Latest / Content, Briefly / Arrows: Stuart Balcombe on platform-native content and knowing your reader

Transcript

Arrows: Stuart Balcombe on platform-native content and knowing your reader · Content, Briefly

• 0:00
  [gentle music] I would say that we have a customer education first approach, which is sort of the theme for the content that we create, where- whichever channel it's for.
• 0:08
  Ultimately, our goal is to move the things that customers need to know to be successful with the product, that they need to know whether they're using Arrows or not to be successful with improving their onboarding process.
• 0:18
  How do we take that stuff and move it as early as possible in the journey? [upbeat music] Hey, everybody, and welcome to another episode of Content Briefly. I'm really excited for this episode.
• 0:29
  We're chatting with Stuart Balcom. He's the head of growth at a company called Arrows. You'll learn all about Arrows in the podcast.
• 0:35
  The important thing to know for this quick teaser is that Stuart's approach to content is slow, thoughtful, and extremely customer-centric. Honestly, I love this conversation.
• 0:46
  It kind of reminded me of some core principles of content marketing that I think are easy to overlook in of a day and age where we're talking about AI and scale and output and efficiency.
• 0:55
  Stuart really brought some of those foundational things that we should all be thinking about. Knowing the customer, talking to them often, giving them stuff they really care about, measuring the right things, et cetera.
• 1:04
  So I really enjoyed this conversation. I hope you do as well. And if you do, we would really appreciate a rating or review in whichever podcast app that you are using to listen to this podcast.
• 1:13
  Hope you enjoyed everybody, and take care. [upbeat music] Hey, everybody. Jimmy from Superpath here for another episode of Content Briefly. Really excited to have my friend Stuart Balcom today, head of growth at Arrows.
• 1:26
  Stuart, how are you doing? I'm doing well. Thanks so much for having me on. Absolutely. Yeah, looking forward to it. I have a ton of questions for you.
• 1:32
  Maybe first, though, could you introduce yourself, tell us a little bit about your background, some of the things you've done that kind of led up to what you're doing today, which is running growth at Arrows? Sure.
• 1:40
  Probably differently than a lot of folks listening to this, I don't come from a content background. Don't even really come from a marketing background directly. I started out... I guess that's not entirely true.
• 1:50
  I started out my career, so to speak, at a growth studio or at a, you know, a venture studio that had a growth arm back in the days when AV testing, paid marketing was really exciting, and that was like, the thing that people were trying to figure out.
• 2:02
  Should the button be red or should it be green?
• 2:04
  Got a little disenchanted with that [chuckles] and shifted to product for a while, which is sort of where I spent a bunch of time, pretty exclusively at early stage startups.
• 2:13
  I was fortunate enough to be at a startup that was sold, and I sort of went off and did my own thing.
• 2:18
  Funnily enough, in the, in the customer research space, which led to starting a, a more content-focused startup, and it's sort of really been the, the theme of everything that I've done, whether it's been in a product, a growth, or a, a marketing role, is that understanding the customer is sort of at the center.
• 2:31
  So I was off doing my own thing, running a content repurposing service, and then joined Arrows in November twenty twenty-one as the first marketing hire. Employee seven, I believe, at Arrows.
• 2:44
  But yeah, so sort of a slightly non-traditional entry point, and now spend my time at Arrows doing all sorts of different things in a, in a head of growth role.
• 2:52
  Content is obviously a huge part of that, as I'm sure we'll get into, but it's been an interesting journey to this point. Yeah, very cool. And how about Arrows?
• 2:58
  Could you talk about Arrows the company and Arrows the product? Yeah, for sure. So Arrows, uh, was founded in twenty twenty, so it's been a couple of years.
• 3:07
  Started out as a bootstrapped project by two founders, James Errick and Ben Nick Fretz. They ran a, a product studio together, and Arrows or the...
• 3:16
  what became the current iteration of, of Arrows was sort of one of the product ideas that they explored.
• 3:21
  Started out bootstrapped and Arrows is a collaborative customer onboarding platform now built specifically for HubSpot, but didn't start out that way, but certainly started as an onboarding tool.
• 3:31
  And they realized, I think, relatively quickly into that journey that the customer success or customer onboarding space was very hot. Lots of big players- Mm. Very competitive.
• 3:40
  So in April twenty twenty-one, they raised a C round from Google fund Gradient Ventures, among other folks, and sort of went the more, more venture route.
• 3:50
  I would say we still have a lot of bootstrap tendencies in terms of sort of team size and the way that we approach things. But have raised almost five and a half million dollars in venture.
• 3:59
  And Arrows the product, as I mentioned, is a collaborative customer onboarding tool now specifically for HubSpot. So what that looks like, it's sort of a two-sided product.
• 4:07
  One is a collaborative customer onboarding or collaborative action plan that you would send to a customer.
• 4:13
  So, you know, maybe it's when a new customer is closed and you need them to complete a set of steps to be live or successful with the product.
• 4:21
  And so it sort of gives them insight into what's happening next, what they need to do, what are the things that have to happen for them to be successful.
• 4:28
  And then on the other side, it gives the team who's managing that process data and insight into which customers need help, where they're stuck, ultimately with the goal of helping make more successful, happy customers.
• 4:40
  That's cool. I like that. So if I... just to make sure I understand it correctly, the customer gets their own view so they can see what's gonna happen next.
• 4:47
  But is it primarily for, like, when I think of HubSpot CRM integrations, I'm thinking like large customers or like, are these enterprise type deals that need a lot of handholding or like professional services, you know, bringing on a high ACV client, that type of thing?
• 5:01
  Or is it als- Could, could it be for probably not self-serve, but like a step above that as well? Yeah, that's a really good question.
• 5:07
  I would say that Arrows is, is somewhere in the middle in that it looks a lot like a project management tool, but is sort of not a project management tool in the way that like Asana or Monday is where you have- Right...
• 5:16
  every single task is going to be hands-on. It might be different for every customer. It's going to be- Mm. Require sort of a lot of back and forth on the individual task every time.
• 5:26
  And obviously, project management tools are primarily built for internal teams. But it's also, to your point, not a in-app onboarding tool and not an entirely self-serve thing.
• 5:34
  So the, the place where we find that Arrows fits is when you have a human in the loop on the, the internal side, you have an assigned CSM, you have an onboarding or implementation specialist, but their goal is really trying to become more efficient and help s- and scale that process or scale the number of customers that they canServe with the same team size.
• 5:53
  So helping the customer self-serve the bits that they are able to self-serve.
• 5:58
  They can submit information through forms, they can book meetings, they can upload files, all that sort of stuff inside of the plan itself, but help make their time more high leverage by unblocking the customer and them only needing to be involved when they actually need to be.
• 6:11
  Got it. Okay, cool. That's very helpful. That kinda sets the stage for all the growth-related stuff that I wanna ask you about. You did mention team size. How many people are at Arrows? We are eight today. Okay.
• 6:21
  Three on the, on the product team, so CPO, CTO and a product engineer. And we, we split sort of product team, customer team, and then we are head of CS, head of biz ops, myself, head of growth, an AE and the CEO.
• 6:35
  CEO sort of-- Daniel floats product and customer team, but that's sort of the breakdown of the team to get to eight. Got it. Okay.
• 6:41
  The reason I was curious about that is because you run growth, but at a small company, everybody cares about growth. Yes. I think that everybody should always care about growth. That's true.
• 6:49
  [laughs] I get that, you know, big companies you have, or bigger companies, you have limitations on specialized roles and that kind of thing, but I do think that growth is a absolutely a full team sport.
• 6:59
  It's pretty hard to drive growth if you try to do it in silos. Yeah, definitely.
• 7:04
  I'm assuming there's probably some benefits to the team being on the small side, just in the sense that, like, the work that you do is probably more collaborative.
• 7:12
  It's easy if you create sales enablement, you can get it in the AE's hands in two seconds, you know, versus having a series of meetings. It's fast, for sure. That's cool. Could you break down growth at Arrows?
• 7:22
  Like, kind of what are the components of it? Obviously, there's a lot of content.
• 7:25
  You know, like when I-- like if I'm, I'm on the website right now and I see under the Learn section, I see templates, guides, more resources, a newsletter, podcast, and I also see some product-related stuff.
• 7:36
  That right there is a lot, and that, it to me kind of speaks to like a content-first approach.
• 7:42
  But I'd be curious if, if that's how you view it, and then if there's other, you know, other kind of heavy investments that you're making in marketing beyond just content. Yeah.
• 7:50
  I would say that we definitely have a content-first approach. I would say that mostly because I think it's...
• 7:56
  there's lots of different kinds of content, there's diff- lots of sort of different ways that people think about content.
• 8:00
  I would say that we have a customer education-first approach, which is sort of the, maybe sort of the theme for the content that we create, whereat- whichever channel it's for.
• 8:09
  Ultimately, our goal is to move the things that customers need to know to be successful with the product, that they need to know whether they're using Arrows or not to be successful with the job of making their customers successful at improving their onboarding process.
• 8:22
  How do we take that stuff and move it as early as possible in the journey? When you think about it through that lens, yes, we're creating content for top of funnel.
• 8:30
  Like, how do we attract people with-- who are searching for this problem online to find Arrows and, you know, through the content discover that there's a product which can potentially solve that.
• 8:38
  But at the same time, like we have customers who are trying to solve for a specific thing. How can we leverage that same content to help educate them on just solving that problem more effectively? Mm.
• 8:49
  That's sort of really the lens that we've sort of approached everything through.
• 8:52
  And I, I think when you start from that perspective, instead of saying, "Oh, we're gonna go run ads," for example, which, you know, is a, a common channel that maybe people are, you know, running paid current growth.
• 9:02
  Like, we have done that. We've experimented there. And like our approach there was still, we are going to do this to educate people.
• 9:09
  It's just a distribution channel for education rather than like, "Oh, we are going to try to look at, we spent this and this much revenue was closed from that."
• 9:16
  It's just sort of how do we get more visibility or more people who need this education to see it, and it's sort of all the same funnel. Got it. Okay. That makes sense.
• 9:25
  Is the education piece born from a product need or a style of marketing? Are folks familiar with this type of product, meaning like a high-end HubSpot integration that helps them achieve this specific task?
• 9:38
  Like is there education needed around that, or is it more just that kind of the brand prefers an educational style or maybe some mix of both? I would definitely say both.
• 9:47
  And I think one thing that's important for context here for folks is that, you know, I mentioned pretty specifically as I'm describing the Arrows product, this is a collaborative customer onboarding tool built for HubSpot, right?
• 9:57
  That wasn't always the case. We actually made that switch- Oh. -in April twenty twenty-two.
• 10:02
  When I joined Arrows, it was still a collaborative customer onboarding tool, but we had integrations with HubSpot, we had integrations with Salesforce, but it was a standalone tool that, you know, the teams who were onboarding customers would go to the tool and, like, that's where they would do their work.
• 10:15
  That's where they would see all the data, all that kind of stuff. And what we found was that, which we can get into how this has shifted over time too, but what we found was that teams didn't want another inbox.
• 10:24
  They didn't want another source of truth for customer data. They didn't want to manage, "Oh, we have a team siloed over here, and this team's asking questions they need to answer."
• 10:31
  Like, so we went really deep on being CRM-centric and started with HubSpot obviously, and that's sort of where we are today.
• 10:40
  But what happened at that point was from an education perspective, we didn't just have, we have to educate people on, you know, customer onboarding, collaborative, even having a collaborative action plan during onboarding.
• 10:51
  But also, how do you do this inside of HubSpot? How do you support this use case inside of HubSpot? Which is both a blessing and a curse in a lot of ways.
• 10:59
  And really that was a lot of what sort of sparked how we saw a really big uptake in content growth last year was figuring out that people were trying to find content for how to solve for X post-sale customer success use case in HubSpot, and it just didn't exist.
• 11:16
  Oh, wow. That's interesting.
• 11:17
  So from an education perspective, we were able to piggyback a lot of that search or that intent and then sort of bridge the gap to, oh, like if you're do- trying to do this thing in HubSpot, here's a tool which is built specifically for HubSpot.
• 11:29
  It's sort of night and day, Arrows versus other tools that maybe plug into HubSpot because of the approach that we took to being CRM-centric and building such a... really building a HubSpot-first product.
• 11:40
  Yeah, that's fascinating. Is that helpful? Like is it easier or harder that way?
• 11:44
  If you're gonna create SEO content, it's branded SEO maybe for someone else's brand, does HubSpot's partner team have a, have a way to enable that for you?
• 11:53
  Like can some of that stuff live on their domain, which I'm sure it's much easier to get stuff ranking for. Yeah. There's definitely challenges there.
• 11:59
  A, because it's HubSpot, and trying to rank for anything against HubSpot is pretty tricky.
• 12:05
  The thing that we have found really helpful there is that one of the first things that we did there was we said, and this is a-It's funny, I, like, just used this format of personal LinkedIn last week, but we essentially asked the community or asked LinkedIn, would anybody want a walkthrough for setting up HubSpot for this use case?
• 12:23
  And what happened was that we got a bunch of questions back for, "Oh, I want... Yes, I want to see that, but I want to see this very specific thing that I'm trying to implement."
• 12:32
  And what we did was we took that, and we combined all the answers there into this big resource, but we also went and found all the questions or created new questions in the HubSpot community, which does rank, right, because it's community.hubspot.com.
• 12:46
  Mm.
• 12:46
  And the thing that I think was smart in what we did there was we included YouTube videos with every answer, which meant that pretty quickly, even if we weren't ranking, the Arrows domain wasn't ranking, we had the YouTube video in the accepted answer in the second-ranked community post, and we got the featured snippet for the video.
• 13:07
  Oh, nice. That's cool. So we ranked much quicker with video for HubSpot terms than the domain ever did. That's so interesting.
• 13:14
  This is why I love this podcast, just because we get to get into some of these, like, nitty-gritty details. Like, there's a partner play here. Yeah.
• 13:20
  Clearly, you're kind of, like, hacking the system a little bit to make it work for you. It's, it's just so much more interesting than, like, a, okay, do this much SEO content.
• 13:28
  Do, like, one thought leadership post a month. You know, like, it's not, like, a super clear playbook. Yeah. I'm probably gonna get crucified for saying this, but, like- [laughs]... I'm...
• 13:37
  It'll be two years at Arrows in November. We have never had a content calendar. Whoa. Okay, let's talk about that. [laughs] Well, you send the, you send the Happy Customers newsletter every week, right? Yeah.
• 13:47
  In some ways, does that drive the rhythm of the other content stuff that you do? At the start, that certainly did. Happy Customers newsletter was the first sort of thing that I started shipping consistently.
• 13:58
  And it started out as sort of I was writing it every week. It was novel, sort of... It was actually, like, new content every week. I, I was writing content specifically for the Happy Customers newsletter.
• 14:08
  But what we found as we made the shift to HubSpot, uh, I mean, I got super active on LinkedIn, and we built a pretty good size following and certainly a very, certainly a very engaged following on LinkedIn around this, sold for this job in HubSpot sort of format.
• 14:24
  Mm-hmm. And the thing that we started doing when it came to the newsletter was we started to flip it a little bit, and actually, we would take...
• 14:31
  We sort of used LinkedIn to test everything, and we would then repurpose that into the newsletter. Interesting. So we would take, this was the thing that resonated most on LinkedIn.
• 14:41
  Sometimes we would flesh it out, sometimes we wouldn't. We would just copy-paste it from LinkedIn into the newsletter.
• 14:46
  We sort of started to treat the newsletter more as, like, while we've built this reasonable sized list, it's a good distribution channel for people who are not active on LinkedIn.
• 14:55
  It's easy if you're posting on social to assume that everybody's seeing everything, right? And they're absolutely not. And at the same time, we were getting like, "Oh, like, have you posted about this?
• 15:04
  I couldn't find it," right? It's much easier to find stuff if you know there's a newsletter with this subject line.
• 15:10
  You know, it's much easier to go find stuff in your inbox than it is to, like, figure out what to search for on LinkedIn and find it. Yeah. Totally.
• 15:15
  So that's sort of how the Happy Customers newsletter shifted, was it we sort of went from, like, email first to LinkedIn first and then repurposed everything from LinkedIn to everywhere else.
• 15:26
  I was publishing at least five times a week on LinkedIn on my personal account. Early on, it was a lot of video, and the posts were not a couple online posts.
• 15:35
  It w- Like, I was writing, you know, six, 700-word LinkedIn posts. Oh, wow. Every day? Probably at least three times a week it was that sort of length, and it was really sort of tactical breakdown of, like, how to do X.
• 15:46
  And out of that came Steal This Workflow, which is sort of a format that we... Probably September last year was, like, the very first Steal This Workflow post, and that just sort of blew up as a concept.
• 15:57
  And now people, people in the community, people at HubSpot, they know Steal This Workflow, which to circle back to the other question about, like, is it harder when you're so tightly aligned or tightly coupled with a bigger brand?
• 16:08
  People almost know Steal This Workflow more than they know Arrows the product. That's beautiful, actually. [laughs] That's really cool. It certainly has some sort of product marketing challenges. Yeah, yeah.
• 16:18
  We get a lot of, "Oh, like, you are the HubSpot expert on this topic." Ah. "Can you do consulting to implement this for me?" [laughs] Right. And we're more of a software company, and, like, that's not part of the model.
• 16:29
  But yeah, it, it certainly has taken on a, sort of a life of its own that both Steal This and the just sort of tactical use case content for HubSpot, which has been really cool.
• 16:39
  And we've sort of started to, you know, figure out other ways to spin that, and we've found that the use case driven approach has been really powerful for us.
• 16:48
  And I think largely because we didn't take the, we're going to publish X posts a week, and we're going to fill this content calendar and rank for these keyword.
• 16:56
  Like, more recently we started looking at some SEO type stuff, but I never wrote a post for LinkedIn or for the newsletter and was like, "I wonder what keywords this is gonna rank for."
• 17:05
  There's actually two things that I want to follow up on that you were just talking through. One is the no content calendar. I find that to be really interesting.
• 17:10
  It's sort of freeing in a way because I've certainly come across teams who commit to whatever content strategy they've come up with, and they fill up the content calendar, and then they hold themselves to it, which if it's working is great, but it's possible that you get three months into it and you're just creating content without maybe stepping back to check yourself, like, is this the right thing?
• 17:31
  You know what I mean? Should we be running tests? Should we... What does the feedback say? Is there even any feedback? And sometimes I think that ends up being a time-consuming and expensive way to run a content program.
• 17:42
  And then the other thing is the newsletter. I find the newsletter interesting for a few reasons. One is that it's branded. It's not like you write content for a blog, and then the newsletter is a distribution method.
• 17:53
  The Happy Customers newsletter is branded in and of itself, so it sets a very different expectation that if you subscribe, you will get something in it other than just a blog post and a button to click to it. Right.
• 18:04
  Could you talk about that a little bit? I mean, I think that my guess is most companies don't do that because they think about it sort of the way I described. Like, we create content, we distribute with email.
• 18:12
  But also, too-You know, once you commit yourself to a branded newsletter, you have to run it. Right. And you have to meet the expectations that you set for people, which maybe that's an intimidating prospect. Yeah.
• 18:22
  I, I think that to sort of start with the newsletter question, the way that I approached it was when you look around in the market and you look at, like, what other companies are sending, to your point, it's pretty uninspiring, and it's clearly written by a marketer, right?
• 18:35
  [laughs] Yeah, yeah. Or written for marketing, right? It's like, "Well, we sent this thing, and it has a button. Our goal really... Like, we wanna see our traffic number go up," right?
• 18:42
  It's like [laughs] how many sessions are we driving from this newsletter? Whereas- Yeah... the way that we approached the newsletter was how do I get people to actually consume this and reply?
• 18:52
  I think it's from Jay Acunzo.
• 18:54
  I talked to him, uh, probably three years ago at this point, and he introduced me to this concept of unsolicited response rate, which is essentially like you can ask customers what they think or ask people what they think, but how many people do that without you asking?
• 19:08
  Have you created something that is good enough that people are like, "Oh, like, this helped me so much that I have to say thanks." So like- Wow. Yeah... you know, "Oh, maybe this didn't actually solve all of my problem.
• 19:17
  Can you help me solve all of my problem?" Right? And that-that's sort of the approach that we tried to take with, with all the content is it's not just us, you know, spouting content.
• 19:25
  It's we are trying to help you solve this problem.
• 19:28
  If it does, then hopefully that was a meaningful problem, and you're excited about it, and you'll, like, let us know that you solved the problem, or if it doesn't, we wanna know.
• 19:35
  And I think that's another thing that is maybe a theme was... certainly a personal approach that I have with content is the content isn't, you know, ship and forget. It's, it's... Content is a product.
• 19:45
  This is the first version of the content. If it doesn't solve for the job, then we need to make it better or delete it, right? It's, like, the same thing with good product. It's not...
• 19:53
  It's, I mean, it's how you get terribly bloated enterprise software, right? Nobody ever deletes anything. But I believe the same thing is true of content.
• 20:00
  Like, you should ship the first thing quickly and in a way that lets you build a feedback loop to know if it's good or not, and then when you get that feedback, you either go improve it or you change it or you just remove it.
• 20:10
  It's worse for the brand to have something that isn't on the same level or isn't as helpful as what people actually need to solve the job that they're trying to do because they then don't trust that the rest of the content or the next thing that you send them will be helpful.
• 20:23
  That was sort of the overarching goal or the sort of thought process behind the newsletter was, I mean, it was a long time before you had any links.
• 20:31
  I mean, sure, we would probably link to the Hours homepage, but, like, it was a long time before there was a link in an email where the expectation was like, "You need to click this to get the whole picture."
• 20:40
  It was always, "Oh, like, if you liked this, then, like, maybe you go check out the product," or, "If you liked this, then we wrote this other thing that is too long to put in an email." And I think that that was...
• 20:50
  It's a big help when you can meet people in the format, like, sort of in the channel, in the format that they expect in the channel. A lot of emails delivered on mobile. It's relatively easy to scroll through an email.
• 21:00
  It's much easier to do that than click a link, and it maybe... Does it open in the inbox browser? Does it open in the regular browser?
• 21:07
  Like, the experience of consuming the content is just worse as soon as you make people jump around, and when the goal was can we get it consumed enough to get a reply, [laughs] that became pretty important.
• 21:17
  That's really fascinating, actually.
• 21:18
  And so it kinda sounds like you're doing the native content thing on LinkedIn as well, where rather than using it as a, quote-unquote, distribution tool, like you're just delivering the... in the platform.
• 21:27
  I'm sure LinkedIn likes that. LinkedIn definitely likes that. Yeah, right. It makes it easier to get in front of more people.
• 21:31
  I mean, the whole, like, link in comments thing on LinkedIn has gotten sort of annoying, but I kinda get why LinkedIn doesn't want people just promoting crap all the time.
• 21:42
  But readers appreciate it too, I think, particularly in an inbox.
• 21:44
  Like, that's a, an environment where you could get a lot of value from an email if you just spend 30 seconds reading it verse, like, as soon as you see, like, the blurb with a link to go somewhere else, you're like, "Ugh, I don't have time for that."
• 21:56
  Right. Yeah, and, and we certainly played with the format of that email to try to make it more readable in, especially in a mobile inbox, to set expectations early in the email that this is what is in this email.
• 22:09
  Like, these are the topics that are being covered. Like, is this something that you want to save for later? Is this something that you want to read now? Is this something you want to jump to in the email?
• 22:16
  How do you make that experience for the audience as good as possible? And the thing [laughs] we always did, have always done is there is a link very high in that email to unsubscribe. Oh, really?
• 22:25
  It's not buried at the bottom? Oh, no. It's like... I mean, there's a link at the bottom too, but there's a link in the first paragraph.
• 22:31
  Like, above the content, there's, like, an intro, a link to unsubscribe, and the content. [laughs] That's fascinating. And what do you find there?
• 22:38
  I mean, like, we, we have seen unsubscribe rates sort of jump around depending on what we're sending, but, like, if we tell you what is in this email and you don't think it's valuable, please unsubscribe.
• 22:48
  That is so interesting. I've never come across that before. But there's still, I mean, on the site, I think it says six thousand plus folks on there.
• 22:55
  So there's six thousand people who get it, see the unsubscribe link at the top of every email, and don't click it 'cause they want it. Right. Yeah, that's really interesting. To me, that sort of...
• 23:03
  it goes to the same end as, like, you're sort of only as good as your worst content. Mm. I like that.
• 23:08
  If people don't believe this thing is going to help them, then I'd rather they don't get stuck in it and, like, can't figure out how to unsubscribe and get annoyed and, like, mark it as spam, then just unsubscribe and, like, maybe they see us later on LinkedIn or somebody else mentions to them that, like, have they seen this other thing, and that's valuable enough for them to res-- Like, it's easy for people to resubscribe.
• 23:26
  Yeah. Which sort of...
• 23:27
  It's the same thing with the, you know, like, the link in comment thing on LinkedIn, which certainly we did and, like, worked well, but I think there's a difference between writing a hook in a LinkedIn post and then asking people to, like, click to read the whole thing, because the h- call to action that we always used on LinkedIn or we've always used with the Steal This Workflow stuff on LinkedIn, for example, is, "Here is one complete thing that you can steal.
• 23:47
  We've published, you know, tens of other things like this. If you want all of them, then go subscribe over here," right? Yeah, yeah. It was never you have to do this in order to get sort of a complete thing. Yeah.
• 23:57
  That's interesting. Yeah. It's like the trap of the page view. Like, if that's the thing you measure, then you'll always be fighting for it, you know? Whereas...
• 24:05
  But when you can take a step back from that and think a little bit more holistically, it makes way more sense to approach it the way you're approaching it.
• 24:11
  But I think it can only happen at certain companies who feel comfortable with this. I mean, it's hard to measure, right? Like, you basically have to be okay with not having good measurement- Okay...
• 24:19
  at the individual asset level, right? Sure, like, I can tell you our best performing LinkedIn content in terms of impressions and engagements, right?
• 24:28
  But, like, I can't tell you how much revenue any individual LinkedIn post drove. Yeah. You could spend probably a lot of time trying to figure that out and- Yeah. I've never tried and never will. [laughs] That's good.
• 24:40
  That's probably good, 'cause I... Anytime I've gone deep on the attribution, like, into that rabbit hole, I alwaysCome out of it feeling like I still don't really know.
• 24:50
  I still feel like the long-term approach where we just try to help people and educate and emanate good vibes is the best approach, and wow, I just spent so much time in these data tools, and I don't feel like we've accomplished hardly anything here.
• 25:05
  Yeah. I mean, in terms of measurement, I know this is one of the things that you want to sort of get into a little bit. In terms of measurement, like obviously you can't measure nothing, right?
• 25:10
  It's not gonna fly if you go to the CEO and like [laughs] Right... "Yeah, I'm just gonna do a bunch of stuff and hope it works." [laughs] Right.
• 25:15
  [laughs] So in terms of how do you measure when you're not measuring any individual thing, I, I mean, revenue is obviously a very lagging indicator, right? There's a lot of dependency in there on, you know, close rate.
• 25:27
  It's a long way downstream. Yeah. So really qualified pipeline is the thing that we... That's the thing that we look at on a weekly, monthly, sort of quarterly basis.
• 25:37
  Like, based on, uh, like defined ICP, like how many deals are we generating from marketing?
• 25:44
  And then the two other things that I would say are certainly not quantitative in the same way, uh, that's sort of unsolicited reply rate.
• 25:51
  Like, are we getting people saying the right things without us asking them about the content? Mm. Right. I mean, now it's to the point, like pretty much every day, certainly on a...
• 25:59
  Every day on average, I get emails that like, "Thank you so much for publishing this thing," or like, "I'm trying to do X. I got part of the way there with this thing. Can you help me get over the hump?" Right?
• 26:09
  Which is great. Like, y- you can look at that as, oh, like now I have to go do more work, but you're doing more work to improve your product of content, right? Yeah.
• 26:17
  It's the same thing with getting a feature request for a thing you already built.
• 26:20
  And then the final thing that I would say, which I think is probably the most important, or the thing that if you ignore, you start to diverge from what's actually helpful to driving revenue from the business, is how effective are we being at reducing the questions that are currently coming later in the journey?
• 26:38
  Can we get people more qualified, understand more of the product, understand better where it fits? Yeah. Do you have a spreadsheet, a dashboard, or something where you're collecting important numbers each month?
• 26:47
  And then related to that, is there anything that you've tried that flopped and you ended up cutting in favor of something else? Yes to both. [laughs] All our reporting is in HubSpot.
• 26:57
  We switched relatively early after I joined Arrows to running everything on HubSpot, so we have sales dashboards in HubSpot obviously, so it's sort of helpful to be able to see pipeline generated.
• 27:06
  We can see meetings booked, like all that kind of stuff. But we also are tracking how are those numbers being influenced by marketing. Like, did these people attend a webinar?
• 27:14
  Like, did they download this particular piece of content? That kind of stuff. But really in HubSpot what we're looking at are, as I mentioned, those sort of ICP qualified deals.
• 27:23
  Is that number where we want it, and are we growing it month over month in a sort of meaningful way? Got it.
• 27:28
  Things that have flopped, and I think this, to your earlier point about, you know, you can set a content calendar and then you feel like you're sort of beholden to that content calendar and can't adjust.
• 27:37
  I think just as important as sort of testing things early is killing things quickly. We recorded seven episodes of the Happy Customers podcast. We actually recorded more and only published seven. People loved it.
• 27:50
  It didn't help the business in the way that we wanted it to, and it took a lot of time, so we killed it. That's very interesting. We will probably bring it back.
• 27:57
  And to the point about the newsletter having its own brand, Happy Customers is sort of the content sub-brand, and we put a lot of stuff sort of under that brand.
• 28:05
  But the podcast is one of the things we killed pretty quickly. More recently, starting Q2, we were pretty bullish on workshops, you know, live workshops being, uh, a big driver of pipeline. They were great.
• 28:19
  People loved them. We got a lot of people to them. Didn't have the pipeline impact that we expect, so we backed off them and we'll almost certainly continue to use them, but in a pretty different way than we, we were.
• 28:30
  They'll probably be more... or deeper in the funnel, more customer focused than sort of new folks. It didn't do a whole lot for list growth, which maybe is not surprising, but we'll certainly reuse those in other ways.
• 28:41
  We tried TikTok for about two weeks and just hated creating video for that format. [laughs] That's, yeah, that's interesting. The thinking was we were really successful with video on LinkedIn.
• 28:53
  It was doing well on YouTube, which is funny. Like we've put... I think this is something that will change. We've put essentially zero investment into YouTube.
• 29:01
  We've just sort of shipped the stuff that we recorded for other channels and put it there, and we have probably hundreds of thousands of views on YouTube.
• 29:07
  Like, we don't even have thumbnails on YouTube videos to sort of the level of time that that has got, but that's something we'll, we'll revisit.
• 29:14
  But yeah, we ne- we never kept going with TikTok or, or, and even YouTube Shorts, like vertical video is just not a format that we... It was easy for us to create well or did outrageously well to keep doing. Right.
• 29:26
  So one other thing I wanted to ask you about was who writes. I mean, you said you were writing these LinkedIn posts. Are you still the one doing that, writing the newsletter?
• 29:32
  And, and part of the spirit of the question too is like for a small team, there's two ways you go. One way is, "I have so much to do, I need to hire somebody to write."
• 29:41
  And the other way to go is, "I care so much about this writing that I only trust myself or someone else internally to do it," and it sounds like you've chosen the latter. Yeah.
• 29:49
  And, and not to say that we haven't tried the former.
• 29:53
  When I joined Arrows, working with an agency, ultimately just sort of it was very SEO focused, and we just sort of shifted away from that strategy and didn't continue with that path. I've hired writers who are...
• 30:03
  I know are great writers, sort of top-tier freelance writers with what I felt like were very solid briefs and we just sort of didn't get...
• 30:12
  For the amount of time that we were still spending on that content, it didn't feel like a worthwhile trade-off versus doing it ourselves, because I think that the thing that is critical for the customer education strategy to work is you have to be educating customers, and it has to be really effective at doing that, which is just very difficult for somebody who doesn't have subject matter expertise to do effectively, consistently.
• 30:36
  Totally. Particularly I feel like at a certain scale, you just have to bring on help in whatever form it takes- For sure... to increase the output.
• 30:44
  But there's something so important about building this super strong foundation of like every piece is of a certain quality, and then if two years from now you decide, "Okay, we're gonna do this or that strategy," it's gonna require 100 posts a year, it will be so much easier to hand off to someone and say, "It needs to be like this."
• 31:02
  If you have a very concrete example and you're always measuring stuff against this strong foundation you've built, it's much easier to scale that.
• 31:07
  To sort of complete the loop on that a little bit, I think that, that's certainly something that we think about a lot is, you know, we're a small team of eight. What are the things that we can do?
• 31:16
  What are the advantages that we have? Or just what are the things that other people won't do?Which is a question that we ask ourselves for pretty much everything that we do is like, will anybody else do this?
• 31:25
  If the answer is no, then we should probably go do it. Which means that you start doing kinda wacky stuff, stuff that just... it's not in the typical B2B SaaS playbook.
• 31:34
  But if you do it well and execute, it will probably pay off much more so than just following the playbook and doing the thing that everybody else has already sort of done. Yeah.
• 31:42
  You know what's so funny about this conver- I'm just, like, looking at my list of questions to make sure I covered everything, and AI is one that I ask most people about.
• 31:49
  That has not come up in this conversation organically, and I think the reason is because you're not pushing for efficiency and scale. At least that's not, that's not what I'm gathering here.
• 32:00
  Are you finding use cases for it, or do you find that the approach you're taking is 100% focused on, like, understand the customer, give them something useful?
• 32:07
  If there's a hack here and there that speeds things up with AI, great, but, like, it's not gonna replace what we do. I mean, maybe I'm assuming too much. I certainly think that that's true.
• 32:15
  I think the thing that we have had to talk ourselves into a little bit is that there certainly is benefits using AI in content.
• 32:22
  I think you're gonna see us probably-- I think we're gonna go relatively hard and relatively quickly into sort of a programmatic SEO-type approach with AI. Ooh, interesting.
• 32:31
  But we're viewing it as two very separate things. This is content that is for search. Its only job is to get somebody to the Arrows domain.
• 32:40
  Once they're there, we want them to discover the things that we actually wrote as quickly as possible and then continue to create the stuff that only we can create and not try to mix those two things.
• 32:49
  That's very interesting. I'm already thinking maybe there's a part two that we do. Whenever the programmatic stuff is up and running, to kind of report back.
• 32:56
  I think people would be really interested to learn more about that, and also hear how did it go. Yeah. Did it achieve what you wanted to? I'm also curious. [laughs] Amazing. Stuart, I wanna be respectful of your time.
• 33:06
  This has been very interesting.
• 33:08
  Sort of taken on a slightly different flavor than some of the episodes we've done recently, which has been wonderful, and it's really cool to hear the way that you and the team are approaching this kind of, like, very thoughtful...
• 33:19
  I was gonna use the word slow, but I mean that it... as a compliment, not derogatory in any way. Meaning, like, you're approaching it in a way that's not like, "Just do as much as we can.
• 33:28
  We need this much output to achieve Y data point."
• 33:32
  Like, because you're not doing that, it just seems that you've kind of freed yourself up to be really in tune with the customer and just do what you feel is best, which is a great reminder to all of us, I think. Yeah.
• 33:40
  Hopefully, it's... at least the, the hypothesis is that it's more sustainable and more efficient to do it this way. Yeah. I love it. Very cool.
• 33:49
  Can we send folks to your LinkedIn, Twitter, a personal website, or, or anywhere else? Yeah, absolutely. I publish pretty frequently on, on LinkedIn, as I, as I mentioned. Certainly come say hi over there.
• 33:59
  Certainly shoot me a message if you have, have questions. Always happy to chat with folks. I do post pretty exclusively about onboarding and, and HubSpot.
• 34:05
  Well, it's gonna be good for folks to observe it in action, I think. Yeah. It's certainly a little different than what a lot of folks are doing on LinkedIn. And then arrows.to is the website.
• 34:14
  Tons of educational resources there and the product for collaborative customer onboarding on HubSpot as well. Beautiful. I love it. Stuart, thank you so much for your time.
• 34:22
  Really appreciate it, and we will see you next time. Thank you so much for having me. [outro music]