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Minuttia: George Chasiotis on building an agency and navigating the "content recession" · Content, Briefly

• 0:00
  [on-hold music] From increased growth budgets, now we have limited budgets for growth, right? We had less ROI scrutiny, now we have increased ROI scrutiny, and companies need to know that, "You know what?
• 0:12
  I will spend this money with you. I will invest. What will I get back?"
• 0:16
  Hiring frenzy is replaced by hiring freeze, which is, I want to believe, a good thing for service providers because companies will not stop needing services. They will outsource more stuff, if anything.
• 0:27
  [on-hold music] Hey, and welcome to another episode of Content Briefly. Today, I'm really excited to chat with my friend George Chasiotis. He's the founder of Minutia. He's a familiar face around Superpath.
• 0:41
  We've done five or six webinars together, all of which have been fantastic, well-attended. We've gotten great feedback on. You can just search Minutia Superpath. You'll find them.
• 0:52
  We've talked about high-level B2B content strategy. We've talked about keyword research, briefs, a number of other things.
• 0:57
  George brings a real depth of knowledge about content marketing, and in this episode, we talk a little bit about content tips and strategy, but we actually primarily focus on what I'll call the content recession.
• 1:08
  The last couple of months have been really tough for content marketers and for content businesses, the service providers in this world. There's been a lot of layoffs. Business has been tough, and it's just a hard time.
• 1:19
  And George has a somewhat unique perspective as an agency owner because he works with a number of different B2B SaaS clients, so he gets to hear from all of them what they're experiencing and so he has sort of a higher level view that we dive into.
• 1:31
  It's really interesting to hear what he's hearing from customers, how his company's been adapting and what he thinks about the next six to twelve months or so of content marketing.
• 1:40
  So I will stop teasing it, and I will get out of the way. If you enjoy this episode, we'd really love a rating or review in whichever podcast app you like, and I hope you enjoy this episode. Thanks so much, everybody.
• 1:52
  [on-hold music] Hey, everybody. Jimmy from Superpath here with another episode of Content Briefly, with a familiar face or a familiar voice, I guess, in podcast form to many of you, my friend George from Minutia.
• 2:05
  If you've been around Superpath at all over the last year or a little more than that, you've seen and heard George. We've done a series of webinars together which have been a huge hit.
• 2:15
  We get great feedback on those every single time. Today, we'll be talking about content tips and strategy.
• 2:21
  I'm sure we'll touch on it, but I wanna know really, George, more about you, more about your business, more about the things you're seeing and experiencing at your agency, Minutia.
• 2:28
  But before we get into all that, George, would you mind just giving a quick intro of yourself for folks who don't know you already? Sure. So George with Minutia. I'm the managing director.
• 2:38
  We started in January of twenty twenty. This was the kind of announcement post for the agency. And then, of course, we all know what happened. The world went to hooey- Yeah [laughs]... sort of.
• 2:48
  But it turned out to be a good time to start a, an agency after all, right? Because there, there has been a growth and an acceleration after the initial shock of COVID.
• 2:59
  And three and a half years later, after going through all these things, we are sixteen, seventeen people. We are adding one more person these days, and I guess a couple more in the following weeks.
• 3:12
  Work with some pretty big names when it comes to SaaS, but also some smaller ones, and we help them.
• 3:18
  In the beginning, it was just, you know, content creation and a very basic service of content audits and primarily keyword research-based content strategy and things like that. Now we are expanding.
• 3:30
  We added design, which integrates perfectly with our content creation service, but also we treat it as a standalone service. We do designs for landing pages, apps, blogs, and so on and so forth.
• 3:43
  And we plan to add more service lines, but not AI content. [laughs] Oh, yeah, we should talk about that. [laughs] Yeah, we will.
• 3:50
  So expanding the service lines, doing as much as we can on the content side, and just trying to figure things out, I guess, like, you know, most businesses out there. Yeah. I hear that. That resonates.
• 4:02
  You don't call Minutia a content agency. You position it as an organic growth agency. It's not just content creation, it's audits, it's design. Can you speak to that a little bit?
• 4:12
  Do you find that that's a helpful way to kick off a conversation with customers?
• 4:16
  First of all, I think that it's good to frame things, but even from the beginning, even from choosing a name, which, you know, it took us three years to kind of teach people to say the name right, but I didn't want anything to be attached to really anything.
• 4:30
  Like, Minutia doesn't mean anything, right? Imagine had we chosen something with content inside or a name, I mean, with content or SEO or anything like that, we would be attached to that.
• 4:42
  And I knew from the very beginning, even though I didn't have a, an idea or how things will evolve, that maybe in the future we will do many more things, and we end up being something way bigger than what we start as.
• 4:56
  So organic growth acceleration, I guess, is part of that.
• 5:00
  Now, to be completely honest with you, I don't think that it resonated as well as I would like it to resonate, meaning that it may be a bit difficult for people to understand what we mean exactly when we say organic growth acceleration.
• 5:14
  Maybe the idea was good, but maybe we were not as good at communicating it. And the example that I could use here is, you know, Drift.
• 5:24
  I'm not comparing Minutia to Drift, by, by no means, but Drift introduced conversational marketing back in, I don't know, around two thousand fifteen or sixteen after they launched, and they used it as a vehicle to grow, right?But they did a lot of things around that.
• 5:39
  They even wrote- Book. Yeah. Yeah. I was gonna say. They made a lot of noise about it for sure. They did.
• 5:43
  I think that organic growth acceleration is a good way to separate yourself from what's out there, and unfortunately, or fortunately, I don't know, it pushes us all to, to become better.
• 5:54
  There are many SaaS content marketing agencies, SaaS SEO agencies, SaaS consultants, and so on and so forth out there.
• 6:00
  But as I mentioned, if I want to be honest, I don't think we did a good job at actually communicating what we mean when we say organic growth acceleration and how is that different than what's already out there. Yeah.
• 6:14
  You know, I've worked at agencies, content agencies specifically, and they're really tough businesses, really tough, because the thing that everybody wants is quality.
• 6:24
  If you wanna grow the business, you have to scale it. It's just difficult.
• 6:28
  I'd be curious, if you're open to it, would you reflect a little bit on have there been some growing pains that you and the business have experienced as you try to get an agency from its infancy into maturity?
• 6:39
  Every day brings us new challenges, right? The term or phrase or whatever I often use to describe the agency life is soul-draining. Yeah. Had I known how difficult it would be, I think I, I never would have done it.
• 6:53
  I never would have gotten into it. And it can be difficult on so many different levels. So many things can happen in the same day.
• 7:01
  You can lose a senior team member, a client may have gotten back to you with terrible feedback because you did something very wrong, you may argued with a partner, and at the same day, you closed, like, the biggest deal the company has ever closed.
• 7:16
  Like- Yeah, yeah [laughs]...
• 7:16
  it's a roller coaster and, and it's also these changes, but I would say that I don't know what life will look like after Minutia, but though the experience has been very full of all these differences and challenging for sure, it's also offers you things that you can use later on in your life because I think that working in professional services, even for a while, can be very intense, but for sure rewarding and the skills you, you will learn by serving clients, by growing your team, by doing all these different things can definitely be applicable in so many other aspects of life.
• 7:55
  Now, I'm not here to say that everything is great and we are growing. That's not true, right? Uh, because, you know, people have growth in their minds as something linear. You know, growth is always up and up and up.
• 8:08
  That's not true, especially in the last three and a half years since we launched the, the agency, and it's not just for us, like, for many other companies out there, it's been a, a roller coaster.
• 8:18
  Yes, one day you win, but the next day you may lose, right?
• 8:22
  And so it's this constant changes, and for you as a person who run the company, you just have to be emotionally deattached by whatever is, is going on, which can be very tough, especially when it comes to people, right?
• 8:37
  But that's what you should do, and that's what I'm trying to do nowadays, to be as emotionally deattached as possible by problems, by whatever situations I have to deal with, so I can make decisions that are based as much as I can on logic and not on whatever I feel at that moment or whatever I want to say to a team member or a client or whoever I'm dealing with, right?
• 9:01
  Yeah. Agencies are people businesses. I think that's perhaps the most exciting and exhausting thing about them.
• 9:06
  It's the people, it's the clients, it's the relationships you build with them, how you communicate with them, how you set expectations and then deliver on them, and then with your team that you build, it's all about finding good people, it's communicating with them well, it's providing them a good process to work from.
• 9:19
  That's not easy, and at some point, it's, like, less about the content. Getting to the part where you write the content or do the audit or do the keyword research is almost the easy part.
• 9:28
  It's all the other stuff that's difficult.
• 9:30
  And I'd be curious, like, running Superpath, 'cause we've been in business just over three years, so kind of a similar age to Minutia, it's been a chaotic three years just in the world.
• 9:39
  That trickles down to my little business, and I sort of imagine running a business would be like sitting in an air traffic control tower, moving levers and turning dials and just making it all work like I want.
• 9:49
  But usually what it feels like on a day-to-day basis is that I'm stuck in a maze [laughs] and I keep going down all these ways trying to find my way, and it's a dead end, so I go another way and it's a dead end, you know?
• 10:00
  And like if you could see me in it, you'd be like, "Oh, no, it's so obvious. Go that way." [laughs] You know?
• 10:05
  But the day-to-day of it is, uh, I hate to use the word struggle, but it's a challenge for sure, just to keep your head in it, try to make good decisions, like you said, not let your emotions get in the way, and I enjoy it.
• 10:17
  I genuinely enjoy it, but it doesn't mean it's easy. It's not easy, but I guess building something from scratch is not supposed to be easy, right?
• 10:26
  These three and a half years have been very challenging for all of us in many different ways. I'm originally from Greece, you know. I was born and raised there.
• 10:34
  I'm kind of used to crisis and dealing with, let's say, difficult stuff. Still, when you have to deal with this stuff in the context of running a business, it's even more difficult, right?
• 10:46
  And we also have to think about the fact that we are a very small part of a very bigger part, right?
• 10:53
  So the fact that today, doing this podcast recording, we are in a recession and the financial, uh, situation is X is because of some things that happened prior to that, right?
• 11:07
  So it's important for me to understand how we got here and also to be open about the situation we are in right now.
• 11:15
  And when I say open, both to clients and your team members and prospects, because don't assume that people don't know, right? We all live in the same world.
• 11:26
  And so it is very important to understand where we are at as a company at any given moment. But as a company, we are part of a broader ecosystem, right?
• 11:36
  So look at the micro, but also try to understand the, the macro and, you know, how this affects your unique situation because in many cases, it affects-Both in a negative and in a positive way more than you can understand.
• 11:50
  I totally agree, and I feel like for me personally, we're recording this June twentieth eighth, the last two months have been absolutely brutal.
• 11:57
  Some of that was building before that, but it kind of all came to a head over the last two months. It has been super challenging, and that seems to be industry wide, with exceptions.
• 12:06
  But many of the folks I've talked to in this industry, whether it's businesses who provide services, employees who have been laid off, content is just kind of experiencing this reckoning.
• 12:16
  And I think it's quite helpful, especially from your perspective, to call that out because you have the opportunity to look across a number of different customers, all of whom are investing heavily in content and organic growth.
• 12:29
  And so you're getting feedback from a bunch of people versus whatever.
• 12:32
  Maybe just that your content team was laid off and, like, your experience is sort of narrow in the sense that you don't have input from twenty or fifty different SaaS companies, all of whom may be experiencing pretty similar things.
• 12:45
  So sort of a long lead up to ask you about, like, what sort of things are you seeing or hearing from your customers right now? Are you finding that folks are anxious? Are they pulling back on budget, pipeline slow?
• 12:58
  Like, to whatever degree you feel comfortable sharing, I'd be super curious to know just kind of what you're seeing from your position as an agency leader.
• 13:04
  So first of all, let me just say that pipeline-wise, uh, things have dried up a little, but the good thing with Musia is that after a certain point, we stopped relying on referrals for fueling our growth, which is something that most agencies do.
• 13:18
  And so we started doing all these things that kind of puts us in a unique position right now to keep getting leads. Are these leads fewer than what they were even in the beginning of the year? The answer is yes.
• 13:31
  At the same time, we call our clients clients, and we don't call them customers, and we build long-term relationships with our clients.
• 13:39
  And I would say that also our clients are not the types of companies that are price sensitive.
• 13:45
  They are not the types of companies that are the first ones to fall, quote unquote, when it comes to AI content and things like that.
• 13:50
  So even though that's not representative of, like, the situation out there, I would say that with the exception of one client, we haven't really lost anything.
• 13:59
  On the contrary, we have clients who increase the engagement and sign twelve-month agreements with us, even though that's not the case right now at all, right? Yeah. That's amazing. Yes.
• 14:10
  But at the same time, it's important to understand how we got here. By understanding how we got here, I think we will be able as an industry to get out of this situation and come out stronger.
• 14:19
  So let's think about how content marketing was before, you know, this recession. Let's go back to COVID-19 and, you know, what followed COVID-19, which was a period that was definitely characterized by extremes.
• 14:32
  Billions of dollars poured into SaaS companies, valuations that seemed inflated and very often artificial, hiring madness and an upward trend in terms of compensation.
• 14:43
  And unfortunately, this led to enforce the mindset on behalf of SaaS companies of financial euphoria. Growth at all costs was the mantra. Increasing budgets and growth-oriented spend in general.
• 14:56
  Definitely less scrutiny in terms of ROI and profitability because we have money to spend, right? Mm-hmm. A hiring frenzy, but this doesn't mean that, you know, companies didn't outsource staff.
• 15:07
  And for the most part, long-term planning, okay? And I'm not saying that this was the case for all companies, but it was the case for many SaaS companies out there.
• 15:17
  I'm, I'm talking about SaaS companies because these are the companies that we serve, okay?
• 15:22
  Now, we are in two thousand twenty-three, June twentieth eighth, and you have to add to the recession two elements to the situation and kind of the mix of where we are at right now, which is AI content and Google's Search Generative Experience, SGE, okay?
• 15:39
  Which we don't really know how these two are going to play out, but they have, for sure, started to change, especially AI content has started to change the perception over what content is, how content should be done, how content should cost, and so on and so forth, right?
• 15:57
  So there is a perception shift that starts to happen based on AI content and all the upcoming changes in search, which at the end we will see how big these changes will be, right?
• 16:08
  And at the same time, from the things I, I mentioned earlier, for example, financial euphoria, now we have financial uncertainty, right? From the mantra of growth at all costs, now companies want sustainable growth.
• 16:23
  I don't even know what that means, but that's the mantra of, like, today, right? Yeah. [laughs] From increased growth budgets, now we have limited budgets for growth, right?
• 16:32
  We had less ROI scrutiny, now we have increased ROI scrutiny, and companies need to know that, "You know what? I will spend this money with you. I will invest. What will I get back?"
• 16:43
  Hiring frenzy is replaced by hiring freeze, right? Which is, I want to believe, a good thing for service providers because companies will not stop needing services, right? They will outsource more stuff, if anything.
• 16:56
  And from long-term planning, we have short-term planning right now because companies want to know whether or not they will hit their goals this month.
• 17:03
  They, they don't want to do things that will have an impact in twelve months because who knows what will happen until then.
• 17:09
  But going back to where we started and how this thing started, it kind of distorted the way many service providers operate and work, right? And I think one example here is agencies that had generally high prices.
• 17:25
  You could call them, you know, premium or anything like that.
• 17:28
  I think that these times are difficult for them because imagine building a business model on the basis of SaaS companies raising money and having valuations that are as high as twenty-five times revenue multiples, right?
• 17:43
  So this is absurd, obviously, and I would say that this whole thing was sooner or later, we would start to realize that, you know what?
• 17:51
  It's kind of artificial, right?And many agencies had a, a very good run during this one, one and a half year, uh, even two years prior to things starting to show up in terms of the recession.
• 18:05
  And now, especially the premium ones, find it difficult to kind of justify this investment, right?
• 18:13
  And once again, g-going back to what I said about the two elements that we have to take into account as to how things are right now, you have to take into account AI content, which especially for content marketing agencies, changes the perception and levels the playing field, right?
• 18:28
  And also, changes in search, which either you like it or not, and regardless of how things will look like at the end when they will release the public version of, like, SGE, it kind of makes some people question whether or not search has a future and whether or not we should invest in that, and so on and so forth.
• 18:46
  That's how I see it, and I think that we as an industry, you know, referring to content marketing agencies now and broadly growth-oriented services for SaaS companies, we didn't do a good job addressing the concerns and emotional states of buyers from SaaS companies right now.
• 19:05
  Because we talk about things, but in most cases, these are not the things that these people are interested in. And when I say interested in, they don't want to hear that, "You know what?
• 19:15
  It's a recession, and you should, uh, focus on bottom of the funnel." I don't subscribe to that term, but whatever, to drive pipeline. Of course, they know that. They are not stupid. The question is how, right?
• 19:26
  And the how is not, like, you should do alternative pages or comparison pages or, or anything like that. They know that.
• 19:33
  Can you add something more to that conversation so that these people are really educated when making a, a decision?
• 19:40
  Because yes, there is a hiring freeze, but this may be very good opportunity for agencies to get more work because companies don't hire, they have to outsource stuff, right? Yeah.
• 19:51
  So we didn't do a good job in that regard.
• 19:54
  These are the thoughts I've been having lately, and I'm trying to kind of answer, let's say, with the help of my team, in order for us to say things and get things out there that really resonate and are not things of the past or things that have been said and have been said by other people many times before.
• 20:14
  Yeah. Super interesting. I feel like you just summed up so much of what has happened over the last couple years so well. I do want to follow up about one thing, which is that businesses do spend money in recessions.
• 20:24
  It still happens. It just looks a little bit differently. And one of the things that I'm seeing, and you've alluded to this as well, is that for each business, they think about head count and budget as separate.
• 20:36
  So if one contracts, it doesn't necessarily mean the other contracts. In fact, the other could expand. But they're approached differently.
• 20:43
  So, like, I've just in working with our own customers, some folks have said, "We're reducing head count. We're laying people off because it's extremely expensive, but we still want to do content, and this is actually...
• 20:54
  It's actually cheaper for us to do it through an agency than to do it with an in-house team."
• 20:58
  And then I've had other customers say, "We don't want to work with you any longer because we want to protect our internal team.
• 21:05
  We would prefer to protect these roles, and we wanna basically change the roles slightly so that the work you were doing will now happen in-house."
• 21:12
  Both decisions I can see making sense, but all these SaaS companies are having these types of discussions right now.
• 21:18
  I've also noticed that over the past couple of years, there has been a significant trend towards content creation specifically being outsourced to vendors because the cost of doing it in-house has increased so dramatically, and part of that comes from content marketer salaries have gone up over the past couple of years, which is, I think, generally a good thing for the industry.
• 21:38
  But the type of work that they do has changed quite a bit as well. It seems like most companies keep the strategic work in-house.
• 21:45
  I'm generalizing, but, you know, they have a core team in-house that sort of runs the show, right?
• 21:50
  And then they bring on vendors to increase output, and a lot of that ends up being the content creation, the keyword research.
• 21:56
  Like, some of the stuff that is time-consuming, specialized work, and is frankly just less expensive to have a, a trusted partner do for you rather than bringing on that talent in-house. Are you seeing similar things?
• 22:09
  Like, has... Is that a trend that you've noticed over the past three-ish years? First of all, to your point regarding how companies think right now and clients think, both ways are acceptable.
• 22:19
  Obviously, either you want to kind of stop hiring or let some people go to outsource staff, or you want to protect people and outsource less, both of them acceptable, obviously. The biggest change I see is...
• 22:33
  And once again, all, all these things play, play a role in how content marketing will evolve ultimately. But I think that we are heading towards a point where the blog will not be the end all and be all.
• 22:48
  The blog is, if it's not dead already, it's, it's slowly dying, and companies start approaching things and thinking about other ways of owning their audiences, right?
• 22:59
  And you see that with the rise of SaaS companies like Audience+ for owns, owning your audience and so on and so forth. I, I, I think that we will see more of that in the future.
• 23:08
  And not only, you know, the blog is dying, but also content marketing is becoming or should become multimedia, right? It can't be just text.
• 23:17
  And I think that the content marketing industry as a whole, I'm generalizing now, and this may not apply to many providers, but we were heavily reliant on content writing, you know, text-based, and this was a format, right?
• 23:32
  And I think that this will change. It already started changing, right?
• 23:37
  I know that this is not good for us as service providers, but really I see it as an opportunity to adapt and, and see where things are heading towards and see how we can fit into this new way of doing content marketing, which, yes, the blog will continue to, to existMaybe in a different form, but definitely the importance will be less.
• 24:00
  I mean, any company that has like Hotjar or any other screen recording software can attest that by just take a look at your screen recordings. Like, we produce five K word guides. Who's reading that? Yeah.
• 24:13
  I mean, who's reading that? I'm not. I'm not, no. Those things are primarily engineered for an algorithm. That's the problem. Yeah.
• 24:19
  And on top of that, you have things like AI content and which the worst thing that AI content does is the perception shift that, yeah, this is easy, it's text-based. I mean, I can do it using AI.
• 24:30
  So I think that this is one of the biggest challenge for us as content marketers right now to kind of understand that things are going in a different direction and basically try to adapt. That's how I see it. Yeah.
• 24:44
  I think it's possible that Minutia is extremely well positioned here because organic growth can capture a lot of things, and I completely agree with you on multimedia. Like, a lot of SaaS companies do podcasts.
• 24:53
  It's usually not the content people that do that. It's someone else.
• 24:56
  A lot of companies, not a lot, some are starting to invest in more video, ranging from kinda like amateur screen share style video to, like, highly produced stuff.
• 25:04
  That all essentially is content, but it's treated quite differently.
• 25:07
  And as those things potentially take on a greater importance and the tech stuff becomes less important, like, the content folks are gonna have to pivot or sort of make lateral moves and learn new skills, et cetera, so that they're trying to accomplish the same thing, make something a reader or a watcher or a listener actually cares about, but learning a new medium, learning new tools, et cetera, which actually is a very good segue into another thing I wanted to ask you about, which is how you've grown Minutia because it's a lot of multimedia.
• 25:36
  And you mentioned something earlier about getting away from referrals.
• 25:38
  I'm very curious about that because word of mouth tends to be the lifeblood of agency growth, and to some degree, you just have to rely on that early on. It just means you do good work and people recommend you.
• 25:49
  Like, you wanna do that anyways. But there comes a point in every agency's life cycle where it's not enough anymore.
• 25:55
  For the business to grow as much as the team would like it to grow, word of mouth will likely not be enough. It's too unpredictable, hard to measure, et cetera.
• 26:03
  Minutia has invested a lot in webinars, podcasts, and text content.
• 26:10
  Is that the core strategy, basically sharing your own expertise with, at least from my perspective, like, a lighter priority on the SEO stuff and more just about getting out there, talking about the stuff a lot, sharing examples, et cetera, just, like, building trust through getting a lot of reps in on a couple different channels?
• 26:28
  First of all, let me just say that regarding organic, other agencies may have a different opinion, and maybe for them things are different. But we get leads from organic search, right?
• 26:38
  It's not part of our growth strategy. Who knows about the future? But in the beginning, I kind of tried to attach or assign or map a keyword to a piece of content we were publishing on our blog.
• 26:51
  After watching an, an interview or having a talk with you, maybe it was for the SaaS SEO, I understood that that's pointless because your content strategy, at the end of the day, ultimately, what you shared with me or what I read from you was that, uh, should be based on your business model.
• 27:07
  And agencies, in most cases, in many cases, not in most cases, I don't want to overgeneralize, are low volume businesses, right? And so it doesn't make sense for us.
• 27:16
  Like, what if we have first page rankings for keywords or anything like that? We don't need that. We just need to form a perception over who we are, what we can do, what we know, and so on to our target audience, right?
• 27:30
  And I found that SEO was not helping in that direction, right? So at some point, we stopped doing that, and now if you take a look at our blog, in some cases, maybe you will see that, you know what?
• 27:43
  On the side, we may target a keyword, but, you know, for the most part, this is not how we do content for Minutia's blog, right? We will write about things that other people don't touch as topics.
• 27:52
  We will write about things that we do differently. We will write about maybe contrarian opinions we have and so on and so forth, but SEO is not part of our playbook, right?
• 28:03
  That's not to say that SEO doesn't work for other companies or anything like that. It just so happens that it's not one of our preferred ways of reaching people, right?
• 28:13
  And at the same time, if I want to be completely honest, the leads we get from organic search are not good. Not in the sense of they don't qualify, they cannot pay for the service. Not at all.
• 28:22
  Just when I get on a call with, with someone from organic search and I ask them, like, "How did you find us?" "Oh yeah, I just typed something like B2B, SaaS, content marketing," whatever, "in Google."
• 28:33
  And I'm like, "Okay, so the chances of working together are very low," because the best leads for us nowadays is, like, "How did you hear from us?"
• 28:41
  "Oh, yeah, so I first saw something about you in a community, then I saw you in a newsletter, then I saw this webinar you did with Clearscope, and then I decided to book a call," right?
• 28:52
  It's always more than one thing, always. Yeah. It has to be. This is how I want it. It has to be. Yeah.
• 28:57
  And I also want it to be difficult because I don't want people to just, you know, react to something they've seen and forget about the fact that they submitted a form request the next day, right?
• 29:08
  I want them to actually think about it, think through it. And when they are in the process of evaluating providers way before the need is born, I want us to me- to be mentally available in the minds of these people.
• 29:22
  So our strategy is based on that. And in that context, you have to, you know, do content in different mediums, and it has to be video, it has to be podcast, it has to be social, and so on and so forth.
• 29:35
  And I want there to be different touchpoints because based on our data, you know, the best clients, prospects, you can call them however you like, are the ones with whom we have multiple touchpoints, right?Now, to your question, you know, how we approach growth, for the first, I don't know, one year and a half of the company, in the beginning it was just me with a couple of freelancers, and at that point we were, I don't know, four, five people maybe.
• 30:01
  I decided that, you know what, we can't rely on referrals.
• 30:04
  We were getting them, but there was also a misalignment, uh, in terms of referrals because we changed our pricing, so the referrals that we were getting were not aligned with our current pricing and so on and so forth.
• 30:14
  So there were some things that not so good. And also, I was keep hearing this thing by successful agency owners or people who, who have exited agencies that you shouldn't rely on referrals.
• 30:27
  And so I was, "Okay, we need to do growth then. We need to do something about it."
• 30:30
  So I brought in our first growth person, and we started doing things on the basis of what we were missing back then, and what we were missing was two things, basically, network, we didn't have a network, while most of our competitors, especially in the US, they had a pretty strong network, and the second thing we were missing was credibility.
• 30:51
  Not that now we are credible or anything like that, or we have the authority, right?
• 30:55
  But we started doing things that would help us expand our network and also beat the fact that we were not credible enough in the industry. People didn't know me as kind of the face of the company and so on.
• 31:08
  And so we got out there, and we tried to achieve those two goals, and this included different activities from running our own podcast to being active when it comes to our blog, but not in the sense of how most agencies define active, uh, which is to do a list post with the best content marketing agencies and [laughs]
• 31:27
  I don't know.
• 31:28
  I don't want to say that this is wrong or anything like that, but I believe that if that's the best we can do, then why should SaaS company come to us when it comes to creativity or when it comes to doing something more than their existing content program, right?
• 31:44
  And so if you read our blog, you will see that the things we do are not the things you will find in most agency blogs.
• 31:51
  And then, of course, to get credibility, uh, and build ourselves as an authority in this space, and we have a, a long way to go, of course, we got on podcasts, we did webinars with different brands, like Clearscope, like, you know, Superpath, like MarketNews.
• 32:06
  And so this is what we did, and we are now at a point where, as I said earlier, are we affected by the fact that there is a recession and, and also it's summer?
• 32:16
  But in general, there is lower, let's say, buying activity, yes. Are we still getting leads? And, you know, we are not reliant at all nowadays at referrals, yes. That's amazing. Yeah.
• 32:27
  When we get a referral, of course, I'm always glad to see the email popping up in my inbox, but that's not the kind of business I want to build, right?
• 32:35
  And so I consciously made the decision to do something about it, and it's a learning process because we made some investments. We spent a lot of time doing some things.
• 32:45
  We, we learned a lot, and we keep learning when it comes to what works and what doesn't work, right? Yeah.
• 32:52
  You know, there's a book, I'm curious if you read it, I think it's called The Trusted Advisor, which is a book about how to, how to grow an agency, and what you just described is, like, exactly the blueprint that the book describes, which I think is pretty cool.
• 33:03
  I've read it, yeah. Yeah. I've read it after I heard, um, Devin from Animal- Yeah... ex-CEO at Animalz.
• 33:10
  It was a podcast or something, uh, and she talked about this book, and I was like, "Okay, this is one of, one of the next books I will read," and I read it, yes. Yeah. That's awesome. Cool.
• 33:19
  George, I wanna be respectful of your time. I feel like there's so many more things we could chat about if you're up for it.
• 33:24
  We should do a round two because I feel like there's a whole world of stuff to talk about regarding the services you offer, regarding your take on AI, regarding, like, a bunch of other things.
• 33:32
  I think we should package that up into another one of these at some point. You know, we've had the chance to work together quite a bit over the last year and a little more.
• 33:40
  It's been wonderful to get to know you, and I have come to really deeply respect your opinion on content marketing, on business, and so I really, really appreciate you taking the time to share, in a very candid way, the things that you're seeing right now.
• 33:54
  Because I feel like a lot of us are feeling it, but it's difficult to capture.
• 33:58
  You know, it's difficult to put some of the uncertainty and, in some cases, fear into words in a succinct way, and I feel like you've, one, you've done that, but you've also provided a, like, an optimistic outlook.
• 34:09
  Content marketing is, despite some of the interruptions that we're all sort of dealing with right now, like, it's still happening. So anyways, thank you for that. I really appreciate it.
• 34:18
  We will obviously link folks to Minutia, to the blog and your podcast and some of the webinars we've done together. Is there anywhere else that we can send folks? Twitter, LinkedIn, a personal website, or anywhere else?
• 34:29
  I would share my side project I'm going to start, which is going to be a, a newsletter, but it's not ready yet, so I can't share it yet. But yeah, I think, you know, the ones you mentioned are, are enough.
• 34:41
  The website and also my, my LinkedIn profile for people who want to connect with me on LinkedIn. Feel free to send a connection request. Okay, cool. When the newsletter is ready to go, let me know.
• 34:51
  We'll add it to show notes. We'll share it with people. Sometime in Q3 for sure. Okay, cool. Awesome. George, thank you so much. Really appreciate it. Thank you very much. Take care.
• 35:02
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