Transcript: Storytelling, Not Spin: Founder-Led Marketing with Dan Woods
0:00 Scott The reason we have a business at all is that companies have struggled always to find a way to get what their brain trust is learning out in the content.
0:27 Scott Welcome everybody to another episode of the How Many CTOs Does It Take podcast.
0:31 Scott My name is Scott Horad and I'm here with my co-host.
0:34 Brad Brad Hefta-Gaub.
0:36 Dan And today we have a special guest,
0:39 Dan a gentleman named Dan Woods.
0:40 Dan Dan and I crossed paths many,
0:43 Dan many, many years ago in the pre first dot com boom area.
0:47 Dan That's like the pre Cambrian era of the Internet,
0:49 Dan I guess, something like that.
0:50 Scott Absolutely,
0:51 Scott 1998.
0:52 Dan Yeah, I was working at a company called Starway and Dan was working on a project called The Street and those two things came together and then we recently got.
1:02 Dan got reacquainted. So we're excited to have Dan here today because he's been doing some work to help software engineers like us and product management folks tell their stories better.
1:11 Dan Welcome,
1:11 Dan Dan.
1:12 Scott Hey, well,
1:13 Scott it's really nice to be here.
1:14 Scott I really enjoy your podcast.
1:16 Scott It's fun and it's light.
1:18 Scott And you also take the time to actually wander into the cool areas. And so I just really was excited to talk about what I've discovered recently about founder-led marketing and the way it makes sense of my career in a way, but also the way that it can be applied to tech companies. And I think that.
1:37 Scott And there's a lot of mistakes tech companies and CTOs make when they try to tell their stories.
1:43 Scott And I just wanted to go over some of the things I've learned in my career about that, but also some of the ways that I think founder-led marketing can be adapted to help tell the story of a tech company and a tech executive. The problem I see in the way that founder-led marketing works right now is that it's based on assumptions.
2:03 Scott about how content's created that I don't think are as universally applicable as some people think.
2:10 Scott So, but anyway,
2:11 Scott let's get into it.
2:13 Dan Well, before we jump into it, let's actually pick up the story where we left off. It's 1998.
2:18 Dan I'm in Seattle,
2:19 Dan Washington doing Star Wave. I think you're in New York City doing street.com.
2:23 Dan And what's happened in between?
2:28 Scott When I was at thestreet.com, I was in my first CTO gig because I had been at Pathfinder,
2:36 Scott which was Time Inc.'s big experiment in putting all of its content online,
2:44 Scott which they started in like 1994,
2:46 Scott 1995.
2:47 Scott I spent three years there doing what I wanted to call being an applications editor.
2:54 Scott Because
2:54 Dan Okay.
2:54 Scott I saw technology as content,
2:57 Scott and I thought that it would be important for people to understand how to use applications as content.
3:06 Scott And people got it, you know, and we were able to do a lot of really cool experiments based on the content that was at the time-made properties. And we had the best properties,
3:18 Scott you know, we had.
3:19 Scott People magazine and Time magazine,
3:21 Scott but then we also had the bizarre collection of stuff like future farmer or something like that and all sorts of other crazy, you know, the weather channel and other things like that that were all under the umbrella.
3:34 Scott So we were able to do experiment after experiment,
3:36 Scott like for Money magazine,
3:38 Scott for example, we did, you know, this was in 1990,
3:42 Scott you know, 697,
3:43 Scott we did the
3:45 Scott They always had a best cities in America edition,
3:48 Scott you know, that would declare the best city in America.
3:50 Scott But then we said, what,
3:51 Scott why don't we take that data and make it allow you to tune the parameters of the model so you could find your own best city.
3:58 Scott Oh,
3:58 Scott So,
3:59 Scott that's cool.
3:59 Scott you know, we created a best city calculator where you can say, no, I really like the arts.
4:05 Scott I don't really care about, you know, transportation,
4:07 Scott blah,
4:07 Scott blah, blah.
4:08 Scott And, you know, it was that sort of thing. It was really fun.
4:11 Scott And then that led to.
4:14 Scott me going to the street.com,
4:15 Scott which was another perfect synthesis of my career,
4:18 Scott because I started in 1980 as a graduate with a BA in computer science,
4:25 Scott worked in IBM systems programming.
4:29 Scott Then after doing a variety of jobs, I went to journalism school.
4:34 Scott And I worked at the Bergen Record as a beat reporter covering banking.
4:37 Scott And then I went to the Raleigh News and Observer and worked there doing data journalism way early,
4:43 Scott you know, and also doing Internet applications as well because they were one of the first Internet newspapers.
4:48 Dan I have to jump in there for a second.
4:49 Dan There was a time in history when someone decided that journalism was a better career opportunity than being a software engineer.
4:59 Scott Well,
5:00 Scott it wasn't considered a wise choice by many.
5:04 Scott But, you know, I had been in the tech world and I had been in seeing,
5:12 Scott you know, what tech was like in big companies,
5:13 Scott seeing what tech was like in Wall Street consulting,
5:15 Scott and it was either time to do a startup.
5:19 Scott or time to keep learning and I thought you know I'm reading all my life I was always doing freelance journalism I just want to keep learning and so and so I wanted to become a real writer you know and and so that's what I did I I went to journalism school and journalism school is sort of like art school you know like the it doesn't really kind of there was a paper that was written while I was in journalism school called
5:44 Scott called the unconscious fraud of journalism education.
5:48 Scott And, you know, that unconscious fraud of ex-education applies all over the place.
5:54 Scott whatever it is but the journalism you know fits into that that category which is you know you you have skills as a writer you have skills as an analyst you have skills as a reporter going to journalism school helps those a bit but then you really learn when you go out and you know do the job and so all I wanted
6:09 Dan Yeah
6:09 Scott to do was skip first three years at a small paper so I did I was able to Bergen record which is a relatively large regional paper as my first job and so
6:19 Scott But yeah,
6:20 Scott that's why I did it is because I wanted to be a real writer.
6:24 Dan That's great and then what
6:27 Dan Then So. you ended up in the street
6:28 Scott So I then went to the news and observer and then I went to the street and at the street I was you know very much in my element I was creating the technology to be the foundation for one of the first internet publications You know pure play internet publications.
6:43 Scott It was a wonderful time Jim Cramer who's you know still on CNBC was the boss and he's a very mercurial guy who would call you up and yell at you and stuff like that
6:54 Scott Yeah.
6:54 Scott And it was, you know, the dot com era. So it was crazy.
6:58 Scott And what we were trying to do is, you know, support a newsroom of journalists under the editorship of Dave Kansas.
7:06 Scott And we were trying to, you know, help them, you know, be a successful publication. Now, they all the people there were from legit journalism.
7:17 Scott And, you know, the weird part of it was that they wanted to show that the Internet could be a home for legit journalism.
7:25 Dan Yeah.
7:25 Scott But this was very early on in the ad market,
7:28 Scott you know, and also the the idea of following traffic wasn't a really important idea to the newsroom.
7:41 Scott They wanted to break news and, you know, serve the financial public the same way that the Wall Street Journal did or the New York Times did.
7:51 Scott And so that recipe.
7:54 Scott you know didn't turn out to find a business model because they kept saying over and over we don't want to be a tip sheet we don't want to be a tip sheet you know but essentially that's what eventually it became more much more like you know which is what people want is you know ideas for how to invest their money much less you know legit journalism about you know covering the financial world so it was a great time to be there and you know it's you know it's crazy you know just a wild
8:19 Scott wild time and yeah as you know being
8:21 Dan Yeah.
8:21 Scott at star wave but then i went from there to another startup called uh uh capital thinking which was a commercial loan commercial mortgage loan automation uh system and we did that for three years and you know that was one of the ones where i started in chairman's basement you know and then built you know as the number two you know person hired the whole technology team and the whole company
8:44 Scott uh and you know like many and that lasted until like 2002 and then i made another decision about what i was going to do again should i go back into tech should i go should i try to do a journalism you know career uh but you know i said this is the time to start my own thing and so i started evolved media which the idea of which is to use my tech background
9:07 Scott And my writing skills to help create content about technology.
9:13 Scott And I found a niche in doing that first with SAP,
9:17 Scott where I wrote lots of books that were the foundation of their go to market in the 2003 to 2012.
9:26 Scott I think we've written more than 15 books for SAP.
9:29 Scott And that led into a more traditional content marketing.
9:34 Scott sort of play where I was doing white papers and books and things like that and then that led into you know what I'm doing now which is this founder-led marketing which sort of puts all of that together you know really
9:49 Scott And can you, for those people,
9:51 Scott I mean, founder-led marketing,
9:53 Scott it sounds like probably what it is, like the phrase,
9:57 Scott but can you kind of describe to us what is the essence of founder-led marketing?
10:02 Scott Yeah,
10:02 Scott the essence of founder-led marketing is the idea that founders have star power and they are human beings with multidimensional aspects to them.
10:15 Scott And if they communicate as human beings authentically to the public that they are seeking to serve, they can then build an audience that can be hugely useful to them in building pipeline,
10:33 Scott in raising awareness,
10:35 Scott in doing a variety of other things.
10:39 Scott And so that they end up being a force in the marketing and growth of their company.
10:47 Scott Now, there's a bunch of tricky things about it that I've come to learn as I've and I've been essentially helping people do founder-led marketing my whole career because half of the stuff we did was streams of executive articles,
11:03 Scott which were.
11:04 Scott You know, intended,
11:06 Scott you know, they weren't, the only difference was they were intended for placement most of the time, not for publication directly.
11:15 Scott And the other part of founder led marketing is that direct access.
11:19 Scott Usually it's LinkedIn is the starting point in the hub.
11:21 Scott But the idea is you are directly publishing there yourself,
11:25 Scott not trying to get placed in another article somewhere. And.
11:30 Scott You're also commenting and interacting with your audience.
11:34 Scott And like I think the kind of the big star success story of this is a guy named Adam Robinson at retention.com.
11:42 Scott And he, you know, he does the perfect founder led playbook where he talks about himself.
11:48 Scott He talks about the problems he's having running the company.
11:50 Scott He's very open. He's very creative and he talks about other issues.
11:55 Scott So it's a it's a the idea is that, you know, you use your humanity and and people, you know, founders are often, you know, very,
12:03 Scott very interesting,
12:04 Scott you know, people who have lots of ideas about lots of stuff.
12:07 Scott And then that's why people follow them. And usually they're talking a lot about, you know, the problem they're trying to solve, but not just in a, hey,
12:14 Scott we added a new feature,
12:15 Scott but also in like,
12:16 Scott oh,
12:16 Scott man, I'm trying to figure out where we should spend more time on this part of the product or that part of the product or, you know.
12:21 Scott You know, oh, no,
12:22 Scott we just lost a client and this is what they said to us. I'm trying to figure out how to fix that.
12:28 Scott You know, it's got to be sort of, you know, that that sort of thing.
12:31 Scott You know, authentic is usually the word used to describe it. But but then, you know, as I've come to understand it more,
12:39 Scott I've started to realize that when you apply founder led marketing to a tech company.
12:45 Scott The traditional playbook needs adjustment,
12:48 Scott and that's mostly what I wanted to talk about today.
12:51 Dan Well, okay,
12:52 Dan so that begs two questions.
12:54 Dan And maybe you've already answered the first one a little bit. What is the traditional playbook and then how does it get adjusted?
12:59 Dan Because I don't think it's founders going on there and saying,
13:01 Dan here's what I had for lunch today.
13:03 Scott And can I want to ask a question related to what I think Scott just asked, which is,
13:08 Scott are there.
13:11 Scott Are there specific types of businesses that are more appropriate for founder-led marketing?
13:17 Scott It sounds like you're going to kind of talk about the differences for tech companies. So I'm just kind of curious,
13:22 Scott the standard playbook.
13:24 Scott You know, what who does this work for?
13:26 Scott You know, if you look back in time,
13:28 Scott you know, you can see that Steve Jobs was the ultimate founder-led marketer, you know, in that he had an audience and he directly communicated with the world,
13:39 Scott you know. Elon Musk is another example of that in that they have a direct connection.
13:46 Scott And so, but the most of the time, the founder-led marketing.
13:51 Scott is usually applied to a B2B context it certainly does work in the B2C context but that's already so saturated with the Kylie Jenner's of the world and you know the goop and Gwyneth Paltrow
14:09 Scott They don't even need to call it founder-led marketing. It's just the way things are done in the B2C world.
14:15 Scott The reason there's a name for it in the B2B world is because it's a little unusual for
14:20 Scott I
14:20 Scott somebody
14:20 Scott see.
14:20 Scott to take that role.
14:22 Scott I see.
14:23 Scott That makes sense.
14:24 Dan You know, the example I'm thinking of is Rand Fishkin.
14:27 Scott Absolutely perfect example.
14:29 Dan Originally of sort of SEMOz, and now he's doing something called SparkToro, but he's put himself out there on the internet very vulnerable about exactly what's going on with him and his companies and how they do it, and he's charted
14:44 Scott He
14:44 Dan his own path.
14:44 Scott is a perfect example of a very, very successful practitioner.
14:48 Scott founder
14:49 Dan Mm
14:49 Scott and a very conscious practitioner of founder-led marketing.
14:52 Dan -hmm.
14:52 Scott I recently saw him on a podcast where he talked about how he timed the official launch of his departure from Moz with the announcement of SparkToro.
15:07 Scott So he wanted to maximize and lately people have been doing things like
15:14 Scott Using their funding announcements as a big having the CEO be the main channel for the funding announcement.
15:22 Scott And then using that as a major marketing event, you know, to achieve a lot of very specific marketing goals such as, you know, build pipeline,
15:33 Scott promote demos,
15:35 Scott you know, grow the audience, you know, all of those things.
15:38 Scott Okay,
15:38 Scott so I think the answer to my question, Dan,
15:41 Scott is that founder-led marketing probably works with.
15:46 Scott most businesses b2c businesses you actually see that a lot they just don't call it that and where you really where you see most of this happening is in the b2b space um and we've just enumerated a couple examples so maybe the next really appropriate question is to scott's point like is there a kind of a summary of that playbook that that people typically execute
16:09 Scott Yeah,
16:09 Scott and that's where you get into the observations I have about what should be.
16:13 Scott should be different about it.
16:14 Scott The
16:14 Scott Yeah.
16:14 Scott standard playbook is that the founder is sort of taught and encouraged to start writing in multidimensions.
16:24 Scott Every single CEO at a B2B company you see posting.
16:29 Scott hey we're going to the you know rsa conference or just had a great partnership announcement with this company or you know just hired a great new chief revenue officer or you know all these sort of like hr announcements or you know pr type announcements what founder-led marketing means is to let's let's let's take the pedal off of that official marketing kind of content and let's add to the mix
16:56 Scott Oh, you know what Benny off said about 50% of the work at that being done at Salesforce is just BS,
17:06 Scott you know, I mean, that's just a it's an irresponsible thing,
17:10 Scott you know, why is he saying that it's giving us all a bad name by just doing this, you know, fear,
17:14 Scott uncertainty and doubt sort of play or,
17:17 Scott you know.
17:18 Scott Every time, you know, Sam Altman opens his mouth, he says that people who are 20 in their 20s are using chat GPT for everything, but people in their 40s only use it for this limited thing, you know, and nobody asks,
17:30 Scott well,
17:31 Scott you know, it doesn't isn't that in his interest to say that, you know, to encourage everybody.
17:36 Scott So just stuff with an edge,
17:38 Scott stuff that pisses you off, like it really makes me mad that this is happening or,
17:42 Scott you know, you know, here's here's what.
17:45 Scott Here's the feature that, you know, in our space, in our category that we all have to get right to be successful,
17:51 Scott you know, and,
17:52 Scott you know, if my prediction is anybody that doesn't get this feature right.
17:57 Scott is going to fail and you know here's what we're doing to make that right of course that's on message but but the idea is it's it's not necessarily as much about the feature as it about his struggle as a ceo to actually make it happen you
18:10 Scott It's
18:10 Scott know and so
18:10 Scott the it's the personalizing of the founder outside,
18:15 Scott you know, in the context of their business,
18:17 Scott but like trying to use the word authenticity earlier.
18:19 Scott So it's this notion of trying to.
18:23 Scott create
18:23 Dan Yeah
18:23 Scott the image of the founder as a person.
18:27 Scott Right. And then that idea of that is not every founder is different. So some founders will be deep tech, you know, doing,
18:35 Scott you know, coding analysis,
18:37 Scott and that's their thing.
18:38 Scott And other founders will be really funny,
18:40 Scott you know, and I mean, but the humanity of the idea is that's the center of it.
18:48 Scott And then the typical, you know, advice given in most founder led.
18:52 Scott You know, agencies is, boy,
18:54 Scott you got to have the the the CEO has to write,
18:57 Scott you know, they have to become a social media thinker. They have to do all of this work hands on themselves.
19:04 Scott Otherwise,
19:05 Scott it's not authentic.
19:06 Scott You know, and there are good reasons for for those agencies to say that.
19:11 Scott The reason mostly is that if they talk to the CEO and try to write for him.
19:16 Scott or heard they can't do it because if you're going to write about a tech company you and you're going to write an authentic piece of content even a short one about the the struggles of a CEO you have to know
19:34 Scott The product that they're selling and you have to know the differentiating features of that product and you have to know how that's rendered into messaging and you have to know the category and you have to know the general engineering and marketing and sales and financial processes that that CEO is having to deal with.
19:52 Scott And then you have to know other contexts that are related.
19:56 Scott And so because I've worked in and been doing.
19:59 Scott content for 20 years i can actually and my team can actually write and listen to a ceo and come up with authentic content and so because the way that it's usually pitched
20:14 Scott You know, we have to have the CEO do it. Well, that really limits the number of CEOs that are going to be able to do founder-led marketing.
20:21 Scott Because,
20:21 Brad Yeah.
20:21 Scott you know, how many people are like the stars who've done it right,
20:25 Scott like Adam Robinson or talented writers,
20:27 Scott talented storytellers, very flamboyant, you know, not many. But if you can use like it's sort of like.
20:36 Scott a ghostwriter, but it's really more like a ghost analyst,
20:40 Scott a ghost product marketer would be perhaps a better idea.
20:44 Scott And so that's what that's the first thing that I think, you know, is different than that we are trying to get across.
20:53 Scott The second part of that is that LinkedIn is a great channel.
20:57 Scott But if you are going to be a serious,
20:59 Scott you know, if you're talking about serious tech people,
21:01 Scott they are on all sorts of other channels, too,
21:04 Scott and they're less on LinkedIn than.
21:07 Scott then you know you would think and they're also the highest consumers of ad blocking and you know all this other technology so you know a lot of the the second part of the playbook is that you then see what works and then you use LinkedIn advertising which has a variety of different structures for doing ads they have conversational ads you know where you can promote little individual posts they have you know ads that allow you to promote decks
21:33 Scott they have you know all sorts of other boosting mechanisms for posts and so that's the other part of most thunder led marketing agencies is that they're amplifying using paid media and and the thing about that for developers developers hate marketing technology people hate marketing and they only want education and so the for a tech company the the the
22:00 Scott CEO has to be teaching obscure stuff that that that people would find interesting and that's way more technical than your typical you know authentic for a tech founder is getting into some deep tech you
22:12 Dan Yeah.
22:12 Scott know and and even or even for a b2b founder I mean you see it you know it's getting into the deep the weeds and saying look this is how it works and so
22:22 Scott What we bring to the table and what I'm really happy about is the idea that I can open this founder-led marketing up for a lot more people who won't be able to write for themselves, who can just, we can talk to them once a week.
22:38 Scott then we can you know and then they we have a trusted party to approve our posts and stay out of trouble then we can keep that going without the CEO having to spend a lot of time on then we have to be able to comment based on what the CEO has to say because you have to do a founder-led marketing the sec another part of the playbook is you have to be engaging just
22:59 Scott Yes
22:59 Scott publishing isn't the the algorithm doesn't like that
23:03 Scott And also,
23:04 Scott you know, you need to in order to bring people in,
23:07 Scott you have to reach out to them so you know that you have to be talking to other people.
23:11 Scott This is great, Dan. It's helping me get a better picture of this.
23:15 Scott And I think if I think what I'm hearing and maybe you could if I play this back, you could tell me if I'm getting it or if I'm missing some core points about it. But I think what I hear you saying is, especially for technology companies.
23:30 Scott in the B2B space where their target customers are very technical.
23:36 Scott The only meaningful way to reach them with the founder-led marketing playbook is you need to present an authentic technical voice.
23:54 Scott that is that blend of like why as a founder i even took this problem on the passion of solving uh ai automated um uh telemetry we've got to get i want to i want to i i spent years in devops just watching all these you know telemetry you know signals and and i want to i'm going to solve that problem and i get passionate about that and
24:19 Scott Your agency has sort of found that magic of, hey, look,
24:23 Scott we know this needs to be a deep technical conversation.
24:27 Scott And also it needs to be an engaging conversation.
24:31 Scott And you've got to be able to understand that deep technology if you're going to help.
24:39 Scott Echo that voice or amplify that voice on behalf of these founders.
24:43 Scott Yeah. And also do it in a time efficient way.
24:45 Scott I mean, we the reason we have a business at all is that companies have struggled always to find a way to get what their brain trust is learning out into content.
24:56 Scott And when they use freelancers or other marketing writers or technical writers.
25:02 Scott They don't they don't have the understanding of the technology.
25:07 Scott They don't understand the business and IT context.
25:10 Scott And so that's why, you know, we've written more than 34 books.
25:14 Scott We've done, you know, dozens of hundreds of white papers.
25:20 Scott All of it's about,
25:21 Scott you know.
25:22 Scott talking to those that brain trust and extracting what they know because that's the most valuable news a company has which is what are we learning how to solve this problem you know that's that's that's the news that that their ICPs want the most you know and and so that's understanding how to extract that and you know we've understood there's a lot of we have a lot of our own process surrounding that as well
25:47 Scott And.
25:49 Scott So you've got you hit the nail on the head in terms of like the essence of what you need to do for a tech founder.
25:56 Scott But there's there's a bunch of other jobs that founder led marketing can do that generally the founder led marketing agencies aren't worried about because they sort of give up and they assume that the founder will be the kind of person who will run the editorial calendar, you know.
26:16 Scott instinct or whatever so another adjustment I have to the founder lead page book is the idea is that you can start solving specific communication problems while you stay authentic so you can authentically talk about sales enablement issues that are coming up
26:35 Scott You know, and why those are so difficult to deal with. And,
26:37 Scott you know, you can authentically talk about objections that people have and why those objections reflect an improper way of thinking about the problem.
26:46 Scott You can talk about like messaging that you are trying to play with, you know, and propose it, you know, and test it out.
26:55 Scott You can talk about the way you want your company to think.
27:00 Scott And they will pay more attention because you're bragging in public than they would if you put out a messaging document internally.
27:07 Scott So I think that the other thing that I think, especially in tech companies that a founder-led marketing program can do is serve a lot of other roles.
27:18 Scott It can help with product marketing, with sales enablement.
27:21 Scott One of my favorite new concepts is message enablement,
27:25 Scott which is actually.
27:25 Scott really teaching people how to understand the message so they can use it in their jobs and so you know that that is again a lot of companies a lot of CEOs try to do this but just in a very ham-handed way
27:43 Scott you know where they don't they they don't kind of make it authentic you know they don't make it more personal but just because it's authentic doesn't mean it has to be off message you know
27:54 Scott Right.
27:55 Scott so here's a question dan that you would have some experience with i bet you
28:02 Scott know there's that story that you hear in that famous david foster wallace speech about
28:07 Scott graduation speech about the fish swimming to work two young fish swimming to work one day they're swimming home from the night shift and an old old savvy fish swimming to work in the morning and the old fish asks the little fish you know how's the water and the young fish say what's water and you don't know it when you're in it
28:28 Scott And I would imagine a lot of these founders are unconscious of what they actually know that other people don't know that would be interesting or novel or have a different take or perspective because they're in it. They're like the young fish.
28:43 Scott And I'm curious to know when you work with founders,
28:46 Scott like how,
28:47 Scott what are techniques or approaches or methods,
28:50 Scott whatever,
28:50 Scott I don't know, that you use to help the founders understand.
28:54 Scott and what they know that maybe somebody else doesn't know.
28:57 Scott Yeah.
28:57 Scott So to them, it just seems obvious.
28:59 Scott Yeah.
28:59 Scott When we started an engagement, we have a long list of questions and lots of dimensions.
29:06 Scott So like, what are you personally interested in?
29:09 Scott You know, because if you if you want to do this right,
29:12 Scott you're going to return to themes and people are going to understand like I'm into Indian cooking.
29:16 Scott You know, so, so,
29:17 Scott you know, I write about Indian cooking,
29:18 Scott you know, all the time, you know, I've written blogs about recipes and things like that. Turns out a bunch of my clients were instant pot cooks.
29:25 Scott So I'm an instant pot cook,
29:27 Scott you know, so that's one thing that can be used over and over,
29:30 Scott you know, then you talk about what are they passionate about,
29:34 Scott like, just in general about stupid things that the tech industry are,
29:38 Scott you know, think.
29:39 Scott You know, why, why, you know, people talking their book and not being called on it, you know, is a, is one thing that, you know, my pet peeves, but, you know, other people have pet peeves where they, they, they just don't like the way people think about tech,
29:53 Scott you know, just not, not necessarily only in their, their domain.
29:57 Scott And then you go on about,
29:59 Scott you know.
30:00 Scott why they you know what's the hero story of that led them to the category and what are the points of pain that we're really solving and what are the ones that we do a crappy job on and you know on and on and then you get this kind of like a really detailed persona and then we understand that and then we can help them
30:21 Scott uh we can have an open-ended conversation with them you know where we ask provocative and probing questions where we bring to them ideas like you know hey these guys are doing this based on what you've told us you should hate that you said well actually you know i only hate this part of it i really like the other part of it and you know and all of a sudden then now you know we've presented an idea that then led to the authentic response so um uh
30:49 Scott You know, there's a different breeds of, you know, CEOs are all over the place in the tech world. You do find people who.
30:56 Scott You ever like Chad Dickerson,
30:58 Scott a friend of mine who was the CTOs and then CEO of Etsy, he's a very introverted person,
31:03 Scott you know, and
31:04 Scott Mm-hmm.
31:04 Scott so, you know, you might have to kind of at first tease him out about, you know, well,
31:11 Scott why would anybody interested be interested in what I thought?
31:13 Scott Well,
31:14 Scott because you built this amazing organization and you can deploy software 30 times a week, you know, safely,
31:20 Scott you know, yeah, that, you know, maybe maybe they believe.
31:23 Scott quickly learn how you figured that out you know and then you know once you go oh that would be interesting then they you know they oh that would be that would be interesting oh my god you're kidding you know wait you they'd want to know that much detail absolutely you know so and then of course we're not going to tell the we can't write you know 5 000 word posts
31:41 Scott initially you know eventually you know this stuff can be you know added up into bigger content then you know that's another part of our playbook that's unusual for founder-led marketing none of the founder-led marketing agencies try to think of how that content then gets added up
31:57 Scott into longer form stuff like white papers or books and you know that's what we've been doing for 20 more than 20 years it's hard to blog your way to a book but you can blog your way especially in the world of AI to you know half a book and then you can finish the book
32:18 Scott Okay,
32:19 Scott it took us like 32 minutes into the episode here,
32:22 Scott Before
32:22 Scott Brad,
32:22 Scott AI
32:22 Scott 30
32:22 Scott got mentioned.
32:23 Scott minutes before AI got brought up.
32:25 Scott Exactly.
32:25 Scott So that's a new record.
32:28 Scott So this question has been on my mind for like probably 20 minutes now. I've been waiting for us to get here,
32:35 Scott which is the AI founder-led marketing bot.
32:42 Scott Right. Which is if I'm a founder and I can, I don't know if this exists, maybe this is our next startup,
32:49 Scott Brad, you know, if I can feed it my emails and all sorts of stuff so it can learn who I am and
32:54 Scott Yep.
32:55 Scott then it can go be that avatar,
32:58 Scott so to speak, it's not really an avatar, but you get my point, I think, on the internet. Is that what's coming?
33:03 Scott Is that the future?
33:04 Scott Well, you know, the the the found if you if you.
33:08 Scott You know, if you've listened and,
33:11 Scott you know, read as much about found a lot marketing as I have,
33:15 Scott one of the most common themes is that please don't make your posts created by AI.
33:26 Scott You know, people can tell AI is not doing authentic posts.
33:33 Scott that said it's crazy to not use AI as a brainstorming mechanism it's crazy not to use it for research it's crazy not to use it for and this is what we use it for all the time Google notebook is an excellent way to you know allow you to load up one interview transcript ten interview transcripts and then when you're on a new post you want to say you know what how do we distill what
34:00 Scott CEO says about, you know, this obscure thing that's been covered maybe three times in 10 interviews,
34:06 Scott you know, and then you get that answer really well, very, you know, chunk and then you then you fold it in.
34:12 Scott The, you know, the idea is that, you know, there's huge advances in, you know, avatars and video and film.
34:21 Scott But the way I see all this going.
34:24 Scott Is that as the cost of production drops to zero or close to zero,
34:33 Scott what then matters?
34:36 Scott And then what we're back, and this is a really interesting point that I'm trying to develop,
34:42 Scott this is going to be my next book,
34:43 Scott we're back in a world of drama and theater.
34:51 Scott We are now going to be worried about what's important to say and how to characterize it and how to create drama in telling that story,
35:02 Scott because it's going to be so easy to tell a story that's visually exciting.
35:07 Scott And the question is, does anybody give a shit?
35:10 Scott You know, like, you know, what Netflix pays a lot of attention to is do people finish the show when, you know, if it's got 10 episodes?
35:18 Scott And so we've all watched shows and series on Netflix or HBO or whatever.
35:23 Scott And then all of a sudden, you know, we're at the third episode and we're like, we don't know why,
35:28 Scott but we
35:29 Scott Mm-mm.
35:30 Scott don't want to watch the fourth episode.
35:33 Scott And so I think that product marketing, marketing in general, is going to become a lot more like what they call in the theater dramaturgy.
35:45 Scott which is the idea of telling of crafting the story so it's more effective crafting the the the the the mechanisms of the play so that the story is better served and and the drama and the and then you've used you know several times the the idea of the hero story you know that's a that's a fundamental poetics you know concept uh and um
36:09 Scott uh that's what's going to become more important as all of the ai makes the you know production high quality production you know and then as part of that included in your you know as a carry along for dramaturgy humor you know if you if you Yeah go to a shakespeare production you're laughing half the time you know those you know shakespeare is funny as hell
36:36 Scott You know, even Hamlet, you know, even these dramatic plays,
36:40 Scott they are hilarious and they're hilarious even in super dramatic moments.
36:45 Scott So, you know, I think how can we be funny is another way that's going to distinguish and give you permission to communicate,
36:53 Scott you know, with.
36:55 Scott with the audience and so AI can participate in all of this but you know it's it's and and you know I have friends who are comedy writers who say that you know AI can do a pretty good job of you know writing you know the first level of jokes you know but then you know
37:13 Scott Yeah,
37:13 Scott you raise
37:14 Scott you got to punch
37:14 Scott the bar yeah
37:15 Scott him up.
37:16 Scott I think it's so interesting you say this, Dan.
37:20 Scott I mean,
37:20 Scott I kind of want to challenge you on this and say, yes, today,
37:24 Scott that sounds right.
37:25 Scott I can't count the number of like, you know, LinkedIn posts I see that are just riddled with M dashes and emojis. And I'm just like, come on, at least if you're going to use degenerative AI,
37:36 Scott tell it to exclude emojis and M dashes because it's obvious you use ChatGPT to generate to write that thing.
37:44 Scott So I think there's
37:45 Scott Wait
37:45 Scott this.
37:45 Scott a second.
37:46 Scott Wait a second.
37:48 Scott Are you saying that M-dashes and emojis are a signal of AI-written content?
37:52 Scott Yes.
37:54 Scott 100%.
37:54 Scott I did not know that.
37:56 Scott Yes.
37:57 Scott I am an M-dash user.
37:58 Scott I'm going to have to get rid of
37:59 Scott If
37:59 Scott that.
37:59 Scott you are default in your writing using M dashes, people are going to start assuming you use ChatGPT to write it.
38:08 Scott Wow.
38:09 Scott Why does ChatGPT use a lot of M-dashes?
38:11 Scott I think because it was straight
38:12 Scott Sure, that's a whole other episode.
38:14 Scott Yeah,
38:14 Scott Yeah,
38:14 Scott it's
38:14 Scott it's a whole
38:15 Scott pretty
38:15 Scott other.
38:15 Scott much everything I wrote is what you're saying.
38:19 Scott You know, it's sort of like, you know, people send me DMs and stuff that were obviously written, you know, by AI.
38:26 Scott You know, you can, you can, it's sort of like that, you know, that fourth episode of Netflix show.
38:32 Scott You're sort of like, it just doesn't feel right.
38:34 Scott It doesn't.
38:36 Scott It's just you know, sometimes it's obvious like you said sometimes it just
38:40 Scott feels empty oh
38:41 Scott But I think it's going to get better.
38:43 Scott I mean, I'll just say that the notion of like, to Scott's idea,
38:47 Scott the notion of like,
38:48 Scott let's let's like load up a load up one of the LLMs with every piece of content I've ever actually written email,
38:55 Scott every speech I've ever given,
38:57 Scott and then start interrogating it and saying, well,
39:00 Scott what's Brad's opinion on this?
39:02 Scott Right.
39:03 Scott And I have a feeling that.
39:05 Scott It'll get it. It'll do pretty well
39:06 Scott Yeah.
39:07 Scott on
39:07 Scott And
39:07 Scott a lot
39:07 Scott also,
39:07 Scott of things.
39:08 Scott it's really important to remember in marketing, a lot of it is just educating the public about who you are,
39:15 Scott what you do,
39:16 Scott how to think about what you do.
39:17 Scott And so there's a lot of stuff that isn't the dramatic story that I'm talking about. It's just like.
39:22 Scott you know do you have a sign on your store that says that you sell deli sandwiches or does your store say some clever little pun well you know maybe it would be better if you had deli sandwiches you know on their sign you know you know you have to do all that basic you know education of the market and uh you know and and ai can help you know create clear explanations ai goes downhill really well you know if you have a large body of content
39:49 Scott You know, and so,
39:50 Scott you know, in product marketing,
39:51 Scott you know, you want to have a whole ocean of content that's loaded up into your AI system so that then you can go and.
39:59 Scott you know with prompts and things like that but then the question is you know like how do you get how do you get people to care about that you know if they you know a big you know truth of marketing is that much successful marketing is really about the fact that the pain that people have is growing you know that your timing was right
40:20 Scott And
40:21 Brad Yeah,
40:21 Scott you're you're connecting to people who have a growing population who has that pain.
40:25 Scott That's a real a lot of marketing successes are about timing, you
40:29 Brad timing.
40:29 Scott know, that you know, they're not, you know, marketing hardly ever creates intent that isn't there already.
40:38 Scott Sometimes you can make people aware of intent that they don't that they're you know, that they that they have.
40:44 Scott But to create, you know, intent out of.
40:47 Scott You know, the pain creates the intent,
40:50 Scott you know, the search for a solution.
40:53 Dan Dan, I have a slightly different question about founder-led marketing, and like Scott,
41:00 Dan I was kind of dying to ask the implications of this.
41:06 Dan What are the downsides to this?
41:08 Dan I mean, one of the most obvious downsides to me feels like, you know, when Rand left SEO Moz,
41:14 Dan right?
41:15 Dan Like what's the, you know, like when your founder, if your founder is deeply tied to the product and the enterprise,
41:23 Dan doesn't that put the enterprise at some risk?
41:28 Scott Definitely.
41:29 Scott And it doesn't really matter whether it's the founder because you can do founder-led marketing with senior executives,
41:37 Scott whether it's the CTO or whether it's the chief product officer or whatever.
41:42 Scott And for founder-led marketing to work,
41:46 Scott you don't have to be as successful as Rand Fishkin in building an audience.
41:51 Dan Fair enough.
41:52 Scott I mean, it can work.
41:54 Scott on a much smaller scale and then you know when you when you when you that person leaps and whatever then you you move to the next next person but there are other dangers from founder-led marketing that are really important to discuss in
42:14 Scott every tech company these days you know when we read back in the Starwave era you know
42:21 Scott A lot of the companies that were successful were kitchen gadgets.
42:26 Scott You know, I remember there was a company that got sold for a lot of money that was just a website downloader because,
42:33 Scott you know, everything was so slow that,
42:35 Scott you know, you could download a website to your PC and then interact that way.
42:40 Scott And then you had that
42:40 Dan Yep.
42:41 Scott that tool, you know, sold for a lot of money or there was another one that just.
42:47 Scott put uh stuff on your screensaver put news on your screensaver i can't remember that
42:52 Dan Yep.
42:52 Scott one something wave i think or or whatever you know that was a big deal for a while um and so
42:59 Dan Yeah,
42:59 Scott yeah
42:59 Dan I remember that.
43:00 Scott and so these are like kitchen gadgets you know they're like they do one thing and in the modern world in the world of the cloud of sass of the internet
43:10 Scott You may start out with a kitchen gadget,
43:12 Scott but you are a platform before your first year is over,
43:17 Scott you know, and, you know, the danger with founder led marketing is usually the founder thinks of the story they are going to tell to the early adopters.
43:31 Scott And that story is about.
43:37 Scott Usually what early adopters care about,
43:39 Scott which is like some technical transformation that they want to do.
43:46 Scott And,
43:47 Scott you know, there's a great founder-led marketing podcast called Founder-led Marketing.
43:52 Scott But on it, there was a guy that talked about how a financial planning company,
43:57 Scott their founder-led marketing was all about replacing Excel.
44:03 Scott But they became very successful.
44:05 Scott And then they were serving all sorts of other markets.
44:09 Scott And the other markets were now business people who wanted to do better planning to make their businesses better.
44:15 Scott And they didn't give a shit whether they were replacing Excel.
44:18 Scott So the founder-led marketing sort of reached a limit.
44:21 Scott It was like, oh,
44:23 Scott we're now telling the story.
44:26 Scott of the early adopter who wants to replace Excel,
44:28 Scott but all our new market growth is coming from people who want to just do better at planning to get business results.
44:40 Scott And we're not talking to them.
44:42 Scott We're continuing to talk about how much Excel sucks, not about how.
44:47 Scott you can actually improve your business outcome by improving planning the
44:51 Dan What is that? Wait,
44:52 Dan what's the risk there,
44:53 Dan Dan?
44:53 Dan Like, it seems risk like
44:54 Scott is what the founder dominates the marketing and then you just stay with that early adopter story you don't move to a new story uh because you don't and then you know it's tricky it's like
45:08 Scott You don't want to give up the first story.
45:11 Scott You still want to sell that story, but you want to tell a new story, too.
45:14 Scott And
45:14 Dan Yeah, I
45:14 Scott the founder may not want to tell that story.
45:18 Dan see.
45:18 Dan Because it feels to me like that would be an opening for a founder to be like.
45:24 Dan you know more of a founder-led story like oh i had no idea this would be interesting to this type of business but we start seeing this traction that i would never have predicted and then you get to tell this whole authentic story about like you know i had an idea over here and it turns out people really love it over here and and wow isn't that cool and interesting and like what's my reaction to that as a founder that sounds like an opportunity yeah
45:46 Scott But, you know, they have to become aware of that that's happening.
45:48 Scott And they also,
45:49 Scott you know, if you and if you've built if you.
45:51 Scott If you've been super successful, you know, getting to a large ARR with a certain story,
45:56 Scott you know, you know, you have to, you know, somebody's got to have some cojones to, you know, say,
46:03 Scott you know.
46:04 Scott stop telling that's worked for a long time let's let's just tell less of it let's tell more this you know or at least do experiment it's so you know it's the classic innovator's dilemma just in sort of a different context yeah yeah and then so i think that's one you know problem uh that can happen with with founder-led marketing in addition to the one you said you know and also you know if it's just not natural if somebody you know not everybody's suited to it but
46:29 Scott you know not and and then and the the the uh creativity is a part of it and a lot of companies aren't you know interested in fun and creativity you know they they're afraid of a thing you don't want to be you don't want to be offensive
46:44 Dan I mean,
46:44 Scott but
46:44 Dan there's risk to
46:45 Scott it could
46:45 Dan it,
46:45 Scott be but fun you know you have to usually
46:48 Scott do something a little tricky edgy you know and that you know the the idea of edgy is then the edgy is a big theme in the traditional founder-led marketing idea and so you know because of that it's not for everybody some people don't want to they don't want to
47:04 Dan Right.
47:04 Scott be dramatic and provocative well Dan thank you very much for coming on today if I was a founder and I wanted to get started with this where would I begin well you know first uh I mean you know you know we would love to work with you know founders but but the idea is I think you have to ask yourself even you know even if I can make it happen for you in an hour a week you know do you want to be
47:30 Scott that public you know
47:32 Dan Yeah.
47:32 Scott um uh is that you you know and it can be an introverted person that's you know it can be you know lots of different personality types but you know if you if you sort of don't like interacting with people you know
47:50 Scott is probably not a good fit but if you enjoy you know if you if you introverts are very natural for it but even as an introvert if you if you enjoy learning and teaching I guess I would say do I have something to teach the market you know and then the second thing I would say is I believe at the foundation of every story
48:14 Scott of a tech company even a vector database company is a set of beliefs you know about the truth of what the problem is and how to solve it and you know in every category people there's a the category believes the same thing no SQL databases all share the category belief
48:39 Scott sql sucks and has a lot of problems you know and isn't suited for everything every single uh category uh you ever you know neo4j mongo db data stacks sql sucks um you know so but then there's a difference between a document database a graph database a wide column database
49:06 Scott And there are beliefs that about that.
49:10 Scott And do you really feel passionate about those beliefs?
49:14 Scott And do you want to teach those beliefs?
49:16 Scott And is that really get you excited to teach somebody how to properly think about,
49:23 Scott you know, no SQL databases and wide column databases? So I think that if you have that spark,
49:29 Scott you know, we can help get that message out.
49:33 Scott and then that's a great place to start all right
49:36 Dan Yeah, it makes sense.
49:37 Scott well Dan thank you for coming on today I Yeah, it was really fun. really I really enjoyed
49:40 Dan appreciate it.
49:40 Scott it I feel like I learned something and
49:42 Dan Yeah,
49:42 Dan this is a very interesting conversation.
49:43 Scott well cool I hope it is not another 30 years before our paths cross again I Well, you know, I live in New York City always good for an exploratory dinner
49:54 Dan Nice.
49:54 Scott look forward to it wonderful
49:56 Scott All right.
49:57 Scott Thank you, Dan.
49:58 Scott And I guess that concludes this episode of How Many CTOs Does It Take?
50:01 Dan Today it's three.
50:02 Dan Remember to smash that subscribe button.
50:04 Scott Yeah, yeah.
50:05 Scott That's right.
50:06 Scott Smash rate and review.
50:07 Scott Oh, hey,
50:08 Scott I got my dad to give us five stars,
50:10 Scott Brad.
50:10 Dan I saw a five-star pop up, so I was like,
50:13 Scott He
50:13 Dan okay.
50:14 Scott said he heard I had a podcast.
50:16 Scott I showed him how to put it on his phone.
50:18 Scott Sidebar, Apple computer company,
50:20 Scott your podcast app is so unusable for a senior citizen that is unbelievable.
50:27 Dan Oh,
50:27 Scott And
50:27 Dan my God.
50:27 Scott I said, Dad, you have to give me five stars.
50:30 Dan there you go
50:32 Scott All right. See you guys next week.
50:33 Dan great talking to you Scott great talking to you Dan
50:37 Dan This episode of How Many CTOs Does It Take Podcast was edited by Saffron Epigal.
50:42 Dan Our theme song was AI Generated by Brad.
50:46 Scott Please follow us on all the social media platforms at at how many CPOs pod you can find us on YouTube LinkedIn Instagram Facebook threads X tik-tok and patreon or at our website at how many CTOs pod calm and remember to rate review and subscribe on the podcast platform of your choice thanks for listening