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The Remote Company: Nicole Lee on multi-brand content strategy · Content, Briefly

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• 2:06
  [gentle music] Hey, and thanks for tuning in to another episode of Content Briefly. Today, we're talking with Nicole Lee.
• 2:14
  She's the senior content manager at a company called The Remote Company, which is actually a kind of an umbrella of a handful of different brands.
• 2:21
  And so what we talk about today is how Nicole approaches creating content strategies and actual content for several different companies, not just products within one company.
• 2:31
  So there's sort of a different level of complexity there. Really interesting, though, how she approaches it and how The Remote Company works. I really enjoyed this conversation, and I think you will, too.
• 2:41
  [gentle music] Hey, everybody. Jimmy from Superpath here today with another episode of Content Briefly.
• 2:47
  Today, we're chatting with Nicole Lee, who I sort of somewhat serendipitously met through a Superpath Pro one-on-one, so plug for Superpath Pro.
• 2:55
  Uh, [laughs] she's the senior content manager at a company called The Remote Company, which has several brands within it. So I'll probably ask you to explain that, Nicole.
• 3:03
  But maybe first, could you just introduce yourself? Tell us a little bit about you and some of the work you've been up to for the past few years. Yeah. I'm Nicole. I'm the senior content manager at The Remote Company.
• 3:12
  The Remote Company has four different SaaS solutions under its umbrella. We actually just sold one of it. It's called MailerLite, which is an email marketing automation platform.
• 3:21
  And then currently, I'm working heavily in Partnero, which is a partnership management platform.
• 3:27
  We also are developing Wicode, which is a visual development platform for designers to collaborate in, as well as MyZantine, which is an employee engagement platform.
• 3:38
  I know there's a lot of platforms going on, but it's basically, you know, we're trying to basically make a lot of in-house solutions so that our company works in-house most of the time. [laughs] Yeah, yeah.
• 3:49
  Everything from HR all the way to our website and marketing as well, so from email marketing to partner marketing. So yeah, it's a pretty interesting place to be.
• 3:59
  Yeah, that's very interesting because, you know, like, I think of Superpath as a vertically integrated business, meaning we have one persona, the content marketer, and we try to provide lots of products and services for that one persona.
• 4:11
  In The Remote Company's case, it's different.
• 4:13
  It's sort of like you look at the suite of tools that you all yourselves use and then try to either fill gaps where something doesn't exist or improve upon products that you're not currently satisfied with.
• 4:22
  Yeah, exactly. Yeah. It's like, hey, this is an idea. There's this platform, but maybe that's not what we want exactly, which is what happened with Partnero.
• 4:30
  I think we were doing a lot of partner marketing, but we found, like, there was no one solution that we could customize to what we wanted, which is where our founder was like, "Let's create a platform."
• 4:41
  [laughs] So I love how innovative it is in this company.
• 4:44
  Basically, if you have an idea and you drive it, you're more than welcome to see it through almost, which is really cool, and you can see that it's the main spirit of the company, really, so. Yeah, so interesting.
• 4:56
  Does The Remote Company have sort of an explicit goal of building these brands and then selling them almost like an incubator, or is that not necessarily the goal of each business started underneath the umbrella?
• 5:06
  Yeah, I don't think that's exactly the goal, but I know that creating something is just something our founders have always been very passionate about, so whether it does get sold or not is, isn't the end goal in particular, but it's to solve a problem that we have in our business and that other businesses might have as well, which is why we're happy to share our solutions with the world.
• 5:27
  I know a lot of... Like, Partnero was something we used in-house for years before we even, like, tried to bring it to market.
• 5:35
  So really, we're solving our own problems, and when we see that there's a need outside of our organization, too, we're like, "Hey, that's an idea." And really, the goal is to solve a problem. [laughs] Yeah, yeah.
• 5:46
  I love it. Could you talk a little bit about The Remote Company itself? There's a lot on there about remote work and sort of all of the benefits of that.
• 5:54
  You know, building software that's primarily for asynchronous work has, I guess, become more common, but from my understanding, The Remote Company's been doing this for a long time.
• 6:04
  But if you could fill in some of the details there, that would be great. Yeah, for sure. The Remote Company has been async for almost, like, 20-ish years, I think. Oh, wow. Yeah, and async's the way we go.
• 6:14
  We don't have that many meetings. I'd say we have, like, a meeting a monthI used to have one-on-one with my manager when I first came in the three months, and after that everything was Async.
• 6:23
  So we're all on Slack a lot, and we're distributed across thirteen different time zones, if I'm not wrong. But yeah, Async's the way to go for us. So we have a lot of things on Slack that promotes employee engagement.
• 6:35
  We use the MyZenTeam bots to ask people questions. We have like question of the day to like, get to know our coworkers, whether we're in the US, Canada, or in Lithuania.
• 6:46
  And we also have moments of the week that we love to share with our coworkers as well. So different channels that are just there for solely engagement as well.
• 6:54
  But yeah, we all love working remotely, [laughs] and I think one of like, the values of the remote company that really resonates with me is like designing your work around life versus designing life around work.
• 7:08
  That's been a really great thing to have in my work life balance currently. Whenever I wanna ski, I just kind of like switch my status [laughs] and then I come back and work through the night if I wanted to.
• 7:20
  And yeah, as like someone who loves backcountry skiing, some days you just have like a good powder day, and you're like, "I don't wanna be stuck inside." Yeah, you can't plan that. Yeah. [laughs] It just happens.
• 7:28
  [laughs] You can't plan that at all. I really love that concept and just that we know that we're a SaaS solution, so we're not there to save someone's life- Sure... at this present moment, right?
• 7:40
  Like it, it's nothing like a heart attack or anything. So I think everyone, even our founders, are on the same page where it's like there's no sense of super urgency, so Async is really helpful in that sense.
• 7:53
  And our founders share their lives with us, too. My boss, Elma, she just had her birthday party, and she was just saying that she was, you know, planning a party to dance on tables and whatnot in New York.
• 8:05
  [laughs] And I love that. Cool. And, uh, yeah. [laughs] So, [laughs] you know, things like that I feel like, uh,
• 8:11
  really puts that human, uh, aspect to our founders and whatnot, and that they're human too, and they, you know, they also take their son to school, blah, blah, blah.
• 8:20
  Um, they'll, you know, when, when we were on Buenos Aires, they played football, so it's really like a flat organization in that sense.
• 8:27
  Um, but yeah, I really love that value, and, uh, I think all our solutions are also to promote a remote work life.
• 8:35
  So several things that are just like, yes, that's a solution for us, but it's also a solution for many remote first companies. Yeah, definitely. You're reminding me of the heyday of remote work.
• 8:45
  [laughs] You know, like I started working remotely like ten years ago, and I often tell people who only started working remotely during COVID that it used to be a lot more fun than this. [laughs] Yeah.
• 8:55
  You know, like COVID forced it on people in a way that was stressful and- Yeah... urgent, compounded with many other factors during that time, of course. But what you're saying totally resonates.
• 9:05
  Like, I sought out remote work in like twenty thirteen or so for all the reasons you just described, like work-life balance, being able to travel to pursue hobbies, all these other things, so. Yeah. I love it.
• 9:16
  And I think it's very cool that you live that, too. Yeah. One just quick follow-up on what you said. You mentioned a, a Slack bot for getting to know people. Yeah. What was the name of that?
• 9:23
  We just have the MyZenTeam Slack bot that is- Oh, MyZe- Oh, it's your... Got it. That's the one you me- Oh. Yeah.
• 9:29
  So again, like that's a solution that we created for our own company, but we're putting it out there to the market now, being like if you're also a remote first company or even if you're an online community like Superpath- Yeah...
• 9:40
  if you need a Slack engagement bot, we have that. Yeah, yeah. We should talk about that after the call 'cause that sounds very interesting for us. Yeah.
• 9:47
  [laughs] I am curious from a content perspective, but also just sort of across the board, does the remote company embrace like a shared services model?
• 9:53
  Meaning like, do you as a senior content manager work on content across all the different brands, or are you focused exclusively on Partnero right now?
• 10:01
  Right now I'm focusing on Partnero, but in the first five months I was context shifting a lot. I was doing a lot of YCode, a lot of MyZenTeam, and some of Partnero.
• 10:11
  And then the shift was during the summer that we were gonna focus more on Partnero 'cause it is our probably most mature product.
• 10:19
  I know YCode's getting there too, so I think in the future I'll be splitting my time between both. But those two are our priorities right now. Got it. Got it.
• 10:27
  Could you give us just quick explainer on Partnero, like w-what is the product and who's it for? Yeah. Partnero is a partnership management platform.
• 10:35
  It's for businesses who want to run partner programs like affiliate programs, referral programs, newsletter referral programs as well, and I know we've got a lot of other features in the works currently, so that's pretty exciting.
• 10:46
  We have over twelve integrations right now, including like PayPal, Mass Payout, Stripe, so the big ones are there already and we're working towards whatever go-to market stack there is now.
• 10:58
  We're trying to tackle [laughs] all of that. Yeah. Yeah. It's for, I don't know, it's for businesses of all kind really.
• 11:03
  If you're looking at partner marketing as an option in your marketing stack, that's who our customers are.
• 11:11
  When you look at newsletters too, really any businesses have that from clothing, e-commerce, you know, like there's so many different industries that use newsletter referrals.
• 11:21
  Like, you know, I just purchased this backcountry BC pass, so it's basically like a resort skiing pass, but it's for backcountry skiing, and they also have a newsletter, so in my mind it's like anyone who has a newsletter, anyone who wants to like refer people in general can use our product.
• 11:37
  But right now we're aiming for SaaS and e-commerce businesses just 'cause they are kind of like the obvious industries to pinpoint, but we're open to really anyone who has started out those programs.
• 11:50
  And, um, I think the one unique selling point that Partnero has is that like you can customize nearly everything from the partner portal.
• 11:58
  It's a white label partner portal, so it doesn't have to say Partnero to your partners.
• 12:03
  It can be your own branding, which is super cool when you can customize, whether it's like a fixed commission or the commission length in general, how often, if it's recurring and stuff like that.And we also have this integration service currently and migration service, so if you're using another platform, we migrate for free.
• 12:19
  Oh, very cool. We also do all the integrations for free currently just 'cause, yeah, that seems to be one of the pain points that people looking at new partnership management platforms are facing.
• 12:30
  So that's what we are currently offering. Very cool. Very cool. A few years ago, I wrote an article for The Animalz blog about content strategy for multi-product companies.
• 12:40
  It, it's potentially worth reading if that's something that you, meaning the listener, kind of work on.
• 12:44
  But there was a, a key distinction in that post that I made, which was there's a big difference between doing content for a multi-product company that sells to a single persona.
• 12:53
  I think the example I used was Zendesk, so they have a suite of products for support people, so there's like live chat, inbox support, calls, a few other things, but all for the same people.
• 13:04
  The other example we used, I think, was Clearbit. So it's basically you're selling the exact same software, but in this case to different personas.
• 13:11
  So like they need a slightly different variation of their content strategy for salespeople versus marketing people, and that adds a pretty significant level of complexity to the way that you think about content.
• 13:22
  And so kinda where I'm heading with this is like how do you think about, you know, you're gonna ramp up a content strategy for Partnero or YCode or another.
• 13:31
  Are you starting basically from scratch, or do you have kind of a playbook that you use over and over again that you sort of tweak here and there? Or you, are you truly like building everything from zero each time?
• 13:41
  I'd say that there is a bit of both. I'm taking my past experience with content to this startup kind of environment. I know the Remote Company has built out MailerLite, and that was a really well-established solution.
• 13:55
  But Partnero, YCode, and my then team now we're back to being a startup again, and I think even my founder said herself like, "Oh, it's, it's taking a few months to actually readjust to being back to a startup [laughs] kind of environment."
• 14:09
  So I think there's a mix of both. I'm coming in with a lot of my knowledge from previous companies, and those companies were not necessarily startups. Like, I've worked for midsize companies.
• 14:19
  I've worked for Audi Winnipeg as well, so that's more like a really corporate kind of marketing background. But I'm bringing all of that, and I'm bringing processes inside the Remote Company.
• 14:29
  So we didn't have any process for content at all when I first came, but now everything's in Notion from our templates to our workflow, seeing like what things are getting done today and what's that looking like next week.
• 14:43
  Publishing our blog posts as well, now we have actually a cadence for Partnero, and we just established that like two months ago. Nice.
• 14:50
  And with the content strategy itself, I think I had to work really hard to get leadership buy-in, [laughs] that there actually needs to be a strategy in the first place.
• 15:00
  But now we're talking about what is our North Star metric. You know, what kind of content do we want, and who are we pursuing?
• 15:06
  So I know that I've said that these solutions can work for really anyone, and we are aiming for remote first companies.
• 15:12
  But Partnero specifically, we're, we're aiming for SaaS and e-commerce companies, so that's kind of our personas right now.
• 15:19
  I know that we could have many personas, but those are the two that we're focusing and honing in on for our content strategy currently. And we're also really listening to our clients currently.
• 15:29
  Uh, I think we're really small, so we're able to actually just speak to our client pretty often and even like cater our solution and put in different features based on their feedback.
• 15:40
  Like recently, I think a client was saying that he wanted to launch a partner program, but he didn't know what the legality of it was.
• 15:47
  So we came out with a blog post and a template just to highlight, you know, what, what a terms of services agreement is when you launch a partner program, what can it look like. We gave an example.
• 15:58
  We also gave a template. By all means also, like we were like, "Run it by a lawyer." [laughs] This is- Yeah, yeah... an example. Disclaimer. [laughs] But this is how we've done it, right?
• 16:07
  And having had that experience and that expertise too, we're just passing that on in a blog post, and now that, now that it's been published, I've seen it been downloaded.
• 16:15
  I've also seen it used by our product manager who does demo calls. She's been sending it out post-call as well.
• 16:22
  So in terms of like content metrics that I'm looking for success, it's like, you know, how many times is it being used in a demo call or after?
• 16:30
  'Cause we don't necessarily have the big data that big companies have currently.
• 16:35
  But I'm looking at all like the small things about how it's being tailored to the customer experience, and I know we talked about sales enablement too.
• 16:43
  Um, so thinking about that as well, like every step of the customer journey right now because we have not a large base, which actually kind of works in your favor sometimes 'cause you can really just customize it to your ideal customer.
• 16:55
  And we want to keep the customers that ask us questions like that, like, "What does, you know, a terms of services agreement look like? What can we do to launch a partner program that is growing?" and whatnot.
• 17:07
  Those are the customers who are most curious, and those are the customers who would tend to like be recurring. So that's the ideal customer for us right now. Yeah. That's so great.
• 17:18
  You mentioned two really, really important things there that are kinda like separate but overlapping. One is company stage. You know, where is the company's life cycle, and where is content needed during that time?
• 17:29
  Which is very different depending on where the company is. And the other would be talking to customers, which is basically the most important thing you can do. And like that example you cited is perfect.
• 17:37
  The overlap, though, is that it's a little easier, I think, to know your customer well when the company's a little earlier on.
• 17:44
  So like being in that kinda like startup mindset seems like what you describe sounds like exactly what I would recommend any early stage company do.
• 17:51
  Like, understand your customer, listen to sales call, figure out what they need, and just give it to them. Yeah. Especially if you're still also finding your product market fit.
• 17:57
  Like I know like with YCode, we've been just kind of playing around with different ways of describing ourselves, you know, and really just honing our positioning at the same time.
• 18:07
  So I think positioning is also a big part of content strategy, and that's something that I think a lot of people overlook.I've talked to, you know, many people at different companies, and I'm like, "So what is your product?
• 18:17
  Can you describe it?" And everyone in the company should be able to describe it in a very similar way.
• 18:23
  You know, there should be like kind of like a boilerplate description of what it is, and I think that, that was how I actually convinced my founders to be like, you know, if leadership can't agree on the same positioning, no one else in the organization's gonna know what this product is.
• 18:40
  Yeah. And the customer won't know. Yeah. I think that's, that's the main issue. [laughs] So leadership just has to be aligned with that.
• 18:47
  And I think startups definitely struggle with that just because we are just like, "Where are we in the market currently, and how can we find a product market fit?"
• 18:55
  And I think when we were talking about that, I've always just said, "So if we didn't exist, if this product didn't exist, if this category didn't exist, would our users be okay?"
• 19:05
  [laughs] That's when you know you have some kind of fit. Absolutely. You know, you're making me think of this question that we used to talk about kind of like pre-ZERP era content marketing.
• 19:17
  [laughs] ZERP meaning zero interest rate policy era where there's just like a lot of money floating around.
• 19:20
  I think it sort of skews some of our thinking around content marketing where to me when I think of a content strategy, it typically boils down to like a fundamental question.
• 19:29
  A ZERP era fundamental question might be like, what do our readers want, or how can we attract more people to our website?
• 19:35
  Whereas like a little before that, and I think we're coming back to it now, a better fundamental question might be, how could content marketing help us unlock more growth?
• 19:44
  When you think about it through that lens, you probably come up with a very different set of tasks for yourself rather than like, you know, dreaming up things that readers might be interested in. Yeah, exactly.
• 19:54
  And at the end of the day, this is all supposed to help you grow the company, right? We've always discussed like how tied marketing is to sales, even if we don't want that to be the case.
• 20:03
  It's like, what is the ARR at the end of the day? Yes, absolutely.
• 20:07
  You mentioned Notion earlier, and that was one of the next things I wanted to ask you about was tools and also just tech stack consolidation because you're managing content programs across multiple different sites.
• 20:17
  So it sounds like you do consolidate all that in Notion, which I imagine there's quite a few efficiencies to be gained there. Do you rely on other tools that help you kinda like manage all this?
• 20:26
  And then in addition to that, freelancers, contractors, agencies, like do you have people helping you with any part of the content workflow, whether it's like keyword research or writing or editing or anything else?
• 20:36
  Yeah. Um, so currently I am mostly managing on Notion, um, in terms of like our marketing tech stack. We're using YCode and [laughs] MailerLite as well, and we're using SEMrush as well.
• 20:48
  But in terms of actually writing and doing the keyword research, I'm doing that all myself currently.
• 20:54
  The writing, sometimes some of the founders will also write, and our remote officer actually writes a lot of the content on the remote company, but I will edit and, like, optimize it for keyword research and SEO and whatnot.
• 21:08
  So a lot of it's on me to like drive it from creation to publication and to distribute as well. But the team does a really good job of actually sharing and liking our content and sharing it on LinkedIn.
• 21:21
  I know our founders have a good following of their own, so I think it gets a lot of eyes there. And I think content marketing has been the easiest for the remote company.
• 21:31
  I think it's just, you know, it's so in trend right now.
• 21:34
  Everyone's loving remote work, and I know one of our articles that did really well is like we posted basically 30 different setups of our work from home office just because that's the amount of people we have in the organization currently, and that article is miraculously driving in like 30% of, um, the s- traffic.
• 21:53
  [laughs] Oh, wow. Wow, that's really interesting. And that's on the remote company's domain. Yeah, that's on the remote company's domain.
• 22:00
  And yeah, and that's what we found, like, you know, a lot of these like listicles, you know, top 50 countries to work remotely in and, and stuff like that.
• 22:07
  That's what people are interested in when they're seeing remote work currently, and I know we're also coming up with different stuff that might be more employee engagement-like, just considering how isolating remote work can be for some people.
• 22:21
  But yeah, a lot of those things are coming, and we've-- we also have... I do regularly meet up with the remote officer to discuss different topics that we could talk about.
• 22:32
  We're constantly monitoring different trends, and we're also kind of seeing what is being published out there through Owler.
• 22:39
  So again, we're back to startup mode, so very scrappy, but Owler by Meltwater has been really helpful in just eyeing what articles are going out about remote work or partnership marketing, web building, and things like that.
• 22:53
  No code as well, just because YCode is a no code platform, so it is a no code visual development platform. So things like that we're keeping an eye on with Owler.
• 23:03
  I know there is a feature in SEMrush too, but sometimes some of the websites don't have that API, so you can't really monitor it as well.
• 23:10
  But Owler does a good job of like, this is your daily update on what's been published on the internet. I found it better than, uh, what was that? It was a Google Alert feature that also does that. Yeah.
• 23:22
  I haven't come across Owler. I'm gonna check that out. That's very interesting. Yeah. You mentioned remote officer. That, that's a role in the company. Mm-hmm. That is a role in the company, yeah.
• 23:30
  [laughs] I- is that someone on like the leadership team? I'd say so, yeah. As I said, it's a very flat organization, but she is like a sole HR person. [laughs] Got it. Okay, that makes sense.
• 23:39
  You mentioned something else that piqued my interest, which is founders writing. Yeah. [laughs] You know? Yeah. Founders writing is like ultimate double-edged sword in my experience. Like- Yeah...
• 23:48
  you want them to write because they have lots of knowledge and strong opinions, and they're very authoritative, and then the flip side is like they don't work in the process that all your other content works in, and sometimes it can turn into like founder pet projects, and it's just sort of distracting.
• 24:03
  Yeah. But I think at the end of the day, you'd rather have it than not. Yeah.
• 24:07
  Do you have some kind of guardrails around that process, or do you just like as the founders have time or something they wanna say, you'll work with them to get it out the door? Yeah.
• 24:14
  I, I definitely say there, there are guardrails. I do have a content brief template set up, so I expect everyone, even our founders, to look at it before writing. Nice. Nice. That's called managing up. I like that. Yeah.
• 24:28
  [laughs] So yeah. It's just so that we don't, yeah, we don't get lost writing something that's completely unpublishable, basically, or, um, you know, at least including some of the keywords in there.
• 24:39
  If there's a base that I could just work on that is workable, that saves me a lot of time too.So I think having that template there, and I think that template's also so helpful because it educates everyone in the company what basic SEO is.
• 24:52
  [laughs] You know, if anyone in the company were to write, at least they have that basic knowledge.
• 24:58
  And I know for YCode, too, we do have SEO features, so it's actually helpful for our YCode developers and anyone who's working in YCode to be like, "Oh, when it comes to SEO, this is what Nicole is looking for," which means this might be what other people who are building websites or anyone who is writing in YCode might be looking for when they're kind of fiddling with SEO and whatnot.
• 25:19
  And I feel like that's a really important part of the development stage of YCode as well. Yeah, absolutely. You mentioned SEO a few times. Do you...
• 25:27
  Is that your primary source of traffic and is your strategy built primarily around that? Currently, yes. And also word of mouth, which is really great 'cause we have Partnero.
• 25:39
  So a lot of, like, referrals and, yeah, we're just-- We also just created this directory, um, called Partnero List. We also have a designer tool list as well for YCode.
• 25:50
  I actually haven't seen a lot of companies do that, which is really unique.
• 25:53
  But yeah, we basically have a directory for Partnero where you can find different affiliate programs or referral programs and newsletter referral programs, and you can either, as a business, list yours there to find affiliate marketers or referral marketers or find a program to be a part of if you're an affiliate marketer or a referral marketer.
• 26:16
  And, you know, if you're launching too, you can see what kind of programs are out there and what you want out of your own program.
• 26:25
  So I think it's really helpful for all stages that our customers might face, but it's also helpful for both sides of the business, whether you're on the marketing side or whether you're on the business side.
• 26:36
  So that's a really interesting... I'd say it's a piece of content [laughs] in a not very traditional content kinda sense. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it delivers on a very specific intent.
• 26:47
  I think that definitely qualifies as content. Yeah. [laughs] Kind of in the same general category as template libraries or even I think sometimes engineering as marketing style initiatives, like free tools. Exactly.
• 26:58
  You know, like Shopify has dozens of these, you know, free tools to help you, like, come up with a business name and generate a logo and, like, some of those types of things.
• 27:05
  They're delivering on search intent, so they're really, I guess, more SEO than they are content. But especially for small companies, SEO and content tend to be more or less the same people. Exactly.
• 27:14
  But, uh, we are trying to, like, go into the e-books kind of realm. I know we're doing, like, a state of partnership report for twenty twenty-four. Oh, very cool. So things like that are in the pipeline.
• 27:25
  Yeah, it just-- it-- we are really small, so we also try to not chew off too much than we can take on. [laughs] Yeah. For sure. For sure. [laughs] We gotta leave time for skiing, too. Yeah.
• 27:35
  [laughs] Which is very important. Um, and I feel that. I feel that. I think about that a lot. Yeah. [laughs] I wanted to ask you about data points.
• 27:42
  Are there a handful of data points you really care about when you think of Partnero?
• 27:47
  And are those the same data points you care about with YCode or any of the other companies, or does each business sort of have its own set of metrics that you care about?
• 27:56
  I say it's pretty similar across content especially. We're looking at how long people are spending on our blog post, how many newsletter sign-ups are we getting through different content assets.
• 28:08
  Our lead magnets too, so whenever you just go to the website, there's a pop-up, see how many people actually put in their email and things like that.
• 28:16
  I'd say what's different is the North Star metric, 'cause I think for Partnero, the aha moment might be after a demo call and we see a customer actually launch their partner program.
• 28:28
  So that would be a North Star metric in that sense. Mm. And then for YCode, we have another North Star metric. It's when...
• 28:36
  So we have this feature where designers can collaborate, and when a designer actually invites another designer to collaborate on their website, that's when we know that the user's actually really into the product.
• 28:48
  That's the aha moment. So I'd say both products have different aha moments, but in terms of, like, content, it's like how many of those demo calls are being converted.
• 28:58
  What it gets converted to is different, but that action for content is similar. Got it. That makes sense. And for some of that reporting, do you use...
• 29:06
  Is, is this, like, Google Sheets, or do you have something fancier set up in Data Studio or some other tool? No. Currently, it's just Google Sheets, keeping it simple.
• 29:15
  We have Google Analytics for both sites, but I know Partnero also has, uh, Fathom. So those are kind of our analytics stack currently. Nice.
• 29:24
  I, I think as we have a better image of what our North Star metric is, we can probably hone in on more analytics, 'cause currently I think, yeah, that's kind of like we only placed that as our North Star metric in, like, the last few months.
• 29:40
  [laughs] Got it. You know? Got it. And we're kind of, like, seeing whether that's working, and, like, we can always change it if we see that it's not working. It's more of let's see how this goes first- Yeah...
• 29:50
  'cause th- we don't-- we have nothing. [laughs] That makes sense. You know, I'm glad you mentioned Fathom. We use Fathom at Superpath, and I really like it.
• 29:56
  And I adopted it earlier this year, kind of as Google Analytics was moving to GA4. There's nothing wrong with GA4. Like, I feel like... Sorry, this is tangent. Going off track here. No.
• 30:05
  [laughs] But, you know, I feel like a lot of content marketers complain about GA4, but I also feel that the people who understand it best like it the best, and the people who don't understand it don't like it.
• 30:15
  I kind of fell into this other category, which is it's just me, feels sort of complicated, and I don't really need all this, so I just set up Fathom, which is for sure simpler than Google Analytics. Like, you...
• 30:26
  It is not as sophisticated, but also, like, I only wanna track a couple things, so- Yeah... Fathom's a wonderful product for that. And also, you don't need a GDPR banner.
• 30:35
  Yeah, that's what we really liked about it too, because, like, yeah, it's all GDPR compliant and whatnot, which is, like, again, in, like, the partnership marketing world too, I think that's been a big talk about-GDPR compliant cookies in general.
• 30:48
  Like, how are we going to track all these different links and all of that? Um, so that was something that was important to Partenero, and I think that's why we've picked Fathom. Yeah. Yeah. Totally.
• 30:57
  We need a similar thing for other types of tracking. Like, Superpath still has a GDPR banner because we have a LinkedIn pixel.
• 31:04
  I hope over time there's, like, a way we can figure that out so that no one has to click that they accept our cookies or whatever. Yeah. I'm so sick of... [laughs] Cool.
• 31:13
  I'm curious, as we kind of wind down here, like, are there things on your radar over the next, I don't know, six to twelve months that you're excited about from a content perspective that you're able to tease?
• 31:22
  Yeah, definitely. Now that we have a regular cadence, just being able to research different topics and get to know the product a bit more.
• 31:29
  I think there's a bit of, like, a product marketing aspect to the content marketing at The Remote Company just because it is just me doing it currently. Mm-hmm.
• 31:38
  So I'm really excited to come up with more sales enablement content to help those demo calls go smoother.
• 31:45
  I was talking about, you know, like, a sales one-pager with my product manager who does the demo calls and also just coming up with maybe a script.
• 31:53
  You know, it doesn't have to be the script exactly, but just something to align all of the demo calls, and then we can actually do some evaluation on what's working and what's not.
• 32:05
  In terms of the email marketing, we're doing a lot more of the AB testing, and we're coming up with a lot more different emails for the different segments, so things like that are really exciting.
• 32:16
  It's more internal, I guess. [laughs] Not really outside facing. But yeah, a lot of state of reports as well, which would be really exciting and just seeing how the directories are going.
• 32:27
  I think from the directory, too, we're able to...
• 32:29
  So touching a bit on content repurposing, but there's a lot of things that we can get out of the directory, like, you know, top 10 website builders with affiliate programs, top 10 e-commerce businesses with affiliate programs and things like that.
• 32:43
  So really excited to work on that. And I think with remote work, just because we're all so passionate about it, [laughs] there's gonna be a lot of different topics and trends that we're keeping an eye on there.
• 32:53
  I know a few of us will be speaking in different remote work conferences, so that would be super, super exciting. Oh, awesome. And yeah, just continue talking to our customers and getting to know them.
• 33:04
  I think what was interesting this year was just our leadership team just realized what we find interesting about the product is not what the customers find interesting [laughs] about the product.
• 33:13
  [laughs] What a great insight, though. I mean, that's- [laughs]... such an important realization. Right. You know, I wonder how many companies haven't had that moment yet. That's, that's great. Exactly.
• 33:23
  So having that moment, and then that's why we're doing a lot of our... We're redoing a lot of our email flows. Everything from, like, our welcome emails to our whenever a user doesn't use Partenero enough or whatnot.
• 33:36
  Yeah. Yeah. Very cool. You know, I really like for each episode that we do to have its own kind of distinct flavor. You've definitely helped us achieve that here.
• 33:46
  The multi-product and really, like, multi-brand- Mm-hmm... content program is a level of complexity that we haven't really explored much on this podcast, so thank you. It's really cool.
• 33:56
  It's really cool to learn about what you're doing and how The Remote Company works.
• 34:00
  I always encourage people, like, go to the site, go to The Remote Company, go to Partenero, and we'll link to this stuff in the show notes. But go see what it looks like in action. Like, go look at the directory.
• 34:08
  Go look at all the stuff. And hearing you talk about it and then going and seeing it in real life I think provides, like, a, a level of inspiration that you don't get just from listening, so go check it out.
• 34:18
  And then for you, Nicole, can we send folks to your LinkedIn, Twitter, personal website, or anywhere else to stay in touch? Yeah, for sure. I'm on LinkedIn most of the time. And yeah, I do have a personal website.
• 34:29
  I do freelance sometimes as well. It's so funny 'cause I, I'm already dealing with different products. What's one more? What's one more? [laughs] I just love content shifting.
• 34:37
  And I think in freelancing too, it's just getting to know other freelancers that network, of content marketers, like, you know, with Superpath as well.
• 34:45
  But when you're freelancing and you're meeting other content writers and whatnot, you're like, "Oh my God. [laughs] These are my people." Um, so that's what I really like out of it too. Cool.
• 34:54
  We will leave links to your stuff and to The Remote Company stuff in the show notes. Nicole, thank you so much. Like, we had the chance to chat a while back.
• 35:02
  It was great to know you, and then after that conversation I was like, "We gotta have you on the podcast and talk more about this." So thank you for taking the time.
• 35:07
  Seriously, we really appreciate it, and hope we could maybe do it again sometime. Yes. Perfect. Take care. Thank you, Jerry. You too. [outro music]