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How to grow without ads, algorithms, or cold outreach · Data Beats Opinion

• 0:00
  Speaker A: So what marketing channels aren't doing so hot right now. Ads, SEO outreach, social. What does that leave? In this episode of Databeats Opinion, we're talking to Greg Digneo about the owned distribution revolution. We're diving into why partnerships crush paid ads and how one conversation can replace a thousand cold emails. And honestly, the counterintuitive truth is that founder led content beats professional marketing every time. Plus, why the future of marketing looks suspiciously like the past. Let's start the show. All right, well, let's dive on in. Greg. Super happy to have you. Very excited about things. Yeah, give me the. Who are you, Greg?
• 0:57
  Speaker B: So I, I mean, the 30 second bio. I am the founder of a company called Content Guppy. Up until like five months ago, we were an SEO agency for SaaS companies. We have since pivoted to what we call own distribution and we could get a lot more into that. But essentially. Well, yeah, but essentially we want to help, help companies get off of or stop relying solely on algorithms and ad marketplaces like Facebook ads or, or Google Ads or whatever. And like basically cold outreach spam as means to acquire customers. And so we want people to own their distribution in case something goes wrong. In case Google decides to de index one of your pages for some reason and you don't know why, or in case Meta decides to double your ad price for some reason or whatever.
• 1:56
  Speaker A: Oh, they, they would never raise prices on ad. I was going through an old talk that I was giving 12 years ago, I think, and I was talking about how you could get leads for about 10 to 20 cents on Facebook ads. Yep. And I was like, well, that's not anymore.
• 2:17
  Speaker B: So. So I started my first business in 2004. I'm dating myself, I was in college and, and we were doing solar panels. So if you know anything about solar panels right now, its cost per Click is like 55, $60 just for the click. We were buying, like we built the entire business on Google Ads paying like 5 cents a click and we would literally just spend 10 bucks a day. We didn't have like optimized landing pages or anything like that, but like, we thought we were geniuses as marketers because, you know, it was just so cheap back then. Yeah, it was so cheap. So.
• 2:51
  Speaker A: So this ties into something. So I want to get into own distribution, but. Because I think it's really important. But you just touched on something that I also want to talk about, which is partnerships and is this partnership revolution that you, that you talk about. And one of the things that hit home with me earlier this year is. So I went to click Funnels. Funnel Hacking Life. Funnel Hacking Life. And they had launched their new offerlabs and what Offer Labs is. It's an easy way for affiliates and partners to put their products out there so that they're discoverable and people can build those affiliate relationships and those partnership relationships. And one of the things that they mentioned on stage and I hadn't put two and two together on this is that back in the day, all these creators, all these info products, it was all affiliate and partnership marketing. There were no Facebook ads, there were no real Google Ads. Like that was not an effective way to get customers back in the day. And so it was all affiliate based, it was all partnership based, it was all relationship based stuff. And you paid a lot for that. Like it was 30% or 50% of revenue for these affiliates because you were list sharing. And then Facebook and Google Ads come in, specifically Facebook, and suddenly you're able to get these leads for like we're saying 20 cents, 30 cents, maybe a dollar at the most. And suddenly the partnerships and the affiliates. Why do I have to give away 50% of my revenue when I can get it in Facebook and I'm getting a dollar customers? Right. And so it killed all of that affiliate marketing and now Facebook is Now, it's now $50, $100 just to get a lead.
• 4:38
  Speaker B: Yes.
• 4:38
  Speaker A: And suddenly that cost price is no longer valuable. But it already killed that affiliate marketing as a main channel. And so this is why I'm super excited about this partnership revolution. Because I think that ads have gotten to the point where they need to, where we, we. They're no longer cost effective for certain businesses.
• 4:59
  Speaker B: Yeah. So if you're an info product or a creator, or course creator or something, and if you have a product for a hundred bucks, like that's just, you can't. I, I don't know if it's possible to, in, in certain industries that's definitely not possible to build a sustainable business. I'm guessing there are some industries that are nascent and things like that, but that are newer. But you know, like the bigger industries like marketing or something like that, like you're not, you're not acquiring a lead for a hundred bucks. It's going to be way more. So. Yeah, so partnerships are definitely a way to go, I think now. But like I, but when I talk about partnerships, I don't even think it's, I think you, I think you have to expand beyond affiliate marketing as a, as a means of acquiring partners. Like you don't have to give away 50% of your, 50% of your, your product or your price to an affiliate. Like, there's, there's definitely other ways to do that for sure. So. And again, like, that's why if you start to like, acquire, when you're, you know, acquiring your customers and you're building your email list and things like that, we could start to leverage things like, leverage that. And I could give you an example.
• 6:06
  Speaker A: Yeah, let's, let's dive into that because I want to talk about what, what does that partnership look like in 2025?
• 6:12
  Speaker B: Yeah. So here's an example. I just actually pitched a friend of mine. She's, she's, her name's Amanda Getz. She's launching a book. The book is like 30 bucks. I think it's like, and once, once she gets all her Amazon things, she gets 30% of that 30 bucks or whatever it is. Right? Like the Barnes and Noble fees, she's getting 30. So it's not like a huge product for her to be like, hey, let's just run Facebook ads to a throw funnel. It's not going to make sense. But she has an 80,000 person email list. She, when she emailed her 80,000 person email list, um, I think she sold 500 books or 700 books or something like that. So she did. Well, like, that's an incredible number. But that's a very small percentage of people who actually bought the book. Right. That's less than 1%. So what, what I pitched her and what I told her she should do is find three friends or four friends who have 50,000 to 80,000 person email list and just say, hey, listen, we're going to host a, we're going to have, we're not going to have a webinar. We're going to have an event. We're going to have an online event and we're going to do a major cross promotion for the event. And you're going to e on all these people are going to email their list, go through their socials and drive everybody to this one webinar, this one registration page where, where everybody registers. And she could then pitch her book on that and then everybody can speak for an hour. All the speakers could speak for an hour. You share the email. And now you, you're promoting your book and your webinar to not just 80,000 people, but now you're promoting it to 300 to 400,000 people. So. And like, I know she has 80,000 people, but imagine you have 5,000 people on your email list, which I'm sure a lot of your audience does, you could do the exact same thing. Find somebody else who has 5,000 people on their email list and say, hey, listen, do you want to do a. Do you want to do a crossover event or something like that where we, you know, I'll talk for an hour, you talk for an hour. And, you know, at the end of each of our speeches or our talks or whatever, we're going to talk about whatever acquiring customers, or we're going to talk about funnels, or we're going to talk about whatever it is, and we'll share the email addresses will at the end. So, like, hey, if you bring in, you know, 250 people, and I bring in 250 people less than now, 250 people more on my email list, and. And I've pitched my pitch, my product to two people who have been heard of me. So that's just one example of, like, something that you could do if you start owning your distribution.
• 8:49
  Speaker A: It really is that. And I love that we have gotten to this point where, you know, they talk about the Internet becoming something that is very. I can't even think of the word. Very closed. Right. It's a walled garden is what they always say. And it's nice to see that. I think a lot of creators, especially, are seeing that and being like, we got to get out of here. We got to get out of this walled garden. And we're really going back to a lot of the strategies that worked for so long. These online summits, these challenges, these types of communal strategies between partners, which I love, because that was why I got into this. I love the partnership of everything.
• 9:32
  Speaker B: I mean, these things, if you look around, these things have been. I mean, partnerships have been around forever. It's not just online. I mean, you know, you know, before the Internet, like, you would always see, like, McDonald's promoting a movie with their Happy Meals. Right. Like, it's the same exact thing. Like, it. Like the thing I love about partnerships and. And that sort of thing is they've been around for a thousand years, since the dawn of commerce, and they're going to be around for a thousand more. I don't know what they're going to look like in a thousand years, but they're going to be around for a thousand years because that's just one of the most effective ways of doing business.
• 10:08
  Speaker A: Yeah. And I think they're always going to come back to this. Like, there's always going to be skips, because there's always going to be the new hotness that people are like.
• 10:15
  Speaker B: Exactly. There's going to be a new fat or a new thing and they're going to die off and then they're going to come back and then they're going to die off. But, but they're still always going to be around. They're always going to be an effective way to sell your products and grow your business.
• 10:27
  Speaker A: And I think that, I think it's important because, you know, we're looking at a lot of AI content now and we're looking at AI content in like blogs and written. We're even seeing it in video and we're seeing it. The, the most egregious example that I see is user generated content. That is all AI.
• 10:49
  Speaker B: Yes.
• 10:50
  Speaker A: Which just flat out should be illegal. Like I should be. I hate it. Like it's, it's miserable. Like the fact that you have user generated content, that none of it is real is, is just the slimiest thing to me. But we are seeing that everywhere. And so I think that there is even more value in these types of partnerships, in these types of real people that you follow, that you relate to promoting each other and being together and doing all that.
• 11:20
  Speaker B: For sure. Because a couple things, when you do a partnership, like I'm just using a webinar as an example, but it could be your guest posting on somebody's newsletter or something like that. Like there's a couple, there's a couple things there. One is you're getting like this implied trust, right? That like, like if I, if I, if you invite me to promote in your newsletter, if you invite me to do a webinar with you, hey, you're inviting me on this podcast, right? Your audience trusts you. And then in turn there's like this trust that I am re. I am just inherently getting because I'm associated with you.
• 11:58
  Speaker A: So I'm not going to bring a schlub, I'm not going to bring a scammy person onto this podcast because why would I do that?
• 12:04
  Speaker B: Exactly. And so, so there's that. And then the other thing is when you go on a webinar, you go on a video or you were like, you know, on your newsletter, you are going to make sure that that's not AI, that's some crappy AI generated thing. You want to publish that, right? So like it's going to be my words, my voice, my writing. And, and your audience could be certain of that because they trust you. They've been on your newsletter for a while and they. And so again, I get that. I get that inherent credibility already because of you. And so. Yeah, that's. That's the. That's one of the reasons. Another reason why I love it is because you get to. You get that credibility already that it's.
• 12:50
  Speaker A: I agree. And I think that, you know, with physical products, we've gotten to the point where they all look the same. They all, like, it's impossible to tell what's real and what's not. What is a dupe, a duplicate that's just made at the factory next door versus an actual brand and all this stuff. And it really has turned into the curation game, where you have to have someone you trust doing that curation and people follow those curators. And it's the same thing for people, I think. And there's so much stuff on YouTube. There's so much stuff on TikTok.
• 13:27
  Speaker B: It's.
• 13:27
  Speaker A: Yeah, you can lock into finding something, but really, it's so and so recommended this to me, and then I started watching so and so recommended. Recommended this to me, and so I started following and then that's how you. It. It's like building relationships in real life. Just online, right?
• 13:41
  Speaker B: Yeah. So. So to go to that real quick, like the curation part, a couple. About a year ago or so, this happened in the. SAT in the software space. But like, all the affiliate sites that were ranking in the, like, top, like top 10 for CRMs, for small business, top 10 for, you know, all these listicles that weren't selling actual products, they were simply affiliate sites, they got obliterated whether it was product or software. Yeah, totally obliterated. Like, sites that were making 25 or $30,000 a month, all of a sudden their traffic went to zero. Like, they just got crushed because it was just this, like, Google realized, like, this, this. These are just crappy listicles that, like, you know, like, like, okay, I'm gonna. I'm gonna give. For. For. If you don't know what SEO is, like, I'm gonna give the. I'm gonna just change the way you shop now. Let's say you want to buy a coffee pot, right? From wherever, and you're like, you go to Google and here's how nobody does this anymore. But this is what you used to do. Used to go to, like, go to Google and write 10 best. Give me what are the best coffee pots or best coffee pots. Like, that was the thing. Well, that article was written by some guy like me who actually, I didn't even write it. I outsourced it to somebody else. Who was charging me 10 cents a word. And then I ranked it. I built some links to it, I ranked it. And we know nothing about coffee pots. We have no idea if this coffee pot is good or not. We have like. But that's how they have an affiliate
• 15:17
  Speaker A: deal and that's what they have, right?
• 15:19
  Speaker B: But that's how the SEO game is played. And so when you recommend a product, it's because to your audience, it's because you've used it, right? And you're a real person. You've used it. And that's the person that I want to hear from. I don't want to hear from like, you know, some random content site.com telling me about the 10 Coffee Best Coffee pots. Like, I want to be like, yo, Keith recommended this awesome coffee pot. Let me check it out.
• 15:45
  Speaker A: This is the interest.
• 15:46
  Speaker B: I don't. I know that was a tangent, but
• 15:49
  Speaker A: it was a great tangent because I feel like we were talking about things going in circles, right? And you're exactly right. It used to be I would go on Google and I'd say best coffee pot and I'd get maybe Consumer Reports and then I'd get a couple of real people who were like recommending coffee pots and stuff. And then it started getting SEO gamed. And then so now whenever I search for best coffee pots, it's all affiliate sites or it's like paid.
• 16:17
  Speaker B: Just totally game content.
• 16:19
  Speaker A: Yes, it's all game content. So what did people start doing? They started going on Reddit, so now they're searching on Reddit for best coffee pots and we're getting good answers there. And then that starts getting game and there's a lot of bots and that's. It's the exact same thing. So now what are people doing? They're going to AI and AI. The way AI works is it's just crawling the site mainly for listicles and recommending what's on those listicles.
• 16:45
  Speaker B: Fun fact. The number one service that people want from my, from my SEO, from the SEO agency is they wanted us to either a write listicles on other sites, like 10Best, whatever it is, put guest post it on another site, or they wanted us to get their product listed in a listicle. That was the, that's the number one service that, that we were. Requests we were getting from people. Again, because it's just, it's just because how do you get listed in AI? Or how does an AI find you?
• 17:17
  Speaker A: How do you get an AI? How do you get SEO? How do you get PageRank? That's still a way to do it.
• 17:22
  Speaker B: Yeah, it's. It's just you gain the system. Yeah.
• 17:25
  Speaker A: And is there a good answer? No, there isn't. Like it really is partnerships. It really is relationships.
• 17:34
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 17:34
  Speaker A: And to go to your other point, its own distribution. Right. Like I don't. So let's dive into own distribution a little bit. I was very. Do you remember when Medium came out?
• 17:50
  Speaker B: Yes.
• 17:51
  Speaker A: And I might be dating myself a little bit here, but when Medium came out, everyone all their content on Medium and it was like it's the new easy blogging system and it's communal. And I was like, but you don't control it. It's. It's scary cause like and everyone was posting all of their stuff only on Medium. None of it was on their own site anymore. It all goes to Medium. And what'd they do A couple years ago they locked it all down. And now if you want to read any content on Medium, you have to have a Medium account.
• 18:24
  Speaker B: Yes.
• 18:24
  Speaker A: Same with Twitter, same with Facebook. And so that was, that was my wake up call for own distribution. But do people still feel like that? Do they like is, is it a pain point that people realize yet or no?
• 18:39
  Speaker B: Well, when.
• 18:40
  Speaker A: Sorry, that was a very leading. Yeah.
• 18:44
  Speaker B: So, so do they think about like owning their distribution? The answer is no. Not until their, their number one page. Their page on number one like that's ranked number one gets. Is now at number seven. And all of a sudden they've lost X amount of dollars a month because Google decided one day that they were going to de index or to to drop their rankings for no fault of their own. There's nothing that we could see. So they, they think, they do think about it. They think a lot in terms of email lists. Especially like course creators think a lot in terms of email lists as well. That is definitely something that, that people think about. But I don't think that they think so. So Every like and SaaS companies collect email addresses too for their trials and stuff like that. But I think where people fall short on is what they could actually do to. For their email list. And once they have an email list like how do I, how do I one grow it? How do I get more money out of it? And then you know, how do I continue to build that credibility to get people to know like and trust you? And I think that's where people are like falling short on the, on that own distribution side. Like those three areas. Like there they are collecting email addresses. People know to collect email addresses. Even like agencies who don't have big email lists. They'll have like a subscribe to the blog kind of thing, right? Like so they all know to collect it. But once they collected it's like now what do I do with it? I think that's the problem and that's the issue.
• 20:27
  Speaker A: So yeah, and what, how, how do you recommend people leverage that? So we all know collect email addresses, but what do we do with that? Like do we send out newsletters? Like is it broadcast? Like what, what are things that maybe not email based. What's, what are ways that we can build that owned distribution.
• 20:46
  Speaker B: So for me it is about collecting email addresses and things like that. So that is. But being intentional about it is really what I think people need to be start doing. So first of all, the first thing that we do is we like, like I built my agency doing this like to several seven figures, small seven figures. It wasn't large seven figures, but small seven figures. And we would send out a weekly founder let founder content. I write an email every single week. It goes out. Used to go out Tuesday, now it goes out Thursdays. I write it. It's me, my voice, my words. It's like my insights, right? So that's the first thing so people get to know me. The second thing that we do is we, we do newsletter swaps all the time, is weekly, every two weeks, things like that. Because that's how we, that's our number one way of growing our email list. So we don't have a huge one but like we don't need a big one because our of who our clients are and things like that. But like we'll go and find somebody with like 2,000 or 5,000 email subscribers and be like, hey, let's do, let's do a lead magnet swap, right? I'll get 50 new subscribers, you'll get 50 new subscribers, you'd get, you know, maybe 100 new subscribers, something like that. If you don't have that many email that have that many email addresses. One thing that works really, really well, sponsorship, sponsoring newsletters. But not like, not in like hey, let's just buy a $500 ad. Like let's say I want to sponsor your newsletter, Keith. I would like send my product over to you. I want you to use my product. I want you to become a fanatic about my product. I want like it to be inte into your workflow and then you're gonna, then I want you to write your experience about it. Yes, I'm going to pay you for that. But I want like, like Your experience about how you use my product into the, into your newsletter. And so again I want to borrow and leverage your credibility in that way. And then the, the other thing we do a lot of is we do a lot of cross webinars. We do that, we try to get one, I try to get one a month, but usually winds up being once every two months in order to again, hey, I have 2,000 subscribers, 3,000 subscribers. You have two, 3,000 subscribers. Let's, let's get a webinar together and we can both talk or hey, I'll give a webinar to your list. You give a webinar to my list. And then you know, we could do that. So that is what's working well. And then the other thing that works really well, I don't know if this could apply to creators, but it would apply to you. What we do is we look at the email addresses and we say, okay, this person is really engaged. They've read the last seven newsletters or they've read the, or they've clicked on these two webinars or whatever. We, we know who's engaged. And then we'll go into Apollo and say, who is this person? Oh Keith, you're the founder of a 10 person software company. You might be a part, you might be really, you might be a really good qualified lead for us. Let me reach out to you. Right. And so we do that routinely to try again to find new customers. I don't know if that works for, it probably would work for creators who are selling courses to marketing companies. Yeah, yeah, like high ticket thousand dollar courses to, to 2000 $5000 courses to like companies or to departments. Yeah, like it wouldn't work for, for a lot of creators who are selling like 500 stuff that they might get a lot of Gmail accounts. But if you're selling two businesses, you're going to get a lot of like company accounts. Like we had a client who was going like, like, who didn't, who never did this but like on their, on their email list they had like so and so from Johnson and Johnson. They had so and so from, @FBI.org right. And you're like, you don't know who these people are until you go look them up and you're like, well wait a minute, this person leads a team of 20 developers. Like that's incredible. Like they're our target market, you know. So that's, that's a really interesting way to kind of again find really qualified leads. So instead of like cold emailing you're sending out a very warm introduction.
• 25:02
  Speaker A: Exactly. And I think that, I mean, one of the things that you mentioned there I think is really key, which is you are, when you're doing the newsletter swap with other people, you are getting them, you're tracking them, you're getting people to go to a lead magnet swap or something like that. So then later down the funnel when you say, oh my gosh, these people are really engaged. What's going on? And then you go see, oh, this was all Sarah's newsletter and she sent them all. The average person that Sarah sends, so much more engaged and being able to follow that down, you only need 10 to 12.
• 25:36
  Speaker B: Like, like if I find like, you know, you're going to, you're going to go through 40 or 50 of them to find those 10 to 12 for sure, maybe more. Maybe you go through a little more than that. But once you find like 10 to 12, you just re. You could recycle every other week or every other, like every quarter. Like you could do one one a week for a quarter and you could be like, oh, Sarah, hey, three months ago we did an awesome newsletter swap. You want. It worked really well. Want to do it again?
• 26:00
  Speaker A: Let's do another one.
• 26:01
  Speaker B: Yeah, exactly. And then you do it quarter two, quarter three, quarter four with Sarah. And then, you know, next week you do, you do this, the next person up. So yeah, you only.
• 26:11
  Speaker A: Yeah, exactly.
• 26:12
  Speaker B: And then once, once the lists dry and they will get stale, you start finding new ones and replacing them. But yeah, it's a really scalable way to grow.
• 26:20
  Speaker A: And once you are, once you find those good, those good lead sources, those good traffic sources, then you are able, like you're saying, to stick it into Apollo. You can even turn that into a process. So everyone who comes in from Sarah, we have a, an analytics information that says, okay, if they opened more than 20 emails or they opened more than six emails in the last whatever days or whatever, they're a very warm lead and they click the links. Then they're a warm lead and they did this thing. Then they're a warm lead. Find all those people, group them together, throw those into Apollo one on one. Maybe you have 20, maybe you have 30, but these are highly hot qualified leads.
• 26:57
  Speaker B: And then you have to get much more qualified than that for sure.
• 26:59
  Speaker A: Right? Exactly, exactly. And then you have this list of people, okay, these are who we're going to sell to. And then you can start to track back and say, look, my average lead from Sarah's $350 per person. That signed up or whatever that number is. And suddenly those numbers start to really change your ideas of who you need to be talking to.
• 27:21
  Speaker B: 100%. You're not selling one to one anymore. You're selling one to one, to many. And that makes all the difference in the world.
• 27:29
  Speaker A: And I love that phrasing. That's a really important phrase that you said, which is one to one too many. Because you're not selling one to many. That's really hard. Right. You're selling. All you need to do is talk to Sarah or whoever the partner is, and then they already have that relationship that they've built over time. And now you are building off of that relationship to build your own relationship.
• 27:52
  Speaker B: Right.
• 27:52
  Speaker A: And so it's. Yeah, it's a lot easier to borrow that. That value.
• 27:58
  Speaker B: Yep. Because Sarah is worth like instead of me going out and spending money on Facebook or whatever to get 50 leads, I just got to talk to Sarah now and she'll get me 50 leads this week.
• 28:09
  Speaker A: Exactly.
• 28:09
  Speaker B: And then I got to talk to John next week and he'll get me 50 leads and like, so get. Like that's. I have to talk to one person. Right, Exactly.
• 28:18
  Speaker A: Yeah. So do you see this all shifting towards that, towards this own distribution? Towards this. I mean, marketing's always been very, especially for creators and SaaS has been very email based. Like, you talk to creators and they're like, would you rather lose all the money in your bank account or lose your entire list? And everyone's like, bank account. Because I know that if I own my list, I can make it back.
• 28:46
  Speaker B: Right.
• 28:46
  Speaker A: And that's. So do you see this as a change, as an evolution, like getting philosophical? How do you feel about this in the current marketing ecosystem?
• 28:57
  Speaker B: So I think that it's becoming again, more and more important to. So I come from, So I come from the SaaS world for first of all. And so in the SaaS world, the playbook is SEO. PPC. Cold, cold outreach. Like that's the playbook. That's what everybody. That's. That's the, that's the go to market strategy in the. So in the SaaS world, people are waking up to the fact that wait a minute, my content is not ranking anymore. Or wait, you know, or hey, my content on page one is now 3/4 of the way down the screen because it's below the AI overviews and it's below the what people want to see thing. Or. And then it's below the, the. The seven ads. Right. And so that content that was, that was bringing in 5k mrr a month or 3k mrr a month is now bringing in 700 mrr a month or 800 bucks mrr a month. I don't know if you're seeing that per se. I have a feel you're nodding your head and I think it looks like you are.
• 30:07
  Speaker A: Oh yeah, yeah.
• 30:09
  Speaker B: And so in the SaaS world now it's like, and we'll get to creators in a second. But so in the SaaS world now, people are starting to open up to this. I mean my clients are seeing year over year a from Google anywhere between an 18 and 26% decrease in traffic. Not because we're ranking any less or ranking any different, but because the content just keeps getting pushed down and, and you know, more zero click searches. So in sas, people are starting to open up with it. The creators have always been in the, hey, let's grow the email list. Like that's, that's something that's innate. We, we do work with a couple newsletters and newsletter, like a couple of newsletter companies and basically their entire thing is grow my email list. Like, that's it. So it is very much a thing that they are, that they want to get their distribution. However, the thing that they are not doing enough of, I don't think or are not being creative about is the partnership aspect of like, hey, I have this, I have a, like if, like I have 100,000 people or sorry, 10,000 people in my newsletter, right? All my traffic turned off. I can't afford ads anymore. SEO is not working now what? Right? How do I get from 10,000 to 15,000 or how do I get from 10,000 to 20,000? Yeah, that's where I, I like people to start thinking is like, you don't have to just keep spending ads. Like, it's fine to do that. I'm not telling you to stop. If it's working, keep doing it. But like thinking about like, what happens if, what happens if this ad becomes too expensive? Then what happens? Like, or this platform becomes too expensive or, or you know, Facebook is like, yo, we don't like your ads anymore. You violated our terms of service.
• 31:58
  Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. But I think it's interesting because the, we're seeing that exact same thing, which is SEO. We're still knock on wood, doing pretty well on SEO because we're working hard on it, but we've stopped. We got, we're no longer getting the outsized returns. Right. We're having to do a lot more work for not much more growth. And so I group Things into bread and butter and like growth tactics. Right. So are we going to stop SEO? No, we're, we're going to keep posting blogs and we're going to keep doing stuff, but we're not going to spend 10 to 20 hours a week or a month on it because the results we're getting are lower than they used to be. And same with ads. We were spending $15,000 a month on ads, specifically Google Ads. And we made the decision to turn them off. And no drop in traffic, no drop in trials. Our trials went up, actually. But Google and Facebook were reporting that these were doing great. And what we found was that they were bringing trials, but not real trials, not good trials. They were not bringing anything that was really growing the business at all. And so that it was. I think that there are a lot of changes in marketing where we used to think, and especially SaaS and creators, we used to think, okay, we do the technical things, not the talking to people, because dear God, we all hate talking to people. And it's like we do the ads, we do the SEO, we do the marketing things that we don't need to talk to people about. And we're still going to get trials and this is going to be awesome. And I think AI especially has just made that dry up because all the bottom level, all the low hanging fruit has just been cut off.
• 33:45
  Speaker B: Yes. If you would have come to me, so I started my agency in 2021. If you would have come to me in 2021, 2022, even up to 2023, I would have been like, yeah, you should spend 30, 40k a month in SEO. Like, and genuinely meant it and I could have helped you. I can't. Like, if, when, when I get like client like clients coming in now, I'm like, you should write these 10 pages, build some links and then do something else because, because you're not going to get the returns anymore. And so, yeah, like, that's, I want to like, don't spend more than 5k a month with us. Like you as an, as an SEO agency. You don't need it. There's, there's. So that's just my personal opinion. I'm sure there's SEOs out there who, who are going to get mad and disagree. And I'm sorry, but that's just the way I feel. Like you shouldn't spend where, like spend where you're going to get your dollars. And I don't see SEO as that. Like SEO is just that the returns are just not there anymore and I
• 34:46
  Speaker A: think that's really true, which is. I mean, it's always been true, but it's even more true now. It's, you have to spend where the dollars come from, not where the traffic comes from, not where it makes you feel good, a high page rank or whatever you really need to. Where do the leads come from and where do the customers come from and where does that lead value and that customer value come from? And that's really the core of it. And we found in our business that it. It is partnerships, it is relationships. I'm so bad at following up with people that that's always a struggle for me, but it really is the number one place whenever we do partnerships, whenever we build relationships, we're doing. You were talking about the online summit where, okay, we're doing a swap and we're all going to talk and we're going to do a list share. We're doing a similar thing with Brennan Dunn from. Right. Message next month.
• 35:38
  Speaker B: Yeah.
• 35:38
  Speaker A: And they're great. They're wonderful. We've done a couple of them in the past. And they get people excited. It's weird, but people are excited when I'm on that webinar with Brennan because they.
• 35:53
  Speaker B: Because they've been following you for three years. I'm reading your stuff for two, whether it's in your newsletter or on social. Because they're following you.
• 36:03
  Speaker A: Exactly, Exactly. I did a presentation a number of years ago. I was like, people don't follow brands, they follow people.
• 36:10
  Speaker B: Correct.
• 36:11
  Speaker A: And I was talking about, like, Wendy's had Dave Thomas for a number. He was the founder. He was on all the commercials. And when people thought of Wendy's, they thought of Dave Thomas, the colonel from kfc. Now he's a cartoon character, but I mean, it's all these people that we build relationships with, not a brand name.
• 36:29
  Speaker B: So here's a perfect example of that. Do you remember, I'm sure you've been to the site Backlinko. You remember Backlinko?
• 36:35
  Speaker A: Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah.
• 36:36
  Speaker B: Remember Brian? What the heck was his last name?
• 36:40
  Speaker A: His last name. But yeah, you know who I'm talking about?
• 36:42
  Speaker B: Brian from Backlinko. Apologies. They were bought by Semrush about two, three years ago. Right. He was sold to Semrush. When was the last time you went to Backlinko?
• 36:52
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 36:55
  Speaker B: Because Brian is not writing articles for them anymore. Yeah, exactly.
• 37:00
  Speaker A: CSS Tricks was the same way. He sold the site. And then, I mean, people still use it, but it doesn't have that person. Like, it's not growing like it used to, right? Like, it's just another site on the Internet. Not something that people have a really devoted following towards.
• 37:16
  Speaker B: Exactly. Yep, totally. I mean, so I like, I use. It's funny, I use Ahrefs because the. Tim is online all the time. He's creating videos, he's on LinkedIn all the time. You could, like, just comment and he'll reply to you. And like, I mean, that's why I use it. Like, I don't care about Ahrefs other than, like, I get to talk to Tim from. Talk. Very recently. Talk to Tim. You know, he's having a conference. So if I really wanted to go to Singapore and. And talk to them, I could, you know. Whereas, like, if you go to, I don't know, a single person at Semrush. Not that they're. Not that they're failing. They're not. But.
• 37:51
  Speaker A: No, they're not.
• 37:52
  Speaker B: But it.
• 37:53
  Speaker A: There's a. Especially before you get to the billion dollar business side, right? Like, there is a. There's a. Brands have personality and the personality of the brand and the relationship with the brand. And it's really weird. Like, there's a bunch of psychology research and stuff on this, but I see this with myself. So I watch a number of discussion shows on YouTube, right. Mainly movie news for some reason, but I feel like I have relationships with the people. They talk about their kids sometimes and one of them had a baby a couple years ago and it's like all this stuff and it's like, oh, yeah, I have a relationship. I don't have a relationship with these people. They don't know me from Adam. But to be part of that discussion, to be part of that life, like, I'm not listening to them to hear about their lives, but it comes in. And there's some humanity to that and there's something that just connects you to them and.
• 38:51
  Speaker B: Yep.
• 38:52
  Speaker A: Yeah. And I, And I have a. I don't even know how to describe it,
• 38:56
  Speaker B: but it's like a parasocial relationship.
• 38:59
  Speaker A: It is. It's 100% a parasocial relationship.
• 39:04
  Speaker B: It's. It totally is. But. But I mean, like, people are excited to hear you because they. They've been reading about your struggle, they've been reading about the things that you've been learning and the things that you. And they know what you've built. And so they're like, oh, Keith has something interesting to say, right? Like, you're not just sending, like, here's the 10 best links from the industry. Like, you're not doing that you're, you're right. And like. And I'm assuming Brennan, Brennan's online a lot too. I, I don't subscribe to his stuff. I'm not in his space but. Or his orbit. But I've seen him from time to time and he does the same thing. He talks about his, I've seen him on Twitter talking about like, hey, right message is growing this week or right message we saw some decrease. So like people are relating to that struggle. And so when, so when you guys come out like the two founders of these, you guys aren't huge companies. You guys are great sized companies for what you're doing. But like you don't have to be a billion dollar company. You don't have to be a hundred million dollar company. You could be, you know, a six figure company who's like figuring it out. And people are going to get excited because they've been following you for, for a long time. They've been going through your journey and they know who you are and they know that you're going to bring real stuff to the table. So. Yeah, yeah.
• 40:20
  Speaker A: 100. And I think, and I want to get your opinion on this. So I feel that creators have that more innately than non. Than SaaS. Right. So creators, there is a piece of you that is. I am creating this thing. I want to show people SaaS. I feel founders are generally the opposite. Where they want to get into their little hidey hole and just like burrow down into the product and the things that they do rather than.
• 40:45
  Speaker B: Yeah. So I find that I do and I find that the founders who are going out there are just growing much faster. Yeah, it's just, I don't have any data to support that. That's just sheer empirical, like what I've observed, pure empirical evidence. I mean so I was blessed to be. I worked for a, for a SAS company and we were very fortunate enough that one of the co founders is very outgoing. He's out there all the time and we grew very quickly I think in large part because he was out there all the time and he still is out there all the time. He's creating YouTube videos, running a conference on LinkedIn daily, things like that. So you know, they, they also have a newsletter that they build and they're. He's doing partnerships and going on webinars. And when I worked there, I mean we got him on a podcast. He was on a podcast or a webinar every single day for nine straight months. And it was hilarious. It's hilarious now he was burnt out. Hilarious now. But, yeah, but, like, and we grew. I think we grew faster than our competitors because they knew. Because the market knew who he was not. And so, yeah, it's just.
• 42:00
  Speaker A: It's a superpower. But how. So the. I understand that at a mental level, but it's still so hard. So what. I mean, what advice do you have for not as much creators, but SaaS or even creators, people who are like, I know I have to do it. I know I have to be out there, but I. It's so hard. Like, it's like pulling teeth to get out there. And God, tweeting every day, Dear Lord.
• 42:24
  Speaker B: Oh, my gosh. Yeah, that would be bad for me, too. Okay, so here's what you do. Start, like. Like, I love having come. You have to find the thing that you like to do. I love having conversations. I love going on podcasts. I love talking to people like this, right? So here's what I would do just from this conversation. First of all, I'm introduced to how you know several thousand new listeners, and that's amazing. But then the other thing. But then I'm going to get the tra. This. This podcast, right? I could get the transcript of this podcast, and then I could go and take that. And this. This podcast could turn into four newsletters without me doing much work. I. It's. It's going to turn. It could turn into 25 to 30 posts on LinkedIn again, without me doing much work. We've been talking for 45 minutes. There's not much more I have to do here, right? Like, I mean, you could use AI to be like, hey, find me the five. Find me five conversations or five topics that. That Keith and I talked about. And then give me the things that we talked about in these five conversations. And then I could just write out my posts and my. My newsletters and things like that. And so I'm just repurposing that content right now. So it's not like I'm even creating anything new. I'm just going to repurpose this conversation. So. So if you go on, like, again, here's what you have to find the things you like to do. Obviously, if you like to tweet every day, then by all means, tweet every day.
• 43:50
  Speaker A: Yeah.
• 43:50
  Speaker B: More power to you if you want to create new LinkedIn content every single day. Again, more power to you. I do not want to do that. But what I like to do is, what I found is, like, I love going on podcasts. I enjoy this so much. I Love talking with other people, I love talking to my customers and I turn that into content. And so what I try to do is like, I will try to go on a podcast every week or two. And so that way I could have these conversations and, and talk to people. And so like just find that thing that you like to do. If you like talking to customers, talk to a customer a week, turn that, record that, turn that into a news, into a couple newsletter topics. Go on. If you like going on podcasts, like I do, go on a podcast every week, turn that into newsletter content. One of the services that we offer is, is because we want to create founder led content and newsletter form. So we were like, how do we do that? And I was like, well, why don't we just get people out to go on podcasts? Because it's two birds with one stone. It's a partnership. They get introduced to a new audience and I get to create content for them.
• 44:53
  Speaker A: Exactly. And there's a great, I mean, not getting into the whole AI content can of worms, but one thing that AI is amazingly good at is taking existing content and parsing it out and saying these are the 12 things you talked about. Here's the bullet points, here's the topics, here's an, an interesting thing you said about each of these. And then there's your outline, just like you're saying. But I think that so many people. And again, I'm trying really hard not to get into this can of worms, but I think a lot of people are like, oh, just throw it into AI. And there's my newsletter. No, no, no. You use it to parse out what you have and restructure what you have and then you rewrite from there. But it's so good at reanalyzing what you have.
• 45:38
  Speaker B: I mean everybody has, has like everybody thinks about. So even if you like. Another thing that you can do is use Whisper Flow, like an app like that, which is basically like a voice to text kind of thing kind of app. So. Or any voice to text app. It doesn't matter. You could even talk straight to chat. Ttp.
• 45:58
  Speaker A: Yeah, exactly.
• 45:59
  Speaker B: It doesn't matter, whatever. But like just talk. You know, when you're going on a walk or you're riding your bike or whatever, just talk to your app and then take that and be and turn that into, into newsletters or into LinkedIn posts or whatever it is. Like don't keep it in your brain. Talk it out and then you could rehash it out and then they'll. The AI is Really great for cleaning it up and being like, oh, wait, this makes more sense if you word it this way. Because you know you were doing something else and, but like you were walking and hopefully not getting hit by a car while you were talking to your app. But like, but, but yeah, so you could do that daily and, and, and turn that into content. But I think you're right. Like where, where people go wrong is where they open up, chat GTP or whatever, and just say, I need a post about X. It's got to be 300 words. Enter. And like, that's nothing.
• 46:55
  Speaker A: I want to hear your comes out of it.
• 46:57
  Speaker B: Like, I don't care if I, I told. I, like, tell people. I don't care if the content is, is AI written. That doesn't bother me. What I want is your thoughts, whether that you, you wrote it with an AI tool to help you or to parse it out or to reframe it or structure it in a LinkedIn post or whatever. Like, that's fine, I don't care. But like, I want to just hear your thoughts. Like, I don't want to hear some regurgitated AI slop.
• 47:21
  Speaker A: Yeah, it's, it's. For me, it's two things. One, it's the humanity of it. It's your personality coming through, like you're saying. And the other one, it's those nuggets of those extremes, right? An extreme of thought or an extreme of an example or something that sets above the average. And that's the humanity that we have and that we have from that, we can bring forth with personal experience and ideas as founders. And the way AI works is just averages. And the problem is that it's going to create perfectly serviceable, perfectly average, perfectly understood content. But there's never going to be that. Well, maybe in five years. Well, who knows? But right now we don't have that humanity. We don't have those swings of highs and lows. We don't have the things that make great writing great.
• 48:13
  Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, the personal experience is like, is what you. I've been doing online marketing for. I've been. I mean, I started my first business in 2004, so I've been doing like, marketing for 21 years. Years. Like, if you've been doing anything, even if it's a year or two, it doesn't matter. It doesn't have to be two decades. It could just be two years. Like, you have something unique and interesting to bring to the table that is above and beyond what some, like you said, some average AI thing is, is going to say, so leverage that. Leverage that information. Like, you've been doing something for six months, a year, like even three months, like you learned something. It doesn't matter. Like, like you learned something that nobody else or very few people have learned and they want to know. So go teach them.
• 48:58
  Speaker A: Yeah. And I think you're exactly right because it is not. It's hard to sit down at that, that computer, that page, and say, like, I'm going to remember awesome things that I know. And it's like, it's much easier. You're having a walk, you're in the shower, you're doing whatever, and you're like, oh, I did that really cool thing that once. Or I remember that story and then. And having it right there. It used to be before all the recording devices and AI and everything, you had a notepad, a notepad by your nightstand. Right. And that was the same thing. As soon as you have that idea, you want to be able to get it out because there's so much going on that you'll just forget it.
• 49:36
  Speaker B: Exactly. And people have more knowledge and more information and are more interesting than they think they are.
• 49:40
  Speaker A: Yeah, exactly. Greg, thank you so much for coming on and talking. This was so much fun. I love talking about the relationships, the partnerships, the own distribution, this idea that we're getting back to where we used to be and really relationships online. I love that.
• 49:55
  Speaker B: It's so much like, give it a shot. This is so much more fun than going into an ad, an ad dashboard and trying to, like trying to sit in Figma or wherever you're creating your ads. It is so much more fun to be, to go and email somebody and be like, hey, let's do something cool together. Yeah.
• 50:13
  Speaker A: It is just. It's hard to get after that first hurdle. But, man, once you get those successes on outreach and talking to people, it's so much fun. It is speaking of outreach and getting in touch with people that are fun. Greg, where can people find you?
• 50:27
  Speaker B: So I am on LinkedIn. I post. I do post a bit on LinkedIn. You know, if you listen to this conversation, you're going to see these posts again. But I also have. You could go to content guppy.com and my homepage is a newsletter and you could just sign up for my newsletter and we email people every Thursday.
• 50:46
  Speaker A: Well, Greg, we'll have all those links in the show notes and thank you so much for joining us.
• 50:50
  Speaker B: Thank you, Keith. This was awesome. Thank you so much.
• 50:53
  Speaker A: Super fun. Cheers.
• 50:54
  Speaker B: Cheers.