Metigy Podcast - Marketing for SMEs: Recent Episodes
Metigy
An award-winning small to medium enterprise marketing podcast.
We tell stories with businesses, brands and marketing experts to help uncover what it takes to build a successful SME.
Our audio content manager, Daren Lake, sublimely curates an audio-candy episode with a teleportation back in history and a few one-on-ones with Metigy's founders. This episode is meant to be consumed with headphones on so we encourage that you plug in and enjoy all in the hopes of understand Metigy, SMEs, marketing and the potential for your own business’ future.
In this episode you will learn:
- The growing population of SMEs
- The history of problems and solutions (that all relate back to business and marketing)
- Metigy’s technology explained in a simple analogy
- How to solve problems for your customers
- Stopping the SME superhero syndrome
- Artificial intelligence explained through Instagram
- What Product Market Fit is
- Predictions on marketing, artificial intelligence and SMEs
- And More
Quotes
- Daren On Artificial Intelligence explained simply:
[00:15:40] “Artificial intelligence while scary isn't as much about a Terminator future but more about a future that we are already living.”
[00:15:51] The maps app or chess game that you use on your smart phone is specific artificial intelligence. The Facebook and Instagram algorithms that you use right now are all based on machine learning from human inputs to then execute different outcomes. - Daren on Product Market Fit (PMF):
“But finding PMF is When you made something that people want.. Your customers, clients or users just want to tell other people to use your product (without any incentive).” - David Fairfull on Metigy App tech stack:
[00:14:51] “How many different technologies do we use to help us do the marketing function? We don't have them connected, right? The proposition is the need to finally have one true source of all data and could make a great decision.”
“Technology is not being there to harness the value of that data. It (currently) comes back to humans interpreting that. AI is a fantastic application in this environment to process that data once it's all connected and distill it down to the thing you should do today.” - Johnson Lin on getting to PMF faster and failing fast:
[00:20:02] “I can see two directions of how to get us there faster. One is by faster iteration cycle time. How can you do more laps? You run faster. So put that into our perspective. Does that mean we make people look faster or work harder? No, the approach you will want to be taking is earlier validation and fail faster and we can go to the next iteration if the previous one is not working.” - Daren’s Summary on JL’s angle on failing:
“Fail Fast. Don't run and work harder. Fail faster and learn in the early stages” - Brendan rocket ship
[00:21:04] I definitely hopped on the rocket ship in late 2018 and, you know, talking to David and Johnson, they just had a really massive vision. And it was something that you really wanted to be a part of. You know, they told the vision of Metigy with so much gravitas, really that. - Brendan on superhero syndrome:
[00:14:00] “I wanted to do the accounting, the marketing, I wanted to do the customer support… But there's only 24 hours in a day. Unless you're Elon Musk. He seems to find a lot more hours in the day somehow. So for average, normal, small business owners, time pressure is a real thing.” - Thiago Zandonai on what Metigy does:
“You connect your social channels in Metigy and we start giving you insights and recommendations to grow your business. So you just connect them and boom, you're done.”
Before you buy a new fancy smart watch, do you just read the packaging or product description and buy the product?
No, you dig around.
You Google them, check social media and even ask friends that might know about the product or service.
What you’re looking for is real world reviews from real people. This is user generated content or UGC for short.
Find out more about user generated content and why you should use it on this episode of This Week In Marketing.
What you’ll learn in this episode
- The benefits of using UGC for your business
- Real world examples that aren’t watch related
- A simple way you can start creating UGC
You have a shorter attention span than a goldfish. Yes, you heard that correctly! The average human attention span is now 8 seconds. A goldfish has an attention span of 9 seconds. With our decreasing attention spans, it’s becoming harder and harder to capture our audience’s attention online. So what’s the best way to capture attention and engagement online? Find out the answer to that question and more on this episode of This week in marketing
What you’ll learn in this episode
- The secret sauce for creating engaging videos
- Why scripted isn’t always the best
- How to light your shoots
- Editing tools
- And more
For more information on improving your social media engagement
- Click here to learn more: https://metigy.com/metigy-learning/the-simple-guide-to-creating-your-first-engaging-video-for-digital-marketing/
Find Joyce here:
• on Linkedin
Are you publishing a bunch of video content but it’s not working? Is your video engagement low and your audience doesn’t seem to care?
If so, we’ve got the answer for you.
Find out how to polish up your video content and more on this episode of This Week In Marketing.
What you’ll learn in this episode:
- Why it’s not connecting
- How to put stuff out that you find interesting
- Using B-Roll footage, music and more!
Let’s get into the convo with Joyce and me.
For more information on improving your social media engagement
- Click here to learn more: https://metigy.com/metigy-learning/how-to-improve-your-declining-social-media-engagement/
Find Joyce here:
- on Linkedin
Organic reach is declining on most social platforms like Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin, which is the norm these days.
That also means your engagement is suffering too.
Unfortunately, engagement is extremely important for converting your followers to customers or clients.
Find out how you can improve your declining engagement and more on this episode of This Week in Marketing.
What you’ll learn in this episode:
- Why just scheduling content isn’t enough
- The 3 proven ways to increase your engagement
- Tools to use
- The benefits of social engagement
- And much more
Artificial intelligence, while scary, isn't as much about a Terminator future but more about a future that we are already living.
The maps app or chess game you use on your smartphone is specific AI.
But artificial intelligence and machine learning are nothing but data and zero and without us, and they need a human to inform them to do something of value for humans. Tune in and learn from one of Metigy's main chiefs, Johnson Lin.
Johnson Lin has been the chief technology officer and co-founder of Metigy since 2017.
Over the last 20 years, Johnson scaled and led technology teams across telecommunications, internet services, e-commerce, digital marketing and social media. He's the swiss army knife of software developers!
In this episode you’ll learn
- What is the one marketing problem that Metigy will solve for businesses with AI?
- Johnson’s reason for creating Metigy with David Fairfull
- The feeling of wanting to create something
- Johnson fav niche productivity tool
- 3 things that AI will do for small business
- and more.
You can reach Johnson here:
- on Linkedin
Here are the statistics on business success rates: After five years, one out of two businesses will fail. That’s 50%. And before ten years, that failure rate increases up to 70%. But why is this?
One of the main reasons why businesses don’t perform well is because they don’t know how to market themselves. Marketing is the lifeblood of the business.
Brendan Hill is not only employee number four of Metigy, but is an entrepreneur, angel investor and solo capitalist with fifteen years of experience under his belt. Having had his own fair share in owning and running a business, he understands the struggles and speed bumps that marketing for your business has. Alongside the growth the several tech startups, Brendan also discusses with Daren Lake the valuable leverage Marketing AI can have on your business.
What you will learn in this episode:
- What to focus on with your small marketing efforts
- What Brendan wants to do for small businesses through their marketing efforts
- The main problem Metigy wants to solve for SMEs
- Why you shouldn’t be a super hero
- What AI can do for small businesses moving forward
Reach Brendan Hill here:
- On Linkedin
When Brendan met Mike at the time in a startup advisory board, he soon learnt that Mike cofounded the successful vet startup, Pawsum, and led as vice president of global customer success at Siteminder, one of Australia’s fastest growing startups.
The lessons learnt from Mike’s extensive experience through the startup life, starting from the US and now in Australia, will teach you the connection between data and marketing strategy, what customer success looks like and why you need to connect your CRM and marketing automation tools as soon as you kick off your business.
Additionally, Mike also shared the story of the similarities between coaching his son’s football team and coaching his marketing team. Let’s delve into it!
What you will learn in this episode
- Why data is so important for your business
- How gamification can lead to data capture opportunities
- Mike’s definition of customer success
- Connecting the data with your marketing strategy
- Make sure that your applications, front end systems, CRM and marketing automation tools are connected straight out of the gate.
- Why progressive profiling can get the right information at the right time from your customers
- Why you need to invest in business intelligence
- Similarities between coaching a football team and coaching a marketing team
- When expanding your business into new international markets > always read history books for that region.
Resources mentioned
- Pawssum
- Siteminder
- 90% of the world’s data was created in the last two years.
- Tableau
- Stripe
- Airpods
- Atlassian
Book Recommendations
- Shogun by James Clavell
What business would you build on Mars?
It kind of goes back to the fact that our society now is so much built on growth, and we talk about GDP, and there's nothing around climate change, and all the things that are basically we're not exactly doing very right by the world at the moment. So, you go to a new world, fundamentally shift. I like to see a blend of the communal sharing of a company as opposed to just the fact that it's sheer growth, and there's a few people at the top. So, there was a company out of the US. I think it's Chobani. It's a yogurt brand. Once they went public, they shared with every single employee, they all became big shareholders in the company. So, if I go to Mars, I would literally probably do something around mining and terraforming. But every person involved would have a huge share of that company because if you could reset what accompany means, I would completely reset it to where everyone's got to share, we grow, but it's a completely different mindset.
Reach Mike here:
- Mike on LinkedIn
To see the full episode transcript and get a listener exclusive 3 month free trial of Metigy, visit metigy.com
This is part five of five in a mini series takeover by The B2B Playbook
In this episode you’ll learn
- Where to actually start
- The importance of trust
- Using the previous 3 BEs (Be ready, Be helpful, be seen) to help the next 2 BEs (Be better and be the best)
- The 5 BEs summed up
- And more
This is part four of five in a mini series takeover by The B2B Playbook.
In this episode you'll learn:
- What to do with all the feedback from being helpful
- How to use this feedback to improve your business, products, services and general marketing comms.
- And more
Enough from me, let’s get into the convo with Kev & George.
This is part three of 5 in a mini series takeover by The B2B Podcast.
In this episode you’ll learn:
- How to understand your dream customers on a deep level.
- How to be authentically helpful to your dream customers and clients
- And How to create content from the perspective of helping first
Enough from me, let’s get into the convo with Kev & George
This is part two of five in a mini series takeover by The B2B Playbook.
In this episode you’ll learn:
- Why B2B online marketing is all about content. But your content journey starts with your customer, not your business.
- Step 1 in the B2B framework “Be Ready”.
- What questions to ask yourself right now so you can find the right customer or client
Enough from me, let’s get into the convo with Kev & George.
This is part one of 5 in a mini series takeover by The B2B Playbook.
In this episode you’ll learn:
- The foundation of Kev and George’s strategy - the five B's.
- B2B online marketing one oh one.
- And why all of this comes back to what content you are putting out.
- Enough from me, let’s get into the convo with Kev & George
Everybody wants business growth, but is your business growth protected?
With content ideas flowing, networking opportunities being prioritized, and long-term strategies being made, it would be evident that there’s a lot of work to be done. However, integrating legal into the core of the business is an important thing as well.
Because when it comes to protecting those ideas and setting boundaries with your stakeholder network, legal becomes the protector at the forefront of your business. Think of it as your business’ insurance and protection.
Tune in and learn from Myra Beal, general counsel and chief of staff Metigy, as she shares the fundamentals of legal, and what your business needs to apply.
What you will learn in this episode:
- Assessing your business’ legal needs
- The importance of IP (Intellectual Property) and how to contract around it
- Employee share schemes and issuing shares
- The importance of well-structured terms and conditions
- Commercial contracts
- Employment issues
- How to find the right lawyer
Key takeaways:
- Think about legal upfront
- Your agreements should be simple and clear
- Set up your legal as soon as possible to prevent having issues further down the track
- Pay the right person for less of their time.
Reach Myra here:
- On Linkedin
HungryHungry has surpassed 20 years of working with professionals in the hospitality industry and they know incredibly well what the practice is behind keeping operations resilient and growing. Let's tune in to this classic episode where Brendan explores early-stage marketing practices with cofounder, Mark Calabro.
Mark's mission is to get restaurants full again and bring back the social element of going out and dining. But how is he going to do this? Good question. Mark founded Hungry Hungry, a platform that gives merchants the opportunity to engage directly with THEIR customer and improve the dining experience.
Hungry Hungry is now used by 700 food and beverage merchants throughout the US and Australia. In my conversation with Mark, we cover a wide range of topics including how to create word of mouth buzz for your business, how to generate genuine reviews and why it’s important to keep in contact with your business network (and actually visit them face to face).
What makes the story of Hungry Hungry and Mark even more inspiring is that Mark has invested $2m of his own personal money to get it off the ground to save an industry that he loves so much. You can tell how passionate Mark is about the food and beverage industry and it comes across in the interview that I’m sure every early-stage business owner will enjoy. Check out all of the resources and tools mentioned at metigy.com/podcast
What you will learn in this episode* How to create word of mouth buzz for your business * Challenges facing the hospitality industry * Upsell tactics (would you like fries with that method) * Why convenience will always win * How to start a business in an area you are passionate about * Before you follow your dream of opening a hospitality business you need to understand the metrics * Why feedback from customers is so critical for your business * How to generate genuine reviews for your business * How Mark has built the Hungry Hungry community * How Mark tested his business assumptions, invested in technology early on, validated the product and market fit and is now ready to scale. * Why it’s important to keep in contact with your network (and visit them face to face) * The process of building the Hungry Hungry app * Mark’s process of collecting primary data from customers and what he does with it.
Reach Mark Calabro here:
- on Linkedin
- HungryHungry on Instagram
- HungryHungry on Facebook
David Fairfull’s experience and establishment in the social media marketing industry grew alongside the boost of the creative and social media marketing industry since 2011.
So much has changed since then. Artificial Intelligence remains the largest difference between digital marketing that existed then, and the digital marketing that exists now. With copious amounts of information to absorb nowadays, AI is not merely a replacement, but a leverage for marketers to fulfil the easy parts of their marketing objectives so they can build on their creative strengths.
With Daren Lake, David explains the reliance and the large capacity of responsibility AI can hold for your business, and the small progresses he made along the way of creating the brand you see today.
For reference, while this interview by itself is very valuable, please go back to the episode from 2021 titled “How Metigy and Elon Musk are disrupting the future of their industries”. This will help you really understand how important technology is to solving digital and social media’s complex problems.
What you will learn:
- The complexity of digital marketing and how it can be fixed by artificial intelligence
- How to pat yourself on the back for small wins
- Who Metigy wants to help
- Crystal ball predictions around the future of marketing, technology and small businesses
- David’s favorite tech tools for organisation
- and so much more
Notable quotes:
- "Digital marketing has never been more difficult and never more critical. So we're trying to help any SME marketer grow into becoming a great marketer... Execute and grow and increase their sales performance in terms of the way they run their business"
- "There's no egos and no stars in the team. And that to me is a huge contributor to the success of where we're going and what we're doing at the moment"
- "Technology is shifting the way that the entire industry is going to work. The power is shifting for brands to do it themself rather than rely on third parties"
- "Digital marketing's never been more difficult and never more critical"
In this episode, Daren Lake explores the perks of Metigy Ads with Google’s partner success manager, Sunny Lo and Metigy’s growth marketing lead, Kevin Chen.
What you will learn in this episode:
- Digital marketing, advertising’s complex problem and how we look to solve it
- Four benefits gained from using Google Ads
- The benefits of using Google Ads within Metigy’s platform
- Tips, tricks, and best practices
Gaining 14 million Linkedin views is unreal. But to do that organically & in less than 12 months? Uncanny! Sally Illingworth, Linkedin queen, will show you how to do this in our classic episode of Forward Thinking.
In this episode from 2019, we touch on how to create the perfect LinkedIn profile, how to get leads that convert on LinkedIn and how publishing 1 video per day on LinkedIn can increase your profile views by 2000%. With over 55,000 pieces of content published on LinkedIn every second, Sally shares exactly how to produce content that cuts through the noise and delivers results for your business. For any business owner who doesn't know how to get started and begin leveraging the massive power of LinkedIn, this episode is a must-listen.
Check out all of the resources and tools mentioned at metigy.com/podcast
What you will learn:
- How to start your content marketing strategy for your business
- How to maximize your content reach > lessons from gaining 14 million organic content views on LinkedIn
- How publishing 1 video per day on LinkedIn can increase your profile views by 2000%
- How cooking Australia’s largest pizza resulted in priceless PR and engaging content
- Why LinkedIn is the best platform for personal branding
- How to create the perfect LinkedIn profile
- How to get leads that convert through LinkedIn
- Creating content assets that create emotional connections with prospects
- Type of content that the LinkedIn algorithm is rewarding the most
- How to maintain content production in your business
- How to produce 30 videos from 1 pillar article
Resources mentioned in this episode:
- Linkedin as a content publishing platform
- Hubspot
- Mailchimp
- Inshot
Linkedin influencers to check out:
- Shay Rowbottom
- Mark Metry
- Sally A Illingworth
In this episode we sit down with the senior account manager of Sling & Stone, Sophia Aiano, to discuss the fundamentals of public relations and how you can catapult your business into the public eye.
What you will learn in this episode:
- The problem of small businesses not having any visibility
- What PR is exactly in the context of helping an SME.
- Actionable tasks that they implement immediately
Reach Sophia here:
- On Linkedin
Watch and learn:
Watch the video podcast to see Metigy's client, Daren Lake walk through Creative Services' visual assets and how they increased his engagement rates by ten fold.
Introduction:
DLake Creates is an endurance sport brand that is headed up by Daren Lake. He focuses his efforts on serious and committed endurance athletes that want to perform better as they age.
His brand has a podcast, social media content (long and short form video, photos, graphic illustrations, etc.) and a newsletter.
His main objective is to “own” his audience as much as possible. On most platforms you are renting your audience. He wants to be able to directly communicate with them.
- Objective 1 - Sign up for his email newsletter
- Objective 2 - Listen to the podcast (then have super fans share it out)
He is focusing a lot of his content on visuals. The best way to promote audio is through visuals like photos, video and design.
This is where Metigy’s Creative Services Can Help.
What you will learn in this episode:
- About DLake Creates
- Dlake Create's social media engagement status prior to using Metigy's Creative Services
- A range of creative assets that Creative Services can generate for you
- Post-performance analytics
Resources:
- Metigy Creative Services
- DLake Creates
Metigy's bringing back one of Forward Thinking's classic episodes from 2019: Growth Marketing – How Anna Cheng Grew Spaceship to $100m in 4 months.
In this episode with Brendan Hill, they cover a wide range of marketing topics including activation, onboarding and her use of pirate metrics. Anna also deconstructs exactly how she built a pre-launch viral waitlist that resulted in 40,000 contacts.
For any business owner who is looking to take their growth marketing strategy to the next level, this episode is a must-listen.
Resources mentioned in this episode
- The difference between growth marketing and growth hacking
- Pirate Metrics – The AARRR Framework (acquisition, activation, retention, referral, revenue)
- 25% increase in your activation metric will lead to a 48% increase in your annual recurring revenue.
- How to improve activation
- How to improve your user onboarding
- Develop customer personas
- Why analysing competitors can save you time and money
- How Anna grew Spaceship to $100m from being employee number 3
- Why it’s important to phone new customers and get their feedback
- Using waitlists to get 40k people on prelaunch list
- Don’t try to scale when you’re not ready to scale
Resources mentioned in this episode:* Mailchimp onboarding process * Asana * Spaceship * SEMrush * ahrefs * Canva * Mike Cannon-Brookes * Robinhood * Segment.io * Mixpanel * Autopilot * Brian Balfour * Sam Zheng * Andrianes Pinantoan * Curious Thing
Book Recommendations:* Traction by Gabriel Weinberg * The Lean Startup by Eric Ries * Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely
What business you would build on Mars?I think if we were to avoid like the obvious answers, which are getting monopolies over resources that everyone needs like water and housing and things like that, I would probably open the first bank there. I think the best way to make money is to help other people make money. I was thinking about this question, with so many business opportunities that you can capitalize on, the best way to do it is just to give people the capital in order for them to achieve those particular dreams that they also might have in regards to what sort of businesses they want to open.
The first thing I’d open is probably a bank or an investment firm or something like that, which basically allows people to borrow or give up some of the equity in order to build out their first businesses, which might be that monopoly of water or that monopoly of food or the next Amazon.
Get in touch with Anna:* Anna on LinkedIn * Anna on Twitter
So you have finalised your product, started scheduling content on your social media platforms, and initiated ads for your business. But what would be the next step?
For all businesses, establishing could be the hardest part. And in the process, it is inevitable that there will be pinpoints and lessons for you to learn along the way. This is what leads to the next part of running your business - reiteration and augmenting.
Brendan Hill explores this practice with Sophie Pank, marketing director of Deputy APAC. She is a driven marketing professional with over 14 years experience working in Financial Services and scaling tech businesses in Sydney, London and Dubai and has previously worked for leading global brands such as The Commonwealth Bank of Australia, AIMIA, Morgan Stanley, American Express.
Sophie is passionate about building strong business relationships and working with like-minded individuals who are fanatical about best in class marketing and customer experience. She has a proven track record in delivering world-class marketing campaigns. Her style is to roll up her sleeves and get her hands dirty and she inspires her team to do the same with a good dose of laughter and energy along the way. Her skills include end-to-end marketing delivery, partner management, new product development, project management and marketing strategy.
What you will learn in this episode:
- The benefits of building strong relationships with stakeholders
- Renewing your product marketing with customer feedback
- The importance of customer testimonials and how to retrieve it
- One successful tactic on how to gain customer insights on your product
- The process from recording customer experience to reiterating your product market fit
- Useful advice on how to build successful marketing campaigns
Notable quotes:
- “It’s a very different conversation and experience for a customer - if you show empathy rather than just telling them buy, buy, buy”
- “Put yourself in the shoes of a customer”
- “It’s about experience. Getting in there, making mistakes, failing fast, learning quickly and pivoting”
Resources mentioned:
- Hubspot
- Intercom
- Salesforce
- Marketo
Book recommendations:
- Strategyzer’s Value Proposition Canvas Book
Reach Sophie here:
- On Linkedin
Prav De Silva, founder and chief growth officer at The Thoughtful Agency said it best - “email marketing is dead for people that aren’t using it correctly.”
After ten years of experience working for large brands and icons like Glue Store, Tiger Mist, Sydney’s Bondi Icebergs, and Tim Cahill and Cahill+, Prav takes a different approach to convert his engagement into sales. His work with his team at The Thoughtful Agency specialize in a range of strategies, from digital and e-commerce to CRM marketing. Learn some of his and The Thoughtful Agency’s practices in this episode.
What you will learn from this episode:
- What to brainstorm before initiating an e-commerce strategy
- Applying an influencer-marketing strategy
- Optimizing your email marketing with customer segmentation
- How to reactivate an inactive customer
- Identifying the email automation workflow
- The psychology behind email competitions
- The effects applying dynamic retargeting on your sales
Notable quotes:
- “Email marketing is dead for people that aren’t using it correctly”
- “One of the most successful executions we've done is a unique experience. So it could be a trip to Palm Springs. It could be a trip to Bali.”..
- “Australians love to travel, right? So you put up a trip in front of them, sponsored by the brand. And you're able to generate, you know, close to seven, 10,000 new database subscribers”
- “Treat influencers like media”
Resources mentioned:
- The Thoughtful Agency
- MailChimp
- Drip
- Shopify
- JD
- Snappic
Book recommendations:
- Lynchpin by Seth Godin
- Seth Godin’s blog
- Principles by Ray Dalio
What business would you build on Mars?
Business is one of these things that you need to be there and be on the ground to figure out what the actual business is and what you are going to call it. But let's just say the stepping stone to that before we'd get there is probably to contact Elon Musk and ask him if we could give away a Tesla or something that we could use on Mars, similar to a Tesla.
Love the brand that Tesla created obviously. It has great prestige. Use that as a magnet to get people to enter a unique experience. So be driven around in Tesla, around Mars and all the people that enter - we're going to get their database and data. So every single product that’s sold once people arrive you know, you're going to be the commercial point there towards launching a lot of conversations.
Reach Prav here:
- on Linkedin
- The Thoughtful Agency on Instagram
Mark is a business growth mentor using his dual background as a chartered accountant and sales and marketing. He enjoys bringing his two decades of experience honed in Sydney, London, and New York to small to medium enterprises across a wide range of industries. Mark's biggest ambition is having formed his consultancy, Own Your Mark, to allow business owners to create better home lives for themselves and spend more valuable time with their families.
What you will learn in this episode:
- How to ultimately defeat “superhero syndrome”
- Tangible ways to spend more time on your life, outside of the business
- Incorporating a two-week time audit into your working-life
- 5 steps to implement to defeat work
- Polishing your decision-making in the hiring process
- Mark’s perspective on CRM benefits
- How to outsource different tasks
- Working as a synergy with your partner at work
Notable Quotes:
- “What it ends up being for most people is they spend 80% of their time doing things which are not the core reason why they started their business, and consequently, they're things that they're not great at doing, and they're the things that stress them”
- “We come from a world where everyone is so scared of technology and robots and they're gonna take our jobs, but the reality is we can work hand in hand with the robots and they can do amazing things for us, so after we've eliminated and automated, then we outsource”
- “It's actually necessary to take some tasks back in rather than leaving them as automated… Let's turn them back into real human touch processes because we found that when we automate things, it doesn't work for our staff or our customers”
Resources mentioned:
- ownyourmark.com.au
- Dubsado
Book recommendations:
Donald Miller’s
- Building a story brand
- A Million Miles in a Thousand Years
What business would you build on Mars?
I would start an environmentally friendly waste disposal business. It would center around the full gamut of waste disposal, recycling, and repurposing of things. What that would be really doing is appealing to the fears of those people who are the new settlers of Mars. I'd illustrate in my marketing, Mars as it is now and Mars as it is in a couple of hundred years' time and how it's totally degrading, and how we had this really great opportunity to create an amazing planet and not to stuff it up again as the same way as we have done with Earth, and really appealing to their sense of legacy because you, as a settler, are gonna be seen as one of the first 100 people on the planet of Mars. Do you want to be remembered for someone who really made it into a remarkable place or do you want to be remembered as one of those selfish people that got it wrong and stuffed it up?
So I always say to people, it's not, when looking for a business to start or a business to promote, it's not about always the sexiest ones. It's about getting the fundamentals right and finding a niche that has a lot of demand.
It might not be sexy to other people and it's not being done well by others…I think waste disposal, one of those things, is gonna be highly necessary and every household needs it. Every business needs it, so it's got a really strong, fundamental, commercial proposition.
Reach Mark here:
- on Linkedin
When it comes to design and branding your business or making the perfect logo, where do you start? Brendan Hill had a one-on-one with Hayden Bleasel at the time he was the director and lead product designer at Jellypepper. Since then, he has advanced on to becoming the chief design officer of Corellium, where he leads the product and design teams.
What you will learn in this episode:
- How Hayden started his agency in the branding space
- How to work with big brands in the branding field
- The blueprint of helping a client with product design
- The best way to get your first iteration of logo and branding
- The meaning of a “minimum beautiful product”
- The deep meaning behind a logo
- The process behind rebranding a business
- How to implement creative problem solving
Resources mentioned:
- Corellium
- Jellypepper
- Spaceship
- Blackbird
- Airtree
- Grok
- Brighte
- 99 designs
- Fiverr
- Baraja
- Ueno
- MetaLab
- Otter
- Clear Motion
- Xero
- Tobias van Schneider
Design tools:
- Dovetail
- Illustrator
- Framer
- Sketch
- Figma
- Adobe XD
- Notion
What business would you build on Mars?
I’m tempted to say Instagram just because I think it would be really funny to see a thousand filtered pictures of red dirt everyday - everyone just commenting on each other’s red dirt.
I would probably do an interplanetary telco. That would be really fun. The first thing you’d want to do when you land on Mars is to check in back home, see how everything is going and the branding of that would be so easy. Tug at the heartstrings.
Reach Hayden Bleasel here:
- on Linkedin
- on Twitter
- on his website
After working in Marketing and PR for the video game and entertainment industries in the UK and Europe, Meisels founded CANDICE PR. After eight years, this agency continues to assist with PR and digital strategies for B2C and B2B clients across Australia and New Zealand
With her deep experience with PR and for journalism, Candice has a plethora of knowledge that can help your business increase its brand awareness and obtain media coverage
What you will learn in this episode:
- The power of your story and your 'why'
- How your expertise can get you media opportunities
- The beginning steps of applying PR to your growth strategy
- How to pitch you or your business effectively to agencies
- Where public relations fit in the marketing mix
- The power of public relations
Notable quotes:
- "Your story and your why is your most powerful asset when it comes to your brand, your marketing and your PR"
- "Sit down and write down your story in your voice and in first person. Around 600-800 words and pitch that story to media outlets because your story is what makes you different"
- "You really need to think about what media your target audience consumes. Then target those outlets"
- "Go on Google. Most of the journalists are there. You can go straight for the editor… I always say reach for the top. Go for the highest and they can always forward you onto another contact."
Resources mentioned:
- Sourcebottle
Book recommendations:
- The power of PR: PR for Small businesses by Candice Meisels
- Chip and Dan Heath's
- The power of moments
- Made to stick
- Decisive
What business would you build on Mars?
I would bring earth water to Mars. Water would be a problem there! It’s scarce to find and it’s riddled with dust and salt. I would bottle earth water and promote to martians. I’d have to find out what language they speak and get a press release written and translated. I’ll find out what news outlets there are on Mars as well as lots of sampling opportunities if they’ve got stores - in-store promotions.
Reach Candice here:
- on Linkedin
Brain Lim is a telecommunications entrepreneur who persevered through naysayers and pessimists about his idea that crosses between the space industry and telecommunications.
He’s networked and supported over 1,000 startups across six continents and has raised more than USD $5million dollars for the companies he has founded.
As the founder and CEO of Dandelions (formerly known as Wise Consulting), Brian integrates emergency services, space logistics and on-demand Internet of Things (IOT) to build solutions for public safety.
What you will learn in this episode:
- Why business owner’s objectives are to reach the highest level of Maslow’s pyramid - Self Transcendence
- The Importance of having a mentor and how to get a one that’s suitable for you
- The shared economy of talent, kindness and experience
- Persevering through business failures and gaining self-confidence
- The start to Dandelions (FKA Wise Consulting) and its ideation to process
- The process behind speed-reading and note-taking
- The four beautiful minds (Buddhism)
Notable quotes:
- "The world doesn't work on self-interest - The world runs off self transcendence"
- "A lot of people’s success have come from individuals that have such high levels of transcendence that they sometimes forget to take care of themselves"
- "Every high performance athlete, business person, priest in a church - everyone had a mentor"
- "Is be kind and generous to everyone, to the best of your ability. You don't know what they'll return to you as a favor or you know how they will give back"
Resources mentioned:
- Dandelions (FKA Wise Consulting)
- Catalyser
- World Food Program
- Richard Branson
Book recommendations:
- Extreme Ownership by Jocko Willink
- Robert Greene’s
- 33 Strategies of War
- The Laws of Human Nature
- The Art of Seduction
- Mastery
- Jordan Peterson’s
- 12 Rules of Life
- Maps of Meaning
- Science of Social Influence, frontiers of social psychology
- The Lucifer Effect by Philip Zimbardo
- One Sentence Persuasion by Blair Warren
- The Kybalian by Three Initiates
What business would you build on Mars?
Would you like a return ticket to Mars? Don't you miss the food, the family that you left behind? It's a great adventure Mars, but at some point you just want to go home and have your dinner with your loved ones. So come. Trip to earth. One way ticket too!
Reach Brian here:
- on Linkedin and Twitter
Shane Allison is the CEO and founder of Public Address, a media relationships management platform that helps PR professionals develop stronger relationships with journalists and secure more coverage.
Being a part of the industry for almost a decade, he has seen the pros and cons for his clients and the media. He’s also celebrated a few wins including the Provoke Media’s Innovator 25 Asia-Pacific class of 2020, winning the 2018 PR professional of the year and the inaugural Mumbrella neXt Award for PR talent.
With this, he comes in to drop a wealth of knowledge that you can absorb!
What you will learn in this episode:
- Why PR is a great long term investment
- How to turn around bad PR
- Ways you can reach out to journalists and get top of mind
- How to be more confident and tough in your industry
- Methods to deal with negative comments
- The media management platform, Public Address and its goals
Notable quotes:
- "Even if LinkedIn isn’t a relevant channel for you and your brand, it’s a great way to continue to shape and refine your thoughts and to make sure you’ve got an opinion on where your industry has gone"
- "All a journalist wants is appropriate content which is going to be relevant to the readers, guides, listeners or viewers… Shape your message, make sure that you've got a strong, compelling opinion"
- "For startups and small businesses, it’s about backing yourself the same way you would to a client and to the media. Making yourself available. Treat media like a client"
Resources mentioned:
- Public Address
- Sinorbis
- Talktrack podcast
Book recommendations
- Good Strategy / Bad Strategy by Richard Rumelt
What business would you build on Mars?
I think what I would do is start the transportation/logistics business, right? Because you look at, uh, you look at the founding of Mars and it's analogous to the founding of America. You know, it's a group of settlers to a new land building and building new communities and what connects communities? Logistics.
So whether it's a railway, whether it's fibre on Mars, whether it's, starting off with a small pack of runners who just help people move stuff between the different houses in the first settlement. I think I would start a logistics and transportation business. The thing that I would do to promote that is actually by providing a really excellent service because I think people get caught up in PR and go “We need to PR this. We need to spend a lot of money on this''.
There's no point in spending money on something if you don't have great service and great customer service to start with, I think people look to PR to fix problems, whereas PR can't fix a broader business problem. And if you're getting the basics right, your PR out will completely bird sail.
Whether it's through word of mouth and that word of mouth then reaching a journalist or people speaking about it online. It’s actually getting the basics right which count more than anything
Reach Shane here:
- On Linkedin
Wondering what great companies do differently than the rest? Tune into this episode for some golden advice.
While working across 13 countries as a senior leader at Google, Hiam Sakakini mentored thousands of google managers and watched the company grow from 21 billion to 110 billion in revenue. Now transforming companies’ cultures as the CEO and founder of The Culture Equation, Hiam is able to mentor scaleups that are pre or post series B!
Without a doubt, Hiam has plenty of valuable knowledge to drop for business leaders and motivated workers who wish to incorporate more value to their teams in their own company and across industries.
What you will learn in this episode:
- How Google's interview process peaked Hiam’s interest in leadership development
- What the hiring process of Google can teach your business about leadership
- Why it’s a pitfall to promote someone who is simply exceeding expectations
- Practices your business can do to keep employees happy
- What working across 13 countries can teach you about working with a diverse culture
- Tools that can help you prioritise tasks in your startup
- Hiam’s verdict on on what your business could look like in 20-30 years
- Using creativity and problem solving to future-proof yourself
Notable Quotes:
- “We’ve got to think differently about how we promote people into managing other people.”
- “What’s exciting about coaching being the number one attribute of great leaders is that it flips the whole thinking around autocratic leadership to more servant leadership”.
- “The only way of overcoming those challenges is through your people. Not moving your people around like pawns but actually working through them.”
- “When they come to you with a challenge rather than giving them what you think is the answer, you ask them the questions that make them come up with the answers themselves. That’s what makes them feel more empowered.”
- “Culture is your autoimmune system. It fights the bad things that try to attack an organism and allows good things in”
Resources mentioned:
- Project oxygen Google’s 10 great traits of leaders and managers
- Asana
- Virtual Hub
- Xero
Book recommendations:
- Work Rules by Laszlo Bock
- Mindset by Carol Dwax
- When by Daniel H. Pink
What business would you build on Mars?
Now just to confirm when you get to Mars, there’s no way back, right? I just can’t deal without food and cafe, so it’d have to be a cafe. Maybe martians like food and coffee. Who knows!
Flat white - strong. And equal! Maybe that’s something that’ll bring us together with our hosts on Mars. Maybe they can have their own menu and we can have our own menu and try each other’s out.
Reach Hiam here:
- on Linkedin
and The Culture Equation:
- on Linkedin and Facebook
After being a digital marketing and ecommerce specialist over the last decade, Manu founded Nuver Digital in 2016 to help small local businesses and online e-commerce shops get customers immediately.
Nuver Digital’s unique position in the market is that they focus more on direct marketing to your target customer instead of general branding.
What you will learn in this episode:
- Leveraging the power of Facebook Ads
- How much your business should spend on ads a day
- The process behind optimising your Facebook Ads
- Re-marketing to your target market and using Facebook Pixel
- Tools for managing multiple clients at a time
Notable quotes:
- “Zuckerberg’s up there spending billions on getting this right. I think the best thing is to trust that algorithm. Let Facebook optimise for every placement it has available.”
- “Start off with three different types (of ads), see which one hits off with the audience, then take that type and expand on it”
- “Getting people to purchase something when they haven’t even seen it physically is something i’m looking forward to becoming an expert at”
- “The platform works, it’s just whether or not the platform works for you”
Resources mentioned:
- Nuver
- Zappos
- Hi-smile
- Zapier
- Shopify
- Fiftysix Creations
Book recommendations:
- How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie
- Gary Vaynerchuck podcast
What business would you build on Mars?
If Musk is taking us to Mars, I’m hoping he’s got most of our stuff sorted out. I hope he’s sorted out our food, housing supplies and water when we get there so hopefully we’re not starting from the caveman days again.
People might be bored and need some entertainment. I think it would be cool to start a sports club. The first Anytime Mars where people can have a basketball, a volleyball court, play some table tennis, play fuzzball… People on earth would definitely want to know what its like up there. Hopefully we’ll have internet up there and I’ll start my instagram page and start being an influencer. I’ll document my Mars day to day life… Maybe I’ll get people to pay me to advertise their stuff.
Reach Manu here:
- onlinkedin
So you've established your business and you want to generate more traction on your website and online. Google Ads is a great tool to initiate that! Here's Kevin Chen, our marketing lead, with three main steps on how you can optimise the performance of your Google Ads.
What you will learn in this episode:
- How to think like your customer
- Understand how Google Ads work
- How to utilise audiences as much as possible
In this episode we have WORK180’s Co-CEO and founder, Valeria Ignatieva.
Valeria's passion and expertise is in gender diversity, recruitment and employee engagement. And as Mark Puncher from Employer Branding Australia says “She's a thought-leader without the hype and a strategist with rolled-up sleeves. If you're working on diversity, talk to her”.
WORK180 connects women with progressive employers by pre-screening companies on amount of paid parental leave, pay equity, flexible working and much more. Transparency around these policies is driving incredible change; on average, once every two weeks a WORK180 Endorsed Employer improves a policy or benefit.
Founded in 2015, WORK180 is backed by Atlassian’s private investment fund Skip Capital and raised over $5.8m in venture capital.
What you will learn in this episode:
- How the push for transparency facilitated a positive social impact for female workers
- How WORK180 grew from the ground up with $20,000 and campaigns on diversity
- Tips on gaining event traction in the early days
- The benefits of building a strong Facebook group
- Networking with the right people to grow your startup
- How anonymity drives Facebook engagement and facilitates valuable and shareable content
- Changing careers with transferable skills
- How to grow your business globally while working remotely
- Preparing your candidates and employees with the agile environment of startups
- Setting boundaries when you’re working from home
Notable quotes:
- "It’s going to take over a hundred years to close that gender equality gap"
- "Through transparency, we have employers now changing their policies at a rate of one employer every three weeks, sometimes more"
- "Don’t look for cultural fit, look for cultural contribution"
- "We have very engaged facebook groups where we have shortlist topics we think are interesting and people can vote on them. Then you’re getting that engagement around. If you’re already invested into coming to an event, you’re more likely to attend"
- "In areas where it’s really hard to pull off an event, ask people to pre-commit"
Resources mentioned:
- WORK180
- WORK180’s Professional Women’s Network
- Sharepoint
- meetup.com
Book recommendations:
- The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz
- What You Do Is Who You Are: How to Create Your Business Culture About Culture by Ben Horowitz
- Radical Focus: Achieving Your Most Important Goals with Objectives and Key Results by Christina Wodtke
What business would you build on Mars?
You know how they say “whatever you experience personally you always try to find a solution for”? I got lost on the way here from the station so for me, a google maps to get around. I’m sure the martians would appreciate it as well!
Anything around integrating the community. If there’s a meetup platform where there’s translation services in place, how do we actually get people to mingle with the martians in terms of events? Because I love playing basketball… don’t know how gravity will help in that case- how do we start a sporting event? Imagine the marketing. Everyone wearing their Chicago Bulls singlet. Space Jam! There you go. This is obviously if work180 isn’t launched over there.
Reach Valeria here:
- on linkedin
- on twitter
For every $1 invested in email marketing, your business can gain an average of $38 back. Initiate and build your email marketing’s ROI as Kalyn New, senior director of product and customer marketing at Campaign Monitor, delves into the fundamentals and steps to get started.
Campaign Monitor's platform makes connecting with your audience through email marketing and automation tools extremely easy!
They use drag and drop technology to create beautiful custom and optimised emails for over 250,000 customers globally.
What you will learn in this episode:
- How your business can get started with email marketing
- Assessing your customers with the customer life cycle
- The retention aspect of email marketing
- What frequency of email send-outs work best
- Other ways your business can personalise email marketing
- Relevance and timeliness
- How to apologise after an email marketing snafu
- The best ways to obtain customer information
- How your brand can project your brand voice and uniqueness
- What defines a good ‘customer’ for your brand
- The user journey for Campaign Monitor’s app
- The four steps of understanding your customer life cycle
Notable quotes:
- “It costs four times more to acquire a customer than it takes to retain an existing customer”
- “Give the customer control when and how they want to hear from you”
- “Every email you send to a customer, it should always come back to the ‘so what?’ factor”
- “It’s really dependent on what information you have about your customers and how you use that”
- “All customer communications have to be relevant and timely to that individual subscriber”
- “B2B marketing and B2C marketing is not all that different in terms of how you write it”
Resources mentioned:
- Campaign Monitor
- CM Group
- Emma
- Cellarmasters
- Customer life Cycle
- Preference Center
- Skip app (coffee)
Book recommendations:
- Lean in by Sherill Sandberg
What business would you build on Mars:
I’d approach it like I’d approach anything here on earth. The first thing I’d do is understand the current landscape: What’s available? What’s on the market? What do the martians need that they don’t have? Understand what those needs are first and try not to push a product or a service on them.
Surveys and interviews, as boring as they sound, are super helpful to either validate the assumptions that you already have… And understanding where the martians are consuming their media? How do they like to be spoken to and making sure you’re bringing a message to them - making it as easy as possible. The “so what” factor is important in this as well...
Not underestimating the power of testing. Whether it’s iterating over and over or ABCDE XYZ testing. If you approach it that way, me and Elon would be very successful.
Reach Kalyn New here:
- on Linkedin
After starting out as an investment banker in London, Daniel quickly figured that he didn’t want to be just another cog in the machine. Always having had an analytical streak, the convergence of marketing, analytics, product and many more disciplines into “growth” turned out to make growth marketing the perfect fit for him.
Having worked as Head of Growth and Data Insights at Sellable, a Sydney prop-tech start-up, Daniel decided it was time to start out himself and build ikaros, a now-established boutique growthmarketing and analytics consultancy leveraging data to deliver high-performance growth strategies for scale-ups and SMEs.
What you will learn in this episode:
- Two factors analytics helps with for any early stage business
- Going beyond knowing the customer’s first name for marketing personalisation
- How to use pirate metrics and acquisition elements to map out your customer journey
- How to apply cohort analysis
- How to start collecting data in a realm of “data-geddon”
- How to monitor the right KPIs
- Daniel’s documenting and process behind growth experiments
- Why doing things that don’t scale is important
- How Daniel drastically improved a direct marketing campaign
- How to monitor the effectiveness of offline marketing strategies
- Picking the right marketing channel
- Prioritising your ideas
- The “7 friends in ten days” framework
- At the end of the episode, Daniel’s weekly challenge for your growth team.
Resources mentioned:
- ikaros
- Rocket Internet
- Deutsche Bahn “No need to fly” campaign
- Pirate metrics
- Segment
- Heap
- Sellable
- Twilio
- Autopilot
- Vero
- Stripe founder Patrick Collison
- Etsy
- The 80/20 rule
- Lean startup principle
- ICE framework
- 7 friends in ten days
Reading recommendations:
- Andrew Chen’s blogs
What business would you build on Mars?
I’m thinking about luxury items. Think about plant-based items...If you're taking seeds for example, it's like very little mass that you need to take to Mars, which obviously, mass is really valuable for you. If you can, successfully grow something even if it's just in your bank or so on Mars and sell that maybe back on earth, that's going to be like a novelty, really unique, luxury item. So it's obviously going to command a massive markup.
Reach Daniel here:
- on Linkedin
In this episode we have our senior brand and content lead, Clare Riley, walk you through the ins and outs of Metigy’s Instagram Content Publishing feature.
What you will learn in this episode:
- IG Content Publishing types and Metigy integration
- Scheduling posts & file types
- Post Approvals and who can use these features
- Costs & The Metigy Mobile App
With the commoditisation of online businesses, Amazon Australia topping 1 billion in sales during 2020 and online sales booming during the lockdown, brand differentiation has never been more relevant. In this episode, founder and creative director of Process Creative, Andy Homan, takes a look into the shifting marketing strategies of e-businesses in the industry and drops some golden slides for you to download too
What you will learn in this episode:
- The shift and focus of E-Commerce strategies
- How your SME can utilise experience led e-commerce
- How to assess your business’ differentiation and value in the market
- How to communicate with different customers on your platform
- Current innovations in the E-Commerce industry
- Advanced tactics with consumer personalisation
- The dos and don'ts of your direct mail marketing strategy
- The impacts of “abandon cart” on your website
- Tips on increasing your business’ conversion rates
- How to use video across your platforms
- The importance of SaaS platforms and how to choose one for your business
- Marketing tools that can help your SME
- A forecast on the future of E-commerce
Resources mentioned:
- Andy’s tips for ecommerce success slide deck
- Google trends
- Google keyword planner
- Klaviyo
- Dot Digital
- MailChimp
- Amazon Australia’s 1500% growth
- Zoltan from Citizen Wolf
- Oxford Suits
- Carla Zambatti
- Mahabis
Book Recommendations:
- Design Thinking by Thomas Lockwood
- Start With Why by Simon Sinek
What business would you build on Mars?
Anybody who knows me knows the answer to this question already. I would definitely start at the martian brewery. I think that'd be kinda cool. I'm kind of a craft beer nut. I've got a brewery in my backyard with nine taps. I think some martian hops and some martian barley. You're just set after a two year trip. I think I'd be wanting to sit back with a nice cold beer.
You can reach Andy here on:
- Process Creative on Instagram, Linkedin and Facebook
What's the best way to initiate story-telling for your brand? Podcasts can be a strong and engaging medium for your business to communicate and entertain your target markets. Listen in as Daren Lake delves into his experience as founder of Pod Paste and provides insight on the podcast industry.
What you will learn in this episode:
- How Daren first got into podcasting
- The power of story-telling and narratives with your podcast
- The advantages of starting podcasts
- The best way to get your business started with podcasts
- What locations are best to produce high-quality sound
- Spaces and microphones you can start recording with/in
- How to make a cost-effective, clean podcast recording
- How to extract stories out of podcast guests
- When to jump in to podcast strategy
Links mentioned:
- The Studio
- NPR show
- Radiolab
- Gimlet Media 230m acquired by Spotify
- Pitch Acoustics
Gear shout outs:
- Rode procaster
- Shure SM70
- Rode podmic
- Zoom H6
Book and podcast recommendations:
- Daren's Podcast (DLake Creates)
- Out on the Wire by Jessica Abel
- This American Life podcast
- The 99% Invisible City by Roman Mars
- Startup a Gimlet series by Alex Blumberg
- Radiolab podcast
- Matt D’Avella’s video production
- Masters of Scale by Reid Hoffman
- Tim Ferris podcast
- How I Built This with Guy Raz
- Song Exploder
What business would you build on Mars?
I want to market with anything audio - in particular, radio podcasting. That’s phase 1. Then transition into music. I would literally duplicate and copy everything the US has done on earth with media… Humans unfortunately will be the same unless we start hacking our biology and our DNA which Elon Musk has a good company called Neurolink - a brain machine interface...
They’re going to have the same needs and wants and desires and the same psychology so audio will be there and first to market. It’s like the wild west. Like the gold rush in San Francisco. That’s your land! No one can take it from you! My virtual land will be the first radio station on Mars. But there’ll be a five minute lag on Mars. There’ll always be downloaded videos. It won’t be real time.
Reach Daren here on:
- on Linkedin
- on Instagram
- on Facebook
- on Twitter
- via email: daren@podpaste.com
Imagine coming straight out of University and having an idea for an app. Imagine all of the anxiety and struggles you would face and problems you would need to overcome with lack of experience. But also imagine the unique sense of confidence because the younger you are, the less you have to lose. Find out how a successful smart locker app company unlocked the minds of young entrepreneurs and more in this episode of... FORWARD THINKING.
(Disclaimer: Before listening, please take note that the original recording of this interview took place in 2019. Some information discussed have evolved through time in adjustment to Yellowbox's current agenda)
What you will learn in this episode:
- How the idea of Yellowbox came about
- How to face challenges at a young age
- Why being at nightclubs at 1AM was a helpful cause for the growth of Yellowbox
- The impacts of University of New South Wales’ acceleration programs on Yellowbox’s growth
- How Vanessa had to pick between a full time grad job and gaining momentum with the startup
- The branding and physical marketing of Yellowbox
- How Yellowbox will be pushing for geo-fencing
- Using research to gain approval from the relevant stakeholders
Resources mentioned:
- Yellowbox on Linkedin, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter
- OVO bikes and Lime Bikes
- Peter Farrell Cup
- 10X Accelerator program
Book and podcast recommendations:
- Zero To One by Peter Thiel
- Steve Jobs autobiography
- Y combinator podcast
What business would you build on Mars?
Ho Jun: I've got a theory that the martians are going to be a bit freaked out by Elon Musk's dance moves. I think it's a bit of a risk that we need to mitigate and I think they would pay loads of money. There's a massive market to get him some dance lessons.
Vanessa: You don't want awkward to be the first point of contact between humans and martians. Obviously we have to send Elon. We can't send anyone else, but he's got his weaknesses as much as we love him.
Ho Jun: Yeah. We're solving that problem. Clear problem, clean market, profit!
Find the cofounders here:
- Vanessa on Linkedin
- Ho Jun on Linkedin
How can your SME build a successful work culture? Tune in and listen to Ross Reekie as he highlights how happiness and work can co-exist for the best outcome in your work environment.
What you will learn from this episode:
- Actionable tips of ways that people can make work meaningful
- How to improve engagement when it feels like you’re working at a job you don’t like
- The change of values across generations in the workplace
- The impacts of Ross’ coaching programs
- How your SME can establish a great work culture
- How Rise Consulting’s small investment in research companies led to streams of publicity
- The multiple benefits of networking events
Notable Quotes:
- I think a really important distinction to make is between happiness and meaning
- Your day-to-day does need to involve some pleasure and some happiness, but the focus needs to be on the long-term satisfaction.
- To feel a sense of belonging in a culture, that culture needs to belong to you
- If you are feeling that work and happiness are a juxtaposition and can't live together please know that it is possible… If you take steps towards what you love doing, it really is possible to get there
Resources mentioned:
- Riseconsulting.com.au
- Zappos work culture
Book Recommendations:
- Man’s Search For Meaning by Viktor Frankl
- Simon Sinek’s “Find Your Why”
What business would you build on Mars?
I think there's a happiness at work conversations we had with him on that spaceship. But if we arrived on Mars and Elon Musk was leader of the Martian universe, then with his intensity, they'd be crying out for a good comedy club. What I would love to do to promote this would be I would get a giant trampoline. We got less gravity on my eyes, so we'd try and set a universe record for higher high. Somebody could jump on the trampoline every night that we opened. I think that would be a bit of fun.
You can reach Ross here:
- on Linkedin
Karim is the head of marketing for Mad Paws Australia, the pet service startup who bagged $12 million dollars in their IPO earlier this year. With the help of everyone’s common denominator, love for dogs, this pup business thrives on user generated content and is one of the largest content producers in the pet industry in the world. In this episode, Karim discusses how he applied the marketing funnel, growth mindset and SEO to grab the attention of 14 million dog owners across Australia.
What you will learn in this episode:
- Karim’s practical guide on how to learn marketing for your business
- The first marketing channel you should try when launching your business
- How to create ambassadors of your business from your existing customers
- How Mad Paws implemented their most successful User Generated Content campaign that resulted in national press coverage around the country
- The advantages of taking your dog to the office
- Ideas to start your first marketing competition
- How to instil a growth marketing mindset across your entire company
- How to identify the metric that matters the most when you are just starting your business
- What is a Northstar Metric?
- How Karim uses meditation apps to achieve balance in his busy day
- How Mad Paws built credibility and trust with their target audience
- What is technical SEO and why is it so important for your business
Notable Quotes:
- "I unlocked this obsession of mine with performance marketing and really seeing the potential that you can drive at the grassroots for businesses of all size"
- "It's something that we're very proud of - being able to unlock that community and network effects to provide value and validation for our brand.
- The north star metric obviously is the one metric the business cares about"
- "How do you convince a social media manager that they're driving that north star metric when they're focused on engagement? It's about breaking down whichever step in the funnel you're looking at moving"
- "We're living in a mobile first world anymore. Your whole user journey and user experiences is in someone's pocket"
Resources Mentioned:
- Mad Paws
- The Iconic
- Rocket Internet
- Food Panda
- Pets in the Office, 4 things we learnt!
- Linktree
- Billy Sixes – Vintage Style Streetwear
- Calm.com
- Headspace
- The Million Dollar Homepage
- Crossing the Chasm by Geoffrey Moore
What Business Would You Build On Mars?
I would literally find five different things, whether it be services, experiences, or anything like that. Fives probably putting a cap on it, maybe 10, maybe 20, maybe 50. I trial all of them and there would be a few of them that would stick.
I'm not necessarily the big entrepreneurial type where I'll come up with the next artificial intelligence software that's going to tell you when your car blink is out or something like... But I'm an executer. Being an executer enables me to try many different things and look for growth within those many different things.
Definitely something service-based. Something that's going to turn into a commoditised need on a daily basis. I wouldn't necessarily be an operator, but I'd be a person who has a lot of knowledge on Mars with that skillset.
Reach Karim here
- Karim on LinkedIn
Aivee Robinson, co-founder and director of Catalyser worked a decade for the UN and now applies her CSR values to major corporations like KPMG, Deloitte and ASIC. Tune in on her journey as she explains how she grew from struggling to download youtube videos off her phone at the start of Catalyser’s business life to leveraging technology so major corporations can scale their CSR.
What you will learn in this episode:
- How Aivee evolved from being a children’s rights advocate to a startup founder
- The benefits of supporting charities
- How to approach tech projects as an non-tech SMEs
- How to build your startup alongside your customers
- How to scale customer acquisition
- How Catalyser landed customers like Deloitte
- How to find the right mentor for you and your SME
- How working in the UN in Mongolia and China impacted the way Aivee works in business
- How Aivee learns and experiments with marketing for Catalyser
Resources mentioned:
- Catalyser Giving LinkedIn
- Catalyser Giving Twitter
- Metigy.com/podcast
Book recommendations:
- New Strategic Selling by Miller and Heiman
Notable quotes:
“Once a company invests in supporting a community and doing CSR, they can start to build their brand to attract better talent.”
“Take the time to qualify whether or not the customer actually has the problem you’re trying to solve”
“Who are the corporates that align with us that can go deep in the cause we’re trying to work towards and stay with us as a long term supporter to sustain long term goals?”
What business would you build on Mars?
“I would probably take a different approach. I’ll try and find the broadest market possible. For us, we’re a SAAS business. We sell to enterprise. It’s very specific. But I think if we were selling to martians… What is a very basic need that everybody needs? What’s the broadest market I could possibly target.
Sugar based food. Get them addicted. Repeat Customers! Something that they would buy and keep coming back for. Something that the broadest market needs that’s easiest to scale.”
Reach Aivee on:
Monica Wulff, head of WeWork labs, discusses why coffee can be the best investment for businesses. Tune in as she talks on receiving negative feedback, identifying problems and utilising social media while dropping golden nuggets of podcasts for you to queue!
What you will learn in this episode:
- How data collection is a story of your business
- How small businesses can strengthen time management
- How to spend time with technology to have the best online and offline experience
- Why having coffee is Monica’s best investment
- How to be more aware of cybersecurity
- How trail running is similar to entrepreneurial life
- A collection of podcasts to queue
Resources mentioned:
- Startup Muster
- We Work Labs
- Digital Love Podcast
- Plann
- Zenify
- Nancy Pelosi and cyber security
- Metigy.com/podcast
- Couch to 5k app
- WeCroak
Books and Podcasts mentioned:
- Hooked by Nir Eyal
- Deepwork and Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport
- Switched on Pop
- Full Story from the Guardian
- Guy Roz How I Built This
- No Such Thing As a Fish
- Site Hive
- The Surrender Experiment by Michael A. Singer
- Dolly Parton’s America podcast
- What I think of when I think about running by Ruku Murakami
- The Profit by Khalil Gibran
What business would you build on Mars?
“I have a confession. I didn't get on the spaceship. I missed the flight. I honestly have no desire to go to Mars, let alone with Elon Musk. I decided to stay on earth and to help the businesses that are actually trying to be sustainable and have social impact and social integrity as well as e-commerce or commerce right now.”
“If I had to go I would be another one of our lab’s members, Sitehive. They have a software and hardware product that captures all the different environmental elements around a construction site. So dust sound, noise, vibration, and they can compute that back to the civil engineers and the engineering teams that are doing construction. So I think that their business would probably be, granted gravity and all those things and space, a useful one. I think there would be like Levi Strauss selling the shovels to the gold diggers.”
Reach Monica here on:
In this episode Brendan Hill talks with a special guest that has something a bit different to offer our SME marketers and businesses. Our guest is pro surfing legend, Mark Mathews.
Mark has made a living achieving the unfathomable: crossing the intersection of danger and excitement. He knows all too well the crippling grasp of fear.
While in Tasmania, fifteen feet in front of a cliff in cold, shark infested waters, Mark hit a reef and instantly blacked out. Terror engulfed every inch of his being. Neck braced and hospital-ridden, he didn’t know if he could ever surf again. At that moment, Mark made a decision never to allow fear to overpower him again.
With his presentation business ”Life Beyond Fear” has him deconstructing, fine-tuning, and personalizing emotional resilience techniques to successfully strengthen one’s mindset and sustain long term performance.
These techniques have helped him win an unprecedented three consecutive Oakley Big Wave Awards and cement him as one of the best big waves surfers in the world.
In this episode you will learn:
- How Mark overcomes the fear of surfing 50-foot waves and how you can apply these techniques to areas of your business
- How to get out of your comfort zone to get the experience you need to create that new comfort zone where new opportunities lie
- How to build a personal brand
- How Mark became a world-class keynote speaker when he couldn’t even speak in front of a room of people at the beginning
- Advantages of keeping your pitches raw and unpolished
- How to make your business more authentic and attract customers
- Why having a high level of authenticity in every aspect of your business increases your chances of success
- How to improve your presentation skills
- Why you need to have a plan in place for all business scenarios
- The powerful moment that changed Mark’s mindset after being told by doctors that he’d never surf again
- The importance of building your own audience
- How studying standup comedy can make you a better public speaker
Resources Mentioned:
- Mark’s Instagram Account
- Red Bull Cape Fear (see Mark @ 48 seconds)
- Pragmatic Thinking
- Upwork
- LinkedIn Helper
- Masterclass
Quotes:
- When you push yourself through that fear and anxiety, usually the experience, feeling, result or success on the other side feels like that Holy Grail. You get that intrinsic reward and the external rewards that make it feel like a Holy Grail - like life's worth living.
- Talk to your audience like you're talking to one person, like you're talking to a friend and carry that tone. Match it to how you would just speak to a close friend, because you speak to your closest friends with the most authenticity.
- When you build your own audience you become like a small marketing agency yourself.
- There will be people that enjoy watching you do what you do. That's my model. Just stick to what you like. It's too tiring trying to be someone that you're not.
What Business would you build on Mars?
"It would have to be indoor wave pools. And surfing sells itself. All you got to do is offer a few free surf lessons and when people experience that feeling, what else is there going to be to do on Mars than ride a few waves? It will sell itself."
Get in touch with Mark:
- markmathews.com
- Mark on Instagram
- Mark on LinkedIn
Transcript:
Brendan:
Mark, welcome to the show.
Mark:
Thanks for having me, Brendan.
Brendan:
You have an amazing LinkedIn profile, that's where I first found out about you. Can you tell us more about big wave surfing?
Mark:
Big wave surfing, I mean, that's my life. It's been my life for the last 15 years. It was my avenue to build a career out of the sport of surfing, even though I wasn't quite good enough or talented enough to be a competitive or a world champion level surfer.
Brendan: Right.
Mark:
It was just this different avenue that I found that I could manufacture myself a career out of the sport that I loved.
Brendan:
Wow. When did you come to the realization that you could follow your passion and make that your career?
Mark:
It happened when I was about 20, so I was working, actually, here in Sydney, down at Darling Harbor, making coffees and cocktails at night. Out of the blue, I got asked to go on a surf trip down to Tasmania to surf a new wave that had been getting talked about in the industry. It was being heralded as one of the biggest and scariest waves that another had ever seen.
Brendan: Wow.
Mark:
And no one had really photographed it at that point in time. And no part of me wanted to go and surf it, because I'd never really surfed big waves and I was absolutely terrified when I got the call. And it was funny because I couldn't figure out why they were calling me because I was kind of a no one in the industry of surfing.
Brendan: Right.
Mark:
I found out down the track they probably called about 30 or 40 other surfers before they got to my name at the bottom of the list. Everyone politely declined because the waves sounded so scary, but I didn't have the chance of saying no. If I had said no, I would never have got my career off the ground because at that point, I didn't have the major sponsorships. Anyway, I went down to Tasmania, one thing lead to another and I ended up surfing waves bigger than I'd ever surfed before in my life.
Brendan: Wow.
Mark:
And the photos and footage of that trip went around the world and I got my first surfing sponsorships and then that basically gave me the blueprint of what I needed to do to make a career, it was travel around the world, chase down the biggest waves I could find, surf them, create content, let that content get in the media and based on the media value, I'd get the sponsorship dollars.
Brendan:
Wow. So how big are these waves that we're talking about?
Mark:
Down in Tasmania, that first time, it was in the 15 to 20 foot range, but the way the waves break down there is what makes them so spectacular and dangerous. So super deep water waves breaking on a really shallow rock ledge, which magnifies the power and the spectacular nature of the waves. To me, way more dangerous than say, if I go and surf waves in excess of 50 feet, but break in deep water, while they look and are a whole lot bigger, it's nowhere near as dangerous or spectacular.
Brendan:
So in terms of taking that first step, I know that one of your mantras is life beyond fear, the other side of fear. So taking that first step. A good example, I just finished watching Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade on Netflix and when he's walking over that invisible gap to get the Holy Grail-
Mark:
I know the one.
Brendan:
Yeah, it's that first step. And I can imagine these massive waves passing by and 15, 20 feet, I mean, up to 50 feet, as you say. Can you tell us more about that first step and how to overcome fear? Because I mean, it has parallels in business as well. That first step is always the hardest.
Mark:
100%. And that's the interesting thing, because as scary as big wave surfing is, and the thought or the reality of maybe drowning, for me, I find public speaking and keynoting that I do now more stressful. I get more anxiety from it, it wears me down more than big wave surfing ever did.
Brendan: Wow.
Mark:
So that's where the corelation is between what action sports people do and what business people do because fear is fear. It doesn't matter whether it's a fear of physical danger or harm or a fear of failure or not being good enough or making mistakes. The way your body reacts is exactly the same. So across the board, I think that's where the relationship is. And then like you said, the Indiana Jones reference is perfect.
It's like the steps across the invisible bridge to the Holy Grail, in my head, it's so terrifying to get out of your comfort zone to get the experience you need to create that new comfort zone where the opportunities are, whether in business or in the sport of surfing. But when you do that and you push yourself through that fear and anxiety, usually the experience or the feeling or the result or the success on the other side feels like that Holy Grail. You get that intrinsic reward and the external rewards that make it feel like a Holy Grail, like life's worth living when you push yourself like that.
Brendan:
Yeah. It's interesting that you say that you get more anxiety now about public speaking than big wave surfing, validating what Jerry Seinfeld always says, "Public speaking is the number one human fear, followed by death at number two." Big wave surfing, I can imagine, wouldn't be far behind these monster swells.
Mark:
Yeah, I think Jerry is definitely right. For an introvert, anyway, I'm highly introverted, so public speaking is the scariest thing in life for me.
Brendan:
So what made you jump into public speaking after your career in big wave surfing?
Mark:
I had a sponsor who sponsored me from when I was in my early twenties, his best friend was in the world of corporate training and had a background climbing mountains and brought that to the business world and then he had said to me, years ago, in my early twenties, that this is the career path that you should look to take while you're still big wave surfing, so that you can build it then and then be able to carry it on down the track when I'm 50, when I can't surf big waves anymore. 60, maybe. I'm pushing for 60.
Mark:
And at the time, I was like, "There's no way I'm ever doing that" because for me, I couldn't even stand in front of a classroom when I was a kid and read from a book, I would stutter so bad, I'd have so much anxiety, so it took a lot for me to be able to do it. Spent untold amounts of money doing every speaking course under the sun.
But eventually, it was exactly like learning to surf big waves, the exposure and the experience just builds up and then you build that new skill set so that it doesn't matter who you stand in front of, who I'm standing in front now, I've got the tools and the skills to dig into my bag and perform on stage and I don't have to feel too anxious about it now but originally, it was tough.
Brendan:
Yeah. Do you remember your first big keynote speech?
Mark:
I do. I was in Hawaii and it was for an insurance company and I got offered the talk two weeks before the event and I didn't have a keynote at all.
Brendan: Wow.
Mark:
So I wrote the keynote in the two weeks before. The only person I said it in front of was my mom.
Brendan: Wow.
Mark:
And I did the keynote in front of her and she actually features in the keynote because she's one of my big motivators in life to be successful. And she had a tear in her eye when I told her and that was kind of enough, I was like, "Okay. We'll see how it goes." And if I look back on the delivery of the keynote that I gave, the delivery was very average, but the bed of the keynote has almost stayed exactly the same. That's what I deliver today. And the feedback that I got from the audience was amazing, off that first keynote.
Brendan:
Right.
Mark:
I had the bosses say, "This is what you've got to do in life." And they just enjoyed, I think, the fact that I was so raw and real on stage because I had no other choice but to be that way. And it wasn't really too polished.
Brendan: Right.
Mark:
And I've always taken that as I've gone on in keynote speaking, never to become that over-polished speaker that's talking to a track, because I think for the audience, you have to remember that they're seeing you for the first time, they want it to be real. Even though I'm telling the same thing that I've told a thousand times, it needs to feel real in that moment and the connection has to be real with the audience for them to even remotely take in what you're going to say.
Brendan:
Yeah. It's a interesting point that you touch on there, authenticity. So I guess that's part of your brand, being really authentic and not being too polished. I mean, when we go on social media feeds, like on Instagram, everyone is looking very polished. How can businesses become more authentic and tell their real story and start to, like yourself, really resonate with their audience?
Mark:
Ah, man, I think it takes courage to do that and it's tricky for businesses. When you have all these insurance factors and regulators and all this stuff hanging over the top of you and then investors, and depending on what size business you're running, to really let people know authentically what's happening within the business, where you're planning to go and all that, it takes courage, but I find that if you looked into some case studies on it, it is worth while to do.
And especially small businesses and small business owners needing the motivation to do what they're going to have to do to be successful in small business, which is such a small amount of people pull that off, the authenticity level has to be there where you have to really love what you're doing and believe in it and there has to be deep meaning in what you're doing for you to go that extra level to the extent that you need to to be successful.
So this authenticity on both aspects is how you run your business internally, but then how you speak to your customers, I think, both of them take some courage, but worth while.
Brendan:
And in terms of speaking to customers, you touched on presentation skills. Obviously very important in every day business. People are presenting on the phone, presenting in their content marketing, for example. What sort of tips can you give early stage businesses
listening on at home? Obviously, you had to learn from the ground up with your presentation skills for your keynotes. You did a lot of courses. People just starting now or wanting to improve their presentation skills, where do they start?
Mark:
I think the best tip that I got as far as tone, when you talk to someone, is that talk to your audience like you're talking to one person, like you're talking to a friend and carry that tone. And you've got to practice it and then watch yourself on video and see if you're carrying that tone because it's really hard to do initially, because when the camera's in front of you or the audience is in front of you, naturally, the anxiety shifts you into a different tone with the way you're speaking to people. But I think if you go back and watch what you look like and then try and match it to how you would just speak to a close friend, because you speak to your closest friends with the most authenticity, you know?
Brendan: True. Yeah.
Mark:
And then if you can keep that tone, I think that helps a lot. And then by far, the most important thing is to be prepared. Unbelievably prepared. Nothing beats the fear of public speaking like preparation. You've going to have, for me, it's the same as surfing. So when I go and surf big waves, I'm ready for every worse case scenario that could possibly happen. I have a really detailed plan put in place.
For example, if I blacked out under water and I had to be resuscitated, they had to restart my heart and then I had to call for a helicopter, we have the whole plan in place. So it takes some of that fear and that apprehension that you get in your mind in the lead up to scary moments away because I'm prepared for it. So the same way, if I'm going to do a keynote this afternoon, for WordPress, actually, here in Sydney, everything that could go wrong, I know exactly what to do.
The whole power can shut off and I have to do my presentation without any photos or footage or anything like that, but I'm ready to do that.
Brendan: Amazing.
Mark:
Or if my mind goes blank, which it does in front of an audience, if something happens, I've got a line and a story where I can go straight into at any point in my presentations.
Brendan:
It's a good idea. Yeah.
Mark:
Yeah. And then give myself the time to get back on track, so overly prepared is the key to
dealing with that kind of fear.
Brendan:
And speaking of scary moments, what was the scariest moments in your big wave surfing career?
Mark:
I've had a recent one where I dislocated my knee surfing down the South Coast of Sydney, five hours South of here. I hit the reef on about a 10 foot wave and completely dislocated my knee, tore every ligament and tendon.
Brendan: Wow.
Mark:
Tore the major artery that runs through my leg. Major nerves. The pain that I experienced when I did that, I knew that something really bad had happened. And then to wake up the following morning in hospital after emergency surgery, and I was basically told that I was going to have a disability where I can't move my foot, I can't lift my foot anymore for the rest of my life.
Brendan: Wow.
Mark:
So it was the doctors telling me, "Your surfing career is over."
Brendan: Right.
Mark:
So that, by far, was the scariest, hearing that news was the scariest thing that I've been through within surfing. But managed to prove them wrong and I'm getting my surfing career back on track. It's taken me about two and a half years, but it's getting there.
Brendan:
Wow. So can you talk us through that mindset from being told you'll never surf again to rebuilding your career?
Mark:
I have to admit, the first six weeks to two months when I was stuck in hospital in the big metal frame brace, with my big wounds from the surgery on my leg and I couldn't get out of bed at all in the worst pain I've felt, nerve pain, by far, I've had almost every other injury you can do, broken bones and stuff, but nothing compares to nerve pain. And yeah, in that two months I got really depressed. Not on the level of depression like suicidal depression, that's something completely different, but depressed in that I didn't want to see anyone. I'd given up hope of surfing again.
Brendan: Wow.
Mark:
I wasn't sleeping because of the pain or they'd give me ridiculous amounts of medication to try and combat the pain, so it was that. All these things just lead to me being so unbelievably unhealthy, physically and mentally. It's interesting because it wasn't until, I'd like to say I just snapped myself out of it, but I didn't.
It wasn't until I actually met a young guy in hospital who reached out to me on social media. And he said, "I've been following your career since I was young. Big fan. I'd love to come up and meet you and get a photo." Because he read that I was in Canberra Hospital and he was actually in there. And I didn't want to see anyone, so I didn't even reply. It was my wife who saw the message and wrote back to him and said, "Yeah, no worries, come up and get a photo."
Mark:
So this kid comes up probably three hours after I'd seen the message. He gets wheeled into my bedroom by his brother, he's a complete quadriplegic and had broken his neck about six months before I hurt myself and the moment that I shook Jason, his name was, hand, and I don't know if you've shook someone's hand who's a quadriplegic, it's confronting. They can't control their arm, anything. And he stuck out his arm with a big grin on his face. And the moment that I shook his hand, it was the craziest shift that I've ever had experienced in my life where my perspective or mindset about what I was dealing with did a complete 180.
Mark:
So I went from being really angry, full of self-pity for what had happened to me, blaming other people, the victim of this wipeout and this injury and just done with it to just feeling like the luckiest person on Earth because if I'd had hit that reef any other part of my body, I could have so easily been dealing with what he was dealing with. And his injury's a million times worse than mine and he's dealing with it that much better. So I was overcome with gratitude, feeling lucky. And from that moment onwards, it was like that feeling of feeling lucky about my situation was the catalyst to get me back on track. Everything fed on from there.
Brendan: Wow.
Mark:
And now, two years later, after all the rehab, I've figured out how to surf good enough with
the disability that I can get back out into big waves. But I think meeting him and that shift in mindset was the saving grace for me in dealing with that.
Brendan:
That's an amazing story. So tell us about the first time after this accident that you got back on the surf board.
Mark:
I surfed a couple of times, probably a year down the track, but I would barely call it surfing, compared to what I've been doing. It was on a longboard, I could only just stand up. I could barely turn the board and at that moment, I was like, "It's nice to be surfing again, but this is ... It's nice to be out in the ocean and the water, but it's not really surfing for me."
It took about another eight months after that to where I rode a wave and got my first barrel, say inside the barrel and caught a wave. Not a big wave, just sort of eight foot wave on the Gold Coast and that moment was just a game changer for me. All the hard work paid off because I could surf good enough just to do that, to get barrelled. It wasn't big waves and get my career on track, but that was enough.
I was like, "If this is it, then that's fine." But then, my surfing ability just kept getting better and better after that, just up until about six weeks ago, I got to compete in the Red Bull Cap Fear event, a big wave surfing event down in Tasmania at that first wave that went to and I got my first big barrel there and that was the icing on the cake. That's two and a half years of rehab. Yeah, it was a good journey.
Brendan:
Yeah, amazing journey. And can you speak more on your mom being a major point of motivation in your life?
Mark:
Yeah. She's just on two different levels, but she's always been the type of person who has that internal reflection and thinks about who she is, what she's like and how she can be better, and she's always had that. She eventually does a lot of meditation and has lived in ashrams around the world and became a yoga teacher, so I think that rubbed off on me.
How valuable it is to know yourself. Figure out who you are and try and work on your flaws and be better. So I think that rubbed off on me a lot. And then the other part is that I've just always wanted to, down the track, when she retires, support her, be able to buy her a house one day. It's the image that I always use in my head.
Before I'm about to do something scary or when I got to get up early and go to training or when I've got to say no to eating that shit food and eat this boring food. All those things, I've just got this clear picture in my head of the day I get to buy her a house and I can see the excitement and that big smile on her face in those moments. So it's those two parts that she's only inspiring to me.
Brendan:
Yeah, amazing. So focusing on your business, now. Your brand that you've built for yourself and you mentioned that you went around the world chasing content. So talk us through, I
guess, your content strategy. You got the footage of you surfing the big waves. What did you do next?
Mark:
Yeah. It was interesting because from the start of my career, it went through the whole digital media revolution.
Brendan: Oh, really?
Mark:
The first surf trip we did was on film, with cameras and photos. And then it was just going out into mainstream newspapers and stuff. And then we just tracked through the whole evolution of digital media in that time. So it's like having one of the first blogs in surfing that people could follow.
Brendan: Wow.
Mark:
Because in my head, I had to make up for a lack of talent as a surfer by having the business smarts and how I could get the exposure and then that would make me as valuable as the other more talented surfers out there. That was what I always had, I was always looking for different things of how I could do that.
And the digital media revolution was the game changer because then it wasn't up to the print media and surf magazines who had a stranglehold on the industry on who was successful. When you build your own audience and then you could show them and you've got your own audience, you become like a small marketing agency yourself.
Brendan: Yeah.
Mark:
So by having that business smart, I controlled my destiny a little bit more. And yeah, I think it made that career, I could extend it longer also as well. So yeah, there are so many nuance things within that, how you do it, but it's the same core principle. Just show people what I love about what I do. Show them that and there's that many people out there on social media in the digital world.
There will be people that enjoy watching you do what you do. That's what's my model. Just stick to what you like. It's too tiring trying to be someone that you're not. I could have gone down that path and you try and do the things that people like or that the big celebrities are doing, but to me, that seemed exhausting. It's just like, just show what you love about surfing and then see if people like it.
Brendan:
Yeah. It comes back to your point about talking to your best friends when you're doing your keynote.
Mark: Yeah.
Brendan:
Focusing on that one person.
Mark:
Exactly. Yeah and then it keeps you authentic in a way.
Brendan:
And what channels are you using at the moment? Have you gone head first into video content as well? I imagine a lot of GoPro footage and ...
Mark: Yeah.
Brendan:
Is live streaming possible in big wave surfing?
Mark:
It is. GoPro is a major sponsor of mine. I've always worked with them and that was just about me wanting to use the best cameras for what we did in action sports. I was always so interested in how can I make my audience get as close to this experience as possible as what I get inside the barrelling part of the wave. If you can help them try and experience that. The tiny point of view camera is where you can give that field and then the GoPro Fusion that shoots the 360 and virtual reality type content, they're awesome tools to be able to do that.
And then on the live streaming front, when the technology became where it became possible to be able to set up these high production live feeds at the drop of a hat, because the difference in surfing as a sport, in big wave surfing as a sport, compared to say, live streaming a football game is what we do is all weather dependent. So I teamed up with Red Bull in that regard to create Red Bull Cape Fear, a big wave surf event.
Brendan: Right.
Mark:
And it's the only company that, again, has set aside that kind of financial amount on the possibility that we may get big enough waves that year to run an event. I couldn't find, there was no other company out there that would just go, "Yeah, here's this much money" even
though the event might not happen. You might only have a 50/50 chance of it happening. Yeah, so now we're able to do that in remote locations, so we could do that down in Tasmania, which is in the middle of nowhere where this wave breaks.
Brendan: Wow.
Mark:
And we streamed it live to, I think, the numbers ended up being about 1.5 million people across a live feed and the first replay because it happens just when it happens, so people aren't prepared for it.
Brendan: Right.
Mark:
We give them a 24 hour window.
Brendan: Okay.
Mark:
Because that's when we got to take that the event's going to happen and then we send the production crews in, so yeah, that's been an interesting experience. I think that's been the latest frontier in regard to that digital media revolution and the way to bring surfing and big wave surfing to people.
Brendan:
Yeah, that's an amazing strategy. And what's next? What problems are you working on now in your business?
Mark:
For me, because I've been injured for the last couple of years, my main focus is keynote speaking in the corporate training world and establishing myself within there and really researching what companies and their employees and everyone needs to manage that hectic paced life of that corporate world. Because there's that sort of disconnect where companies want so much out of their employees.
They want them to work ridiculous hours and the employees are getting burned out because of that but the world's so competitive that if you don't put up with that burnout, you'll lose your job because someone else will put their hand up and try and take it on. And so it's how can I equip those employees to still do the workload or the hours but not be as drained or affected by it? So it's how can you take on that and not have it rule their life where it destroys their relationships and their personal life? And I think that's, at the moment, within the corporate world, the Holy Grail of figuring
that complex web of its meaning for the employees to want to take on all the stress, they have to find that meaning and the company has to align with them to be able to do that. And then the physical aspect of being able to cope with the crazy work hours, so there's that physical element, whether it's diet, exercise, sleep, those parts.
Mark:
And then the relationship aspect of their work relationships and their personal relationships because that emotional side and that relationship side is the other big part of taxing you as a human. So it's a complex web, but I love it. For me, human performance on any level is amazing.
I originally loved the freak performers who were the world champions at a given sport and how they did what they did, but the more you dive into that, it's like, usually once they're best of the best at something, they're freakishly genetically talented, which isn't that interesting to me.
And then if they're not really good at one thing and really good at something completely different, then it's like the tools they're using to be good at one thing might not be transferrable to anyone else.
Brendan: Right.
Mark:
Yeah. But when you see people that can go and be the highest level in one aspect of life and another aspect of life and another aspect of life, it's like whatever's working there is then transferrable. And that's what I've tried to find with surfing.
I can conquer fear in the world of surfing, but do those same techniques and rules apply to public speaking or to developing business or to just all these other aspects of life? So I've just been testing them and I'm slowly coming up and still tweaking different programs and workshops for corporate.
I deliver a keynote which is more on the inspirational side and then a more detailed workshop, where if I can get anywhere from three to six hours with an audience, then you can deep dive into it and make more lasting changes with people than a keynote can.
Brendan:
Yeah. And how do you find these companies to do the workshops, are they through their keynotes?
Mark:
Yes. There's lots of work out there for keynote speakers, if you're a half decent keynote speaker, the companies are coming knocking at your door.
Brendan: Wow.
Mark:
And that's been the case, but because it's such a short amount of time, the companies don't mind giving you that little bit of time with the audience, because it's not as big an investment for them. Because the money that they pay you is not the expense, it's the investment of having a hundred employees sit there listening to you and they're not doing whatever other work they're supposed to be doing.
So to then ask for three hours or six hours or a multi-tiered program over a year, where you make a radical culture change in a company, that's a big investment, money-wise and time-wise for them. So yeah, you've got to give to get, so it's like, "Here, we'll do it for you like this for a lesser amount and you'll see the results." And then now I've got the testimonials from certain companies, then the other companies can come aboard because they can believe what you're doing.
Brendan:
Yeah. And can you tell us any stories of the changes in culture and the results that you've seen in some of these companies?
Mark:
Yeah. To me, the interesting ones or the radical ones are usually the stress reduction ones, that's huge, and where you dive into stress programs. But then, if that's the main set of programs that you're doing, but then the offshoot of managing stress and creating resilience is say, a workshop around how to have tough conversations in an organization.
Because that, to me, is probably one of the main relationship emotional factors that drain people in companies because there's animosity being carried around by employees because they're not speaking up and they can't have a tough conversation with their boss or with their peers without rubbing people the wrong way. And then they just live in this world of constant stress and social pressure.
Brendan:
Yeah, the conflict avoidance.
Mark:
Yeah. So we built, a company called Pragmatic Thinking, that I work closely with, they've got the best tough conversation program or workshop that I've seen. I can do a keynote, have all this stress reduction stuff and bring them and we'll do a tough conversations piece there.
Brendan: Great.
Mark:
And then you see radical shifts because just that small number of skills, if you can criticize someone without tearing their whole ego apart, there's an amazing ride along effect from that because you can then give criticism without destroying someone. And then that just plays out. And once a whole number of people in your team can do that, the culture change in a year's time and the progression as far as the way the team works shifts hugely.
Brendan:
Yeah. That's amazing. So speaking of tools now, I like to ask all the guests that come on what marketing tools they use for their business. So what's been the best investment that you've made tool-wise?
Mark: Marketing-wise?
Brendan:
Yeah, marketing-wise.
Mark:
Outsourcing with Upwork, for me, having a really small business, is amazing. The talent of people out there around the world that you can access at the drop of a hat is phenomenal. So probably that, as an outsourcing tool. I probably shouldn't say this, but I had a LinkedIn helper tool that was phenomenal.
Brendan: Oh, yeah.
Mark:
But I think it might have just got shut down recently, so I have to go back to the old way of running LinkedIn. But yeah, any of those tools that can automate things that you do but automate them in a way that it doesn't seem like things are being automated, then it's super valuable.
Brendan:
Yeah. And are you a big reader, Mark?
Mark:
More listen. I like podcasts. I do like to read, but I just recently did an IQ test and my language comprehension skills are so low. It's ridiculous. So reading for me is time consuming whereas I love to listen to different podcasts and especially when you can get two experts debating on something, I find that the most valuable way to learn.
Brendan:
So more of the longform podcasts?
Mark:
Definitely longform podcasts or lecture series. A lot of universities and professors out there put their lecture courses online, like on YouTube, so you can access almost anything these days.
Brendan: Yeah.
Mark:
And there's amazing learning platforms, like MasterClass and a whole bunch of other ones. To read is amazing if you're a good reader because it's really good for your imagination as well, but to just be able to have the highest end quality YouTube learning video or MasterClass platform or whatever like that that can just teach you through five different mediums at once, for me, that's way more beneficial. Yeah.
Brendan:
Yeah, I was on MasterClass yesterday, actually, some amazing courses.
Mark:
Amazing stuff, yeah. I think I did one of the value ones. I did Steve Martin's comedy one.
Brendan: Oh, wow.
Mark:
Just for public speaking. And when you see the way they break apart jokes in telling jokes, you can then learn to refine the way you would deliver a keynote because the emphasis on how much ... I heard Jerry Seinfeld say this too. He can spend a week on one line.
Brendan: Yeah.
Mark:
Writing and re-writing one line and pausing in different places and it can make or break a joke. So as a keynote speaker, if you can dive into that level of detail on what you deliver, it's interesting. But you just got to be bothered to give it the time.
Brendan:
Yeah. And I know Seinfeld has another statistic, I think it's one week for every one minute of content.
Mark:
Oh, that's perfect. Perfect.
Brendan:
How long does it take you to do one minute of one of your keynote presentations, preparation-wise?
Mark:
It would depend, it would be in that realm, but I find, for me, the preparation and learning is every time I deliver a keynote, then watching it and then re-structuring some part of it. Yeah, it would be in that realm, I reckon. Probably less. I think comedians, it's so much harder than, I think, any other form of entertainment.
Brendan:
Well, you have to get a laugh every 15 secs, I think it is.
Mark:
Yeah. I think that's the hardest version of entertainment there is. They're re-working a minute, compared to what I do with keynote because I can tell a story and there's five or 10 minutes of content and I don't have to spend that much time to get that story, I bet it does make a difference when you get some detail in there and do some work on the delivery.
Brendan:
And what about online education, is that an area that you've looked at for your workshops, for example?
Mark:
Yeah. I've built, just recently, for a client, a big software company, a video learning series.
Brendan: Right.
Mark:
The feedback from that's been awesome. Yeah, it was a big investment, so it was just because the client specifically wanted it that I ended up going down that track. I was thinking more in a future plan of what I'm doing, I would do that, but I just ended up doing it because the client wanted it. And they really liked it. And it's matching a simple lesson that works across the board, whether it's in the corporate world or what I do as a surfer to a surf story.
Brendan: Right.
Mark:
So it's just an entertaining way for them to see the same lesson that they're going to see on any other learning platform or internally, they see it all the time, but when you can match a surf story to it and what's going on in the business ecosystem of professional surfing, it just anchors the message a little more. It's a good way to bring a different world to it and then for me, I know it's working with a client is when the staff start using surf examples for what they're doing. It's like, "Ah, this is just like when Mark decided to chase a virtual reality
opportunity over going to chase a new market production in China for a new sponsor." It's like these scenarios, so if they're talking in that way, I'm like, "Yes, that's working."
Brendan:
So Mark, wanted to thank you so much for coming on. Wide ranging conversation. So many inspiring stories and tactics as well.
Mark: Thanks.
Brendan:
But before we go, we like to ask our guests two abstract questions. So are you ready for abstract part of the show?
Mark:
Yeah, my dumb brain is trying to figure out what abstract means. That's my language problem in the IQ world. But yeah, fire away.
Brendan:
So the first question, if you could have a billboard, it can be anywhere in the world, what would it say and where would you put it?
Mark:
What would it say? Oh, man, I had this quote I read on the plane this morning. It's something like, is high performance is more like a cobweb than it is an organizational chart? It's something like that.
Brendan: Yeah.
Mark:
Yeah. And it's just like that complex adaptive systems theory where everything affects everything. And it's the same way companies run, it's the same way your physiology in your body runs, but it's more so intertwined that if you leave out one aspect of performance, then all the others suffer. But if you take an entire system's approach to fixing performance, regardless of what it is, then you get crazy results.
Brendan:
Yeah, it's awesome.
Mark:
So it's cobweb versus, I think it was organizational chart or something like that. It'd be a long-winded billboard, that one.
Brendan:
Yeah. And the final question, you are on the first flight to Mars, with Elon Musk and the first settlers aboard the SpaceX starship Rocket. So what business do you start when you land on Mars and how do you promote it to the new Martians?
Mark:
It would have to be indoor wave pools, I think.
Brendan:
The first time I ask-
Mark:
And surfing sells itself. All you got to do is offer a few free surf lessons and when people experience that feeling, what else is there going to be to do on Mars than ride a few waves? So it will sell itself.
Brendan:
Definitely. So Mark, once again, really appreciate your time today and the value you've dropped to the audience. Is there anything you'd like to say before we wrap up and how can people get in touch?
Mark:
Thanks for having me first and thanks to the listeners for listening. If anyone wants to get in contact with me, my website is www.markmathews.com. And Mathews with one T.
Brendan: OneT.
Mark:
Yeah, or on LinkedIn or social media, it's @markmathewssurf, so feel free to reach out and I'd love to work with your company and figure out this whole complex cobweb of performance, stress, energy, all of that stuff.
Brendan:
Yeah, amazing. We'll put all the links and resources Mark has mentioned in the show notes. And Mark, thanks for such a fantastic conversation. And I'll also put up some of your big wave surfing photos in the show notes because they're absolutely mind-blowing and hard to describe on air.
Mark:
Yeah. I think when people look at that, they'll be like, "No, we're not listening to this crazy person."
Brendan:
No, it's an awesome mission that you're out on changing many people's lives. So yeah, I want to thank you for that and thank you for coming in today.
Mark:
Awesome. Thanks for having me.
Our audio content manager, Daren Lake decided to create audio candy for your ears. This episode is meant to be consumed with headphones on and will take you on a journey spanning from 200,000 years ago to the present.
All in the hopes of having you better understand Metigy, SMEs, marketing and the potential for your own business’ future.
In this episode you will learn;
- What exactly an SME is
- Metigy’s technology explained in a simple analogy
- How to solve problems for your customers
- The world history of problems and solutions (that all relate back to business and marketing)
- Stopping the SME superman syndrome
- Artificial intelligence explained through Instagram
- Product Market Fit
- Predictions on marketing, artificial intelligence and SMEs
- And More
Quotes:
Daren Lake on AI and on product market fit:
- “Artificial intelligence while scary isn't as much about a Terminator future but more about a future that we are already living.”
- "The maps app or chess game that you use on your smart phone is specific artificial intelligence. The Facebook and Instagram algorithims that you use right now are all based on machine learning from human inputs to then execute different outcomes."
- "Finding PMF is when you made something that people want. Your customers, clients or users just want to tell other people to use your product (without any incentive)."
David Fairfull on Metigy App tech stack-
- “How many different technologies do we use to help us do the marketing function? We don't have them connected, right? The proposition is the need to finally have one true source of all data and could make a great decision.”
- “Technology is not being there to harness the value of that data. It (currently) comes back to humans interpreting that. AI is a fantastic application in this environment to process that data once it's all connected and distill it down to the thing you should do today.”
Johnson Lin's angle on failing to get to PMF faster-
- "The approach you will want to be taking is earlier validation and fail faster. We can go to the next iteration if the previous one is not working.”
- Daren's take: “Fail Fast. Don't run and work harder. Fail faster and learn in the early stages”
Brendan Hill on superhero syndrome-
- “I wanted to do the accounting, the marketing, the customer support… But there's only 24 hours in a day. Unless you're Elon Musk- he seems to find a lot more hours in the day somehow. For average, normal, small business owners, time pressure is a real thing.”
Thiago Zandonai on what Metigy does
- Connect your social channels in Metigy and we start giving you insights and recommendations to grow your business. You just connect them and boom, you're done.
Welcome to THIS WEEK IN MARKETING, another podcast by Metigy.
This series will aim to bring to light concepts and answer specific marketing and business questions in a short and sharp format. All in the hopes of helping you market your small to medium enterprise better. On this episode we'll be addressing this query:
Dear Metigy,
I’ve created my podcast for my brand but now I’m stuck and I don’t know how to promote it or what I should be doing to make sure my ideal listeners find it. Can you help me with the next steps so the work I’ve created so far doesn’t go to waste? My budget is pretty small so ideally, I would like to promote my podcast for free.
What you will learn in this episode:
- Understanding the podcast ecosystem’s search algorithms
- How to repurpose social media content from one podcast episode
- How to increase content visibility through collaboration and relationships
Quotes:
- “The goal is to be so good that people share your episode organically and the algorithms don’t … even … matter!”
- “Most people are using some form of social media or email. Since their attention is there – this is a great place to raise visibility and general awareness around your podcast.”
- “There is no magic bullet to getting more listens on your podcast… But if you can address as many angles and touchpoints around your potential listeners, you should start seeing a higher quality and quantity of listeners and engagement.”
Resources and links mentioned:
- Metigy.com/Podcast
- Reach Daren here on Linkedin
This is a cross release episode with our awesome friends Neuralle and the Uncommon Podcast down in Melbourne, Australia. Metigy, CEO, and co-founder David Fairfull was interviewed by host, Jordan Michaelides. Since Metigy is a marketing platform and tool for SMEs. We really get under the hood of all things business, tech and marketing. Artificial Intelligence - not being a fad
- Social Media Marketing Predictions
- Surprises from getting Customer Insights
- The positioning of Metigy as a platform in an established industry
- Metigy’s purpose, road map and timeline
- Lessons from David’s past career experience as the managing partner at We Are Social
- His morning routine, best purchase under $200 and so much more
Quotes:
"How do you solve the problem you're on now, but how do you get to really where you want to be? I think the nature of an entrepreneur is you need to be able to get in and do the details as well."
"Most entrepreneurs are inquisitive. They want to solve a problem that nobody else has really solved and they're absolutely determined to make that happen. That's the driving force."
"AI is the perfect application for marketing, right? Because it is about the ability to be able to process large volumes of data and make decisions on that data faster than a human."
"With AI knowledge, the human can be so much more creative to deliver a fantastic outcome."
Resources and Links Mentioned:
Metigy.com
Metigy.com/podcast
4 x 4 x 48 a fitness concept by David Goggins
Queen’s Gamit a Netflix series David Fairfull appreciated between international calls
Book Recommendations:
Ogilvy on Advertising by David Ogilvy
Cable Cowboys by Mark Robichaux
Reach David Fairfull on Linkedin here
Finder.com's CEO, Fred Schebesta on why your first business goal should be to make $1 of profit, how to show your employees that you care about them, and focusing on your strengths.
And this week, my very special guest is Australia’s first ever digital marketer, Fred Schebesta.
Over the last 15 years, Fred has built Finder.com a fintech that helps people around the world make better financial decisions and improve their lives.
Fred is not only one of Australia's most successful entrepreneurs, but he is also one of the most generous with his time, always willing to help others navigate the challenges of starting and running their own business. And he shares many of his business secrets in today’s episode that helped him grow Finder to over 500 employees across 6 countries.
In my conversation with Fred we cover a wide range of topics including why your first business goal should be to make $1 of profit, taking your marketing mastery and turning it into a process and frameworks that you can use make the best decisions for your business.
Fred also tells a great story of how he ran over the Manhattan Bridge to secure a whiteboard for his new office for $8 from Craigslist and there is a great business lesson to learn from this story.
So please enjoy this wide ranging conversation with Fred Schebesta.
What you will learn in this episode
- Ways that you can make the best decisions for your business
- Why it’s important for business owners to save money where they can
- Lessons from Fred setting up international offices in US, Canada, UK and other countries
- Why your first business goal should be to make $1 of profit
- Why you need to pay your staff well
- How to show your employees that you care about them
- Fred’s advice if you are just starting a business (you need to separate yourself from your company and look at it objectively)
- Why you need to focus on your own strengths
- Take your marketing mastery and turn it into a process
- How Fred manages his time between so many exciting projects and responsibilities
- How Fred has leveraged video to build his personal brand
- How Fred learns new skills
Quotes
"I believe that the world’s a better place when it's well-informed to make decisions. With that premise, I Co-founded Finder. We're trying to better all the world's decisions."
"If you separate yourself from your business and look at it objectively, you can start to take actions that are objectively good for the business. *Do what’s best for your business."
When starting a business, you need to focus on your own strengths.
Take your marketing mastery and turn it into a process.
I’m engaging in the mastery of video, and therefore translating that into processes and systems that Finder can use.
The internet is full to the brim with answers.
"In the beginning, I made so many mistakes and they really hurt. They are the scars that you wear that no one else can see, but you can feel them. "
"The moments when you are outside your comfort zone is when you tend to fail, but that’s the moment where you can find the most incredible opportunities. Those are the moments in time when you’re feeling so much anxiety and duress, that if you can just put your head up and look around, you will see the greatest opportunities. "
"If you’re not growing and not feeling uncomfortable, you’re not pushing hard enough. "
Resources & links mentioned
- Finder.com
HiveEx.com – Fred’s global OTC & brokerage desk specialised in large order cryptocurrency trading -- https://www.hiveex.com/ - Running over the Manhattan Bridge for an $8 Craigslist Whiteboard - https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/running-over-manhattan-bridge-8-craigslist-whiteboard-fred
- Aeron Chair by Herman Miller - https://www.hermanmiller.com/en_au/products/seating/office-chairs/aeron-chairs/
- The 5 Love Languages: The Secret to Love that Lasts - https://www.amazon.com/Love-Languages-Secret-that-Lasts/dp/080241270X#:~:text=The%205%20Love%20Languages%3A%20The,9780802412706%3A%20Amazon.com%3A%20Books
- Larry Ellison Co-Founder of Oracle - https://www.oracle.com/corporate/executives/ellison/
- Brian Armstrong Co-founder of Coinbase - https://twitter.com/brian_armstrong
- Ben Horowitz Co-Founder of a16z - https://twitter.com/bhorowitz
Book Recommendations
- The 5 Love Languages: The Secret to Love that Lasts by Gary Chapman
https://www.amazon.com/Love-Languages-Secret-that-Lasts/dp/080241270X#:~:text=The%205%20Love%20Languages%3A%20The,9780802412706%3A%20Amazon.com%3A%20Books - Trillion Dollar Coach: The Leadership Handbook of Silicon Valley’s Bill Campbell
https://www.amazon.com/Trillion-Dollar-Coach-Leadership-Handbook-ebook/dp/B07JFKHCNY - The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz
https://www.amazon.com/Hard-Thing-About-Things-Building-ebook/dp/B00DQ845EA/ref=sr_1_1?crid=2R9V873FP337Z&dchild=1&keywords=the+hard+thing+about+hard+things&qid=1594418787&s=digital-text&sprefix=the+hard+thin%2Cdigital-text%2C350&sr=1-1 - Flash Boys by Michael Lewis
https://www.amazon.com.au/dp/B00NX91DR4/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1 - The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen R. Covey
https://www.amazon.com/Habits-Highly-Effective-People-Powerful/dp/0743269519 - How to Win Friends & Influence People by Dale Carnegie
https://www.amazon.com/How-Win-Friends-Influence-People/dp/0671027034/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1PV401QGJ95ZW&dchild=1&keywords=how+to+win+friends+and+influence+people&qid=1594419470&s=books&sprefix=how+to+win+fr%2Cstripbooks-intl-ship%2C347&sr=1-1
The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon by Brad Stone
https://www.amazon.com.au/Everything-Store-Jeff-Bezos-Amazon-ebook/dp/B00DJ3ITKS
What business would you build on Mars?
I’d start a water business. When I look at a company, I like to solve problems.
How would I promote it? I’d call it “Earth”.
Reach Fred here
- Fred Schebesta on LinkedIn
- Fred Schebesta on Twitter
- Finder.com
What you will learn in this episode* Why you need to keep the customer at the heart of everything you do * Why you don’t need big budgets to run a successful marketing campaign * Why it’s important to engage with your audience in a way that is natural and native * How to transition from offline to online marketing * How to build a community * How to get started creating a content hub for your business * What it’s like working in a business with your wife or husband * Nassie’s time management tips when working on multiple projects * How Nassie optimized the Optus SMB marketing funnel to increase the number of conversions * Why you need to know what success looks like * Why you shouldn’t test for the sake of testing * Why you don't necessarily need large budgets to start usability testing (just buy $40 worth of coffee) * How allowing your customers to share their stories in an authentic way, it will empower them to grow and connect with new customers * Tools that will help you automate your marketing * Why content marketing is like compound interest
Resources mentioned in this episodeYes Business Content Community - Optus
Fern Lawyers
Metigy
Zoom
Optus Loop Live
Optimizely
Google Optimize
Tealeaf
Sydney Startup Hub
Pardot | Powerful B2B Marketing Automation by Salesforce
Infusionsoft by Keap
ADMA: Association for Data-driven Marketing and Advertising
Brené Brown: The power of vulnerability | TED Talk
Book RecommendationUnwritten: Reinvent Tomorrow: Jack Delosa
What business would you build on Mars?Hopefully, I would have known that I was heading on that flight and actually did my research on the needs of the Martians because it's all about the customer. So a bit about me, I've got a Greek background, so, based on that, I know the way to someone's heart is through the stomach, so Martians I'm assuming have stomachs and they can breathe and they need to eat, so I would say that we need a good restaurant on Mars, so I'm thinking Earth would be pretty intriguing to the Martians because they haven't been there before, so we'll have an Earth-themed restaurant.
And how would I market it? I guess, I'm assuming there'd be digital channels there, too, because that's my stomping ground, so let's assume that that's available, and also something, some experiential marketing as well I think would be quite cool.
Get in touch with NassieLiz Mckenzie on LinkedIn
Liz Mckenzie on Twitter
To see the full episode transcript and get a listener exclusive 3 month free trial of Metigy, visit metigy.com/podcast
What you will learn in this episode How to know when your business needs PR * How to create your brand’s story * Lessons from working with Melanie Perkins * How mentors can help your business * The Art of Receiving Negative Feedback (without feeling dead inside) * How to influence your customers to take action * Word of mouth marketing * The 2 things that every PR campaign should have * How to connect with journalists * How to create your 3 key messages for your business*
Resources mentioned in this episodeHow I Built this podcast episode with Melanie Perkins [must listen]
Source Bottle
Help a Reporter Out
Find relevant reporters on Twitter
Free version of Canva
Canva Pro
Timechi
Book RecommendationThe Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck by Mark Manson
What business would you build on Mars?Reverse Tourism. Get the Martians to go and visit earth!
Get in touch with LizLiz Mckenzie on LinkedIn
Liz Mckenzie on Twitter
To see the full episode transcript and get a listener exclusive 3 month free trial of Metigy, visit metigy.com/podcast
What you will learn in this episode* How to build your product around customers * Marketing to your customer's pain points * Taking on customer feedback and integrating it into future versions of your product * Word of mouth marketing * How Oscar got 67 referrals from 1 customer! * After getting traction in one city, how to expand your marketing activity to the rest of the country * Using different marketing tactics for a double-sided marketplace business * How to get started when you know nothing about marketing (spoiler alert: flyers) * Why offline marketing still works * How offline marketing can be a good excuse to talk to customers and get valuable feedback * How to scale your business with limited resources * How can small businesses utilise the sharing economy * Why it’s important to have business mentors to take your business to the next level * Why supervillains are good at loyalty marketing ('Darth Vader is crushing it') * Why learning on the job can be the best way to learn marketing * Why failure is a good thing (sometimes) * Don’t build any new features without talking to customers first
Resources mentionedCOVID-19 healthcare worker campaign to share free parking spaces around hospitals for healthcare workers
Share with Oscar
Instabug
StartCon Awards
UNSW 10x Accelerator
Neil Patel Marketing Blog
Intercom
Heap Analytics
UNSW 10x Accelerator
Book RecommendationLean In by Sheryl Sandberg
What business would you build on Mars?This might sound like a bit of a cop-out but it would have to be like a Google Translate for like Martian communication, to communicate between the inhabitants of Mars and us new inhabitants.
Brendan: You guys are very good building apps as well.
Lisa: Yeah, exactly. We'll build that.
Get in touch with Lisa and LouiseLouise Chen on LinkedIn
Lisa Qi on LinkedIn
Share with Oscar Website
To see the full episode transcript and get a listener exclusive 3 month free trial of Metigy, visit metigy.com/podcast
What you will learn in this episode* What is SEO and why it’s important for your business
* Why it’s so important to be on page 1 of Google search results
"As the search engines get better at indexing the results and showing the correct information to people, fewer and fewer people go to pages two and three. So if you're not on page one, particularly the first half of page one, then you're going to get very little traction from search engines."
* Why Google Ads is the best way to get in front of the customers who are looking for your services and products.
* The differences between SEO (search engine optimization) and SEM (search engine marketing)
* If people search for something, the top two to three results will get 80% of the traffic. Those that are lower down the page get rapidly diminishing returns.
* The challenges of SEO (it’s not actually free! Time=money)
* Why you should always start with paid before organic
* You don’t necessarily have to pull back on your paid search if your organic SEO activity starts to take off
* How to increase your organic SEO ranking
* Important factors that search engines look for on your website
* What are H1 and H2 headings and why they are important
* Changes in SEO over the last 10 years
* Don’t be too concerned with Google Algorithm updates. Just stay focused on quality content and a good experience for your customers.
* How social media effects your SEO rankings
* SEO tools that Jon uses everyday
* When thinking about potential keywords for your business, think about queries and questions as opposed to individual words
* Why it’s important to measure your SEO activity through Google Analytics
* How to formulate your SEO plan if your business is in a competitive niche
* What is remarketing?
Resources mentionedDigital Ninjas
Google Ads
It takes at least three to six months to see a return on the time and money that you invest in an organic SEO strategy.
If you're starting with SEO today, create content and create content for your customers. Don't worry too much about what the search engines want, worry about your customers. That’s the number one thing.
Google Trends
Google Analytics
Google Keyword Planner Tool
Ahrefs – helps you learn why your competitors rank so high and what you need to do to outrank them
SEMrush - Online Visibility Management Platform
Episode 3: How to build a voice first marketing strategy with Nick Myers and Brett Brooks from Redfox AI
Dr Dave Chaffey : Digital Insights
Search Engine Land
What business would you build on Mars?Jon Dawson:
Okay, that's a an interesting question. So I'm the first settler, I think I'd probably go for something in the healthcare space, on the assumption that other people would be following behind me and some of those people would have healthcare needs. So maybe I'd have an integrated service like the GPs available, but also maybe a gym. I could start a gym franchise within there. People need health services wherever they go.
Brendan Hill:
So a maybe like an F45 on Mars.
Jon Dawson:
Yeah, I probably wouldn't allow F45 to franchise, I'd start my own franchise. But they're a very good business model. I do like the F45 model.
Reach Jon hereJon on LinkedIn
Digital Ninjas
To see the full episode transcript and get a listener exclusive 3 month free trial of Metigy, visit metigy.com/podcast
What you will learn in this episode* How to get your first sale for your business * How to craft your sales message that speaks to your ideal clients * How to influence people to want to interact with your brand and then eventually buy your products * The 10 critical steps in a sales conversation * Understand your pitch: Why you need to be able to pitch what you do with clarity * Saying what you do in a metaphor (picture it like this…) builds a deep connection * How to formulate sales metaphors for your business * Methods to overcome nerves when pitching * Conversations cause chemical reactions > how to understand the different chemical reactions that are occurring in our bodies at any time during sales conversations. * How a bit at that adrenaline does sharpen our minds * Why the most important thing in sales is our mindset * Why a mindset audit is a powerful tool in sales * Australia vs United States selling culture * How to sell through inspiration and not manipulation * How to learn a style of selling that matches your personality * The best way to learn from famous sales personalities like Jordan Belfort, Zig Ziglar and Grant Cardone * Lessons from comedians that can help you sell
Resources mentioned"The first sale is always to yourself, and we've probably all heard that, but no one will ever buy from you unless you are completely sold on what you sell and your worth."
"You need to price in a way that falls within a window of expectation for people. We all were brought up to think that when we're paying a little bit more for something, it's more valuable and it's got more quality. So be at that higher end of expectation."
"According to most studies, people's number one fear is public speaking. Number two is death. Death is number two. Does that sound right? This means to the average person, if you go to a funeral, you're better off in the casket than doing the eulogy."
Jerry Seinfeld
Northstar Martial Arts
Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee
Zig Ziglar
Jordan Belfort
Grant Cardone
Book RecommendationsRaving Fans: Revolutionary Approach to Customer Service by Ken Blanchard
Feel The Fear And Do It Anyway by Susan Jeffers
The Absolutely Critical Non-Essentials by Dr Paddi Lund
What business would you build on Mars?This is a great question. You know what I'm going to do? When we get to Mars, everybody is going to feel like they're excited, but very quickly they're going to be homesick and missing their loved ones very badly. What I know to be true is that when you're feeling like that, you need to exercise and you need to feel like you belong and that you can build bonds with other people as quickly as possible. There's no better way to do that than for everybody to be exercising and having fun together.
I'm going to go back to my personal training days actually, and I'm going to get together and have everybody at the start of every day, we're all going to exercise together. We're going to have fun together. We're going to do programs for people that all match their personalities and their fitness levels, etc. It's going to give them that big endorphin hit every morning so that they can start to feel like they're a new community of people who are feeling more connected and bonded together because that will help them overcome their feelings of homesick and missing people that they love. I think having a daily dose of inspiration and feeling great is important, and I'm going to be the person who runs that. I'm going to market it. I'm going to do what I do very well and what I help our clients to do as well. It's going to take us two years to get to Mars.
Get in touch with RachelRachel Bourke on LinkedIn
SalesSPACE
Special offer from RachelTo take up the special SalesSPACE OFFER from Rachel, visit https://salesspace.com.au/your-sales-success-kit/ and apply the discount coupon: FTM
Your Sales Success Kit - Normally $497 and 12 month access. Now only $297 and lifetime access.
To see the full episode transcript and get a listener exclusive 3 month free trial of Metigy, visit metigy.com/podcast
What you will learn in this episode
- Don’t get stuck on one platform, look where the audience is going.
- How to work with the esports industry
- Sam’s first experiences with LinkedIn Live and how this can help your brand
- How to start your first LinkedIn Live campaign
- Why LinkedIn is the platform of choice for growth
- How to use LinkedIn to get in front of people that you would never think possible
- How to use direct audio messages on LinkedIn to increase conversion and introduce your personal brand (I’ve tried this since recording the episode – it works!)
- How replacing your business cards with the LinkedIn QR code feature can scale your online reputation
- The flow Sam uses to nurture new connections on LinkedIn before asking to catchup in person
- Is LinkedIn the new Tinder? How Sam met her partner on LinkedIn!
- Sam’s thoughts on Tiktok as a marketing tool in 2020 and beyond
- The best way to get started on Tiktok
- How to get testimonials from customers and why they are important
- Why Sam works with all of her team members on their personal brands
Resources mentioned
Thinktank Social
Big Esports
Tony Nash - CEO at Booktopia
Jeremy Loeliger - Commissioner at National Basketball League (NBL)
Using the Find Nearby Feature
Tiktok
Linktree
Metigy
Pixaloop
Gary Vaynerchuk Podcast
No Bullsh!t Leadership Podcast
Book Recommendations
The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck by Mark Manson
It's All Possible by Rob Hartnett
What business would you build on Mars?
I would create a business that focused on educating everyone around self-awareness. A business that's a personal development business that then leads to professional development. So, teaching people how to best communicate, then we will communicate to the Martians around the school that we're actually creating, which is around making the Martians smarter and more self aware and helping them get what they want and then we get what we want. So, everyone's smarter and more caring and considerate of each other.
Reach Sam here
Sam Mutimer on LinkedIn
Sam Mutimer on Twitter
To see the full episode transcript and get a listener exclusive 3 month free trial of Metigy, visit metigy.com/podcast
What you will learn in this episode* How to create word of mouth buzz for your business * Challenges facing the hospitality industry * Upsell tactics (would you like fries with that method) * Why convenience will always win * How to start a business in an area you are passionate about * Before you follow your dream of opening a hospitality business you need to understand the metrics * Why feedback from customers is so critical for your business * How to generate genuine reviews for your business * How Mark has built the Hungry Hungry community * How Mark tested his business assumptions, invested in technology early on, validated the product and market fit and is now ready to scale. * Why it’s important to keep in contact with your network (and visit them face to face) * The process of building the Hungry Hungry app * Mark’s process of collecting primary data from customers and what he does with it
Resources mentionedHungry Hungry
Airbnb: The Growth Story You Didn't Know
9,999 in 10,000 Mobile Apps Will Fail
OrderMate founders pump $2 million into new startup that improves dining out without screwing over small businesses
Almond Bar Darlinghurst
Entrepreneurs' Organization (EO) is a global network of 12,000-plus influential business owners, with over 160 chapters in more than 50 countries.
Calm.com meditation app
1 Giant Mind
Bulletproof Radio with Dave Asprey - Biohacking Podcast
Book RecommendationsThe Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni
What business would you build on Mars?I'm a little bit of a green thumb. In my spare time I've got a little patch of garden where I like to grow all different types of broccoli, I love my greens. So the seeds, I would say the seeds would have to come with me. And I would need to make sure someone brings some water because we don't know how are we going to make them... where there's a will, there's a way. So I'm going to say broccoli seeds and the business would be around something with agriculture perhaps until such point in time that we need an app to order food. But we are going to need to actually cultivate food at the onset.
Get in touch with MarkMark on LinkedIn
Hungry Hungry on Facebook
Hungry Hungry on Instagram
To see the full episode transcript and get a listener exclusive 3 month free trial of Metigy, visit metigy.com/podcast
What you will learn in this episode* Why businesses need to focus more on retention * How to close the loyalty loop * What Amber is excited about for the future of marketing * AI in marketing * How Amber builds thriving communities * How General Assembly build their community * “Word of mouth is your highest form of marketing and flattery.” * What is social messaging? * Why you need to focus on personal branding > you are your business * How Amber learns new digital marketing skills
Resources mentionedAirtasker
Amber’s digital marketing course at General Assembly
Google Home
Amazon Alexa
Acquiring a new customer can cost five times more than retaining an existing customer.
Increasing customer retention by 5% can increase profits from 25-95%
Brené Brown
Digital marketing events and training - Interactive Minds Sydney
Khoros: Online Community & Social Media Management
Frank Body
Slack
Is Facebook Messenger the New Email? 3 Experiments to Find Out
In a test at a Hubspot event, the Facebook Messenger broadcasts had an average open rate of 80% and average CTR of 13%. That was 242% and 609% better than our email controls, respectively.
1 in every 3 mobile minutes is spent on Facebook and Instagram
Babblestack – Acquire, engage & serve customers with Live Chat, IVR and Social Messaging
By 2027, 50% of the American workforce will be in the gig economy.
Leonardo DiCatrio on Instagram
Calm.com meditation app
Koala Mattresses
Book RecommendationsDare to Lead by Brené Brown
Hug Your Haters by Jay Baer
This Is Marketing by Seth Godin
12 Rules for Life by Jordan B. Peterson
Alive: The Story of the Andes Survivors by by Piers Paul Read
What business would you build on Mars?I love this question, by the way. Big Elon Musk fan. I think what I'd probably do is open some sort of museum, gallery, or library. Or, a combination of all of those things which allows people to experience where we've come from and also have a space that they can touch physical things that aren't virtual, and physical things from the past to keep us in touch with yeah, like I said, where we've come from, but I guess who we are as human beings before all just AI and a computer, or future arm, we're just plugged in. I think that's what I would do.
Get in touch with AmberAmber on LinkedIn
Amber's website
To see the full episode transcript and get a listener exclusive 3 month free trial of Metigy, visit metigy.com/podcast
What you will learn in this episode
- Why data is so important for your business
- How gamification can lead to data capture opportunities
- Mike’s definition of customer success
- Connecting the data with your marketing strategy
- Make sure that your applications, front end systems, CRM and marketing automation tools are connected straight out of the gate.
- Why progressive profiling can get the right information at the right time from your customers
- Why you need to invest in business intelligence
- Similarities between coaching a football team and coaching a marketing team
- When expanding your business into new international markets > always read history books for that region.
Resources mentioned
Pawssum (Mike’s former pet startup)
Siteminder
90% of the world’s data was created in the last two years.
Tableau
Stripe
Airpods
Atlassian
Book Recommendations
Shogun by James Clavell
What business would you build on Mars?
It kind of goes back to the fact that our society now is so much built on growth, and we talk about GDP, and there's nothing around climate change, and all the things that are basically we're not exactly doing very right by the world at the moment. So, you go to a new world, fundamentally shift. I like to see a blend of the communal sharing of a company as opposed to just the fact that it's sheer growth, and there's a few people at the top. So, there was a company out of the US. I think it's Chobani. It's a yogurt brand. Once they went public, they shared with every single employee, they all became big shareholders in the company. So, if I go to Mars, I would literally probably do something around mining and terraforming. But every person involved would have a huge share of that company because if you could reset what accompany means, I would completely reset it to where everyone's got to share, we grow, but it's a completely different mindset.
Reach Mike here
Mike on LinkedIn
To see the full episode transcript and get a listener exclusive 3 month free trial of Metigy, visit metigy.com/podcast
What you will learn in this episode
How Cliff and Mel from Canva convinced Mahesh to leave his startup (just when he was about to close the seed round funding) to go and work at Canva.
Mahesh’s TimTam marketing hack that won him Uber’s as a client
Why recruitment has been one of the major factors around Canva’s success
Why talent acquisition is just like growth marketing
Don’t compromise when hiring – wait for the right skillset
Why you should never underestimate anyone
How to be commercial when hiring
Thoughts around business leadership
Resources mentioned
Take a HR course with Mahesh
Airtasker
Canva
TimTams
Zappos
Stack Overflow
YouTube Premuim (formerly YouTube Red)
(The mighty) Tottenham Hostspur
Mahesh’s ‘hiring in football article’ (coming soon)
Book Recommendations
Lean Analytics by Alistair Croll and Benjamin Yoskovitz
Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman
Work Rules by Laszlo Bock
Reinventing Organizations by Frederic Laloux
What business would you build on Mars?
I have very dry and geeky answers to these kind of things. My first response was, "What do they need? What do they want?" Then I was like, "Let's make some assumptions." I'm a tourist coming into this brand new country. We're not going to sell probably something that I think is cool because it's exclusive. Gold seems to be very attractive to people constantly, so if they don't have a shiny thing or something that smells nice or something that drives an immediate kick of endorphins, I'll find that out and then I'll sell to them. I'll just tell them that this is the coolest thing and make it super exclusive.
Reach Mahesh here
Mahesh on Twitter
Mahesh on LinkedIn
To see the full episode transcript and get a listener exclusive 3 month free trial of Metigy, visit metigy.com/podcast
What you will learn in this episode* How to produce highly customised videos in your marketing on a small budget * How Justin built the Vloggi app * Developing a minimal marketable product * How talking to customers can change your product roadmap * Why videos are such a powerful part of your marketing mix * How to overcome the barriers to entry to make videos for your business * If a picture is worth 1,000 words, a video is worth 1,000,000 words * Why a founder can’t do everything in their business * The benefits of having marketing advisors
Resources mentionedGet a free Vloggi template for your business by messaging Justin on LinkedIn
Because of its visual nature, 80% of users can recall a video ad they’ve seen in the past 30 days
Vloggi
YouTube
Slack
What business you would build on Mars?Well, interesting. I was reading about this last week. The current theory is that they're going to have female only crews go to Mars. This being so because the only way to control human desires is to exclude men, basically. And I think the project could be jeopardized if you had men up there, who wanted to procreate. So, they're going to take up with them lots of frozen sperm from earth, and assuming that Elon and I get killed, so we are on the first flight, but then they implement the female only plan. The business that we were set up before we get killed is an AI-driven sperm banks.
Kind of like a dating agency, kind of like a bumble or soulmate finder that actually matches the right sperm to the right female scientists up there. And this will be done not only... So how it will be marketed will be some of the profiles and the pictures, but actually behind the scenes, we've all done the analysis on the women to find out actually we need very tall people over there to do this bit of work. We will only preselected the sperm on board, marketing it to the women is another matter. But the AI engine behind the scenes is we need a success rate of kind of 75% on these impregnations and I'm not sure how you do it, but I'll leave that Elon.
Get in touch with JustinJustin on LinkedIn
To see the full episode transcript and get a listener exclusive 3 month free trial of Metigy, visit metigy.com/podcast
What you will learn in this episode
- The best ways your business can leverage drone technology for your marketing
- How BIRDI built their most successful user activation campaign
- How to run a successful marketing competition
- How to build and engage a community
- Drone breakfasts! How to create successful events for your business to engage current and potential customers
- How to get started using drones in your marketing activity
- How to understand your customers and know what they really want
- How BIRDI uses Metigy to make the most effective choices with their marketing strategy
Resources mentioned
BIRDI Forward Thinking Marketer Award campaign
BIRDI photo marketing competition [check out the amazing images]
BIRDI and Pexels Drone Video Contest sponsored by Canva
Uber Elevate - Aerial Ridesharing at Scale
Amazon Prime Air Drone Delivery
Federation of International Touch
Metigy
Metigy Learning
Canva
Mailchimp
What business you would build on Mars?
That's a good question. It's very difficult to come up with the solution if you don't understand what problem the customer's going to look at. So you'd really want to make sure you understand once you landed there, who were the customers that you're trying to serve and what was their purpose. Now if I take that, if I put my entrepreneur and fast moving hat on, I think from a quick response I'd be like, "One you'd have to be looking at, hey, strategically partner with SpaceX themselves because that offers, you get quite strong distribution, right?" And so whether that was selling tickets back to come to Earth, the return trip, you never know what environment they're in. They might be looking to get away just as much as we are looking to get away.
It can be good exchange exchange, opportunity. Obviously there's an element of natural vital resources. So you'd be looking at, you know, who's supplying oxygen, water, food on-site, but then I don't know what this, I guess these Martians are pretty self-sustaining in some way on their own merit. So I think I'd be, personally, I'd be looking at that partnership opportunity with Space X in some way, shape or form that I was addressing one of their problems primarily because I'm more likely to understand their model. I think it would take me a bit longer to recognize what a martian might need.
And then in terms of promoting it, you always give away freebies. So we just make sure to load up on like some earth rocks or something and pass them out because then they're looking at them, they remember us and we gave them something. So it's like a good feeling as a potential customer.
Reach Seb and Kirra here
Sebastian Robertson on LinkedIn
Sebastian Robertson on Twitter
Kirra Stutchbury on LinkedIn
BIRDI
To see the full episode transcript and get a listener exclusive 3 month free trial of Metigy, visit metigy.com/podcast
What you will learn in this episode
- How to learn from your business failures
- Lessons from relying too heavily on Facebook ads
- Influencer campaigns don’t work for every ecommerce campaign
- Lessons on how to tell your brand story in a single post
- Engagement on Instagram means nothing unless it translates to sales
- Marketing advice to business owners who are just starting an ecommerce store
- How to learn new marketing skills
- User experience – the balance between simplicity and accuracy
- How to introduce technology into industries that are reluctant to change (you need to be naive + stupid + throw in a bit of ego :)
- Why Zoltan wouldn’t outsource tech again
Resources mentioned in this episode
Eric Phu – Co Founder at Citizen Wolf
1 in 3 pieces of clothing made every year goes straight to landfill, often with the tags on. The brand that made them can't afford to dilute their brand by selling at a significant discount. So I'm talking luxury brands or they're burnt. There's an identifiable percentage of Sweden's power that comes from burning H&M clothes.
Fishburners
Citizen Wolf Sydney shopfront @ 2 Steam Mill La, Haymarket NSW
Citizen Wolf Instagram
maggie.the.goldie on Instagram
Sydney Golden Retreiver Meetup :)
Zoltan’s magic fit algorithm
Earth Overshoot Day
Shopify
Mailchimp
Sendgrid
15 minutes with a dog increases your serotonin levels by two to three times.
The Business of Fashion
Book Recommendations
Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling High-Tech Products to Mainstream Customers by by Geoffrey A. Moore (Author), Regis McKenna
The Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni
What business you would build on Mars?
So, I was thinking about this and there's a lesson that I like to think about from Levi Strauss actually who made a lot more money than anybody mining gold ever did right. And as the old adage, you don't mine the gold, you sell the shovels. Or in this case, the jeans that they were wearing. So I tried to apply that Mars and I was like, "Well, what would that be?" And I guess it would be starting a business that provides the tools for people looking for water on Mars because there is water there and we need if you're going to make it habitable village or city, we need to solve it. And it's much easier to extract it probably than get it from any other means. So yeah, I don't quite know what that would be but I guess I've got nine months on the rocket ship to figure it out and talk to the scientists that know.
Get in touch with Zoltan
Citizen Wolf website
Citizen Wolf Instagram
Zoltan on LinkedIn
To see the full episode transcript and get a listener exclusive 3 month free trial of Metigy, visit metigy.com/podcast
What you will learn in this episode
- Personal branding lessons from working with Richard Branson
- How to start building your own personal brand
- How to build a minimum viable personal brand
- Grow your message with a human face
- How your backstory is your businesses backstory
- How to write the perfect LinkedIn bio
- Lessons from founding TEDx Sydney
Resources mentioned in this episode
Afterpay
Nick Molnar
Seth Godin - Talker’s block
TEDx Sydney
Tech Sydney
Launch Group
Take a Zambesi course with Fleur
Slack (check out the best Slack marketing group Online Marketing Geniuses)
Joe Allen
Evan Williams
Book Recommendations
The Business of Being YOU: Personal Brand Secrets of CEOs and Celebrities by Fleur Brown
This Is Marketing by Seth Godin
Back, After the Break by Osher Günsberg
What business you would build on Mars?
I would start some sort of communications platform. So one of my great, I guess, business crushes is Evan Williams who created Blogger, then Twitter, and Medium. So that platform is really, really amazing. I imagine language barriers would be an issue. So creating a platform where people can share their stories and it's automatically translated into English for us, I guess, or the equivalent language of whoever's there. That would be a priority for me. And then people on Earth who are grappling with climate change can write and share those stories and be inspired to come to Mars and escape the madness of Earth.
Get in touch with Fleur
Fleur on LinkedIn
Fleur on Twitter
Fleur on Facebook
To see the full episode transcript and get a listener exclusive 3 month free trial of Metigy, visit metigy.com/podcast
What you will learn in this episode
How to become a deep listener
Practical tips on how to not neglect your existing customers
Acquiring a new customer can cost five times more than retaining an existing customer.
How to listen to what your customers are not saying
Learning to listen to what’s unsaid
Why the magic phrase is ‘Tell me more’ and ‘I’m curious what else you’re thinking about on that topic.’
The 5 different levels of listening
How to take notes in meetings (this is really cool!)
‘If your goal can be achieved in your lifetime, it's not worth going for.’
Resources mentioned in this episode
Deep Listening: Impact Beyond Words by Oscar Trimboli
Oscar’s Deep Listening Podcast
oscartrimboli.com
Google Alerts
We speak at about 125 to 150 words a minute. You can listen right now at 400 words a minute, but as a speaker, I can think at up 900 words a minute.
Jason Calacanis – This Week in Startups Podcast
Boris Conrad – World memory champion
The Lion's Share
Evernote
Book Recommendations
Deep Listening: Impact Beyond Words by Oscar Trimboli
Atomic Habits by James Clear
Business you would build on Mars
I think this is a transformational time in commerce. It means that Martians and people from the Earth will be able to trade for the first time. I don't know if it's Bitcoin, but we would need to set up a currency or rate of exchange between the two planets. What we need to do is figure out how do we transact across the galaxy? I hope that will be valuable to both marketplaces, and I know that creating a double sided marketplace is probably the hardest thing you can ever do in software development.
But in terms of promoting it, I just think that we need to get the Elon Musk of Mars, and the Elon Musk of Earth do the first trade together, and just record that in some kind of medium that both planets can see and hopefully that will set off a process of trade that will make both planets closer together.
Get in touch with Oscar
Oscar on LinkedIn
oscartrimboli.com
To see the full episode transcript and get a listener exclusive 3 month free trial of Metigy, visit metigy.com/podcast
You will learn
- How to learn from your competitors while also staying true to your idea
- The main marketing pain points that Geoff sees with the businesses he works with
- Why a cookie-cutter approach to your marketing will not work
- Geoff’s questions that he asks businesses when he starts working with them
- How partnering with complimentary brands can lead to a win for both brands
- Why growth hacking is not the starting point of your marketing activity
- How to develop your sales skills
- How to build your marketing team
- How to take the first step and start a digital marketing campaign for your business
- Business lessons that you can learn from your parents
Resources mentioned
50% of all business fail within 2 years. One of the top two reasons is that business owners don't know how to market themselves effectively.
PassionBerry Marketing
LinkedIn learning courses
Masterclass
The Mentor with Mark Bouris
Unicorn Hunting - Milos Nikolic
The Art Of War by Sun Tzu
SpyFu - Competitor Keyword Research Tool
SEMrush - Online Visibility Management Platform
Book Recommendation
Marketing Warfare By Al Ries and Jack Trout
Get in touch with Geoff
Geoff Main on LinkedIn
PassionBerry Marketing
To see the full episode transcript and get a listener exclusive 3 month free trial of Metigy, visit metigy.com/podcast
What you will learn How to build a highly targeted network of over 8k contacts * The best way to reach out to cold contacts on LinkedIn * The results of asking everyone you meet how you can help them * What MC Hammer taught Cheryl about mastering nerves before a performance when they met * Why you need to know your story * Why founder wellness is important * Why it’s best to choose mentors for your business who are 6 to 12 months ahead of you on your business journey * Dealing with self-doubt in business*
Resources mentioned in this episodeStartCon
Contacts+
HubSpot
Superhuman
Referral Hero
Freakonomics Podcast
Astro Teller – The Difficult Part of Building Driverless Cars
Book recommendations (there's a few:)Blink by Malcolm Gladwell
The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell
The Four Steps to the Epiphany by Steve Blank
The Lean Startup by Eric Ries
High Output Management by Andrew S. Grove
Good to Great by Jim Collins
Bad Blood by John Carreyrou
Chaos Monkeys by Antonio Garcia Martinez
Freakonomics by Stephen J. Dubner
What business you would build on Mars?A business that sells a mini pocket Earth, and this is a miniature Earth that you can keep in your pocket to remind you of the place that you came from. Or if you're a new alien on Mars, to help you visualize the Earth you may one day visit and it'd be a little miniature version of Earth, maybe about the kind of palm of your hand that you could put in your pocket and it would have some sort of mechanic that when you hold it in your palm, it would spin in, the way that Earth does so that. I think we would market it as, "Keep a little piece of Earth in your pocket. You can't see earth anymore, so now you can."
Get in touch with CherylCheryl on LinkedIn
Cheryl on Twitter
To see the full episode transcript and get a listener exclusive 3 month free trial of Metigy, visit metigy.com/podcast
What you will learn How to get your first 100 customers * How to learn marketing in 2019 * How to work in a role that you’re passionate about * How putting yourself in uncomfortable situations can lead to big success * Why listening to your customers, understanding their problems and solving them with a level of authenticity has led Academy Xi to rapid growth * How Ben learns new skills * What the future of learning looks like*
Resources mentioned in this episodeAcademy Xi
General Assembly
Intercom live chat
Book recommendationsThe Code of the Extraordinary Mind by Vishen Lakhiani
Delivering Happiness by Tony Hsieh
Sapiens book by Yuval Noah Harari
What business you would build on Mars?This is an exciting thing. I mean Elon Musk is my hero. So I think if I was there, if education was something that would be needed, I would probably start education, because it's something that I believe in. I'll probably focus less on the skills that we're teaching today only because they'd probably be less applicable and more about the soft skills and look at how we could align I guess different interests of Martians and human and how are we going to educate each other and how we are going to live and what skillset we really need to build on Mars? I'm sure they would be incredibly intelligent, so I would look at how, what sort of skills they have and how we can integrate our learnings together and build something really exciting.
To see the full episode transcript and get a listener exclusive 3 month free trial of Metigy, visit metigy.com/podcast
What you will learn* How to leverage the power of artificial intelligence and voice assistant technology to “literally give your brand a voice.” * How your business can leverage voice search * A simple explanation of how Amazon Alexa and Google Home actually work * How to own your niche in search using a voice search strategy * Why you need to add voice to your marketing strategy in 2020 * How to change the sound and tone of Alexa to match your brand * How to build your personal brand * Why you don’t have to be on every social media platform * How travelling can inspire you with new marketing ideas
Resources mentioned in this episodeSocial Media Marketing Summit
Redfox AI
Amazon Alexa and Echo
Google Home
There were an estimated one billion voice searches per month in 2018
Miri Rodriguez On The Art Of Storytelling for Business
The Artificial Podcast by RedFox AI (Nick and Brett's Podcast - check it out!)
Book RecommendationsLife 3.0 by Max Tegmark
Talk to Me by James Vlahos
What business you would build on Mars?The Etsy of Mars. People are going to want things to hang up in their new Mars homes, right? What we do is we take all the red Mars clay sand and create knickknacks and sell them at a low but reasonable cost. And then we brand them so the first brand that people will always have present in their home is whatever we decided to be.
Get in touch with Nick and BrettNick Myers on LinkedIn
Brett Brooks on LinkedIn
Redfox AI
To see the full episode transcript and get a listener exclusive 3 month free trial of Metigy, visit metigy.com/podcast
What you will learn* The difference between growth marketing and growth hacking * Pirate Metrics – The AARRR Framework (acquisition, activation, retention, referral, revenue) * 25% increase in your activation metric will lead to a 48% increase in your annual recurring revenue. * How to improve activation * How to improve your user onboarding * Develop customer personas * Why analysing competitors can save you time and money * How Anna grew Spaceship to $100m from being employee number 3 * Why it’s important to phone new customers and get their feedback * Using waitlists to get 40k people on prelaunch list * Don’t try to scale when you’re not ready to scale
Resources mentioned in this episodeMailchimp onboarding process
Asana
Spaceship
SEMrush
ahrefs
Canva
Mike Cannon-Brookes
Robinhood
Segment.io
Mixpanel
Autopilot
Brian Balfour
Sam Zheng
Andrianes Pinantoan
Curious Thing
Book RecommendationTraction by Gabriel Weinberg
The Lean Startup by Eric Ries
Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely
What business you would build on Mars?I think if we were to avoid like the obvious answers, which are getting monopolies over resources that everyone needs like water and housing and things like that, I would probably open the first bank there. I think the best way to make money is to help other people make money. I was thinking about this question, with so many business opportunities that you can capitalize on, the best way to do it is just to give people the capital in order for them to achieve those particular dreams that they also might have in regards to what sort of businesses they want to open.
The first thing I'd open is probably a bank or an investment firm or something like that, which basically allows people to borrow or give up some of the equity in order to build out their first businesses, which might be that monopoly of water or that monopoly of food or the next Amazon.
Get in touch with AnnaAnna on LinkedIn
Anna on Twitter
To see the full episode transcript and get a listener exclusive 3 month free trial of Metigy, visit metigy.com/podcast
What you will learn How to start your content marketing strategy for your business * How to maximize your content reach > lessons from gaining 14 million organic content views on LinkedIn * How publishing 1 video per day on LinkedIn can increase your profile views by 2000% * How cooking Australia’s largest pizza resulted in priceless PR and engaging content * Why LinkedIn is the best platform for personal branding * How to create the perfect LinkedIn profile * How to get leads that convert through LinkedIn * Creating content assets that create emotional connections with prospects * Type of content that the LinkedIn algorithm is rewarding the most * How to maintain content production in your business * How to produce 30 videos from 1 pillar article*
Resources mentioned in this episodeLinkedin as a content publishing platform
Hubspot
Mailchimp
Inshot
LinkedIn influencers to check out:
Shay Rowbottom
Mark Metry
Sally A Illingworth
To see the full episode transcript and get a listener exclusive 3 month free trial of Metigy, visit metigy.com/podcast