← Content Is Profit
Content Is Profit
How Micro-Creators & UGC are Transforming the Influencer Marketing Game for Brands with William Gasner
00:41:52
Loading summary
Transcript89 lines
- [00:01]
A
Start now. Right. There's never been a better time to launch a brand or become a creator. We can automate so much stuff now. You can build products so rapidly. People are hungry for new things.
- [00:13]
B
So I think quality is very subjective.
- [00:16]
A
But I don't necessarily think that everyone needs to have a professional camera to say this is a quality piece of content.
- [00:23]
B
Yeah.
- [00:23]
A
I think the bottom line is comes down to true authenticity and trust.
- [00:27]
B
It's good to promote. Right. And I think that hits the ego sometimes. Like oh man, like of course my product is super good, but maybe nobody wants it.
- [00:36]
A
As an example, beauty products work fantastic. But you're selling foot fungus cream. You might sell millions of dollars online for athletes foot cream. People don't want to talk about foot fungus on social media.
- [00:45]
B
Right.
- [00:45]
A
Or on a lot of other channels.
- [00:47]
B
You scale an e commerce business to seven figures in six months. You've co founded six businesses. You bootstrap stack influence to do over a million annual recurring revenue. Right. With only 1000 bucks. What are some lessons that you can share with maybe creators or business operators?
- [01:01]
A
I would say one of the biggest lessons whether you're creator just starting out or a brand launching your first product.
- [01:13]
B
All right guys, welcome back to content is profit. Today I have a banger for you. I just had the most incredible conversation with a tech founder that helps brands and influencers connect and increase revenue. So whether you're a brand or a creator that are looking for opportunities, this conversation is for you. He has co founded six businesses. He scale an e commerce business to seven figures in just six months. And not only his platform helps, but he is a wealth of knowledge in there. Like his company reached like 1,000,000 ARR with only 100, with only $1,000 and after raising a little investment now on pace to do $10 million which is insane. He also made it to the Inc. 5000 and anyways this guy know what he's talking about and the conversation was so good because we lately we've had a lot of brands that kind of want to get into the content game and we also have a ton of creators that want to get into the product and selling and figure out what to sell. And this is what his platform does and also the frameworks that he share was incredible. He we talked about things like why they are actually focusing on working with influencers and creators with less than 100,000 followers. That is a very small career even with creators with a thousand followers and why that is so important. Why brands are actually trying to find those kind of creators which could Be you listening right now, right? What's the difference between starting and scaling and like what does it need to actually succeed in that user generated content game as a brand and as a creator? We talked about quality. What type of quality does your video, your content needs to be to be successful online and what are the two things that actually consumers are looking for that they have backed up by data? Anyways, incredible conversation. I hope you enjoy. Here we go. Welcome to the show, man. I'm stoked to talk to you. We chatted last week for a little bit, we kind of connected online and you open a whole new world on content distribution and management of creators.
- [03:19]
A
Absolutely.
- [03:20]
B
Do you want to share a little bit of kind of like what you're doing right now? And obviously people just heard the interest. So you're MVP in this industry. You've been going on for a few years now. But what are you guys focusing on right now?
- [03:32]
A
So main focus is scaling up what we call the long tail of creators. So the 90% of social media users who aren't the celebrities of the world with hundreds of thousands of followers who usually have pretty much less than 100,000. And the beautiful thing about them is that they're authentic, they're trustworthy, they understand their audience at a much better rate. Right. They're like more in tune. So the content they produce we find is again more, not only more trustworthy, but in a lot of capacities, higher quality and better converting for the brands that work with us, specifically e commerce brands. So yeah, and as the high level overview, which I know you already kind of briefly mentioned, but the stock influence platform helps brands not only scale up creator collaborations, but also automate the management, you know.
- [04:32]
B
Yeah, absolutely. I mean that's pretty hot. Take that you have there. Right. And I, you know, to preface, like I'm completely in agreeance with you, I think, you know, lower audit, like smaller audiences can be probably higher quality. And that's a conversation I have a lot with podcasters specifically. Right. Because the audio platform of the podcast might be probably the hardest one to grow, you know, around everything else. And everybody when they start seem to be a little bit discouraged when sometimes, you know, that audience knock doesn't come as fast as maybe short form content. Right. The reels and shorts and things like that. So I like your take. I like the part on the connection part. I think people understand that and I think the market is shifting. Right. You probably see a lot of brands that are going, I mean, that's why platforms like yours exist, right? They're Going from instead of like one massive influencer that might, you know, go in, but not as deep as maybe somebody that has that. So do you have like any like specific examples or like success stories? You know, we talked a little bit about. You guys mainly are like physical products. Right. Like you deal with companies that have physical products and then they use that micro influencer, you know, marketing on the side. Like how does a company get started? Like what, what are some of the things that they should be looking for?
- [05:49]
A
Absolutely. One thing to dive into real quick before I go into all of kind of how you start with stack influence and scale it up. But amazing thing to kind of follow up on your point of why brands are going with these smaller creators and not putting all their eggs in one basket with a larger influencer is social platforms dramatically have changed over the past few years. And it used to be the fact that when you produced content it would only go to your follower base. Right. You were subjected to the people simply following you.
- [06:24]
B
Yeah.
- [06:25]
A
And now what has happened is as long as you're producing high quality content, that content will now get syndicated across a lot of newer audiences. So you can have a few hundred followers, a few thousand followers and get posts that get millions of views. Right. And so it really comes down to how quality is the content that you're actually producing. Yeah. And to answer also your follow up questions we've had because of that new reality on social, we've had insane results for our clients. Like literally I've seen as high as 13x ROI from a campaign.
- [07:06]
B
And that ROI is for the company, correct?
- [07:09]
A
That's exactly right. Yeah. For just like scaling up their online sales specifically for an E commerce brand and due to the fact that you're getting, you're diversifying your risk across a lot of creators. Right. And that's what our platform really specializes, that it's not just working with five people or ten people, working with hundreds or thousands. So the results are unbelievable on just in essence a performance marketing side and then also on a brand building side. So like the content people produce is also extremely valuable. There's a lot of stats online of how what the industry calls ugc, right. User generated content performs in variety of fashions. But we've got results from brands that implementing some UGC, they've decreased their ad rates by 5x, they've increased conversions. So not only is the promotion actually effective, but also then taking the content that's produced and then repurposing it on other channels.
- [08:06]
B
Yeah.
- [08:07]
A
And then the last follow up to Believe your final question for me. Like, how do you get started? Like our platform, we try to simplify everything in influencer marketing. There's a lot that goes into it.
- [08:17]
B
Yeah, yeah.
- [08:19]
A
And not only finding the right person who's a good fit for your brand, but conveying proper posting guidelines, making sure people have the right esthetics and produce kind of content that aligns with the brand or products, but then also actually getting someone to do a promotion. In general, our platform focuses also on product seeding, so like sending free products in exchange for posts. And there can be a lot of issues with aligning things in that process. So for us, it's very simple. Or for brands that use our platform, they set specific goals, how many influencers they want to work on a certain timeframe basis. They set what their objectives for posting guidelines are, and the platform handles the rest. And brands just pay as you go. We don't have subscription fees. It's a flat fee for successful posts. So you're only going to pay if you actually get content as opposed to a lot of other models, which is a big reason we built stack. Influence in general is like someone gives you a database of 10 million people and some filtering tools and outreach tools, and you pay a huge monthly fee for that. But then you don't realize how much effort goes into actually reaching out to people, managing them, and then every other person is charging you a different fee and it jacks up the price quite rapidly.
- [09:38]
B
Yeah, I think that's probably like the main concern for a lot of people. And for those listening that might not be familiar with a model like this, let's say you sell the example that we talked about in our initial call, right? Like this brand that has the chocolate, right? And they decided to give full freedom to the creators. Specific, a few guidelines, but almost like full freedom. Like you are the creator, you understand your audience. Go create. Here's a product, right? And a lot of the people that we kind of deal with as well, they. They tend to have a little more control over like what the handle we're using, what is the hashtag? And this guy just flipped the script and he's like, you go, go crazy, right? Because at the end of the day, if your content works, you're going to sell the product. And then for them, that specific example was an affiliate deal, right? So when a lot of companies go into this, I, we've seen the fear on control on the brand type deal, right? Or even like the overwhelm of maybe managing hundreds of this. Like how these guys Solved. It was like he had a discord channel and then all his creators were in that channel and they were kind of like have higher rankings. And the people that did not perform, they just stopped creating because they weren't selling the product. And it was just, it came from the creator, not for them. So I think like he flipped the script on that. But I think it's super interesting having a platform like yours to, to, to be able to manage all these things and kind of remove, you know, we call it smooth operator. Right. Like remove the friction of the process that otherwise could be super daunting for a lot of these brands. Right.
- [11:08]
A
So 100%.
- [11:09]
B
You mentioned some results, like do you have like a metric on like a specific budget? And I know that, you know, some of our listeners, they might have E commerce brands. Am I, you know, trying to figure out the content game, you know, in as we've talked about, the power obviously of podcasting, long form content and short form. Maybe they have their own process, their own selling process inside of their business. They have their sales teams. But what are some advantages apart from these people knowing the back of their mind, their audiences, the pains, what moves them? Do you know any averages on what a campaign would look like? You have incredible results. Right. Like five to six years. Think you said like 13x. It's kind of crazy.
- [11:56]
A
That's always the case.
- [11:57]
B
Yeah, those are like obviously like big, big campaigns, but like what are some budgets that people can start thinking about? Okay, I want to, you know, go into your platform and I want to start experimenting with something like this. Where should we start? Like where what status of company do they need? Like, do they need like a final product doing fulfillment? Obviously, I'm assuming, like what are the things that the boxes that they need to check to start a campaign?
- [12:21]
A
So absolutely need your product for sale online. So right now our platform and we are planning to build out features for fast companies and digital products and apps, et cetera, and even potentially for physical locations. Like someone walks into a coffee shop and you promote your morning coffee. Right. Awesome. But our main focus right now is E commerce and so you have to have your products sold someplace online. You need also good presence. Like you have to have a good brand. Influencers are only going like, at least this is the model that we've created. We've created this marketplace with an actual dedicated community of people who interact a lot with the brands that they collaborate with.
- [13:04]
B
Yeah.
- [13:05]
A
So it's not just no relationship. Here's a random database. We've never contacted them. We have 600,000 people who like are part of the stack influence community.
- [13:13]
B
Yeah.
- [13:14]
A
Now they aren't forced, they opt into the brands. We create layers of intent to make sure that fit is proper. And we also only show certain collaboration opportunities utilizing AI analysis and variety of intent factors to people who would be a good fit for a specific product. But at the end of the day, the influencer actually has to choose which product and which brand to collaborate with. Now, like any normal consumer, if you don't have a good online presence, if you don't have a good brand, if you don't have good products, people aren't going to want to collaborate with you. Right. And you want that right match fit because that's how products at the end of the day are sold. We also have specialty, focus or a lot of clients that work with us also utilize our campaigns for E commerce marketplace growth. So think Amazon, Walmart Target. There's different layers there of preparation that you should have before investing in a campaign like ours, specifically in terms of keyword optimization of your listings. There's a big reason people utilize us for those parts. Marketplaces is to increase their natural visibility within the marketplace. So like when you first launch a product on Amazon, let's say Amazon has no data about how your product performs. So you're going to be on page 1000 probably even longer than that. Right. Like there's thousands of pages for any given niche and 75% of people don't even go past the first page. So how do you even get any visibility to take advantage of shoppers on a marketplace? How you do it is you first off have to optimize your listing properly, but you also have to feed your listing with proper conversion metrics. And one of the best ways to do that is what they call external traffic. Right. Traffic that comes off Amazon, to Amazon or to Walmart. And influencer marketing is one of the best ways to do that because it's trusted, it's high converting. So a lot of our brands do that. But if you're launching there, you need to have. We could drive as much external traffic there. But if your listing is not optimized for the right keywords, you're not going to show up in the right places. Right. So that's another piece of advice on that side. Inventory is also very key. You don't want to run out of inventory during a campaign. Yeah, because especially on a marketplace like you might get to the first page through something, you run an inventory, you're going back down to the thousand page, right.
- [15:48]
B
Yeah.
- [15:50]
A
And then as far as your question about budget. So our platform is a scale platform. Right. If you're just trying to. It's your first time utilizing influencer marketing, like you've never done it before. You don't have a large budget. Like I. My recommendation is test it out yourself. Like, it's not that difficult to find a handful of people DMing them on social media, search for relevant hashtags, find people who are creating some content. There's a lot of other kind of free databases of just finding some people who potentially could be willing to collaborate with you.
- [16:25]
B
Yeah.
- [16:26]
A
And negotiate with them. Maybe you're doing a affiliate commission, maybe you're sending them a flat fee. Maybe you can convince them to do a collaboration just for a free product like we do and see how the process works. Right. And then when you're actually trying to scale, we're a great platform for that. The minimum budget around for our system is about fifteen hundred dollars. So not a fit for every single brand. Right. If you have a very, very low budget. But once you're at that level to really wanting to collaborate with a lot of influencers. Yeah, we're an amazing platform and, and especially if you're like really trying to scale it up. Like there's some brands that do thousands of collaborations a month on the system. So.
- [17:06]
B
Yeah, no, absolutely. I think, I think that's super important to, to at least give people also a target and starting point. When we first ran our, our first advertising campaign for the audio side of the podcast, it was a minimum investment of $3,000. Right. With the platform that we end up choosing. And it was interesting, right, because the shot at the time, it was like brand new on a, on a. Was like brand new on a network, the HubSpot Podcast Network. And we found, we ran that and then we found that collaborating with other creators organically did a lot better than that initial campaign. So we got more exposure. But the people that discovered the show didn't really stick to the show versus with other ones. They were already familiar with the topic. There might be, you know, some overlay in what we're talking about on the messaging, and they flock to the show and they lasted longer listening to us. So, you know, testing, I think, is an integral part where a lot of people may be starting out. They think, hey, like this is the one method that we need to go after and then like, make it work. And we always say like contents. It's, you know, is a hypothesis, a constant hypothesis, like, hey, I'm going to do this, and I think it's going to do this. And then what happens? Right? And then we debrief and then we try something else. And just last month we started testing YouTube promotions for, for our show. So interesting results, right? Increase in, in subscribers of the, of the channel. But then now a month later we're like, maybe they're not the right, you know, subscribers because they might be in a country that, you know, we don't really engage with on the business side. So what's, you know, what's the decision that we need to make here? So like you said, I love that you laid out the path of, okay, how do we get to this point locally, Try out, you know, some people and start, you know, giving them the product. I mean, how do we even know if your product is good to promote? Right? And I think that hits the ego sometimes. Like, oh man. Like, no, of course my product is super good, but maybe nobody wants it, right? And I think that's interesting. Right before they make an, an investment like that. So we talk. We talked. Oh, go ahead.
- [19:14]
A
Yeah. To even add to that, not every product works for influencers, right? Like it's, some people, like as an example, beauty products work fantastic, but people don't want to like foot. You're selling foot fungus cream. You might sell millions of dollars online for athletes foot cream. But people don't want to talk about foot fungus on social media. Right. Or on a lot of other channels. So. And maybe there are a few who are willing to do it, right?
- [19:38]
B
Yeah, they're like, here are my toes. Who knows? There might be a niche market for that.
- [19:43]
A
Exactly. There is a niche for everything. But there's levels to how you want to scale time based things. Right. And you have to figure that out. And the same thing back to what you previously said about giving creators a lot of creative freedom is fantastic because as a brand, sometimes you think your product should be pitched in one way and sometimes you're right, but other times you'll be surprised what someone can come up with. And that's where really, just to your point, getting it out there, testing the waters, refining, once you understand what's working, what's not, and we're a big advocate about that on specifically our platform. It's like why we start off with a product seeding model is like low risk, right?
- [20:29]
B
Yeah, yeah.
- [20:30]
A
Once you've established relationships with people, then build up that relationship further. Start doing affiliate marketing, start maybe paying people to actually do more curated content. But you need to figure out what works first and then refine your strategy from there.
- [20:44]
B
Yeah. 100 I love. So we've seen a lot of it. Obviously this part of the conversation has been on the brand side of things, which obviously, you know, super important. But I want to also now flip it a little bit to the creator side, right? We have a lot of people that listen to a show that are creators and they're like, they might be just starting either with short form content, maybe experimenting with YouTube. They have a podcast and they might be. There's two, there's two buckets that we found, right? Like one is people that already have a business and they want to tap into content to promote that one business, which are, you know, these brands that we talked about and then we have the creator that starts creating and they're like, let me figure out like what am I going to go sell or what am I going to go promote or how do I actually monetize that platform, right? So the first topic I really want to talk about is quality. Quality of the content, right? And I'll explain my point of view first and then you tell me. So I think quality is very subjective because right now we see, we had this meeting with, we had an incredible customer, Amanda Holmes. She wrote a book called the Ultimate Sales Machine. Huge shout out.
- [21:51]
A
We worked with her for a few.
- [21:52]
B
Years on the launch of the second edition of the book. And super high level, they sell to the Samsungs of the world, right? And we were having a production meeting on the content side and she, you know, she had talking head podcast episodes and we did like daily 5 minute like snippets and different things. And we're experimenting with also what she liked to do and didn't consume a ton of energy, right? Like there's a balance here. And one of the comments that she made is like, guys, like I was online yesterday on reels and I was watching these videos that have millions of views and I cannot believe what people like to watch nowadays. And she's like, you never see me creating that kind of content, right? And same thing that, you know, when we're late at night, we're scrolling through this and there's like these videos that, you know, the footage is like scrappy or like is like out of a line and this, the subtitles are not branded and it's like a random, you know, tag but you're laughing and you're watching the entire thing, right? So yeah, it's very subjective to that and that's as a producer of content, like that's a hard conversation to have, right? Because For I hate the conversations, like send me an example. And I'm like, well, we have thousands, thousands of examples, but we really want to create what you want to create type deal. Right. So in your platform, what are some of those indicators of quality? Right. For podcasting, in our specific market, we talk a lot about quality or the message over quality of the production. Right. Even though we have a studio, we encourage people to start creating wherever they are. So in your specific case, what are some examples of interesting things that you've seen around quality?
- [23:28]
A
Absolutely. Great question. And to your point, quality is insanely subjective. We see brand, like what brands. Every other brand we work with has different thoughts on what type of quality that is acceptable for them. Right. And to your point? Absolutely. Like sometimes people produce what I would consider lower quality. Right. Like iPhone shot things not super clear. Right. And brands who actually understand kind of that you gotta test the market. Even like in online ads, they've run ads with that versus like the perfectly curated like professional camera stuff. Those like somewhat blurry but realer and more authentic. You could say pieces of content actually perform better. So it's very hard to determine what is absolutely like the best quality for any given promotion. But I think, and you kind of briefly brought this up, it depends on what product you are promoting, right?
- [24:37]
B
Yeah.
- [24:37]
A
Some products require much more detailed. Like we also allow, we do a mixture of image and video content on the system. Okay. Some products need video content. Like they need to be actually explained. Right. They need a talking head. Like it shouldn't just be a simple like, like product on a table. Right. Like you want actual interaction of utilizing the product. Yeah. Other products have really good boxing or unboxing experiences. Some, some brands hate that. Right. Like they don't want any unboxing. They want the product in use. They think their boxing sucks. Yeah. And then others actually really love just static content like and that that actually tells the picture really, really well or conveys the messaging about the brand. At the end of the day, we push people to, I mean, baseline things. Like a product in a post needs to be clearly visible and the branding needs to be visible. Right. People don't even realize that. Right. Like you don't want a logo that's reversed in a video or like when they're taking a selfie with it, etc. Or recording a video. So basic things like that. And then as far as like editing tools have come and they're only rapidly evolving, we recommend people utilize and do creative stuff with editing. Right. Maybe it's caption, maybe it's different graphics within the video content, different cuts. Right. Like I think that's more interesting to the audience. Not every creator will do that.
- [26:14]
B
Yeah.
- [26:14]
A
But the more you invest in those technologies and there's a lot coming out right now with AI that can like really help you with.
- [26:21]
B
Yeah.
- [26:22]
A
Quickly developing, parsing together different pieces of content and making this kind of final, really polished video. But I don't necessarily think that everyone needs to have a professional camera to say this is a quality piece of content.
- [26:36]
B
Yeah.
- [26:37]
A
I think the bottom line is, comes down to true authenticity and trust. Right. Like that's what sells. And so if you can convey that and sometimes like a perfect, like why is professional photography dying to ugc? Right. And the reason is it's faker. Right. It's less trustworthy. Like someone knows that this was in a studio and totally curated. And it's insane to me that a video shot on an iPhone could outperform something with tens of thousands of dollars worth of equipment. But like that is the new reality we're in. It's because we've been bombarded by that for so long and consumers now understand what an ad is, etc. So not to say that that's still not valuable because that does give your brand and as a creator like give you a certain presence. So like 100%, I think that as going back into the creator mind. Like I think when you're producing content to your point, know who you're producing content for, ask those actual questions. If those brands want you to actually produce kind of or like have majority of the creative control, possibly do a mixture of things, right. Like make some curated really high quality content, really like clear and crisp and then possibly make some more authentic talking head like kind of in the everyday life content. And they both work and they work differently on different platforms.
- [28:05]
B
Yeah.
- [28:06]
A
Right. Like TikTok can, they're now investing a bit more in longer form, but usually very, very quick short form content works better. Right. YouTube might actually longer form content actually is what is getting kind of higher views, et cetera.
- [28:18]
B
Yeah.
- [28:19]
A
Shorts is shifting that. But like again, different types of content works differently across the board.
- [28:25]
B
Yeah, 100% I think, you know, we talk a lot about the balance of resources like when you are a creator, right. And not only like team members, like if you have an editor that knows like your flow and you guys are synced up. Awesome. But most of, I'm assuming most of the creators that are in your platform are probably people that create themselves and edit themselves and they have and like you said today, with a phone, you could do magic, you could create magic. And it's incredible. You know, the other day I had, I upgraded to the iPhone 16 and there's an application called Blackmagic. And Blackmagic is like this brand of cameras that each camera, like the cheaper one, is a thousand bucks and it comes without a lens. Right. But the application turns your phone camera into a blackmagic camera. And the quality is incredible. And I took it to Disney and I started shooting my kids with it and I sent it to my brother and like. And he goes like, bro, do you take one of the studio cameras? And I'm like, no, this is the iPhone. This is insane. 4K. Incredible. And it's like just with a thumb drive, you know, maybe 100 bucks. Like, you're already in the business. Like, if you want like that, nice shooting. But at the same time, you might not need that. And right now they're like, there's. I'm trying to spot this trend of authentic but. But fake content online. You know, it's like authentic, but staged. Right? Because what happened was that you have like, you had this high quality content of promotion of a product or a service or something, and then people starting noticing that wasn't performing. And then you see the trend of like authentic content, as in, like, I just grabbed my phone, phone, and they're. I'm telling a story in this, Bob, maybe a little editing, you know, whatever. So people responded to that, but now they're like, okay, how do I grab more attention? How do I keep them more engaged? And there's like these ridiculous scenes that you're like, they hook you because the situation is so crazy, but you're like, it makes you wonder.
- [30:12]
A
It's like, this is.
- [30:13]
B
This doesn't happen in real life, but it does look like real life. Right? So, and. And it's. It's crazy. And then all of a sudden it's like the. Or trends. Like the Chinese guy with the, with the lights with the LEDs. I don't know if you've seen videos, but yes, he just hops on trends, right? And then he cuts into him, like, I don't care about that. And then he talks about the product.
- [30:32]
A
Yeah.
- [30:33]
B
And that's another example. So I think like, creativity is massive in this stuff. And not agree more. There's opportunity for everybody, especially in your platform that you connect. I think you talked to me about hundreds of thousands of creators with like a bunch of brands as well. So what a great way to start as a creator. I think this is a great platform for you to find, you know, your next opportunity and for brands out there to find your next creator.
- [31:02]
A
That's exactly right. And, and yeah, creators come to our platform like not just for obviously free products. It's like we, we want to be the, we kind of pitch ourselves as the gateway to the influencer world and awesome. Also just to the content creator world, right? Is like you as your, as a creator just starting out, you want to become big, start working with brands, right? And you might not get paid that much off the bat, but like as you start to create content, as you create a portfolio of that content, as you start to actually show real results to those brands, you're going to get paid opportunities, you're going to create longer term relationships with these brands. You're going to be able to actually monetize and potentially become a full time kind of paid creator. You could say, make it a full time job. So 100%, we want to help people throughout that journey and, and then also help the brands connect as well.
- [31:53]
B
Dude. So, so cool. So as we approach the tail end of the show, right, like, I mean I see here some of my notes is you scale an E commerce business to seven figures in six months. Super impressive, right? You've co founded six businesses, you bootstrap, stack, influence to do over a million annual recurring revenue. Right. With only $1,000 after raising some investment. I mean, you're an MVP when it comes to business and something like this. So what are some lessons? Because what are some lessons that you can share with maybe creators or business operators too? Because a lot of the people listen to the show, they are running a business, but they're also trying to be a creator. And I kind of merge those two. The connection between content and revenue, it tends to be a big friction point, right? So on that side, what are some of the big lessons or maybe a mistake that you may be like, man, this made a total difference to us. For example, for us, we approach content for three years in not the right way for us because we're huge on relationships. We love having conversations like the one that we're having and we're trying to create these specific clips and graphics and things and it didn't play into our strength of creating relationships. And then that's why podcasting started working for us and that's what changed, right, do podcasting. So for you, what are some of those lessons?
- [33:18]
A
Absolutely, I would say one of the biggest lessons, and this is whether you're creator just starting out or a Brand launching your first product or starting a tech company. Start small and start vertical and start quickly. And that's three lessons, but they play into each other. And the reality to that is big. I would say failures I've had in the past was waiting to launch something until I thought it was totally perfect. Right. And then realizing that the audience or the consumer actually doesn't really like, resonate with actually that thing that I built and I spent all this time polishing something that was not even ready for the market. Right?
- [34:03]
B
Yeah.
- [34:03]
A
So get something out, get feedback, reiterate, right. Learn what your audience actually resonates with in the sense of start small. Right. Secondly, you can produce and get something up very, very quickly. Right. Like as a content creator, you can start creating content right away with an iPhone. Right. You don't need super expensive equipment. Maybe evolve to that over time, but like, you don't need to invest in like a $5,000 camera right off the bat. And then also as someone launching a company, like, there's so many easy ways now to like put up a website, like start getting feedback, pre order sales, Kickstarter, if you're selling a product and start getting interest of. Do people even like this idea? Right.
- [34:49]
B
Yeah.
- [34:49]
A
So put it out into the market and then when I say start vertically. Right. Like, I've had failures in the past where we just targeted way too broad an audience. Right. A tech startup I was working back actually in early, like late high school, early college days, was in essence a Uber and Airbnb kind of competitor. Yeah, it was like an open marketplace. The idea was iPhones were just coming out. Craigslist existed. There was no actual application for like having a profile and selling stuff online and marketing services. Right? Yeah. But what we did was we were like, this is going to be this wide open marketplace for everything, right? Whether you need to hail a cab, whether you need delivery like grubhub, whether you want someone to go cut your lawn, like pass rabbit, et cetera. And when it's a marketplace for everything, it's a marketplace for nothing. Right? Because it was like you could have one person on this platform who does each thing, but if they're busy and you need a cab right now, like, you're gonna leave that, that software.
- [36:02]
B
Right?
- [36:04]
A
And now all these companies came out, like, focusing on one specific vertical and they became like the largest companies in the world. Right. Like, Uber started with just drive, rideshare, now they actually do delivery. Now they do all these other verticals and they're moving into them.
- [36:19]
B
Right.
- [36:19]
A
And so you can take that lesson into a micro, you could say environment, right? Is like hone your audience whether you're a content creator, focus on a specific niche. It's much harder to talk and pitch to like everything, right? As opposed to you're starting a E commerce podcast, right? Doesn't have to be about everything in E commerce. Maybe you just focus on Amazon growth and Amazon growth for people who are in the supplement industry, you know what I mean? So, like, the more focus you go and you can always expand, you can go vertical by vertical by vertical till you're horizontal, but you're going to resonate with a specific audience. It's going to be easier to attract those initial consumers and you could say followers who are really passionate and going to spread the word about it and then incrementally evolve it. So that would be my advice whether, and I think it resonates whether you're a content creator or a brand just starting out.
- [37:16]
B
100. 100. That's so awesome, man. Dude. Well, you just dropped a bunch of golden boulders in here.
- [37:23]
A
Gold.
- [37:24]
B
It's like golden nuggets, but bigger.
- [37:25]
A
Way bigger.
- [37:27]
B
And dude, I'm incredibly grateful that, that we met and that your platform is out there for everybody. How can people find you, connect with you, or, you know, try out the platform, whether a brand or a creator?
- [37:39]
A
Absolutely. Go to stackinfluence.com whether you're a creator or brand at the top, right. You can sign up. It's going to direct you to whether either portal to log in, whatever type of either brand or creator you are. And you can also find us on pretty much every single social platform, acinfluence.com or @Stackinfluence. And then feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn, @Twitter, @ William Gassner.
- [38:05]
B
Awesome. We're gonna leave all the links right below. Is there anything else you want to share before we head out?
- [38:15]
A
I would say my last piece of advice is start now. Right? There's never been a better time to launch a brand or become a creator. Right? And like, as we can automate so much stuff now, like, you can build products so rapidly, you can test it out. People are hungry for new things. So get started.
- [38:36]
B
Yeah, a hundred percent. I'll share like a quick story before, you know, we close out the show. But my wife, she's very different than me. Like, we're very entrepreneurial and stuff. And she's type A, has her job, loves her job. And December, she got like the tax document and she thought the race that she got last year was bigger than what showed on the paper. And we had a little moment of depression on her side and a little moment of excitement on my side because I'm like, opportunity. And for the longest time I've been like, Dave, like, you know, we do all this stuff with content, we deal with these creators. Like we've, we've seen it all. Like, I think like there's opportunity, you know, from like reviews, you know, like very friction opportunities, like reviews on Amazon, you know, Etsy, like what do you want to do? So she decided to start an Etsy shop with children, birthday party invitations. And just yesterday she sold I think her hundred and one invitation. And in like three months she's already halfway through the entire raise that she did last year on the job. And she's like, this is insane. So I'm telling you, I'm like, no skills whatsoever. Like she just looked at a couple of YouTube videos and started, you know, putting those together and putting out there. So I promise you, if I can do it, if my wife can do it, if influencers can do it, like you can do it too. So, you know, grab that camera, start creating, you know, put your voice out there, put your message out there and I'm sure opportunities are going to start showing up. So thank you Will for coming, man, and introducing us to your incredible platform and best of luck.
- [40:05]
A
Thank you sir. Much appreciated having me on.
- [40:08]
B
Awesome guys. With that said, thank you so much for following, for tuning to the Content Profit podcast. And go ahead and go to contentprofit.com and don't forget BusinessCreator Club up April 21st. We start with a 17 day challenge, baby. Let's go. We'll see you soon.
- [40:22]
A
Bye.