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- [00:00]
Hamid
Because we're trying to make everything so perfect, we're getting in the way of progress. And progress really comes from just doing it right? So, like even releasing the ad or releasing the video. And if it's bad, what's the worst thing that happens? Okay, it was bad. A few. A few people saw it. A couple hundred thousand or whatever it is. It's not the end of the world, right? What did you learn from it? How would you make it better? And how would you further evolve your own skill set so that you can take it to the next level? Or how would you find the resources that you need and surround yourself with other A players that will allow you to be able to bring your vision to life? Hi, my name is Hamid and you're listening to the Future.
- [00:48]
Chris Do
What is up, everybody? Today, Hamlet is joining me and he is a marketing executive with 20 years of experience. Experience. And he's helped venture back startups that range from pre seed to early stage series A and B. I don't know what that means, so we'll have to talk about that a little bit. As a senior growth advisor in his role, he's helped develop playbooks, hired and trained the marketing and growth teams. Hamlet, welcome to the show.
- [01:09]
Hamid
Thanks for having me on. Excited to be here.
- [01:12]
Chris Do
For people who don't know who you are, can you give us a little intro about how you got into this field that you're doing?
- [01:18]
Hamid
Yeah, sure. So I work with startups, particularly early stage, which usually means it's the founders who have an idea they might not even have a product yet. They have definitely no revenue, they have zero customers so far. And I want to go through and try to figure out if there's a business here and what that business is. And I come in typically at that stage as more of as an advisor where I'm guiding them to run different experiments and going outside of their immediate circles. Because usually, obviously our family and our loved ones will always say it's a great idea because they might be being polite. But the reality is you need to reach out of that inner circle and talk to people who don't even know you and to see if you're really solving a pain point, really solving a problem. And that's what I do in the early stage.
- [02:10]
Chris Do
I know that people use this term startup. There's the technical definition of what a startup is. Right. Can you explain that before you continue?
- [02:17]
Hamid
Yeah, of course. So what a startup is is a group of founders or a group of a team, a small team that gets together and what their Goal is, is to build a new company, a new service that solves a pretty scalable problem and it will most likely disrupt the status quo. So I'll give you a specific example. One of the startups that we helped scale up was called Camino Financial and it was started by two guys out of Harvard Business School, Sean and Kenny Salas. And when I met them, they were at the super early stage, meaning it was literally them at a Regis Co working space, hanging out, trying to figure out how they would disrupt the B2B financial tech industry, but predominantly providing loans for first generation Latino based businesses. And so when I came in, we were ideating, how do we go about running different experiments, how do we test this concept? And what we quickly learned is running really hyper focused experiments on Facebook allowed us to learn really fast what the real pain point was and how to build up a go to market strategy.
- [03:26]
Chris Do
Okay, and this pre seed or early stage means they don't have a lot.
- [03:30]
Hamid
Of funding, they have no funding. So in this scenario they had just received their first few checks and most of the time those checks might be friends and family or it might be angels and they had received about 700,000 or so. And the grand scheme of starting a business, that might sound like a lot, but it really isn't when you're factoring it's like five people working for $700,000. Right. And let alone all the marketing expenses and all the other expenses that go along with it.
- [03:59]
Chris Do
Okay, that makes sense. I mean for everybody who is a small time, small business owner, $700,000 is a lot of money. But in the startups that's not a lot to get your thing going. Because that answered my first question is how does someone even afford you if they have no money? But they do have some money to build an idea, right?
- [04:16]
Hamid
Yeah, there's some capital. There's typically pre seed VCs which are venture capitalists and they typically cut a check size of anywhere between 50,000 to half a million dollars. There's accelerators. One of the most famous one is Y Combinator, which cuts a check about half a million dollars. And there's others. So there's a bunch of these different organizations that allow people who have good ideas, who can build it to apply and get accepted into it. And in addition get capital and sell a portion of their company for that capital to be able to test and ideate their idea. So what we do is obviously I think you had brought up earlier like what's the difference of the startup? So there's Seed, we're mostly guiding, advising, providing feedback, but not necessarily involved at the rate that we get involved later on in the stage. So normally where we step in is when they've raised a little more. So the product has been built at this point. Right. So in the early days when they don't have a product, one of the worst things you can do is you start building things and hoping people show up. Right. It's almost better to build a prototype, like literally build a Figma prototype and market that and market a landing page with the value proposition. And I know you have a lot of designers that listen in and like every single one of them is enabled to do this, right? So you could easily build a simple landing page, talk about the pain points, what the product can be, what you think it would be solving, and then build a FIGMA prototype showing the use case of it how it is, and then be able to run a small campaign, not even a lot, to just to even see if the top of the funnel shows interest. Right. Are people even reacting to the ads, the images, Are they landing on the landing page? Are they scheduling and want to get a demo of this prototype? Are they signing up to be one of the early users of the product that will later on be built? All of these different things give incredible signals and once you've done that, just small aspects of those things, you can then go start raising what's called the seed round. And what the seed round will allow you to do is to actually go hire the team to build the product that you've been ideating and really get it to market. Once you get it to market, your job is now to try to get to 80,000 mrr. So monthly recurring revenue if you're a SaaS business, but in general about a million dollars a year or so, if you're about to build the revenue to annually about a million dollars, then you're able to go raise what's called a Series A round, which then at that point could be anywhere between 3 to 12 million dollars in extra capital that you get. So we normally come somewhere between the seed and Series A once the product has been fully built out.
- [07:02]
Chris Do
Okay, super interesting. That was a really good succinct, high level overview. It's got me excited and I have many, many questions for you. So first of all, you're kind of preaching to the choir here and you don't want to overbuild any idea. Whether it's a startup or your business, you need to make sure that there's good product market Fit. And I love the way that you're talking about this. You would prototype it, use figma. You build a sales page and you try to figure out the problem that you're solving. The value proposition. I think everybody understands that part. Okay, now you do some special things. I think from what I was able to find out in my research is you actually help them to convert traffic on social into conversions or at least signups. So right now let's just assume we're not selling anything. We're still like prototyping ideas. What do we need to do on social to get people to get onto that page and what does that page need to do so that they say, hey, you know what? Put my name down on the list. I think I'd like to get this product or service from you.
- [07:57]
Hamid
Yeah. I mean, let's start with if you were trying to target on Facebook or Instagram. Cause that still is the big monster in the room. Obviously YouTube does well and TikTok does well, as do depending on the audience. But let's just talk about Facebook and Instagram. So the advice I would give, I'll go back to Camino because this is a really good example of it. So when we started Camino Financial, we were trying to target Latino businesses who lived in the US who are first generation that had moved here into the country that didn't speak a word of English. Right. So we're now trying to do targeting Spanish in Spanish in the US and bring them over. And what we ended up doing is we created a bunch of ads. So in total, I think it was about 25 to 30 different ads because we had no idea what would resonate with the audience. Right. So this is called multivariate testing. And what we were really doing was we were both testing the ads, but within each ads we try to make it completely uniquely different, focused on one thing and mainly on the value proposition or a theme. So for example, one theme would be product specific. Hey, we're going to give you a loan. Right. Like the loan is at this rate, it's all of these. The other thing might be at a value specific. Are you trying to build generational wealth for your family? The other one would be more family specific. Right. Like, so all these different themes we had going on that were completely different, but were centered around the product as well. And then at the same time, we were testing different targeting options, trying to figure out which targeting option would get us in front of the right audience. When you take these combinations and I'm going to make the math Easy, right? Like, let's say if you had five targeting options, five different themes, it's like five times five. So you have 25 ads kind of concurrently running all at the same time. You could actually get a lot of data for dirt cheap. I know people are probably thinking, wow, this doesn't cost a ton of money. It really didn't. It cost us roughly 5 to $10 per ad to determine if it's headed in the right direction. And then you quickly start turning things off, and then you quickly start understanding what works. And what this taught us in a really short manner was that specifically in this audience, what really mattered for Latino businesses was the orientation of family and having imagery that was of them. So the raw or the image, meaning at the restaurant, or even with one of our sales associates, you know, with our sales associate at the restaurant with them talking about their business with a picture shot, outperform any creative that we produce. So any beautiful ads that we had, any imagery that we had just didn't do that. The same notion as just a really raw photo taken at the restaurant itself.
- [10:51]
Chris Do
So for people who haven't run Facebook ads yet, and you say it's not expensive to get ideas, this is really like cheap research that you can do. You're running, say, at this point, 25 ads. So each piece of creative goes out to five different types of audiences. As you're segmenting your audience, literally how much money are you spending a day?
- [11:09]
Hamid
125 bucks a day.
- [11:11]
Chris Do
125 bucks for the entire campaign or.
- [11:13]
Hamid
Each ad less than going to dinner.
- [11:16]
Chris Do
With three people, especially the people that drink. That's like. That's a cheap dinner right there. Okay, so 125 bucks, especially with inflation these days, right?
- [11:25]
Hamid
It's like, man, yeah, you're right.
- [11:26]
Chris Do
You go Taco Bell now it's like a hundred bucks. Okay, so you're spending a couple hundred bucks at most to run these odds. And you'll start. I've done ads before. You'll start to see a clear winner immediately. It's just almost obvious. It's so weird. And it's not always what you expect. You think, oh, this is going to be the winner, and it's not always the one that you perform. And then all of a sudden, you start to kill certain ideas, and you realize a couple of them work really well. You do a second round of ads where you then vary the creative.
- [11:52]
Hamid
Yeah, you go deeper. Yeah. So once you start understanding a concept of working, a theme is working, you start going deeper and deeper. Into that. And this is what I love about like creative, right? And so the world of taking the creative concept and really resonating with the customer or the user Persona, understanding their emotions, understanding what's unique. And once you figure that out, so it's not just the demographic info, it's more the psychographic info. And then really going deep in each one of those themes allows you to figure out a unique creative that is completely scalable in the market. And once you have that combo, it's pretty deadly because then you could scale up. So now you're getting people who haven't run ads. So like on Facebook, most ads get about a 1% click through rate, which is average, right? Like, so that means for every, let's say a hundred people that see the ad, one person will click on that ad. And then if you're lucky, out of that, if you're doing a decent job, you get maybe a 10% conversion, right? So that's 10% of the people do what you want on the landing page and give you your contact information. But once you get this magic working properly, you're seeing like click through rates of 2%, 3%, 4%, sometimes even as high as 8%. So the cost of you acquiring that customer substantially is going down. And you're seeing a similar impact on the second part, which is the landing page. Instead of getting a 10% conversion, you might get a 15% or a 20% conversion. So the combination of the two things makes it really, really cheap for you to be able to acquire customers.
- [13:32]
Chris Do
Okay, everybody hang in there. Get a cup of coffee. We're getting a little nerdy here. But I, I think Hamlet, you're bringing it in just enough information where they're going to freak out, but not enough where they're going to faint because it's just too much information. But there's a bunch of things I have to be a translator and help unpack for our audience. Okay, almost everybody listening understands demographics. That's like age, occupation, income, where you live in, geography, are you married, all that kind of stuff. Fewer people understand the importance of psychographics. So first of all, what is a psychographic? And why should people pay more attention to that?
- [14:03]
Hamid
So it's the why. So that's the way I like to describe it, right? So there's a famous the five whys. If you ask any customer, why did you do this? And then they'll give you an answer, and then you ask another why, why did you do this? And you go through the sequence of the 5 whys usually what you get to is the raw emotional reason of why they made that decision. And that's the best for a marketer, right? The real inner why is what can really set you apart. Because now you're talking, you're talking to them at an emotional level that is so basic and so rudimentary that it clearly comes out across all of the noise. So, for example, in, in the Camino case, what we learned is these business owners, right, they had left a tough, tough, tough world. They were struggling in Mexico or they were struggling in Latin America, and they immigrated to the US sometimes illegally. And they did it with, with the hope of being able to provide a better life for their children. And no one has even given them a chance, let alone is treating them as third class citizens, right? So why are not even second class like to the bottom of the barrel. They work their butts up. They're up at 5:00am, you know, they're the first to be out there. They're making sure that they're employing, they're making sure they're covering payroll for all their employees. They're getting everything done. But unfortunately, they've been given so much bad advice that no one has really believed in them. So the core emotional lie that we resonated and we figured out is having belief in them. We're here for you. We are here to give you the solid advice that you need. We're going to support you no matter what. We don't care what else is going on. The other core belief that we got into is that we understand why you made this transition and it's really, really hard and you want to build for your family. We also understand that you are incredibly responsible and you deserve a chance, right? So those inner whys is what we learned. And most of the creatives and most of the campaigns were a combination of those things. It was never even about the loan. Like, hey, we're going to give you a business. Like, we never even talked about that. The loan was almost secondary. It was more like, here's the capital. But in order for you to really, really grow, we have to start small on the capital. But we need to fix all these other things which are near business, and this is why we need to fix it. And that combo worked incredibly well.
- [16:43]
Chris Do
This is a very user or customer centric approach to understanding a business problem. You're speaking to my heart here. Once I understood this concept, it radically changed the way I approach design. Because everything else before was about like, what my world was like what I wanted to do. And if you put that aside and say there's a person in front of you that's trying to solve a real problem, they have wants and needs, hopes and fears. When you start to unpack that using your kind of five why process, you start to really understand what moves them, what motivates them, and what their dream outcomes are so that you can speak to that. And that's really important. Did you do this when you said you, you were able to discover this? Did you do this by interviewing people or did you sit around and strategize using your vast knowledge and experience of how this stuff works?
- [17:27]
Hamid
A bunch of different things. So we did sort of both qualitative and quantitative. So quantitative is we created a type form for those of you don't know. It's a tool that allows you to take a bunch of surveys. And we created a beautiful survey. We sent it out to who we had as emails, right? And who we thought were going to be our customers. And honestly, not a lot of them filled it out. You emailed. I think it was like a thousand people. We got maybe 40 responses back. So we're like, all right, I don't, I don't know what I Learned, but from 40 people. But we saw some commonalities somewhere in there, right? Then we got on phone calls and we started doing phone interviews. And this was more the qualitative and really asking the why, why, why, why, why to try to figure out the inner whys. And then with that, we created what was our version, one of our customer Persona document. And we called them Miguel, by the way. So Miguel was born. Then we started running different tables, test experiments that I mentioned earlier, validating both and disproving the opposites, right? So we knew what we had a good idea of what would work. We also went on the fringe edges of it to be 100% clear that this is exactly who Miguel is and this is what he believes in. And then once we started getting all these learnings, we had them locked and loaded. We're like, okay, we understand who Miguel is now. That allowed us honestly to be able to scale the business from what we were that small little company, to having offices in both downtown la, Mexico City and Columbia within two years. So just that little unlock, nothing changed after that. It was really like we knew who Miguel was, We knew what Miguel cared about. And everything we did in marketing and everything, every decision we made on both the product, what is the loan we're going to offer them, what is the experience we're going to do, how are we going to communicate with Miguel was done with that early work and that customer discovery process.
- [19:26]
Chris Do
Can you take me through an example of like when you're interviewing somebody, what the first question is and then how the five whys and the responses they get like, it doesn't have to be about communal financial. It could be anybody.
- [19:39]
Hamid
How would I do you?
- [19:40]
Chris Do
Oh, you want to do it? Okay, shoot. All right. Okay, go ahead. Let's do it. Okay, everybody, this is not rehearse. I may f up here, so just hang in there. Okay, do me.
- [19:52]
Hamid
So, Chris, you know, honestly, there's no right or wrong answer to any of these questions that I'm going to be giving you. So this first part is obvious. I'm level setting the expectations. All I really want from you, Chris, is the honest truth. The more honest you are with me, the better overall it's going to be for us to be able to build a better product for you or to be able to provide a better service. So that whole initial onset is really just getting them to be comfortable and to be able to get them to be as open, as honest as they can be about anything. So, Chris, tell me about those headphones that you're wearing right now. What do you like about them?
- [20:27]
Chris Do
Oh, they're modular. I think they're a Danish company. All the parts are replaceable and they're pretty responsible in terms of if something happens your headphones, within two years, they'll replace that part. And they're the most comfortable over ear headphones I own. And they don't create any kind of weird pressure. I don't have earache, which I don't know if you do, but my ear hurts if I use different headphones. And it also doesn't leave a dent on the top of my head because heavy headphones will do that to me as well. And you can imagine I'm on calls like this all the time.
- [21:00]
Hamid
Amazing. So you shared a lot of great things about the product itself. But why are headphones for you very important? What does it make the call experience for you by wearing a headphone do for you?
- [21:11]
Chris Do
It's very important for me to be able to hear the person because a lot of what I do, I believe is about having great conversations. And so I want to listen to every single word. If you, if you let out a sigh, I need to hear it. And I have very sensitive hearing. So this really allows me to isolate the sound and focus in on the conversation. The person in front of me.
- [21:29]
Hamid
Amazing. And the environment that you're in right now does it get loud? Is it? Or does it become really hard to hear? Is that one of the reasons for the headphones? Or are you looking for even the subtlety of sound? Are you much more. Much more interested in that?
- [21:44]
Chris Do
I used to be in an environment that might have had street traffic or sirens or children walking by. This is pretty quiet where I am today. But it's really about that subtlety. Like I tell people, oh, are you eating right now? How do you know that? Because I can hear you chewing on something. And it's not to call them out, but it's like, I really pay attention to those little things.
- [22:03]
Hamid
That's amazing. And how did you go about finding these headphones, particularly? Like, obviously we can't just buy it on Amazon and know. So what was your actual process of going through and identifying? You mentioned it was a Danish brand earlier. Like, can you walk me through that process?
- [22:20]
Chris Do
Yes. One of my former creative directors, Matthew Encina, he says, chris, you should check out this headphone company. I think you'll like them. And he kind of brought them into the office and showed it to me. I like, aesthetically, like the way it looked. And I tried them on, which is important. And because they're modular, you can specify the different drivers, the different ear cups, the headbands, cables, the wiring that you have. Every part of this is customizable.
- [22:44]
Hamid
Amazing. So it fits to your face, to your form, to your liking. And all of those are important to you?
- [22:49]
Chris Do
Yes.
- [22:50]
Hamid
I mean, I could go on. You've given me so much to market on already. So, like, what did I learn from this? Right. So I learned sound is really important for you. I learned also, having a referral from a trusted person that you connect with is also very important for you. I learned customization is critical for you. I love connection and being able to. When you're constantly on calls and you feel being right next to someone is also equally as important for you, to the point that you could hear everything that's going on, even if they're eating or chewing or whatever it might be. So it would feel like they're sitting in the room next to you or in the same room as you. So all of these would be themes that we would be generating and testing around to see if it would have value to a bigger audience.
- [23:38]
Chris Do
Yes.
- [23:38]
Hamid
Does that make sense?
- [23:39]
Chris Do
It does make sense. There's a couple of things. One, I could hear children in the background, so I'm assuming. But your father. I can hear some kids in the back there. Just to show you that it does Pick up every single thing. But none of the questions sounded like a why question.
- [23:53]
Hamid
It wasn't because we were specifically speaking to the product itself, Right. And what I was trying to ascertain was the why, and you were giving me the whys within those answers. And based off of those, I would ask a secondary question, and the secondary question would allow me to confirm and reconfirm of what you said. And most of the time, the modularity and the customization was coming around it. So I kind of knew that that was the critical element of it for you.
- [24:21]
Chris Do
Do most of your interviews sound like this? The person's very forthright. They understand what they want, what they don't want. Or do you sometimes really dig it out?
- [24:29]
Hamid
No. No, no, no, no. So sometimes they won't. So that's the difference here, right? So if you, for example, told me that, I don't know, I think they're just cool, right? I'd be like, why are they cool? Well, you know, they look nice. Okay, what about them Looks nice? So, like, we've got deeper and deeper and deeper. But you knew. You knew your products. I'm like, all right, you gave me, I think, on the first answer, you gave me, like, six, seven, eight different things. So I'm not going to make the person I'm interviewing feel bad about each specific one of those things, right? So then I'm going to just be reconfirming and revalidating. What are some of the elements that you brought up?
- [25:08]
Chris Do
I don't want everyone who goes out to try this, because you've been very clear about what you're doing. Level setting, asking the questions that they go out and they hit a brick wall and they're like, oh, my God. Amla did not prepare me for this. And like, well, it doesn't always work like this. This is the experience speaking. It's coming through. I'm a very discriminate buyer, so very particular about what it is that I buy and use. And so I always say this, and it's inappropriate for me to say, but I'm like the marketer's wet dream. I buy everything. I'll try everything. I'll fill out your survey, because I enjoy that entire process, so I'm very easy to sell to. Okay, let's take it to the next step. We have some data, and let's stay with the headphone company. How do you then convert this into maybe some of the different. When you say multivariate testing, what are the different specific things that you might want to target and run a campaign on. And what might that sound like?
- [25:56]
Hamid
So here, right, like the headphone company, what we learned about you was customization, modularity. So kind of showing that in actual real life, what do each piece of the puzzle look? What are the different. Different parts of it? And that right now you're just testing that idea. And so you go one by one by one on each one of those ideas in the early onset to see what the winners are. Right? So is modularity really, really important or is it being in a room, you know, like this whole idea of, like, you could hear me chewing or you can hear my daughter crying in the background and all of those different things, right? So is that would be a whole other concept, right? So now, like, you have the headphones on and you're saying, is she okay? The whole idea that. The fact that you could even hear that is incredible, right? So to me, that shows that, wow, that this really can pick up sound to that level of it. So you start testing this. Different themes of the different answers you gave, and then once you start seeing which ones are winning, you start combining the two or you. Where it makes sense. Obviously, the customization and the sound element of it wouldn't be a daughter imagery, it would be something else, right? So. Or it would be like the weight element of it. You said, I don't even feel like it's on anymore. Like, it's really snug on my ears. Like it blends in with my hat. Like, actually it looks really cool. It looks like I'm wearing a really tight headphone and it's really lightweight. All elements of those will allow you to kind of quickly learn what's working. And then once you figure that out, then you might start testing different audiences, Right, So. So the audiences you might be testing are remote workers. Is this really important for them? Or designers? Is this really, really important for them? Or. Or people who are constantly on, like, zoom calls, or like, you can kind of figure out what tools that they're using, what work style that they have and so on and so forth. And then you start zoning in onto those different elements. It might be Apple users. Apple users might be completely different than Android users and a combination of those.
- [27:59]
C
It's time for a quick break, but we'll be right back.
- [28:11]
Chris Do
Are you committed to making 2024 your best year in business? We want to help you make it happen. With expert guidance, a supportive community, and exclusive trainings, the Future Pro Membership was created to give you everything you need to take your business to the next level. Go to the future.compro to learn more and join us inside. Okay, back to the conversation.
- [28:37]
C
And rebecc, welcome back to our conversation.
- [28:42]
Chris Do
So I made a list of things that you might want to target in terms of different concepts. Modularity, comfort, sustainability, design referrals and reviews. Connection, like the ability to be in the same room with that person. And maybe this whole idea of built for you by you. Okay. And then the visual came up. Even though maybe the idea of listening or hearing your daughter crying isn't something I might want to see. But if I had a young child and I'm like on a trip somewhere and I can't talk to my children, it's kind of like the second best thing to be in the same room as your child or something like that. Or connection so clear you might swear they were in the same room or you can hear somebody's grinding their teeth or something. And that for a person like me, those are headphones I need.
- [29:25]
Hamid
You're not going to make a deadly combo, I'm telling you.
- [29:30]
Chris Do
Or so comfortable you'll forget that you're wearing headphones. Because that matters to me too. Right? I got to be able to wear these all day. And I got to tell you, I was suffering a little bit because one of the parts broke and I had to wear a different headphone. So I was desperately waiting for my replacement part to come. And after each call, I'd have to take the headphones off and I could just feel the weight, the dent that was left by the previous headphones. Good headphones, by the way, but not really as comfortable as these are.
- [29:56]
Hamid
One thing I want to highlight, and I know you talk about this a lot too, I've seen in some of your streams, is one thing we didn't get into at all was price. So that's a really important part of this, right? Is we're not. I don't even know how much those headphones are. But the more we stay away from being the cheapest on the block and the more we focus on the value and the connection and what it offers, the better it is for the product itself, but also for the marketer. Right? Because. Because now the connection is further away from, oh, so is this $100 or is this $200 or is this $50? So you're no longer in the barter commodity category. You're now more in the value creation and you're solving a real pain point. And the pain point that you're solving with this headphone is obviously incredible. Sound comfort being connection all Elements of that versus, oh, this is just a really cheap phone. Because everyone could really create the really cheap headphone. But that's not. That's not what this product really is. Right? That's. And some of the elements of this. Also that gets really interesting with luxury products is the story of the headphone. The creators of it, how did they come up with it, the engineering elements of it. These are things we didn't even talk about here that you didn't bring up. But these are things that I would want to test, right? I would really want to see how the headphone was engineered and who engineered it. Does that have a huge impact? Like, similar to, like this, what Dyson does, right? Like, if you think about the vacuums and all elements of what they create, wonderful.
- [31:31]
Chris Do
Okay, you know, sidebar here. I own several Dyson vacuums. They're not great vacuums. Great marketing, I'll say that. Okay. When we bought a melee vacuum cleaner, my housekeeper thanked me for it. She was like, so appreciative. Like, thank God you got rid of that garbage. She couldn't say it, but once we got the new one, she was like, this is it. This is nirvana. And I use that. And I think that is such a superior product. Not as good marketing, but. Okay, so you're talking about kind of being multidisciplinary here. So some of what you're doing is strategic. Some of it is just straight old school performance marketing. There's creative that's involved in all aspects of design, photography, visuals, copywriting. And then there's a little bit of this. That's tech, which is you need to run the campaigns. You need to understand targeting. And there's a tool set there. And you're putting all this together and so that now we know what ad is going to work. And then the idea now is the market is signaled to us. Interest in something. They go to a sales page. Take me to the sales page part. Because this is where I think many people eff it up. And they're like, oh, shoot, got this traffic. And now no one signed up for anything. What do we need to do? Can you take us through a similar process? Let's stay on the headphone product. Where do we go from here?
- [32:40]
Hamid
Yeah. So first is tooling. So what I would do is there's. I don't know if your audience does or doesn't know, but there's so much tools out in the marketplace. And one of them, there's hotjar, there is smart look. And what these tools allow you to do is to create both heat maps and videos. So now you're able to actually see what happens with the users when they land on the page. So you're able to quantify and be able to really, really track which part of the landing page are they spending the most time on, what are they reading, where is their eyes really going or their mouse particularly. Right. And what are the parts that they're ignoring which then allows you to do the same thing that you did on the ads on the landing page. So now you're starting to work through your offer on the landing page to make sure that it's super, super relevant and clear and is personalized to the particular audience as well. Okay. So you do that through the tooling that you have. Once you've done that and you've sent enough traffic and usually you can't make a determination here until you get about 500 visitors or so, about 100. You kind of have an idea right around 500, it's super, super clear. But then you can start running different tests here to start improving the conversion rate. So to getting the actual goal that you want. There's different frameworks to use here on the on landing pages, right? So the usual one that seems to work incredibly well is you have like a bold claim. You show some evidence. So the evidence might be customer reviews and different examples of it. And then on top of that you have trust symbols. What are trust symbols are like, were you featured on different news publications? Or if you're lucky enough that you have different celebrities that have been wearing your product, you can showcase that. You might have the story of the brand there initially. You might have FAQs. What are some common questions that customers might have before they purchase? You might have some version of a guarantee, right? Like, hey, you can try the headphones risk free for 30 days. If you don't love it, just send them back like things of that sort. And sometimes you might be even going deeper in your guarantee if you're a brand new product, right? So you might say, if you don't love it, keep it. Things as bold as that to get the first few units out the door. Because remember at the early days, if you were this brand new headphone manufacturer and you were a startup, what you really want is you want to get the goods in the hands of as many people as you possibly can to work out all of the different bugs, because the product itself might be going through an iteration cycle as well too.
- [35:22]
Chris Do
So if I haven't manufactured the headphones yet, these will probably be some renderings and just say, like, we're designing.
- [35:30]
Hamid
If you haven't manufactured headphones, it would most likely be renderings or it would be what we're building. Right. So it becomes more like the place to do this would be on, like, a crowdfunding type of page, would be much more applicable. You might have a video, it might be you speaking about it. You might be talking about why you're building these headphones. You might be comparing other headphones that are out in the market and why yours is going to be better and different, and going back to the same reasons that we learned from interviewing some of the customers early on, making sure those components are stated there. And then now you're driving your crowdfunding experiment. And then on top of that, what you're also doing is you can get pre orders now. So now you're actually basically getting people to put in a deposit or put in a commitment, a small one, and say, yeah, I'm ready. You know, when the product is ready, I'm definitely in here. Here is $25 for now. And I'm going to buy the product at 50% off or whatever it is when it's already. So some elements of that you could start doing with the early batch, and then you could start doing much bigger and bigger deposits as you get more people committed to it.
- [36:40]
Chris Do
Wonderful. I know exactly what you're talking about now. So we run the ad, we figure out what works, and we drive them to a crowdfunding site. If it's just a prototype or something we're thinking about. And I can see the headline. The headline is something like, we spent over $28,000 in headphones, and here's the one thing we discovered. And somebody dumps out all these headphones, and it's all garbage. Like, this one sucks, this sucks. And they just go through this. And it's kind of like the founder story, right? Like, why we feel a need for this. And they take off the headphones, and there's, like, impressions in the ear, and it's sore. They talk about all these things, and this is plastic, and these break down. And what do you do if this happens? And so you really. I think you're putting your finger on the pain that you're trying to solve, and you're telling that story, and then hopefully every couple of points, somebody's going to raise their hands like, that's me, that's me. I felt that, too.
- [37:27]
Hamid
Exactly.
- [37:28]
Chris Do
Okay. And then you do the pre order. I love that there's a CTA here. So it's not just all like fun and games and some of this, if possible you would run some software so that you can watch the heat map which is like it's hot, like this is where everybody's looking and it's cold and nobody's looking at this. So something's wrong with that. Or, or maybe we need to move the heat map up here where it's closer to the CTA or something like that. That's a concept, right?
- [37:50]
Hamid
Exactly.
- [37:51]
Chris Do
And then some software allows you to quickly iterate on a b testing and sometimes it's colors, you switch one or two things and you keep doing this. So this is very, I think in the language in the world that you work in, it's very data driven decisions to understand how to market and what the strategy might be. So we're not guessing. We're testing all the time, right?
- [38:12]
Hamid
We're testing all the time. Exactly. We're running a bunch of experiments. We're collecting data, right? We're collecting data in different ways. Some of it with tools that we utilize and we're building hypotheses. So these are like if this happens and this will happen, things of that sort.
- [38:28]
Chris Do
Okay, now I want to go back to some of the things I wanted to ask you about earlier, which is I think you're a big believer in segmenting market. It was clear. It's like we work with a very specific type of entrepreneur. Why do you like working with these people that are pre seed or early seed or something like that? What is it about them that in this very stage that you like the most?
- [38:51]
Hamid
It's the mindset, it's a combination of different things. And what I mean by the mindset is I talk a lot about a growth mindset where you don't always know the answer and you're constantly in a state of learning. And what might have worked yesterday doesn't mean necessarily mean it will work tomorrow. And what at least I've noticed in my earlier part of the my career was with startups there was more of that. Right. And that's what excited me more. And I think part of what drew me there was personally I was working for like a large corporation and a big company and the mindset definitely was not there. Right? Like this is the status quo, this is what we're going to be doing. This has worked for a hundred years, this is exact. And you would start seeing the sales drop off, right? Year over year you're like, well okay, but the ship is sinking guys, the ship is sinking. We need to change our When I got introduced startups, it was the complete opposite. We don't know what the heck we're doing, but we want to learn and we want to try all these different things and we want to try to figure, figure it out, but we want to do it in a scientific way. And I just fell in love with that. I think the other thing that draws me in is what I call an A culture, which is what we try to breathe within our organization as well too. It's we want A players. And what I mean by that is there's A players, there's B players and there's C players, right? And I don't know if your audience knows about this or you've heard about this terminology before, right? So like A players are, are rock stars. They do more with less. They're constantly trying to become better. They're. They are the teammates that you want to have on your team, right? They know they roll, they know what they're good at. They're going to help everybody whenever they can. They're going to give a lending hand. You know, when they see there's fire, they're not going to run away. They're like, oh wow, there's a fire. Let's all focus on fixing this fire. It doesn't matter. I was working on something else. This is much more important and that seems to exist tremendously in early stage startups. It kind of goes away as they get bigger and larger, which is natural, right? But in early stage startups it tends to draw a lot of people of that B players are kind of what ends up happening as the startup grows, right? They're like, man, there's stability here. I like my job. I'm just going to go to work from 9am to 5pm and then I'm going to go home and, and if I don't learn anything, okay, I didn't learn anything, you know, but I did what I was asked to do, I got my job done. And then C players are like, man, work sucks. Why are we even working? Let's go party. Like, like the complete. Beyond all this, right? So what draws me into startups is founders typically have a growth mindset, typically are A players and they want to surround themselves with other A players and they're typically trying to solve a very focused problem that they have a vision on and they are hyper focused on that and they're willing to put in all of the work for absolutely no reward. And sometimes they realize that the reward might not be there. It's actually highly likely that the reward might not be there, but that doesn't matter as long as that they have the conviction that if this product comes to this world and if it does work, it's going to make a huge difference. It and those are the type of people that I get drawn to.
- [42:15]
Chris Do
This almost sounds like an ad for Apple's Think Different. Here's to the troublemakers, the square pegs and the round holes, the rebels, the artists who dream of a better world.
- [42:25]
Hamid
Incredible ad, right? That's probably one of the best ads of all time.
- [42:28]
Chris Do
Yeah, I didn't know this at the time, but that's a Jack Kerouac poem that they just license, I think. So Kerouac wrote that and then whoever at Chai Day who figured that out, like, let's use this. And it really speaks to the heart of these, these mavericks, these misfits that dream of a better world. And I think that's what you're talking about. So A players tend to be divergent. They imagine a better world. Sometimes they're altruistic and they're deeply driven by purpose and passion and that's what they want to achieve. And then the B and the C players tend to be more convergent thinker. They think there's one way to do something or they're very process oriented. So if it doesn't fit within a playbook, they're like, nah, I don't know what to do, not my job. Or they're just phoning it in. Just like I wonder how long it's going to take before they realize I'm not doing anything and I'm just going to coast for as long as I can and then probably have a lawsuit with HR because of wrongful dismissal. You definitely need to stay away from those kinds of players. Maybe those are F players and not C players. In all fairness to C players, I love that.
- [43:30]
Hamid
Yeah.
- [43:30]
Chris Do
Okay. There's so many more things that we can talk about, but I want to make sure that we get to a couple of things that you want to talk about. I know all over your resume, it's like SEO. I go to your site, you have these massively long articles. I know what you're doing. You're eating the dog food as they say. You're creating massive data rich articles that are very search friendly to optimize for SEO. That's clear to me now. We don't have enough time to unpack that. But you've talked a little bit about building customer centric profiles, data driven marketing and strategy, connecting creative strategy and just really this kind of human centered idea, we didn't get into SEO. Is there another thing that you like to talk about a lot that we can just hint at maybe for a follow up episode?
- [44:14]
Hamid
We talked about growth, mindset a little bit. Right. So that's usually something I like to get into. Another thing that I like to talk about, and I think your audience might appreciate this, is there was a famous, I think it was Churchill or Voltaire quote, perfection is the enemy of progress. Maybe I'm butchering it or some element of that. And what I've noticed at least this happens within our own team and it happened with me a lot as well too is sometimes we get on in our own way. And what I mean by that is we're so scared that the ad is just not right, or the landing page is not correct, or the email doesn't look great, or the copy doesn't sound fantastic, or. Or the blog is too long. Is anyone really going to read it? Or like we could go on to the laundry list of the video. Seems a little cheesy. Should I really be sending this out there? And all of that kind of stuff. Right. So what ends up happening is because we're trying to make everything so perfect, we're getting in the way of progress. And progress really comes from just doing it. Right? So like even releasing the ad or releasing the video. And if it's bad, what's the worst thing that happens? Okay, it was bad. A few people saw it, A couple hundred thousand or whatever it is, it's not the end of the world, right? What did you learn from it? How would you make it better? And how would you further evolve your own skill set so that you can take it to the next level? Or how would you find the resources that you need and surround yourself with other A players that will allow you to be able to bring your vision to life.
- [45:50]
Chris Do
I was just having a couple different thoughts here. So somebody's listening to this, they get really excited, like, wow, this guy really knows what he's talking about. And I'm excited and there are terms I didn't understand, but I want to work with you. How does somebody work with you? How do you structure your fees? Give us an idea about how this might work so in case they feel like, yeah, I got to dig a little deeper.
- [46:12]
Hamid
We try to. Let me give you kind of explain what the process is. Right. So I haven't talked about what I do, so let me kind of probably have to fill people in on all of that. So once I finished the Consulting component, working with the different venture backed startups, right. So the different VCs themselves. So the guys with the capital will come to me and they would ask, can you coach other of our companies or portfolio companies? And I would say, honestly, I'm good. I had three clients at the time. All three were doing phenomenally well. One is Camino we talked about earlier in the podcast. Another one was called cbdfx which was doing incredibly well as well. I was more helping them with advisory and guidance and the third was Disco as well where I was more hands on helping them build out their go to market strategy. So I had three clients, I was paid well across all three of them. I was living a good life, but there was something really missing for me. And what was really missing was I felt like I had stagnated. So I had gone from being an A player to really a B player. Even though all businesses were doing well and, and there was something not happening there for me. And then with the encouragement of my wife and also the VCs, they told me that you need to do more, you need to provide more and why don't you start teaching? And I know teaching is really big as well for you. And so I said, okay, that makes sense. So I started doing mentors, I started teaching at different universities and I started falling in love with that. Then I traveled for to. I'm Armenian. So Armenian is an Eastern European country. It's been in conflict for hundreds and thousands of years and me being Armenian, not being born in Armenia, but living most of my life in the us My wife was Armenian from Armenia. She finally encouraged me to go back home. When I went back home, I fell in love with the country. They teach programming at an early age and free at modern facilities like Tummo and creativity is off the charts. But what was missing, at least what I saw is this new modern approach of marketing that I like to do, which is this data driven marketing that we've been talking about. And I wanted to change that. So I decided at that point I wanted to start a school. But in order to start a school I wanted a. I had to start an agency, right? I can't just magically start a school out of nowhere. So the birth of our agency Postborn, which is Azerian Growth Agency. Fast forward this story, right? So if you want to work with us, you can go to AzerbaijanGrowthagency.com you can look at the different jobs we have. But if you want to learn with us, we also have an academy, which is a growth academy. Right. So you can easily apply and be any of the classes. All the students get 100% scholarships. This is not an edtech platform. We review very closely all the applicants. We, we go through the application process. We want to make sure we're, we're bringing people that are genuinely interested in this and they want to join startups and they want to be part of a startup team and we cover all the expenses so there's absolutely no cost to that. And we do, if you have a startup, we do the same. So you can apply and join and we cover the fees for the startups as well. The startups pay nothing. So startups pay nothing, students pay nothing. And how do we do all of this?
- [49:34]
Chris Do
It's really, I'm like how does this work?
- [49:36]
Hamid
So what happens with the agency is we're working with different startups, very, very selective and high growth companies. So these are typically businesses that are and high growth companies, they're already doing about 2 to 3 million dollars a year. But they're stuck. They're founder led, right? The founder has a great vision, has a great product, has a great business, might have a great service and has scaled it to a certain point, but they can't figure out a go to market strategy. So if you're one of those people listening in today, feel free to reach out or they're further along. They're doing about 12, 15, 18 million a year and they're also stuck and they're trying to grow their business. It's typically an E commerce business at this point and they have some marketing working, but they might not have a marketing department. They might have one or two people who are marketers but don't know the modern way of doing things and they're looking to augment that team. So they would hire our agency and what our agency does, which is different than most typical agencies. Now finally what we do right is we build teams and what we will do is we will build a team of a ui, UX designer, a programmer, right? Typically a front end developer, sometimes even a backend developer, an analyst, a marketer or a growth marketer, a content marketer and a writer. So it's like becomes like this really hit squad or pod. And unlike other agencies that do something like that, similarly where you might be working on 10 accounts or 15 accounts, we literally focus you on one or two accounts and because of that our rates might be a little bit higher. So most typical agency engagements run at around 6 or $8,000 a month or so on a retainer basis. We're a little above that. So we're. We start at 10 and we go higher than that. I wanted to answer your question, but I wanted to give you full context.
- [51:33]
Chris Do
To all of that. No, that was very helpful, and I'm glad you answered that way. Okay. I think, and I'm not saying this just facetiously, this is one of those ones where I probably could benefit from another hour talking to you. There's many topics here I want to geek out with you. All kinds of stuff. I wanted to just quickly ask you this last question before we have to run. Unfortunately, I have another thing I got to do is what's the tech stack? What is the tech stack that you guys like?
- [51:56]
Hamid
Oh, my God, there's so many.
- [51:58]
Chris Do
You rattle them off, they'll fly across the screen. Just so that.
- [52:00]
Hamid
Let me tell you, there's so many. That. One of the things that I'm doing for very soon, for San Francisco Tech Week, so we're big in AI, by the way. So we're analyzing over 1,500 AI tools and we're narrowing it down because there's so many popping up at the rate that they're coming out right now, it's like insane, right? You could do everything from video to image to writing to, you name it, sound to music. Like, there's so much available to you in this modern world. So it's not really a fair answer for me to answer today. But, I mean, I could tell you from image creation. We use Shutterfly Mid Journey. Free Pick is kind of the three. Obviously we use Photoshop and all elements of that as well, too. All the Adobe suites are something we use that. And I started with Image because I know you speak to a lot of designers for videos. We use Runway. We like Runway a lot, particularly. It's still early. We think you could go somewhere else. And we use some of the avatar generation ones like Agen, where you can create an avatar version of yourself that is scary reel like, it's almost like literally, you.
- [53:06]
Chris Do
Well, you mentioned Figma. You mentioned hotjar.
- [53:09]
Hamid
Figma, hotjar. Smart. Look for those components of it. Something that might be interesting for your audience, too, which we find very helpful, is if you have clients that get a lot of phone calls. There's a tool called CallRail that will allow you to do recording of the calls and then transcription and sentiment analysis and summation so you don't have to listen to all the calls, but you can quickly start understanding and listening for those whys. And why are they calling? What are the main things that they're looking for in the product and it really bubbles it up for you. Obviously, the chat GPTs is a staple. We build GPT Transformers with that streamline, we're getting into agentic AI, which is really cool because you can really build different workhorses, right? You can build marketing content writer, or you can pick the idea generator and so on and so forth. I can go on. Man. This. This is my.
- [54:05]
Chris Do
That was great. You said I wasn't going to name any and then you went and named them all.
- [54:08]
Hamid
So I can literally keep on going.
- [54:10]
Chris Do
I'm sure you can. I believe it. I believe it. Well, Helmla, it was. It was awesome talking to you. Thanks for sharing with us today. And I want to do this for our audience. If you're watching this on YouTube, please leave a comment and ask us a question about what you would have liked to learn more about. And if there's enough response there, if Hamlet's willing, we'll circle back and we'll do Episode two, but that's really dependent on you, so make sure you comment in the section below. Hamlet, it was a pleasure talking to you. I wish you the very best. I'm excited about just the things I've learned today and I know our creative community can apply them. So y'all just don't listen to an episode. Really. You gotta take some action here and don't let perfection get in the way of progress, everybody.
- [54:52]
Hamid
Thank you, Chris. Thanks for having me on. Hi, my name is Hamad and you're listening to the Future.
- [55:02]
C
Thanks for joining us. If you haven't already, subscribe to our show on your favorite podcasting app and get new insightful episodes from us every week. The Future Podcast is hosted by Chris do and produced and edited by Rich Cardona Media. Thank you to Adam Sanborn for our intro music. If you if you enjoyed this episode, then do us a favor by reviewing and rating our show on Apple Podcasts. It will help us grow the show and make future episodes that much better. If you'd like to support the show and invest in yourself while you're at it, visit thefuture.com and you'll find video courses, digital products, and a bunch of helpful resources about design and the creative business. Thanks again for listening and we'll see you next time.