Latest / Content, Briefly / Atlassian: Ashley Faus on human-centered marketing in the age of AI

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Atlassian: Ashley Faus on human-centered marketing in the age of AI · Content, Briefly

• 0:00
  [outro jingle] Hey, and thanks for tuning in to another episode of Content Briefly. Before we dive in, just wanna give you a quick update on Superpath Pro.
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• 1:18
  So superpath.co for all of that. Okay, today's episode is with Ashley Faus.
• 1:23
  She is the head of lifecycle marketing portfolio at Atlassian, and basically what that means is she is trying to upsell and cross-sell across all the various Atlassian products, which include Confluence and Jira, among others.
• 1:36
  So it's a big job because there's a huge opportunity to cross-sell and upsell and expand accounts. We talk all about that.
• 1:43
  She's worked in demand gen, in communications, in product marketing over the course of her career, and it gave us an opportunity also to talk about where content fits in all of these different types of marketing.
• 1:54
  Additionally, she has recently written a book, which will be out in May, and it is called Human-Centered Marketing: How to Connect with Audiences in the Age of AI. Very timely, obviously.
• 2:04
  We talk about the book, what you can expect from it. It sounds fantastic. You can actually pre-order it with the link in the show notes. There's a code down there as well to get twenty percent off.
• 2:13
  I've already pre-ordered mine. I can't wait to read it. Anyways, tons of good stuff in this conversation, tons more if you want it in Ashley's book. As always, I really enjoyed this conversation, and I hope you do too.
• 2:24
  This episode is brought to you by our friends at TenSpeed. Hey, you've been part of Superpath long enough to know that cranking out blogs doesn't do the trick anymore. SaaS companies can't just, quote, "Do SEO."
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  They need a strategy that works with AI overviews and still builds brand authority, and that's what TenSpeed does best. TenSpeed combines SEO best practices with content that wins in the AI era.
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• 3:00
  You can use the link in the show notes to schedule a time to learn more, and make sure you mention Superpath to get one thousand dollars off your first month. Hey, everybody. Jimmy from Superpath here.
• 3:10
  Very excited to be chatting with Ashley Faus, head of lifecycle marketing portfolio at Atlassian. Did I get the title right? That is correct. Okay, cool.
• 3:19
  I have a bunch of questions for you about Atlassian and some of the stuff you've been doing there over the past couple years, but maybe, maybe let's start there.
• 3:24
  Could you introduce yourself to folks who don't already know you? Tell us a little bit about who you are and some of the work that you do. Sure.
• 3:30
  So I'm a marketer, writer, and speaker by day, and then singer, actor, and fitness fiend by night.
• 3:36
  And I do like to combine all of those things, a touch of the personal and professional, and I do bring some of those personal hobbies into my marketing work and framework. So that's who I am.
• 3:47
  I have been at Atlassian for just over seven years at this point. I think I'm on my fourth team and maybe fifth role, something like that.
• 3:55
  So I've kind of made my way around content marketing, product marketing, and now in lifecycle marketing, which dovetails a bit on the demand gen side, but then also on, you know, retention, cross-sell, upsell, et cetera.
• 4:08
  So yeah, all things marketing. I, I have done quite a few different things during my time at Atlassian and prior to Atlassian.
• 4:15
  You know, y- actually, most folks who come on this podcast have the word content somewhere in their title. You don't, and I'm curious where content fits in, not just to the work you do today, but where had it...
• 4:27
  You know, I'm looking at your LinkedIn right now. You know, you've done communications, integrated media, product marketing, et cetera. The content is somewhere in there in all of those things, right? But you're...
• 4:38
  I guess what I'm sort of getting to is that you're approaching it a little differently than the way a, just a, a pure content marketer would, where it's like, how many people can we get on the website?
• 4:45
  Like that type of thing. I would imagine it's different for you. It is different, and I think it's interesting. Content, it's odd to me that content...
• 4:54
  I understand how we got to this point where content marketing is its own discipline. It has its own metrics.
• 4:59
  But the funny thing is that, to your point, a lot of people conflate content marketing with SEO, and SEO is one tactic or one distribution channel within the broader marketing mix that often falls under a larger content marketing team's remit, particularly if you're at a larger company.
• 5:17
  In all cases, you have to have content to fuel the audience journey, whether you're doing that via email, whether you're doing that from an onboarding standpoint, from a nurture standpoint, from a paid standpoint, from a thought leadership standpoint.
• 5:31
  And really, the way that I think about it, if you look at some of the different roles that I've held, it's the, the content piece of it shifts based on the audience intent.
• 5:42
  So from a product marketing standpoint, you're primarily looking at use intent and buy intent content. From a demand gen standpoint, you're primarily looking at buy intent content.
• 5:53
  If you're on the customer success side, you're actually probably looking at it more from a help or a remediation intent content. Intent is the type of content that you would be giving to your customers.
• 6:03
  Obviously, if you're on the sales side, it's all buy intent. If you're on the brand side, that might actually be true-Learn intent or trust intent content.
• 6:11
  And so even if you kind of look through and you're looking for that common thread of like how have you done all these random roles and how does it connect to content, the intent thread, yes, I've shifted my focus on which types of intent I'm tackling, but at the end of the day, that is the common thread of how content and my variety of titles and roles connect.
• 6:33
  Amazing. Okay. That is gonna be our LinkedIn clip that we post after this, so that was awesome. Should I say it more enthusiastically? [laughs] 'Cause I f- I kinda rambled. That was perfect.
• 6:44
  In your role now on lifecycle marketing, this is post-sign up or post-purchase? So we actually work very closely with teams who do all of it.
• 6:53
  So d- we do a mix of traditional demand gen, where we're trying to attract new customers.
• 6:59
  We also work with those teams for expansion cross-sell and upsell, so getting people to buy more of, more of the products that they already have. Mm-hmm.
• 7:06
  Buy more Atlassian products, so maybe they have Jira and we want them to buy Confluence, and/or to upgrade to an additional tier. So we've got free standard and premium, and then enterprise tiers of many of our products.
• 7:19
  And so all of those fall under that lifecycle marketing umbrella. Okay. That makes sense.
• 7:24
  I guess Atlassian has a ton of room for upsells and cross-sells given that it can go all the way up to the enterprise and there's different products within the suite. Exactly. Exactly.
• 7:34
  And this is one thing that is different. So prior to Atlassian, I had always been at smaller companies.
• 7:39
  So I was at two security startups prior to Atlassian, you know, that were somewhere between 50 and 70 people total, and they had one product and maybe two editions.
• 7:49
  Like, they had a standard edition and an enterprise edition, and that was kind of it. And then prior to those two companies, I was at Duarte, which was more of an agency model.
• 7:58
  And so definitely a different style of selling and thinking about that edition strategy compared to Atlassian, which is now, you know, enterprise SaaS. And- Right...
• 8:09
  we've got multiple products, multiple personas, multiple use cases, and then all of the different editions per product. How is content as a function distributed across Atlassian?
• 8:19
  And what I mean by that is, is there a central content team where other marketing teams go to, to get, you know, written stuff for whatever purpose they have?
• 8:28
  Do you or s- folks on the lifecycle marketing team do your own writing rather than kind of hand it off to the writers? Yeah. It is quite distributed.
• 8:37
  So it's been decentralized and continues to be fairly decentralized, again, kind of based on intent. So if you look at, again... And some of this makes perfect sense, right?
• 8:47
  Like, if you're a product marketer, it makes perfect sense that you would be writing a lot of the content around, or creating videos for demos of the product, how to use it, helping to write tutorials.
• 8:59
  You might partner very closely with a content design team. Again, we're a big company, so those different disciplines of being able to write documentation, writing help or remediation content.
• 9:10
  There's some interesting interplay between those two things because all of our documentation is public, and so that means it shows up when you search for something from an SEO standpoint.
• 9:19
  So SEO, again, tends to be more of a marketing discipline, but if you think about it from a documentation standpoint and actually enabling the customers to use the products they've already purchased, that becomes very important to make sure that that's structured well, that it shows up, that it's kept up to date.
• 9:35
  But other teams actually handle that. We do have brand content teams.
• 9:40
  So if you have heard of the Atlassian podcast Teamistry or Work Check, we've done a variety of different podcasts that are, you know, branded podcasts and are more thought leadership or true learn intent content.
• 9:54
  So they're not specifically selling a product or talking very specifically about how to use our products, but they're more about practices and teamwork, collaboration, communication, and how to work better together.
• 10:06
  So depending on the intent, that content tends to be decentralized. Okay. That makes sense. You know, Atlassian is sort of a l- not sort of, it is a legendary SaaS company.
• 10:19
  And part of the origin story, if I'm not mistaken, is that it was one of the first that was a fully inbound model, where customers could come in and it was fully self-serve.
• 10:28
  There's not, like, an outbound sales team, and that goes, like, way back to the beginning. I think it was founded in Australia, right? Yep, yep. Founded in Sydney.
• 10:35
  Are there imprints of that origin story on the business today, or is that... Has it grow- has it evolved so much that, you know, it's changed? There are definitely imprints on, of that origin story today.
• 10:47
  So I kind of joke that we were doing product-led growth before it was cool. Like, everybody now talks about PLG and the freemium model and the self-serve and the flywheel and, you know, the different...
• 10:57
  Like, having a free tier that is on par with your standard tier, where you've basically got user limits as the pay gate versus feature gates as the pay gate.
• 11:09
  So that is, like, a very PLG mindset that, like, you can get the full value of the product for free, and then once you start inviting enough people, that's when you have to pay, right? Like, that's a very PLG mindset.
• 11:20
  So we do still see that. We do still get a ton of inbound folks who come in, they're a single team, they throw down a credit card.
• 11:27
  We actually just, we have a program called Atlassian for Startups that is very specifically focused on earlier stage companies and helping them get the products that they need to be able to grow and scale.
• 11:41
  And so again, when you think about that from a licensing standpoint, we do have...
• 11:46
  Our products are available for free for up to 10 users, but if you're a scaling startup, there's a little bit of a, kind of a interesting crossfade between that free tier and what you need as you're scaling versus how much cash or funding or- Right...
• 12:02
  your ability to actually pay for that. So it's kind of that betting on that future potential that those startups are gonna get big enough that they, you know, we want them to grow with Atlassian.
• 12:11
  So yeah, you definitely still see that throughout the business and really thinking through-How do we enable people to get value from the product as quickly as possible, individually and as a small team, and across different teams versus a lot of traditional enterprises that are using more of a sales-led motion.
• 12:31
  It's very top-down, it's very roll this out across your entire org.
• 12:36
  We're gonna have to put together this very specific pilot for an entire org, not, "Hey, you could actually start testing this out as a team, and then continue to scale."
• 12:45
  So we actually have both motions now, but yeah, we definitely still see a large chunk of the business coming through with people figuring it out for themselves, like we've seen throughout. That is so interesting.
• 12:56
  A question for you, how, like, how technical are you? And what I'm sort of getting at is one of the... I, I'm not a product marketer. One of the things I...
• 13:04
  One of the differences I observe between content marketers and product marketers is, like, there's this big overlap of communicating well.
• 13:11
  The product marketers, I think, are more technical, meaning they're more comfortable with the product, they have a better understanding of how the product works and why it does certain things.
• 13:19
  They know how to use tools like Amplitude or Hotjar or, you know, uh, these kind of like more like product analytics type tools that tell them a lot about the customer, and that's stuff that content marketers are typically kind of on the outside of.
• 13:31
  Y- you know what I mean? Do you find that? How technical are you? Has that been part of the kind of like your evolution as a marketer is, is getting there too? I would say so.
• 13:41
  One, I th- I think there's a couple of things in there. This word technical I think is hard.
• 13:46
  I actually sat on our Agile and DevOps team, so one of the products, the most recent products that I was working on prior to moving over to our lifecycle marketing organization is Compass, and it is an internal developer experience platform, and it is specifically focused on helping you manage your microservices architecture, right?
• 14:04
  When I say that to someone who's, you know, more of a content marketing background, you're like, "Oh, you're very technical."
• 14:11
  And I'm like, "Let me talk to you about how technical I am whenever you get me in a room with the engineers," right? [laughs] Yeah. I don't use Compass. I'm a marketer. I don't know what I would use Compass for, right?
• 14:20
  Like [laughs] I don't manage any microservices, I don't manage repositories, I don't go on call, I don't do incident management, right?
• 14:26
  But my ability to understand who is that customer, what is their workflow, what are these features, how are they useful to them, how do I connect those with some of our other products, that's an area where...
• 14:40
  That's something that I think is unique in my skill set that I'm very good at kind of connecting those dots, and I've been fortunate to work across a multi-product portfolio.
• 14:49
  And again, my current title says portfolio, and people are like, "What does that mean?" I'm like, "Kinda just means I work across all of our products."
• 14:56
  Some of my peers have a similar title, but for a specific product or portion of the portfolio.
• 15:02
  So I think I do find that product marketers tend to be more technical, but I would argue that content marketers, when you mention things like Amplitude or Hotjar, when you talk about Google Analytics, when you talk about Marketo, when you talk about HubSpot,
• 15:17
  content marketing is not a fluffy discipline. Like, they have to do reporting. They have to understand the pathing. They have to understand the user behavior.
• 15:26
  They just look at it on different properties and with different touchpoints compared to what product marketing looks at. Yeah. That makes sense.
• 15:34
  So I hesitate to say, like, you know, technical is an interesting word, depending on... You know, and again, I worked at a secure hyperconverged infrastructure company, right? And it's like, "The heck is that?"
• 15:46
  I'm like, "Oh, let me tell you- [laughs]... the messaging struggles and positioning struggles we had with that," right? And then I worked at a cloud access security broker prior to that.
• 15:55
  So I would argue that my work in those two companies was more technical than the roles that I've held at Atlassian, even though I used, from a marketing discipline standpoint, a lot of similar tools.
• 16:11
  So it's an interesting...
• 16:12
  I, I feel like that's a, a hard question to answer actually because I think there's the craft tools that help you understand customers in different ways, and then there's the actual products themselves. If you work,
• 16:27
  you know, if you work in MarTech, right, like are the product marketers at some place like HubSpot or Marketo less technical because they're using...
• 16:36
  They're talking about product, they're talking about tools for marketers- Yeah, yeah. Right... versus developer marketing, which is kind of what I've done throughout my career in SaaS. So been an interesting nuance.
• 16:49
  Yeah, that's interesting.
• 16:50
  You know, if I were a young marketer, you know, if I were kinda like entering content marketing, especially like where we are right now, which is different than it has been, to say the least, I think going the, the developer, g- going deeper, getting more technical is what I would recommend to someone younger, or like even if that was me in that, in those shoes, you know?
• 17:10
  Of like the hardest parts, I think the hardest things to market are the most technical things and, you know, learning the language, so to speak, is the best way to like build a really great career by kind of niching down in those things.
• 17:22
  It's kind of neither here nor there, but I feel like that's one of the things that, at least at Superpath, like we get leads regularly f- through our marketplace, companies who they're like, "Oh, Superpath can help us find writers."
• 17:33
  It's one of the things we do. And I really struggle to find writers who are technical, meaning like they can write for a developer audience. Really difficult.
• 17:43
  You know, if you can figure that out you can have a great career. Yeah. And I would... It, it's interesting. I would push back on that a little bit because there's...
• 17:50
  You know how in, I think it's, what is it, Dark Knight Rising, where it's like, you know, you merely adopted the darkness, but I was born in it, right?
• 17:58
  [laughs] And I actually think that the proper pairing is a subject matter expert and, you know, a writer or a marketer who both respect each other from a craft perspective. Mm. It's not, "Ugh, this writer.
• 18:10
  Ugh, all you're doing is writing things." Like, no. The ability to underst- to match a narrative with a format and then match that asset to the channelThat is a separate skill set, and that should be respected.
• 18:24
  Understanding the nuts and bolts of CI/CD pipelines and observability and incident management, right? Like, I can throw around all of these buzzwords.
• 18:32
  If you dig half an inch below the surface, you will figure out that I am not a developer. I've never done an on-call rotation. I have never actually set up a repo. I have never actually had to spin up a VPN.
• 18:42
  I don't know any of that, right? It's the same thing with marketers. There are plenty of people who are like, "Oh, yeah, I ran an ad campaign," and I'm like, "Let's play." And you can tell they're not marketers, right?
• 18:51
  And I don't think that's a bad thing. I also would argue that developers are humans too, and it's this interesting dichotomy where on one hand, they dislike marketing.
• 19:01
  What they dislike is people who don't know their world, and I would argue that marketers should not have to know and be a developer. Marketers are a specific skill. Content marketers and writers are a specific skill.
• 19:17
  They should be able to pair with the subject matter experts. That's where the real magic happens. So it's an interesting thing. I, I agree with you.
• 19:24
  It is a rare find, and it is helpful when you can find somebody who has that themselves.
• 19:30
  But then the likelihood that they can also do social, do email, do video, like, content that has to span multiple different channels, it's not just the writing.
• 19:40
  It has to go everywhere, and that's a different skill than technical writing or technical documentation, right? Yeah.
• 19:46
  So that's-- I push back a little bit on that, um, and some of it is biased because I've been really fortunate to work with some super smart engineers and have that really close partnership with them throughout my career.
• 19:58
  And so I see what it can be if you get two people who are willing to go toe-to-toe and respect each other for their relative expertise. Point taken. I think you're right.
• 20:10
  I think that one of the things I see in the content world is like-- or one of the things I hear from our customers as an example is like they'll-- you know, they want writers with subject matter expertise, and I, I think they prefer that, or maybe they think they prefer that because it just seems easier th- to have one person than two.
• 20:25
  You know [chuckles] what I mean? But it's so difficult. The more specific you get, the harder it's gonna be to find the person who can write and has all the knowledge and skills about the thing you write.
• 20:34
  It's just at some point it becomes basically im-impossible. If it's like lightweight stuff, sure. You can Google it and learn it and whatever. It's harder to set yourself apart as a writer that way.
• 20:44
  But as you get further down the road into like deeper, heavier, more technical topics, it is impossible.
• 20:51
  Anyways, um, you have me thinking about some, maybe some like landing page copy that I might put on our marketplace site. Love that. Solving problems as we go. [laughs] I do-- I wanna ask you about your book.
• 21:01
  So you wrote a book. It's coming out in May, which is amazing. It's called Human-Centered Marketing: How to Connect with Audience in the Age of AI, which is the topic that's basically on every marketer's mind right now.
• 21:12
  [chuckles] But I would love to just know a little bit about the origin story here. Like, how'd you-- what was the moment where you're like, "I have to do this," you know?
• 21:19
  And then tell us too about like the process of writing it. Sure. So it's kinda funny. People have been asking me for years if I'm gonna... "Oh, when are you gonna write the book?" "Oh, have you written a book?"
• 21:28
  "Oh, when are you gonna write the book about, you know, this or that?" And I had always traditionally said like, "I just don't know. I w- I won't say never, but I don't currently feel compelled to write the book."
• 21:38
  So I looked at it. Originally, I was looking into self-publishing, and the reality is that the math, the math ain't mathing on self-publishing.
• 21:47
  And I also through that process discovered that marketing for books is like a whole thing, and trying to get it, like there's a whole algorithm gamification thing that you do on Amazon, and there's timing.
• 22:01
  It's a whole thing.
• 22:02
  And I was like, "Okay, so you're telling me that not only do I have to write the book, then I have to get it published, then I have to do the logistics of shipping and inventory and all of that, print runs.
• 22:11
  How, how am I supposed to estimate that? And I have to learn a whole new algorithm? Like, I'm not doing any of that." A-and again- Yeah, that's daunting. [chuckles] For what, right? Like, I have a full-time job.
• 22:21
  I'm happy. I'm not currently intending to do consulting or, you know, what is the ROI of this whole book situation?
• 22:28
  So the actual moment of, "Hey, I'm gonna do this," was that a publisher reached out to me and said like, "Hey, we've, you know, saw your work. We see that you do speaking. Seems like you've got some interesting ideas.
• 22:40
  Have you thought about writing a book?" And I was like, "Well, funny enough, I actually have." And one thing that has been surprisingly nice about writing the book is you have the ability to go really deep.
• 22:50
  And so people have asked me questions. Oh, I'll present a 30-minute session at Inbound, and then people come up afterwards and ask me a bunch of questions.
• 22:58
  And I'm like, "Man, I should've put that in the presentation," but I didn't have time. Yeah. Or I'll be on podcasts, and it's like, "Okay, we've got 30 minutes. Like, let's-- we're gonna cover this topic."
• 23:07
  And so with the book, now I have the ability to say like, "Okay, here's all of these different scenarios and considerations, and here's how these things all interact with each other."
• 23:17
  So it covers my three core frameworks, the playground, which is basically rethinking the audience journey instead of a funnel into how people actually behave, which is they go up, down, and sideways throughout the journey.
• 23:28
  The social media spectrum, which is about evolving how you approach social media and moving beyond not just kind of this broadcast mindset.
• 23:37
  A lot of companies are stuck in this conversation mindset where the goal is for people to talk to the brand and about the brand instead of going all the way to community, where the brand is a participant and they're acting as an equal member with their community.
• 23:52
  So again, that also dovetails with that playground journey when you think about building trust, you think about education, et cetera.
• 23:59
  And then the final piece is around thought leadership, which again, this comes up pretty frequently of like, oh, we're gonna do thought leadership for a founder. Yeah. Yeah.
• 24:08
  That's the-- and now with founder-led brands, I'm like-- I told the publisher actually, I was like, "Maybe we should write an article about founder-led brands and talking about that," because I actually have some disagreements.
• 24:17
  It's timely. That came out basically after I had already finished writing the book.
• 24:21
  But anyways, the inter-interaction between all three of those and really thinking about how to build trust, and particularly in the age of AI, where-You can automate so much stuff.
• 24:30
  You can get so much more content created from an image standpoint, or a written standpoint, or a video stand- like, you have the ability to completely strip the humans out on both sides, and that's a problem.
• 24:41
  And so many marketers are so focused on what the machines are doing and the spreadsheets are doing, that we've totally forgotten that there's a human behind the screen. We're not just leads in a spreadsheet.
• 24:52
  We're not just dollar signs in a dashboard, right? We are actual people. And when you start to think about how humans connect with other humans, that's where you build that trust. That's who does the buying.
• 25:04
  That's where that longterm relationship to actually, you know, win and re-win the hearts, minds, and wallets of our audience comes in. And so how do you actually do that?
• 25:13
  So that's the premise of the book around that building trust and human-to-human connection, and then obviously there's tools, and frameworks, and exercises, and examples for how to actually do that.
• 25:23
  Dang, that's awesome, and very timely. Very... One thing I do wanna know is about the writing process. How was it? I, I mean, how long did it take?
• 25:31
  Like, as a writer, like I aspire to one day write a book, and to me the most intimidating part is actually sitting down to do it, 'cause it's so overwhelming. It's intimidating.
• 25:41
  So the original target word count was around 70,000 words, which is nothing. [laughs] That's a lot. Yeah. [laughs] Like, it, it ended up being about 70,000 words.
• 25:51
  I actually, my sweet spot, I tend to write a lot on LinkedIn, so my sweet spot is probably around 1,000 words. Like, 100 words like for Twitter, like, nah, it's too short.
• 26:00
  A 3,000 word article, I'm like, "I'm sorry, you want me to write 3,000 words? That is so many words. I'm not doing that," right?
• 26:05
  But like around somewhere in the 600 to like 1,200 words on LinkedIn, I do really well with that. Or like, you know, shorter articles, and presentations, like a 30-minute presentation, right? So it was intimidating.
• 26:18
  I had a word count spreadsheet, and so each session I was like tracking the word count. And there were some sessions where, like, I wrote for two hours and got less than 300 words, and I was just like, "This is...
• 26:29
  This sucks," right? [laughs] Right. Like, like how have I been doing... And you know, obviously there was editing, and source citations, and formatting, and blah, blah, blah, right? But...
• 26:37
  So I had about six months to write the book, and I had deadlines every, I think it was like six i- six-ish weeks. And I, you know- Oh, that's helpful. Like from the publisher?
• 26:48
  Yeah, yeah, that's- Yeah, from the publisher. They gave me specific deadlines and a specific amount of chapters that they wanted so that it was...
• 26:55
  'Cause again, for them to try to edit all of that, they don't wanna edit a whole book in one go, you know? Sure. Yeah, yeah.
• 27:01
  So I actually wrote it in about six months, and for the most part, I will say this, it was not as hard as I thought it was gonna be. A lot of people are like, "Writing the book is the hardest thing I've ever done."
• 27:12
  It was actually not that hard for me because I've been talking about this stuff for five years. Yeah, yeah. I'd already done the thinking.
• 27:20
  A lot of people that are writing a book are using the book to think, and so they have to rewrite, they have to do research, they have to figure out the frameworks, right? I had my frameworks. I had my examples.
• 27:33
  I had a boatload of questions that people have asked me over the years that I haven't had the space to expand upon. Right. So yes, I had to expand.
• 27:43
  It, you know, some people were like, "Oh, for as much as you write on LinkedIn, like you could just... You've got all this source material." Fun fact, the source material was only 15,000 words, right? Like- [laughs]
• 27:53
  That's not enough. That's what? Like a sixth of the amount that I actually- Yeah. [laughs]... needed. Something like that, right? But I had already done the thinking, and so I do think that's something interesting.
• 28:01
  A number of people now have commented, like, "Oh, it's your first book. I can't read to, wait to read your second book." And I'm like [laughs] "I don't... What would my second book be about?"
• 28:10
  [laughs] Like, what would I say in a second book, right? And to me, the fact that I don't have an answer, like what would I write a second book about?
• 28:18
  And so I think I almost did it backwards, where I had this whole body of work. Instead of using the book to answer a question, I've already answered the question. I already had the question. I already had my thesis.
• 28:29
  I've already done the thinking. Right. The book was just articulating and expanding on that.
• 28:33
  I think for a lot of people, the reason that it's so hard is because maybe a question pops into their head, and they're trying to answer the question by writing the book instead of having already answered the question and just codifying it and formatting it into a book.
• 28:49
  Yeah. So yeah, it, it, it was hard. I mean, it, it was a lot of nights and weekends. Maybe, maybe ask my husband how it was. Maybe don't ask him. [laughs] Yeah, yeah. Maybe ask...
• 28:58
  My spreadsheet, I think I need to make a word cloud on the spreadsheet. There's some like... I was looking at it, and the sentiment is like all over the place. It's like unmotivated, lazy, demotivated. [laughs] Right?
• 29:08
  And then there's other ones where it's like, in the flow, feeling good, fleshing out, finishing up, right? So it's kinda all over the place. But I found the process to be fine, and I didn't feel...
• 29:22
  Writing a book mon- a book in six months I think is considered fast, but I didn't find it to be overly fast. I wasn't... I didn't feel like I was like, "Oh my gosh, I gotta hustle," like... So yeah, it's a weird thing.
• 29:33
  I think it's awesome. I'm actually, I'm in the middle of Setting the Table by Danny Meyer, which is a great book. I'm really enjoying it.
• 29:40
  And on the very first page he says, "I did not consult anyone else or do any research. This is just like my own lived experiences and the stuff I've learned doing it."
• 29:49
  And I can just like imagine him sitting down and just writing. Like, I imagine him in like one go writing 250 pages.
• 29:55
  But it's kinda like when you have lived the experience, the process of writing actually sounds like it'd be cathartic to just like take all the stuff that lives in your brain and get it out. You know what I mean?
• 30:04
  That's awesome. I can't wait to read it. Is... I think it's available for presale now, right? Yep, yep. It's available for presale now. So it's available, you know, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, all the places you get books.
• 30:15
  It's also available on the Kogan Page website if you... And I can share with show notes. I can share a discount code if you wanna include that with show notes. Oh, that'd be awesome. Yes.
• 30:24
  We'll, we'll put it in the show notes and a link to go get it, for sure. We'd love to do that. Perfect. Yeah. Amazing. Well, Ashley, thank you so much. It's wonderful to meet you.
• 30:32
  Thank you for taking the time, and thank you for giving me an easy LinkedIn clip. Sometimes I spend 20 minutes-