definitely worth checking out. That, he does it live every Tuesday, and then there's recordings, of course.
• 2:00
  We'll leave links to The Cutting Room, The Content Studio, to the course, the cohort, all of that in the show notes. I know I always say this, but I really enjoyed this episode, and I think you will too. Take care.
• 2:13
  One last thing before we get into this episode. Would encourage everyone to go check out our paid Slack community. It's twenty bucks a month or two hundred and twenty dollars a year. You get access to ten paid channels.
• 2:22
  There's almost five hundred people that are part of that paid group now, and the conversations that are being had there are in-depth, really fascinating, stuff that you absolutely will not find on Google or anywhere else.
• 2:33
  You also get transcripts to this podcast, and we have unlocked almost five years of this Slack group to be searched. So there's a search channel.
• 2:42
  You can go in there, ask questions, and it will query almost nine hundred thousand messages over the course of nearly five years. So would encourage folks to go check it out, superpath.co/community.
• 2:54
  Hey, everybody, Jimmy here. Thank you for tuning in to another episode. I'd say this one is overdue. We've got Tommy Walker today. Tommy, you're one of my oldest content friends, and to prove it,
• 3:04
  I went into my email, and I searched your name, and I found the oldest correspondence that I could find- Yeah... which was June twenty fifteen.
• 3:12
  But in the thread, we're talking about a previous conversation we'd had, so we must have been emailing on my Vero email. Like, there was other-- obviously, like, we knew each other prior to that.
• 3:21
  So there were two important things.
• 3:22
  The first was I left my gig at Vero to start freelancing in summer twenty fifteen, partially because we had been talking, and you had said, "Hey, I need some freelance writing at Shopify Plus. I'll hire you."
• 3:36
  And then a few years later, I was frustrated with a job that I was at, and you were doing some consulting work for QuickBooks, and part of the- Mm-hmm...
• 3:44
  part of your scope of work was to help them hire a, I think it was a managing editor was the title of the role. Yep. And you made that connection, and I'm forever grateful. So thank you very much for those things. So
• 3:56
  will you, Tommy, for those who don't know you, could you just give us, like, a brief overview of who you are and some of the things you've been up to over the last ten or, gosh, maybe- [laughs]...
• 4:04
  twelve or so years in content? Sure. Eighteen years- Oh, wow. [laughs]... in content in one-- in some way, shape, or form, yeah. That's awesome. So I am Tommy Walker, the founder of The Content Studio.
• 4:15
  I consult with Fortune five hundred businesses on building out content programs, rehabbing content programs, operations, strategy, hiring, basically anything having to do with the program itself, editorial standards.
• 4:29
  That's what I focus on, and the whole goal is to create high-quality content at scale.
• 4:34
  Before The Content Studio, I was the first marketing hire at Shopify Plus there at the major inflection point for them, and then the global editor-in-chief over at QuickBooks, where I ran content for sixteen markets with forty-plus contributors across multiple marketing disciplines.
• 4:52
  So since The Content Studio, I know you said brief, but, like, in the last few- It's all good...
• 4:58
  years, The Content Studio is not even four years old yet, and I've already consulted with companies like LinkedIn, Vimeo, GoDaddy, Twitch, so a number of high-profile brands, and yeah, that's only continuing to go down, and I love it.
• 5:12
  That's, that's fantastic. You know, when we... This is the probably twenty, probably near the end of twenty sixteen, you and I are starting to talk about this QuickBooks role. Mm-hmm.
• 5:22
  And one of the things that I took notice of was that you had, that you, you were a content marketer taking on a kind of, sort of a new form, right?
• 5:32
  Like, you were a consultant to this business in terms of helping them build out their operations, getting the right people in place.
• 5:38
  Like that, I actually hadn't come across that before, and I was sort of fascinated by that. Could you talk a little bit about that?
• 5:45
  Just sort of like the, your entrepreneurial streak in the content marketing world, because I, part of the reason I'm asking is, one, I was inspired by it. Like, that's- Mm-hmm...
• 5:53
  Superpath is, in many ways, a reflection of that. But is also, I think a lot of people aspire to use their content marketing skills to con- do more than create content.Yeah, for sure.
• 6:05
  So it was all pretty accidental and a matter of survival in a lot of ways. So you and I met when I was at ConversionXL, and we actually go back to 2012. Oh my God. We met over the growthhacker.com- That's right...
• 6:18
  forums. And- That's right. [chuckles] Yeah. So that's where we got a lot of our connection there. And when I was the editor over at CXL, we managed to have a whole awful lot of guest contributors.
• 6:32
  And what that forced me to do, 'cause I was also doing other freelance work on the side, what that forced me to do was create systems for myself for managing the flow of content, right?
• 6:42
  So I became this very systems-oriented person just sort of by defau- by accident because of that. And then when I moved over to Shopify Plus, it was growing, right? I was employee number 14 in that division.
• 6:55
  It grew to 315 people within the span- Oh, wow... of like a year and a half.
• 6:59
  And with that, as the only official marketing hire, that came as a, you know, I was getting requests like back and forth with customer service and sales and had a lot of different things to manage.
• 7:11
  So that turned into really creating these solid operations and automations, which is a lot of where I focus to keep up with the growth of the company and not become completely overwhelmed.
• 7:23
  The other part of that was I had a very strong vision for what we wanted to do because Shopify Plus at the time did not have any distinguishing features really from the core Shopify program.
• 7:34
  So we had dedicated customer service, lower transaction fees, and the ability to customize your checkout. This was at a time when people weren't taking cloud e-commerce seriously at all. It wasn't a thing.
• 7:46
  You had to have on-premise servers or you were not being serious. And Shopify Plus, one, couldn't, but two, refused to compete on features.
• 7:57
  So the question I had to answer was, well, what are we gonna compete on with the rest of the market? And that turned out to be, if I can't compete on features, I'm gonna compete on knowledge.
• 8:08
  And having a really strong idea and set of principles, right? And you're familiar with my whole content code- Mm-hmm... idea, right?
• 8:16
  Having a very strong idea of what our principles were gonna be, that's what informed who I was going to hire to write for us and create this content because I had no choice but to compete on knowledge and be better than everybody else.
• 8:34
  And this was something that was instilled into me from Pap Laya, who had impossibly high standards, would make me cry with some of the edits that I would get back from him when I was writing.
• 8:45
  And that was just something where I wanted to make sure that I had the absolute very best people to hire and fill out this vision that I had come up with for the different ways that we were going to distinguish ourselves and the rest of the market.
• 8:58
  That's really cool. Have you always gravitated towards larger companies? Maybe Shopify Plus is... I think of it as sort of an enterprise play, but I guess at the time- Mm... Shopify was still relatively small. Um, no.
• 9:12
  I mean, for the first several years of my career it was, you know, survival. It was, you know, taking, you know, doing the odd webinar on social media and writing for different...
• 9:24
  I mean, I, I, I have no different story than a lot of the people who have come up in writing, right? I took whatever I could get and then just started to accidentally come across all of these opportunities.
• 9:35
  And with, you know, Shopify, that was at a really growing point of time for that. CXL, I was a part of that while it was growing.
• 9:44
  I've done very few public speaking engagements, but one of them that I did while I was at Shopify Plus, the group manager for QuickBooks was there and was like, "Hey, I really like your concepts and your ideas.
• 9:56
  Let's work together." And as a result of this sort of whole accidental journey into the enterprise, and really as a matter of survival for all the things that I'm trying to do, that's just kind of where I landed.
• 10:10
  And, you know, I come from an acting background.
• 10:13
  I graduated from an acting conservatory, so a lot of my philosophies and everything around this stuff is grounded in filmmaking, and acting, and character study, and script analysis, and things like that.
• 10:23
  And I found really strong parallels, and fortunately, that has been able to carry me pretty far, so far.
• 10:31
  So when, yeah, when I get to talk about this stuff, I'm talking about it in a way usually that people aren't familiar with or draws these really interesting parallels and, yeah. But it's just, it's been a lot of luck.
• 10:44
  I'll give you an example, okay? So you know Aaron Orendorf, right? Sure. Um- Been on this podcast. I... Yeah. Yeah, he's amazing. Yeah, he's great. So I met him accidentally.
• 10:56
  He was, he was using a tool that was created by one of the growthhacking.com folks actually, where they would send out automated tweets to people when it said, "Hey, I mentioned you in an article," right? It was cool.
• 11:09
  Like, and I read it. He didn't even know who I was. I read it, and I was like, "That's excellent. Write for me," right? That was just the... Write for me was my only response. We hit it off.
• 11:20
  We've known each other for years now. He worked with me at Shopify Plus, right? Most recently, I have a contract with LinkedIn, and they reached out to me after seeing...
• 11:31
  And you see these types of tweets and LinkedIn posts all the time. "Here are people I like to work with."
• 11:36
  He put that out on a lark, and then months go by after that, and they reached out to me and were like, "Hey, would you like to write for us?" And I'm like, "Yes, of course." But also,
• 11:49
  when they described the program that they were trying to do, I was like, "That sounds like a lot of management, and I know what it's like working in the enterprise, and I don't think you're gonna have time to do this and your regular job."
• 12:00
  Yeah, yeah. So, so I said, "Here's all the system stuff that I learned before, and here's what I do with the building the operations and all of this other stuff."
• 12:08
  And it's just kind of-Worked out that way where I get to work...
• 12:13
  I'm very fortunate and very lucky to work with the types of businesses that I work with, and I don't attribute it-- I mean, I've got skill, but I attribute a lot of the success there in the enterprise to luck.
• 12:26
  Luck, yes, but good things happen to good people, right? Like [chuckles] you know, you've established- Well, I appreciate that... a, a great reputation in the content industry. But too, like,
• 12:36
  just thinking of myself personally, like, you've helped me out a few times. Like- Mm-hmm... I am here to help you out anytime, and I bet there's a lot of people out there that feel the same way.
• 12:44
  I did wanna ask you about CXL, the CXL days. So, like, I was working at Vero at the time.
• 12:50
  We were working really hard to get that blog off the ground, and we would always-- Chris, the founder, and I would always read your posts on CXL, and then we'd, like, send the links in HipChat because there was no Slack.
• 13:01
  [both laughing] Sure. We were always like, "Dang. Okay, that's so good." Like, what are we gonna do with this? You know, one, like, is there some kind of growth tactic that we could pull from it and try out?
• 13:10
  And two, what can we learn from the format of this content or how Tommy distributed or things like that?
• 13:15
  I'm curious about what it was like to work with Peep in those days, and you mentioned earlier his extremely high standards. If you- Yeah...
• 13:22
  can talk a little bit about that, I would love to just know more about, you know, that was not an accident, that that blog- No... was really good and performed really well. Yeah. He had impossibly high standards.
• 13:33
  His whole thing at the time is, "I want this blog post to be the absolute best blog post on the internet when it comes to this."
• 13:40
  And at the time, so a lot of this has to do with market timing and everything else too, at the time, a lot of marketing blogs weren't doing statistics. They weren't backing things up with studies.
• 13:52
  I think we've over-corrected in the space now, but it was a lot of, "Hey, here's what I think."
• 13:58
  It was a lot of pontificating about different things, and his whole thing was, if you are going to make a claim, back it up with some research.
• 14:07
  And, you know, if you want to understand certain things, you need to understand the behavioral psychology behind this, not just this is what people do. And a lot of that was like, he wanted very evidence-based things.
• 14:21
  And when I was writing, before I started doing the managing/editing part,
• 14:26
  when I was writing, there would be frequent times where it was, you know, three, four drafts to-- before it became publishable, and I got plenty of stuff rejected too.
• 14:37
  But it was one of those things where it was because of the standards of that blog, it did as much as it did. We developed a really good, trustworthy relationship back and forth once I really started doing it.
• 14:49
  The only reason I became the editor of that blog is at the end of the year, he had said, "You know, congratulations, you were the number one and number six most trafficked article on the site."
• 14:58
  And I was at a point where I was pretty much on the verge of homelessness, like, quite frankly. Like, I was looking at, you know, three articles are gonna pay my oil bill. Two articles are gonna pay my rent.
• 15:10
  Like, it was, it was very much like that. And, and I kid you not, Jimmy, I haven't talked about this with anybody ever, but, like, we were going to the food pantry, right?
• 15:19
  And we had our oil shut off at a couple of points, and, you know, it was, it was bad. We were juggling which things we were gonna pay. And
• 15:28
  it was a matter of being able, for me, going to how can I produce the volume of work that needs to happen, but also get as high of a standard out as possible because I don't have time for revisions. Yeah. Yeah.
• 15:44
  You're balancing... Well, first, that's a remarkable story, but you're kinda balancing, like, short term, I gotta get this in so that I can invoice and get paid for it, and then there's a long-term vision too.
• 15:54
  Like, I have to build a reputation for myself so that this-- I can build a great career. I didn't- No, you're not... Okay. I didn't care, I didn't care about out... It was too short term.
• 16:02
  So Jimmy, like, the situation was like this. My wife was pregnant with our second kid. My firstborn son, he was about two and a half, right? She was pregnant.
• 16:13
  We were in a situation where we had gotten kicked out of one place. We moved into another. Two weeks after we moved into that place, we spent all of our money on the move.
• 16:23
  Two weeks into that, they said, "Sorry, we sold the building. You gotta find some other place to go." So- Oh my God...
• 16:28
  we ended up in another spot that was, like, this pretty run-down place that we were very fortunate to get into, but it was also on the coast, so it was very cold because it was also wintertime.
• 16:40
  And after all of that happened, right, we were already broke. I was freelancing for dollars. I was blogging for, I think, two or three hundred dol- $200 an article, right?
• 16:51
  And the engine in my car had blown out too, and we were miles away from civilization. So there were all of these circumstances where I was like, "I'm not taking help from family. I'm not, I'm not asking for money.
• 17:05
  I'm not begging for money from anybody. I'm not-- I don't trust anybody with my family responsibilities."
• 17:11
  So I had this, like, obligation to get this volume of work out, and I did not care one iota about career at that point. The byproduct of all of that was creating a volume of work and building a reputation for myself.
• 17:29
  A solid foundation. I wouldn't say, like, a reputation because, you know, it takes a while to build a reputation.
• 17:34
  But, like, building a solid foundation of work that then became noticed, but it was pure survival at, at that point because, yeah, I mean, I had a kid on the way and, you know, I couldn't...
• 17:49
  But we were considering, like, you know, tents. Like, it was like that. Like... So. Dude, that's, it's s- I mean, thank you so much for sharing that.
• 17:58
  I mean, that just sounds incredibly stressful, and it sounds like with the hindsight of 15 plus years, that it was a formidable experience for you. Like, to say it turned you- Yeah...
• 18:11
  into a great content marketer is sort of an understatement. [chuckles] It's not really-Fully capturing the whole situation. Part of what I'm hearing is, like, it forced you to hone this skill very, very quickly. Yes.
• 18:21
  But also, I think it's worth pointing out that at that time it wasn't necessarily clear that the B2B content world was going to turn into- Mm-hmm... what it has become. No, not at all.
• 18:31
  Where companies now, they raise tons of money, they're throwing all kinds of money at content programs, everybody's got a blog, everybody's got a budget. Like, that wasn't, it just wasn't really the case back then.
• 18:40
  Right. Yeah.
• 18:41
  In hindsight, I don't wanna say that we were at the front of that at CXL when it came to, like, the really high standards, but, I mean, from my perspective, we were one of the first to, like- Oh, definitely...
• 18:52
  be doing the heavily researched stuff and going real deep into the subject matter. Yeah.
• 18:58
  And yeah, I think as a result of that, like, for my career, if I were to take that 30,000-foot view, like, yeah, I got to ride that wave of, like, you know, people starting to take that more seriously.
• 19:09
  And I think that the work that I was doing personally, but also the work that you were doing over at Vero, and, like, everybody sort of pushing each other at the time, especially in the GrowthHackers forum, pushing each other to be better because we were all looking for up votes really [laughs] that's the thing that started pushing the rest of the industry forward.
• 19:28
  Because, yeah, I mean, that's just where people started to see that sort of success of, like, hey, these businesses are taking off as a result of that, and, and I think that's part of it.
• 19:39
  Shopify was really great at the time, too, because at that time they refused to do any paid advertisement.
• 19:46
  You wouldn't believe this by looking at YouTube now, but, like, they refused to do any level of paid advertisement.
• 19:51
  They didn't wanna be on the radar for the bigger businesses because as soon as you do paid advertising, somebody else can just outspend you. Yeah. And that's where they were at right then.
• 20:00
  So they invested very heavily in content at the time. I didn't have a budget, and I didn't have to ever present with any decks, right?
• 20:08
  I never did a PowerPoint presentation the entire time I was there, and that was a pretty cool experience because they were taking it seriously.
• 20:16
  And then, you know, for me, just from my perspective, it was a very much a domino effect of, like, working with businesses every single time who were starting to take it more and more seriously all throughout.
• 20:26
  Absolutely. You know, in those days, there was really three blogs that I think everybody looked to as the standard. It was CXL, it was Buffer, and it was Help Scout. At least those are the three- Mm-hmm...
• 20:40
  I mean, I'm sure there was other good ones out there, but, like, those, to me- Vero was, Vero Well, you know, Vero- I looked at Vero... the Vero blog in many ways rode the coattails of CXL and Help Scout and Buffer.
• 20:50
  You know, it wasn't necessarily that it was all novel, it was just I think we copied the playbook pretty well, you know? Mm-hmm. But even then, I remember, I remember thinking, "Okay, I'm gonna study posts like yours.
• 21:05
  I'm gonna try to, try to engineer a similar thing for Vero," but it was really hard. [laughs] It was really hard. Yeah.
• 21:11
  You know, and at that time, Chris, the founder of Vero, who's a great guy and we still stay in touch, he didn't push me that much. He kind of trusted me to go do my own thing.
• 21:22
  It wasn't 'til later in my career when I sort of had my own Pap lia, li- lia, right? Is that how you pronounce his last name? Paplia, yep. Which is Walter Chen.
• 21:30
  He was the first person that ever looked at an article I wrote and just ripped it to shreds. Mm-hmm. It made me feel like I had absolutely no idea what I was doing. [laughs] Yeah. You know.
• 21:40
  So anyways, just fascinating, though. I am curious, so then you go from Conversion XL, you go to Shopify Plus from there, right? And that's like- Mm-hmm... in my mind, Shopify Plus is like the big leagues, is different.
• 21:52
  Like, it's a large company, they're launching, I think Shopify Plus at the time was a brand-new offering from Shopify. So it's not like this- Yep... scrappy, bootstrapped blog building this business from scratch.
• 22:03
  This is, like, professional. Oh, no, it was. It was, uh... Shopify did not want Shopify Plus to exist at the time. Oh, interesting. Yeah. So we were actually constantly fighting.
• 22:15
  We were swimming upstream when it came to the company itself and, you know, that don't, I mean, hope- hopefully no- nobody from Shopify is watching this now. Or please, Shopify, don't sue me for anything.
• 22:23
  But it was at the time, like, you know, I was employee 14. All of our expenses were coming off of our personal credit cards- What?... and then being expensed back to the company. Yeah.
• 22:34
  Because what Shopify, from an ideological perspective, and it totally makes sense, was they wanted to stay for SMBs. That was their whole thing. They were like, "We don't wanna do the whole Salesforce thing.
• 22:47
  We don't wanna go upmarket and lose our soul as a business and all of that." And we had a really excellent general manager, Lauren Padelford, which he had a very strong vision and he fought very hard to say, "Look,
• 23:02
  you're not gonna lose your soul if you go upmarket, and what we're gonna look at is Shopify Plus
• 23:06
  is an experimental, you know, area, and we can do the experiments over here on the big side, and that stuff can, you know, trickle down.
• 23:16
  And also because of that, because we charge higher prices, we'll be able to be the growth engine in some ways over here. So you're gonna hedge our bets on us." But there was very few resources at the time.
• 23:30
  Before I got there, they were, you know, there was a time where they were literally working out of a closet. Right? That's crazy. So yeah.
• 23:37
  They were like, you know, laptops around a person's living room, no office, and they earned, as a division, every single thing that happened because Shopify from an ideological standpoint did not wanna go upmarket.
• 23:50
  So we were in a constant proving ground and, yeah, budgets were, uh, the, a lot of the experimental stuff was coming out of our own pockets and then reimbursed. That's, wow, that's fascinating.
• 24:00
  I would be curious just- Mm-hmm... given that you've worked at places where it's super scrappy and you're kind of just trying to create magic- Mm-hmm... all the time, you know, versus like the larger company- Yeah...
• 24:10
  where you have the budget and it's less about the magic and more about the process. Like, could you, like, compare and contrast those just a little bit?
• 24:16
  I'm just curious, like, the skill set that you have to employ to be the content leader in either situation is, is pretty different.Yeah. I mean, in some ways.
• 24:27
  So what's interesting about when I moved over to QuickBooks, right?
• 24:32
  You know, I mean, it-- you w- you were there in the very beginning when I was consulting with them, where it was they saw that they wanted to start moving more like a startup, and startups were trying to move more like enterprises.
• 24:43
  Mm-hmm.
• 24:43
  So this is again where I say I was really fortunate to be at the moment in time, that I was very lucky to be at that moment in time because it was like, well, you're at this really successful company right now, or this company is becoming successful in part, not all, but in part because of the content program that's in place.
• 25:01
  How do we do that, right? And then getting in there, you know, what I got to learn was navigating the bureaucracy of a large organization.
• 25:12
  That's actually when you decided to leave and go to Animals, that was kind of, like, one of your- Yeah... reasons wh- it was like, there's a lot of red tape that's involved.
• 25:21
  But what I learned was basically how to make those connections, have those conversations with people, start to persuade people the different ways that you need to persuade people, play politics.
• 25:33
  It's Game of Thrones- Yeah... really. Having learned that, going into my own consultancy, you know, later on down the road after they had a, a layoff,
• 25:42
  knowing how decisions are made, knowing how budgets are decided, knowing how timelines work and the patience and all of that stuff, right? That was something that was hugely important.
• 25:54
  But a lot of, like, the, the decision-making process, it was a lot of education, really. I remember having a conversation with my manager, Josh Briggs, when we were talking to the rest of the, the group,
• 26:07
  and he was talking about basic SEO, and he had to ask people, like, of the search results, if you look at a Google search result, how many-- what percentage of people do you think click on, you know, organic links versus paid links?
• 26:21
  Now, as a large organization, a lot of their advertising, like, they spend a lot of money on advertising instead of organic because that's what they're used to. It's a dollars in, dollars out model.
• 26:33
  And to my surprise, a lot of people, it was inverse of what we expect, right? A lot of people were going, "Oh, all the clicks go to paid." And it was like, "Mm, actually the study or the research says otherwise." And
• 26:48
  for me, some of the education, the internal education that needed to happen, and I think this is maybe gonna answer the question, was around, hey, think about your own behavior and how you make decisions,
• 27:01
  now apply that to other people. Because we think as businesses before we think about what my own human behavior is like. So now think about put yourself in your own shoes, really. Yeah. And then think about that.
• 27:13
  I love that. That's a lot of how the decision-making process ends up being made. That's the, that's the, that's the common thread, really.
• 27:20
  I think with startups who are a little bit more scrappy and don't have that budget, they start to understand that a little bit more intuitively, I-- because you have, you know, you gotta do what you can with what you've got, and then when you have money to throw stuff at things, it's like maybe you lose sight of your own behavior a little bit.
• 27:38
  But once it's pointed out, it, it's, it's very obvious, and then you can start making those conversations a little bit easier. Yeah. Yeah. You know, QuickBooks did a thing that I thought was so fascinating, which is that
• 27:49
  in the, or at the Mountain View campus, they would bring in QuickBooks customers once a week and make them available to employees- Mm-hmm... who wanted to chat with them. And, and so we could do it on Zoom occasionally.
• 28:00
  You're right. At a company that large, it is very easy to lose sight of. You can just, like, play content marketing all day [chuckles] and kinda like- Mm-hmm...
• 28:09
  forget about why you're doing this, who is it for, and then you meet someone, they run a deli. They use QuickBooks. They've used it for, like, twenty-five years. They migrated from the desktop version to the cloud.
• 28:18
  It was a huge ordeal for them. You know, their needs are so specific. And then to, to take that back to the brief you're working on and think about, "Really, I'm just gonna stuff a bunch of keywords in here?"
• 28:31
  Like, what can I give this person that would be valuable to them? Yeah. Anyways, b- they-- QuickBooks really built that into the culture of the business, which I thought was really cool.
• 28:40
  I think a lot of other companies, even much, much smaller ones, could probably borrow a lesson there.
• 28:45
  The hard part with, the hard part with larger organizations is that, that customer access, a lot of times there is a group that you have to go- Yeah... through to get customer access.
• 28:56
  Whereas when I was at Shopify, we did a case study every week because we had direct access to customers. Oh, wow. Every week? I could... Yeah. Well, let me talk about that- Yeah, yeah... for a second, right?
• 29:04
  And we'll go on a little tangent and then swim and see where we end up.
• 29:08
  But one of the big things that I wanted to do at Shopify when I started looking at the rest of the market, right, going to market analysis for a minute, every single company that was out there was company X works with company Y and sees Z results, right?
• 29:21
  So it becomes, you become blind to that, right? I'm on your website, I'm looking at your testimonials, I'm looking at your case studies.
• 29:26
  Of course, I'm going to see this narrative of company X work- works with company Y and sees Z results.
• 29:33
  That narrative is necessary at a certain point, but when we looked at that, I said, "Well, they're not publishing case studies on a regular basis," right?
• 29:43
  Because they're too big, they have too much weight to carry to do that. So I said, "We're small, so if we publish on a frequent basis, we're gonna have a couple things done.
• 29:54
  One, we're gonna look bigger than we actually are- Yeah... because we're publishing these things more frequently.
• 29:59
  But two, the stories that we were telling were, you know, not company X works with company Y and sees Z results, but it was Jimmy started using this software, and here's how Jimmy's day changed as a result, and here's your personal satisfaction, and this is why you got into the game to do all of these things.
• 30:13
  I think that's kind of an important point to make, and that's the difference between the two, you know, between startup and enterprise world, is like, it can be harder to get things like that done if there's a lot of weight to throw around.You can imagine a CMO at a large company saying to the content folks like, "Hey, we need some more case studies," and the content team saying, "That sounds like a pain in the butt."
• 30:34
  [laughs] Yeah. I can't- "I'm gonna have to fight so hard to do this." I can't do that. Right. And then you've got, like, legal approval. Yeah. And, like, legal is, you know, that's always... God bless you legal people.
• 30:45
  Yeah. [laughs] We have-- That's the first conversation you need to have when you become a content leader in any place, is get good with your legal team. Absolutely.
• 30:54
  You mentioned a little bit ago that at The Content Studio, so that's today that's what you're working on. This is- Yep...
• 30:59
  it's a consultancy, and you work with Fortune 500 companies, but then you also mentioned that, you know, your time at Shopify and QuickBooks was this period of learning where you got to understand, like, how do these companies operate?
• 31:09
  Where do the budgets come from? What do those conversations look like? Yep. How do you navigate this whole sort of political thing to get to the point where, you know, you can consult for them? I'm so curious
• 31:23
  how The Content Studio was born. What does it look like today? How do you operate? Is it just you? Like, what are the kinda nuts and bolts of all this? Yeah. So I was laid off. QuickBooks decided to...
• 31:36
  or Intuit as a whole company laid off seven percent of their entire portfolio across multiple businesses. So QuickBooks, TurboTax, um, Quicken, like, they laid off a whole swath of people so they could make room for AI.
• 31:49
  Mm. Which in retrospect, it was kinda cool that, like, I got replaced by a robot. [laughs] I got to say that. Yeah, yeah. [laughs] So I, I cried for about 30 minutes, right?
• 32:02
  And they were so nice that they had, like, all of these... They provided a lot of services to people, like resume writing services and, like, you know, post-career education and stuff like that.
• 32:12
  But because I had this experience before I went into CXL really, and, you know, kind of pre-CXL, like, in CXL itself, I said, "I'm gonna do a better job of doing this on my own than I am trying to get a job, you know, a regular J-O-B."
• 32:28
  And that's primarily because also, like, on paper, my credentials don't look great, right? Like, I don't have a bachelor's degree.
• 32:37
  I have a certificate in acting because I graduated from conservatory, so a lot of screening software just puts my stuff right out of the, you know, right out, no matter what my experience is.
• 32:48
  And I said, "I'm just gonna have much better luck going out on my own." So I cried for about 30 minutes,
• 32:55
  and then I registered my own business and I said, "If I'm gonna do the whole, you know, working for myself thing again, I'm gonna do it right." Got the paperwork, got all the insurances, all of the things.
• 33:05
  I put my flag up on LinkedIn and I said, "Hey, this is one of the things that, you know, this just happened. I'm taking on consulting clients."
• 33:13
  And William Harris of Element, if you-- He's got a really great podcast, folks. Check it out if you're in the e-commerce space. He reached out and was like, "Hey, it's cool that you're on the market now.
• 33:26
  Let me introduce you to these folks." He was consulting with a business that had gotten sold to GoDaddy, and he said, you know...
• 33:34
  He made some introductions and that process took a while to happen, but I ended up consulting with them. And then
• 33:40
  Neil Patel actually, you know, a lot of people crap on Neil Patel, but he saw that I put that out there and I've got him on my ph- you know, he's in my contacts.
• 33:51
  And, uh, he texted me and was like, "Hey, I've got these people who might be interested in doing, you know, doing some work, and they can't afford my consultancy, but I know you're really good and you really need a win right now."
• 34:02
  So, you know, I, as much as I say, like, you know, GoDaddy was my first big client out of the gate, Neil Patel actually gave me my first real win. That's really cool. Yeah. So I can't say anything bad about Neil.
• 34:15
  But then, yeah, it was like, you know, GoDaddy, uh, happened, and then that contract closed out and I saw another opportunity for Twitch and then, you know, it's just sort of like I'm lucky.
• 34:26
  I'm really lucky in a lot of ways, but I produce really good work, so there's kind of this push and pull of, you know, making sure that the work speaks for itself, but also just having really good timing.
• 34:39
  [laughs] Yeah, yeah. You know, I was fired from a job once. Best thing that ever happened to me. And it's, it's a privilege- Yep... to look back now and say that.
• 34:45
  It certainly didn't feel that way at the time, but- That's terrifying... in the same way, it sort of forced me to think about, all right, what, what am I really gonna do here?
• 34:52
  Another thing I wanted to ask you about- Yeah... is money. Not specifically how much money- Sure... do you make, but I am curious. I left a job once to freelance solely because I thought- Mm-hmm...
• 35:04
  I could make about twice as much money as I was in my day job. I was wrong. [laughs] And I was wrong because I set up a freelance writing business and I realized that the math didn't add up.
• 35:18
  I couldn't pump out as many- Mm-hmm... articles as I needed to pump out to make enough money or to make twice as much money. I could make,
• 35:25
  you know, 25% more money, but I was gonna have to work twice as hard and twice as many hours to get there. So that whole thing, failure. Yeah. Shut it down. Went back to Vero begging- Yeah...
• 35:35
  for my job back with my tail between my legs.
• 35:38
  [laughs] You know, but p- part of the reason I'm asking this is I think a lot of people do, for one reason or another, end up going off on their own with this dream of financial success. And so I'm trying- Yep...
• 35:51
  to figure out the right way to get to this question without saying, "How much money exactly do you make?" But really more like, has it, has it proven to be that? Has it given you more...
• 35:58
  given you kind of the autonomy that you seek in your work, the financial reward that I'm sure you seek from it, things like that? Let me, let me put it this way, Jimmy. I'll tell you after the podcast, just so...
• 36:09
  I'll give you the real numbers after the podcast. I'll put it this way, is I cannot go in-house again. Okay. [laughs] I was hoping you would say that. The, the money that I'm making...
• 36:18
  Yeah, the money that I'm making now would not be feasible for a business to pay me as a full-time employee.
• 36:24
  And I need to caveat this though, that-You know, the whole cliche of blood, sweat, and tears I've lived that, right? To the point like... And this is within the last few years, right?
• 36:37
  So since starting the content studio which has had really great success in the last three and a half years now you know, I've woken up in a cold sweat. I've had two weeks worth of runway at one point in time.
• 36:49
  I literally for a good portion of time was donating plasma to make sure that I could offset some of my costs, right? So you know, blood, sweat- Literally. Yeah...
• 36:58
  like literal blood, literal sweat, and definitely plenty of nights where I was like not sleeping and crying because I'm like, "How is this...
• 37:06
  Like, what the hell am I gonna do because I can't sustain the lifestyle that I've created, and also nobody will hire me because my asking price is too high," right?
• 37:18
  So you get to a certain position where you know, and like I said, I was in a position not that long ago, really it was, you know, nine years ago, 10, 10 years ago now, where it was desperate, right?
• 37:32
  But you gotta fight for it, you know? And I'm not like a rise and grind type of guy. I'm not like hustle, hustle, hustle. Like, I still very much value my family time, and I balance that.
• 37:41
  Family comes first more than anything else, because why the hell am I doing the rest of this? But there's a lot of persistence that needs to happen if you're going to get to that point.
• 37:52
  You gotta be willing to go through it, and the only way out is- Yeah... through. Right? And I mean, you know this.
• 37:57
  You just put this out on, you know, you were very honest about how it was with Superpath but for last year. For sure. It's very tough. Right? Yeah. And yeah.
• 38:06
  And that's the thing is like you, you get to a certain point where you've gotta be willing to fight for it every single step of the way, and it's not for everybody. Yeah. Like, that's, that's the other part.
• 38:15
  It's not for everybody, and that's okay. Yeah. That totally resonates. I sometimes, I sometimes let myself get into this frame of thinking where I imagine I'll do this hard thing now so I can have that easy thing later.
• 38:28
  But that's not- Yeah... really what happens. It's hard now. It'll be hard next time. It'll be hard... You know what I mean? It's hard because work- Yeah... like,
• 38:36
  if you're gonna do it, you should do it well, therefore it's hard. Yeah. You know? And- Yeah.
• 38:41
  I just had Devin Reed on my show not too long ago, and one of the things he was saying that was very true that stuck with me was that he's like, "I choose to do hard things, and I do hard things because they're hard,
• 38:56
  and this is my choice." Mm. I like that. Right? Like- I like that. I, I, I thought that was important. He's like, "This is hard right now. It does suck, but I am choosing this, to do this right now." Yeah, I like that.
• 39:09
  There's an analogy I, that I lean on occasionally. I like to run. I run marathons, I run ultra-marathons.
• 39:14
  It's like a thing in my life that I really enjoy, but one of the kind of analogies that I often pull from is like if you're gonna run two miles, then you're thinking about the end as soon as you've started.
• 39:27
  But if you're gonna run- Yep... a marathon, you settle in. You don't think about the end because it's too far away. And I think about [chuckles] that with work a lot nowadays, and I find it to be a helpful- Mm-hmm...
• 39:36
  a kind of a helpful framework for just, just settling in. Just settling in one day at a time. Mm-hmm. Do good work. Like, the next morning do it again. Don't think so much about- Yep...
• 39:46
  the end because the end is ephemeral. It, it may never come. Yep. E- especially if you don't want it to.
• 39:53
  I do martial arts three times a week now, partly because it's like my midlife crisis thing, but the other part is like, you know, I want to do things that I kinda suck at because it is hard. Yeah. Right?
• 40:05
  And like, you know, am I looking to ever become an MMA fighter? No. No, I'm too old for that now. But like,
• 40:13
  but if I can get through the mental part of getting through a really tough workout, then I'm gonna be able to apply those lessons on the other side.
• 40:23
  And I'm actually like, segue way to family stuff for a second there, I'm actually, my 13-year-old boy, he goes... We do it together. That's awesome.
• 40:29
  And, um, he's trying to become more disciplined as a result of the discipline of going because it's like I don't always wanna go and sweat and, you know, like, I've got the lungs of a 38-year-old right now, but [chuckles] they're not what they used to be.
• 40:43
  But it's being able to get through it and having somebody there, this is the important part too, is our coach is really good at keeping you going even when you feel like you're, you're gassed. Yeah, yeah.
• 40:55
  We all need that support structure. I never would've been able to do this. We talked about, you know, we're kinda touching on money.
• 41:00
  Never would've been able to get there without my wife and her support, and even just the little nudges that she's given along the way, so. For sure. Yeah. I love that, man. That's beautiful.
• 41:10
  Doing it with your kid, I love. So cool. You know, I feel like there's a through line throughout everything we've talked about in your career in this conversation of persistence- Yeah... right? Hard work.
• 41:23
  Do you see it that way?
• 41:24
  And are there other things that you see as a through line, maybe certain skills you've honed or other kind of like narratives that stick out in your mind as you think back on 18 years of content marketing?
• 41:36
  As person who goes through it, I don't think about it like as persistence or hard... I mean, of course that is what it is, but it's just, it's a matter of survival and a- again, it's a choice, right?
• 41:45
  Like, I chose to be in this field. I chose, like when I started my whole career, I was working at a gas station after graduating from a conservatory. I sold cell phones.
• 41:57
  Like, like I got fired over a pair of pants w- after a cell phone job, and that was the first time I decided that I was gonna work for myself.
• 42:04
  And it was just a matter of going, you know, at that time, and I've kind of always held this mentality, is if I'm not making my own money, it's my own damn fault. Yeah. You know? I don't wanna rely on anybody for that.
• 42:16
  And it's, it's going back to what Devin said, where it's like, you know, I made this choice and now I have to stick by that choice even when it gets tough.
• 42:25
  And then the other part of that is one of the things that I learned, and this is gonna sound like it's not related, but one of the things I learned when I was in conservatory was a lot of storytelling techniques, right?And what's interesting about once you start getting into the underlying code of a good story, what makes good stories,
• 42:48
  is for me anyways, it's almost like I know how to write my own story at this point
• 42:55
  because I understand what a protagonist is supposed to go through when you put them through the conflict, you start to understand the different levels of conflict that happen in a story, so you can start to identify those things in real life.
• 43:08
  And when I talk about story too, I'm not talking about it in like the BS, you know, B2B marketing type of way. Like I'm talking about- [laughs] Right...
• 43:15
  like the storytelling techniques that have existed for thousands of years. So it's understanding the code of what that story is and then going, "Okay, I'm going through an arc right now.
• 43:26
  Like, this is part of my plot of where I'm at right now. This is part of my character arc. These are the things I know I need to learn to move on to that next step." Right?
• 43:36
  So as cliche as that sounds, understanding that code also helps me to write my own story and remind myself that even though this is hard right now, this is the test.
• 43:48
  This is the trial, this is how we get through to the next chapter, this is the character arc, and I can't give up. I personally can't give up, and it's okay. Like kind of pull that back.
• 44:00
  If you are a type of person who's like, "I want to make a name for myself. I want to, you know, do all of these big grand things," and then it gets too hard, that is okay.
• 44:11
  Like, it's not for everybody, but for me that's one of the things where I'm like, I try to remember the trials and tribulations of what a protagonist goes through and then say like, "Yeah, I can, I can get through this," because that's what...
• 44:24
  that's just part of the story at this point. You know, we've had a lot of cool conversations on this podcast. This is the realest, and thank you for that. Seriously. This has been awesome. Yeah.
• 44:36
  Can you tease some of the things you're working on right now? Yeah. There are two things that I'm really working on right now.
• 44:43
  In March, I don't know when this is gonna air, but in March, I am launching my very first summit. It is a premium price course, but it goes into the broad overview of everything I know.
• 44:54
  So it's market research and analysis on day one.
• 44:58
  Day two is creative development, which we start to get into things like Aristotle's rhetoric to get into creative development and creating your own content code and doing things that nobody else is doing based on the research you see in day one.
• 45:10
  Day three is about writing, which talks about the character arcs and, you know, different things that need to happen to give really strong context before a person comes in and reads to make that content human, right?
• 45:24
  A lot of folks talk about humanizing content, but don't know how to get there. So that's what the ultimate through line is. And then day four is editing.
• 45:32
  So how do you make sure that all of these ideas are clear, crisp, and then find the gaps in your own stuff, uh, when you're going out there.
• 45:38
  So that's the summit, and then that's leading into a year-long cohort, which each one of these days will be expanded over an entire quarter to, to go get deep into it. That's awesome.
• 45:51
  And I assume all of this is on the Content Studio website or will be by the time we publish this in early March. We've actually launched the program on Maven. Oh, awesome. So yeah. So I'll send you the link to Maven.
• 46:04
  Maven's great. They've been an awesome partner in all of this so far. Okay, cool. We-- There will be a link to Maven in the show notes for folks who wanna check it out.
• 46:12
  I feel like content marketing is going through kind of a generational change right now. Yeah. There's a lot of uncertainty.
• 46:20
  If there were ever a time to reexamine the basics, now would be a good time, and this would be a great opportunity to do that. Yeah.
• 46:29
  The whole thing is based on the idea of understanding the underlying code between all of it and making your content work harder for you, making it travel more and do all the things that we want it to do. So cool.
• 46:44
  Well, like I said, we'll have a link to that. We'll have a link to the Content Studio. Should we put LinkedIn, Twitter, both in the show notes also? Tommy is my name everywhere. Okay. Yeah. Cool. Go connect with Tommy.
• 46:54
  Tommy, seriously, thank you for this very real and inspiring conversation, but for many things over the last decade or so. Really appreciate you. Thanks, Jimmy. Take care, man.
• 47:06
  [outro music]