Speaker 1: (00:02)
Kate Bradley Churns. Welcome to the Digital Slice podcast. So good to see you.
Speaker 2: (00:07)
Oh, Brad, you're like, you're like an old friend, you know? I mean, isn't that amazing? Like how we can create these relationships virtually online for the most part, right? It
Speaker 1: (00:17)
Is, it is amazing. And, you know, I have to admit that I don't normally get nervous for these podcasts, but I've been a little nervous about this because I'm so excited to see you, and I've been, I've been following you, or I guess stalking you for the last several years. And, uh, I gotta say that your, your personality and your entrepreneurial spirit is just contagious. And I'm just so excited to have you here today.
Speaker 2: (00:46)
I love you. This is the, you're making my day already. So , and I see, by the way, that you got your H two H pillow back there we're, we're connected from Brian Kramer, right? Is that
Speaker 1: (00:56)
We met Yeah. Yeah, that's exactly how we met. Yep.
Speaker 2: (00:58)
Yep. The human to human.
Speaker 1: (01:00)
The human to human. I've got it back there. Just to remind me, uh, every day as to why I'm doing what I'm doing and how I'm doing it.
Speaker 2: (01:08)
It's big, you know, we talk about that a lot. And people think it's, right? Yeah. That, that it's touchy-feely and, um, it's not right. That, and we can talk about some, some numbers. Well, why don't we talk about them now, actually. Right. You know, I'm in the business of leveraging the human or turning listeners into fans or customers into evangelists. And when you're able to do that and, and do it well, and it with intent, by the way, the sale is the intent. And there's no shame in that. We have a 98% close rate,
Speaker 1: (01:48)
Which is amazing.
Speaker 2: (01:49)
Yeah. So not fluffy. Right? Right. It works. It works
Speaker 1: (01:54)
, right? It works. I mean, and you know, even before I met Brian and was transformed by, by him, um, you know, I would tell people, people buy from people they don't buy from companies. They, they, you, there has to be some kind of connection, relationship nurturing, whatever you want to call it, um, before you can sell. And it's that human to human touch that makes it happen.
Speaker 2: (02:27)
It sure is. You know, he gave us a great gift, which was an introduction to Katie Jordan, who I think you, you also know. Yeah. And Katie is actually the personality behind my brand. So, you know, what, what's so great is her personality supersedes the brand. You can really hear a voice and feel a voice of a human behind everything she writes for us. And we got so lucky with that because it's a hard thing to do.
Speaker 1: (02:56)
Oh, yeah.
Speaker 2: (02:57)
You know? Yeah. Like, you gotta have the logo out there. It's unavoidable. But how do you make sure people know that there's just a , a normal, very bubbly and fun in our face,
Speaker 1: (03:11)
Person. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Well, you know, which leads me to my very first question, which would be tell us a little bit about yourself and the, how you started lately.
Speaker 2: (03:25)
Um, well, thanks for asking. So I think the, the funnest tidbit is that I used to be a rock and roll dj, and my last gig was broadcasting to 20 million listeners a day for XM Satellite Radio.
Speaker 1: (03:38)
Only 20 million.
Speaker 2: (03:40)
Only 20 million
Speaker 1: (03:41)
. Wow. So you, and you were outpacing Howard Stern at that point, right?
Speaker 2: (03:46)
They hadn't brought Howard on yet. Actually, he wasn't on on XM in any case. Um, Uhhuh. And yeah, it was really a fun time to be there because XM was a startup then. It was only three years old. And it was mayhem. I mean, we were, so this was in the, it still is in the old anti, um, um, what's it called? The National Geographic Printing Press building on New York Avenue in Washington DC now, at the time, they were just putting in a metro stop there. It was incredibly dangerous. You didn't park your car and then walk to work by yourself. Like you had someone come out if you couldn't get into the lot, if there wasn't enough spaces, like I always was escorted in cause it was just Wow. Hell over there. Yeah. It's not like that anymore. But, um, and we were on the top floor, all the DJs were, and you walked in.
Speaker 2: (04:40)
Now this is before Google had all its offices, like open office was just happening. This whole idea of open cubicles when you walked in the room, you just saw a vomit of posters and just hanging from all over the ceiling. Right. Because, and there was, you know, a hundred different formats too. So merch galore, every kind of merch you could possibly imagine. I remember Tony Bennett literally walked by me the first day I was there, which is cool. And it was just a zoo. And then as it got bigger and bigger, first of all, they moved us downstairs to the bottom floor. Ha hint, hint, hint.
Speaker 1: (05:22)
Yeah. I was gonna say, what did that have, what did that say?
Speaker 2: (05:26)
Tightened up the playlist. I remember one day we walked in and there we're suddenly speaking of Howard, all of these posters in the hallway of all these famous people who weren't in the building. So Oprah and Howard, and, um, I think Derek Jeter, like everyone who now had their own branded channel. And we were all like, what the? Where's the poster of me? Like, you know, I'm, I'm here. And, um, you know, and that's how it goes. Like, the lawlessness of anything in the beginning is part of the fun. You know, I was actually, um, I was a line cook before all this brad. Oh yeah.
Speaker 1: (06:07)
I did some of that back in the, uh, you did old days. Yeah.
Speaker 2: (06:11)
Yeah. It's, I mean, what a great skill to have. Right? For sure. I, I didn't learn how to speak Spanish. I took French, so, oh,
Speaker 1: (06:18)
That's so funny that you say that because I tell people all the time, had I been able to speak Spanish, I might still be in that business.
Speaker 2: (06:26)
what a skill. Who knew, you
Speaker 1: (06:28)
Know? Exactly.
Speaker 2: (06:29)
Who knew. But like, as a woman in the, in the cooking industry, you know, it was just cra totally crazy. I mean, um, but again, I loved, I loved the idea that we all had to come together as a team and put everything up hot, which is hard to do, you know, on time. And through the chaos, you just make total beauty. Right, right. Guess what? Startup life, same
Speaker 1: (06:56)
, very similar. Yeah.
Speaker 2: (06:58)
Constant chaos. Yeah. Yeah. So, um, and, and then I guess to tie it all up in between all that, I, I did also in a marketing agency and one of my first clients was Walmart.
Speaker 1: (07:09)
Oh, so you started small.
Speaker 2: (07:11)
I started small
Speaker 1: (07:12)
pimo startups.
Speaker 2: (07:15)
I got lucky . I got a, I had a nice intro from my aunt actually. And, um, you know, I, I arrived on that scene, not surprising, with like zero editing capability. And as in my own self-editing and, and my, um, um, corporate sophistication was just in the toilet. And so they were astonished. I think , who the hell is this? And I had crazy ideas, but my crazy ideas worked and ended up getting us 130% ROI year over year for three years.
Speaker 1: (07:54)
Wow. You know, the, uh, um, Walmart, the owners of Walmart recently purchased the, uh, Denver Broncos. Wow. So we've been seeing some of those Walmart people around Denver, and certainly at the, at the first several embarrassing games. , they might be regretting this purchase at this point or getting ready to make some big changes. But yeah, so Walmart interesting. Um, has a presence in Denver now.
Speaker 2: (08:26)
They're nice people. Actually, I, it was a really good, we worked, there's, um, we worked with both the foundation, the Walmart Foundation, and with corporate Walmart, which was pretty interesting to see that. Um, they have the same problems everyone else has. When you put nonprofit and for profit together, it's like cooks and waitresses. There's always some, some funny rub, you know? Yeah. And at this time, marketers will appreciate this. It was, well, so what we were doing is we were figuring out how to communicate a series of financial empowerment education practices, um, to the poor and to the national population of people with disabilities, which mostly live underneath the poverty line. And it was all about taxes and tax credits. So we worked with the irs, right. IRS disability acronym City, let me tell you, bore galore . I bet. Yeah. Um, and, and finances. Sorry guys. But it was, it was real, a real education for me. And in the, the kind of framework of what we did in spreadsheets Kill me Now and by hand is what, um, built the bedrock of what lately became.
Speaker 1: (09:42)
So when you talk about those spreadsheets, um, what kinds of, I mean, go into just a little tiny bit of detail cuz I'm, I want to know how the use of those spreadsheets led to the idea of lately.
Speaker 2: (09:57)
Well, so, so I'm organized , I'm an organized person. Brad ,
Speaker 1: (10:03)
Look. Okay, I'll believe that. , I would think you would have to be .
Speaker 2: (10:08)
And that's what my, so my first thought when I, the Walmart project, that wasn't only Walmart and the IRS and the National Disability Institute. It was also at and t and Bank of America and United Way Worldwide. Now all of those national groups and global groups have thousands of local entities with be it franchises, et cetera. And they were also involved. So there was roughly 20,000 markers by the end of the project. A lot of people. Yep. And small business, uh, medium business and large business, non-profit for-profit government, essentially everybody. So my first thought was two, I had two first thoughts. I need to understand what these people know, cuz we can't really tell them to do anything if we don't understand what their level of sophistication or education is around marketing. So let's hold a bunch of, let's, let's figure out a way to audit them and do this. So I I created a very quick audit auditing system and I did it for everybody.
Speaker 1: (11:12)
Wow.
Speaker 2: (11:12)
Yep. And then we gave over 200 workshops to the same groups. Turns out, now this will not surprise any other marketing consultants listening that the largest company in the world has the same problems as the, you know, library down the street, . They wanna know things like, well, how often should I post each day on Twitter? Right. For example. You know, so that was kind of interesting. And then I, as I was doing the audits, I realized that so much content was being created and there was like umpteen redundancies, you know, 50 people creating the same press release, for example. So I thought, well that doesn't really work out as far as consistent messaging goes. , let's figure out how to take something from the top, from the global team here, the national team, and then use it in a way, create templates essentially. And then teach the people on the local side exactly how to customize the template in their own voice so it'll work for their target audience.
Speaker 2: (12:19)
That was the, the idea in, in this process, I also had a crazy idea to, um, organize every piece of content that was being published. And, and by every, I mean every, wow. So paid, not paid. I was asking them at the time we were doing, um, like radio tours. So someone would get interviewed by like 20 stations or something. And so I was finding the recordings or organizing the links, thinking of repurposing, like how, what are we doing with this content? It just evaporates. I can see that these people are writing blogs. What's happening with the blogs? You know, all that kind of idea. And trying to, trying to come up with a way to, um, not only repurpose, but then to identify, well, what's working super well and let's replicate that elsewhere. Right. So like I could see, for example, we were doing advertising in Salt Lake City newspapers and we had access to the different zip codes and I was ab testing different messaging in different departments or different areas of the city. And then I was thinking, well if it's working there, why don't we take the same messaging and like try it in social or vice versa, you know? Mm-hmm. , this was a new idea. , you know, and Twitter had just happened. This is 2000, like, I think it was like 2010 or 11. I mean, it was new. Really new. I think we still had MySpace.
Speaker 1: (13:49)
Oh yeah, I remember MySpace. I had MySpace.
Speaker 2: (13:52)
I still do. I mean, I never canceled it.
Speaker 1: (13:54)
I'm sure I still do
Speaker 2: (13:55)
Too. Yeah. Does it exist? I don't know. I should probably erase that. I
Speaker 1: (13:59)
Probably, you know, I heard that. I think it does . I don't know. I haven't been there in years . So now I, now I understand how all of that sort of led into, uh, to lately. And, um, so I'm wondering about the shift. Yeah. You know, I, I mean I've read that, uh, female founders have to work 98% harder than their male counterparts. Was that your experience when starting lately?
Speaker 2: (14:30)
Yeah. Yep. It, it, it's so funny. I was, I've been left at the altar so many times, Brad. I mean, it's kind of unbelievable how, these are the things people told me. Male investors will never say no to a female entrepreneur because they don't wanna say no to you specifically, but they'll always take the meeting, especially if you're good looking. Cuz they wanna say they've had a meeting with a pretty girl. Okay. I thought that sounds crazy. No way. It's true. It's
Speaker 1: (15:01)
True. Really?
Speaker 2: (15:01)
Oh yeah. I've had people put their, um, you know, their hands on my knees or my legs. Um, I've had them make all kinds of remarks, you know, go, just, I've had one guy literally show me a series of cartoon penises during our meeting.
Speaker 1: (15:19)
No kidding.
Speaker 2: (15:20)
Oh yeah.
Speaker 1: (15:21)
Oh my.
Speaker 2: (15:22)
And then there's the kind of not sexual way of, of belittling you by either dragging things out, you know, making you feel like the deal is gonna close and then not doing it. And it, you think it's in your head. This is, this is what the, they're trying, it wears you down. I mean, to be honest, right? Because you're, you're going over these things. You don't wanna blame somebody else because, I mean, of course it takes two to tango. I have to own my role. What, maybe I did a bad job. Right? Right. What did I do wrong? And so you're constantly doing all this self examination, putting the weight on your own shoulders. And at some point other people just start to tell you it's not you. This is the system. You know, so the, that you quoted is, um, venture female founders only get two, I think it's 2.7% of all venture funding. It was 2.3 when I started. It got worse in covid, believe it or not. You know, and you know, I have 4 58 customers. I am close to a million in, um, annual recurring revenue. I have a product in market and I still haven't raised a venture round. Now I've seen plenty of white guys just walk, walk into a room. They've got no product whatsoever, no revenue, and they're raising $10 million. It happens all the time. You
Speaker 1: (16:49)
Know. Unbelievable.
Speaker 2: (16:50)
Someone gave me, um, a really good tip the other day, which is so amazing here. Here's what's right. It's a sticky note. It's right on my desk here. The more you explain yourself, the less confident you sound. And he said this is what his, most of his female entrepreneur friends are guilty of. And I am a thousand percent guilty of this.
Speaker 1: (17:15)
Interesting. Isn't it? Very interesting, huh?
Speaker 2: (17:19)
Yep.
Speaker 1: (17:20)
Well, I mean, I have to say that probably not since, uh, Ted Turner have I seen a CEO where cowboy boots . So you , so you know, ha have you always been a fan of cowboy boots or ? You know, what started you wearing the cowboy boots to your pitches? Is it this female male thing? Uh, yeah. I love the pictures you post on social of here I am going to ask for $5 million and you're wearing a skirt and cowboy boots. , I told you I've been stalking you for the last few years.
Speaker 2: (17:59)
I'm so impressed with you. No one has asked that question yet. Um, I, I love my boots. Those boots, the blue ones are green, they're kind of green. I wore those underneath my wedding dress, by the way.
Speaker 1: (18:11)
There you go.
Speaker 2: (18:12)
My, um, my husband who I love is five four and I'm five six. And he said, just on this particular day, no heels. And I said, no problem, .
Speaker 2: (18:26)
But yeah, the boots came about because um, I needed to feel confident. I was, I was dressing up as someone other than myself in the beginning when I was going to pitches because I thought I should wear a suit and have a leather briefcase, which is what I had. Cause that's what you were taught. You know, you'd go an interview, dressed up, dressed the part. And I was uncomfortable cuz that's not my thing, you know? And one of my investors kept telling me, be yourself, be yourself, be yourself. And I thought, duh, that's so stupid and cliche. I mean, what are you talking about? Cause I didn't get it. What he was saying, and you can tell myself is, um, an ensu, foulmouthed,
Speaker 1: (19:13)
,
Speaker 2: (19:14)
messy hair, young woman. No, I'm not very young. Um, but that's how I perceive myself in any case. So that was a big part of it. And also because they're very comfortable. You can walk all day in them and I'm, you know, was walking in the city all the time. Right,
Speaker 1: (19:32)
Right. Okay. Well I love it. I mean, personally, I love it. So let's talk a little bit about lately. Um, let's start with just telling people what lately is what it does.
Speaker 2: (19:49)
So lately uses artificial intelligence to first learn any brand or individual voice. And it builds a custom writing model, not only based on your voice, but designed to engage your specific audience. Once it has those things, which takes anywhere from 1.8 to 30 seconds to actually build for you, it then asks you to feed it, uh, long form content so it can learn more. And the long form content could be any blog, any kind of text whatsoever, like chapters of a book or a news article online or any podcast. So an audio file or any video webinar or an interview just like this. And when you feed it the long form content, it takes that unique model and it it reads it. So in the case of this video, it's gonna transcribe and read that first. And it's lifting out the quotes that contain what's in the model that it knows will get you the highest engagement, the highest sales leads essentially. And gives you dozens of social posts with, with those quotes in mind. And then in some cases it'll actually rewrite those quotes for you. Hmm. Cause it's just constantly thinking of like how to get the most for you. So we work with um, uh, a guy, I think a lot of people know his name is Gary Vayner. Chuck.
Speaker 1: (21:18)
Yeah. I think people have probably heard that name, seen that smiling face.
Speaker 2: (21:23)
Gary did
Speaker 1: (21:24)
A Jets game. Yeah.
Speaker 2: (21:25)
Yeah. You know , he's, he's a pretty nice guy. So he did an experiment with lately, um, and we, he wanted to see number one, how well did it pit against his human team? And the answer was 80%. It, it grabbed 80% of the same content from the long form components that his team did, which is good. Uh, and ended up getting him 84% more clicks and a 12000% increase in engagement.
Speaker 1: (21:53)
Wow. 12000% increase in engagement.
Speaker 2: (21:57)
Yeah.
Speaker 1: (21:58)
And he's now an investor in the company.
Speaker 2: (22:01)
He is not an investor in the company. We should please ask him why not honestly. Yeah. Yeah. Cause he said he would invest and he has not. And this has been going on for three
Speaker 1: (22:12)
Years. That's one of those male female things going on. Huh?
Speaker 2: (22:16)
You know, I don't know. I'm small fry and you know, Gary has bigger fish to, to fry and that's totally fine. And you know, the lately isn't, Gary doesn't need, lately he has an army. Right? Right. And so the partnership with him wasn't about getting him to be a customer at the time. What we wanted to figure out was can Gary's fans be lately customers? And at the time the answer was no. We didn't have a product for them. And so we actually built that product this year. So we now have a self-service product designed for armies of one. I think we start at 19 bucks, but we're about to raise the prices in a week here. Um, and address essentially everybody who wants to be Gary.
Speaker 1: (23:06)
Oh
Speaker 2: (23:07)
Yeah.
Speaker 1: (23:08)
Yeah. Oh okay. That's great. That's a lot of people . Yeah, I was gonna say that. That's a, that is a lot of people.
Speaker 2: (23:16)
I should reach out to him and tell him that I'm doing this. I haven't talked to him in a while.
Speaker 1: (23:20)
Yeah, that's a, that is amazing. So, um, what kind of marketing tactics have you used to grow lately?
Speaker 2: (23:30)
Well we are big fans of dog food. Um, which means in case people don't know it comes from I think PR arena. They weren't selling their dog food until they had a commercial of like someone on the company's dog eating the dog food as the commercial. And then they sold lots of dog food. So, um, interesting the idea of like eating your own, you know? Right.
Speaker 2: (23:55)
So at lately, , we, we do this, we don't do any paid ads and no cold calls and no cold emails. I do one or two speaking engagements a week now and I am going to ask you for the file as you know, I don't care if you have two listeners or 22 million listeners cuz it's content to me. I'm gonna run the file through my own ai, it's going to snip up our conversation in two dozens of tiny videos with the coolest one-liners. You or I have said that it already knows my audience will click, comment and share. On our enterprise side, we're able to to qualify or disqualify people pretty quickly. So that's where that 98% conversion comes in. Mm-hmm . And then on our self-service side, which we newly, newly launched, we have a 49% conversion there, which was, you know, interesting to us because the one thing that investors, one of the many things that investors have told me that I didn't listen to for the last eight years was that you can't market to small medium in large companies the same way, but you can. Brad ,
Speaker 1: (25:11)
It's worked for
Speaker 2: (25:12)
You, it's working. Yeah,
Speaker 1: (25:14)
Yeah, yeah. So, okay. So the tool goes in, it creates dozens of, uh, little snippets that go into social media posts. Um, personally when I think of social media marketing, I think of Thanksgiving dinner. But I also have a lot of clients who say dozens of posts about the same thing. , isn't that too much? Aren't you just bombarding people with this content?
Speaker 2: (25:49)
Yeah, we heard the same thing. What's so interesting is like, it's such an antiquated way of thinking, but it's also wrong. So two things. Um, number, well many things. Number one, the old marketing adage says, you must see here watch something about a company seven times for it to make an impact. Now it's 12 to 14, so duh. In radio we used to play you the same song 300 times a week hoping you would hear it once. Also, what's great about lately is it's never the same message. It's multiple messages about the same thing. So it's very keen on treating humans as the multifaceted people we are. So there's not a per perception of um, spam. But then the other thing, think about this, like no one is looking at your feed. No one goes to your feed to see how many messages you're posting. You're in their feed. Right? Right. And so I get a, first of all, I'd have to see all 20 of your messages in my feed, which doesn't happen cuz I'm not going, I'm not looking at Twitter all day long, for example. It's not happening. And second of all, because for example, each meme in the case of video looks different. People don't know it's the same. You're pushing the same thing. Right.
Speaker 2: (27:12)
The last thing I'll say is this. If you have a 98% sales conversion, definitely don't do this.
Speaker 1: (27:20)
, not a lot of people can say they have a 98 sales conversion . Uh, I mean I'm just tossing that out there. Yeah,
Speaker 2: (27:29)
Yeah. Right. It's like, you know, that's what I always say to them. I was like, well, is the way you're doing it now working for you? Cuz if it's, if it is, then bye.
Speaker 1: (27:38)
Right. right. You're gonna be in our 2%. Right? Yeah. If it's already working for you, . So to do all of this, um, tell me a little bit about your staff. I mean, are there 200 engineers sitting in a warehouse cranking out code all day long?
Speaker 2: (27:57)
Uh, no. There are three and really two and a half. Cuz one of them is mostly a designer and not an engineer. So for there's two, um, well we do have an AI mentor as well. So I'll say there's three altogether. Two, two and a half plus a half plus two or whatever. That doesn't, I'm, I'm not good at math, but it's a small team and um, there's seven of us who are full time and another three who are part-time and you know, we're great at making the most of it. I mean, this is what a small, nimble team does. We're really great at problem solving and putting puzzles together. I think this is where that metaphor from the kitchen and radio comes back in. You know, you have to in the kitchen especially like, it's a tight space and it's hot and you're dancing around each other.
Speaker 2: (28:54)
Right. You know, and that's what we do. And we're able to cut through the chaos, which is ever present. I mean, we all, all, we often have short, very, very short runway meaning, you know, maybe someone's getting paid next month. Not sure. Right. We, um, often break stuff and five alarm city, you know, we're a. We gotta fix that , what happened? What did we break? Oh my god. Um, customers might freak out one day and we have to placate them and just, it's part of the deal. And sometimes we, um, we make bad guesses. Right. But I was, I was listening to a totally weird thing on a podcast about decision making and the guy was saying how decision making is something that's very hard for most people. And I thought, not me,
Speaker 1: (30:00)
,
Speaker 2: (30:02)
It's not my problem, but but be what's You fail fast. That's the cliche. Right. Fail fast and learn fast. And so I'm, I'm so proud to say that we do that super well. We, we learn and iterate very, very quickly. And um, you know, that's the kind of tough thing is like the right investors like Joanne Wilson or Jason call Canis or David Bierman Scott, those are all, some are my investors. They know that this is a warts and all club here. Right. Right. And they're investing in the fact that they believe we can figure it out. They don't care about the mistakes, the off the couch investors wanna see a sure thing. Right. Yeah. And that's called a bond, by the way.
Speaker 1: (30:52)
. . Yeah. And, and we're not really talking about that right now, are we?
Speaker 2: (31:00)
Right. Right.
Speaker 1: (31:01)
Yeah. All right. So, um, when lately spits out these dozens of posts, one still goes through them and edits and makes a few little tweaks to make sure they're in their voice, um, before they go out. But now I also understand that lately integrates with Hootsuite and lately integrates with HubSpot and so now it pushes it into the tools that many of us are already using too.
Speaker 2: (31:32)
Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's a combination of a great partnership we've had with those companies. I mean they really see that lately extends the value of what they already do. So lucky us. Um, and funnily we thought we could actually stop providing publishing through our own platform cuz it's really a pain in our. But the demand was so high, so we just actually included it back in starting I think like yesterday or day before.
Speaker 1: (32:01)
Oh really? Which
Speaker 2: (32:02)
Is Yeah. , which is crazy on the, on the self-service side, you know, we're experimenting. Right. This is one of those things we learn. And the training, the ai, which you talked about, boy that's such a hard thing to get through people's heads. Like the AI requires you to help it along because it is a dumb, it's just dumb. It's a dumb robot, you know? Right,
Speaker 1: (32:22)
Sure. It's the garbage in, garbage out.
Speaker 2: (32:25)
Yeah,
Speaker 1: (32:26)
It's, well you gotta tell it.
Speaker 2: (32:27)
You gotta tell it. And it's so funny, Brad, I'm, I'm selling against magic all the time. Like, they're like, well why isn't it just like, know everything about me and at a thin air write the most amazing copy in the world? And I was like, well magic hasn't been invented yet. I mean, I'm working on it. Jesus.
Speaker 1: (32:47)
Um, yeah. Yeah. So there's some need for some, um, teaching of the AI and then a little copywriting on the inside and you uh, you know a little bit about copywriting.
Speaker 2: (33:03)
Yeah.
Speaker 1: (33:04)
So I understand you've actually, you did a session at, uh, content Marketing World on writing rules and you actually graduated college with a concentration in creative writing and English, right?
Speaker 2: (33:20)
Yeah. Otherwise,
Speaker 1: (33:21)
So you know something about all this
Speaker 2: (33:23)
,
Speaker 1: (33:27)
But it's come back to be useful for you, hasn't it?
Speaker 2: (33:31)
Who knew? Right. People used to make fun of English majors cuz it was a soft skill. Yeah. What could you do with that skill? And now the whole world runs on writing. Yeah.
Speaker 1: (33:42)
Right. And you have a a, a company that needs to copyright .
Speaker 2: (33:48)
Yeah. The
Speaker 1: (33:49)
Tool needs to do it.
Speaker 2: (33:51)
I, um, the, so the AI learns from me as part of one of its best practices that it's pulls from. And, and the reason is, I mean, we train it on you and a number of other actually millions of data sets. But one of the defaults, um, when those things kind of fail and, and a combination of different other learnings is me. So I only write organic online. That's it. It's not lately writing it's me because we're feeding that brain. So like I got, I had a LinkedIn post from a year and a half ago that got I think 84,000 views.
Speaker 1: (34:25)
Wow.
Speaker 2: (34:26)
Yep. I wrote one about a month ago that got around 22,000. So, you know, I do know what I'm doing.
Speaker 1: (34:35)
. Yeah. Apparently. Apparently you do. Uh, which is cool and, and it kind of leads in, I saw this quote of yours once that said, uh, imperfect marketing is the most powerful. Stop polishing and let it rip humans react to humans. So be one , which I think is just, I mean I love the thinking behind it and then you put that into play every day and in all your posts and it seems to be working.
Speaker 2: (35:09)
Can you send me that? I should rewrite that. I should republish that. It's good.
Speaker 1: (35:13)
. Yeah. I wish I could remember where I saw it, but Yeah, you said it
Speaker 2: (35:19)
Good for me. It's so true. Right? And it's a hard, it's a very hard skill to communicate. People think themselves boring. That's a problem they really do. Like, and the evidence I have around this is I'm always having to write, um, bios for my team, you know, and I love my team so
Speaker 1: (35:36)
Much. That's the hardest, hardest thing to do, right? It's
Speaker 2: (35:38)
Hard about yourself. Yeah. Very, very hard. Yeah. You know, and it sort of amazes me because they don't even know where to start. And so the place to start is to just ask people questions. I mean, I know these guys so I don't have to ask much. I know a lot about their lives already. Um, but it is sort of amazing to me. You know, how writing is it? It's like, um, what's that movie? Was it with Adam Sandler where it's like about the video games and it's all about patterns, right? So you can, oh you can win any video game if you know what the patterns are. I have vintage Pac Man, Galaga Centipede in my garage.
Speaker 1: (36:18)
Really? I used to love Galaga.
Speaker 2: (36:20)
They're so great. And I, I've beat the machines multiple times. Meaning I, I tipped the, the points over from all the way back to zero. You know, you just rotate it cuz it can't, couldn't go up any farther Uhhuh. Cause I played them since I was a teenager. And it's all about the patterns, you know. So our premise with writing is, are there patterns that make writing successful? Right?
Speaker 1: (36:45)
Right.
Speaker 2: (36:46)
And we look at it a very low level, but on a high level the answer is, um, there's, there's a lot of answers that I've been testing. So I'll share a few, couple tips here and we can
Speaker 1: (36:59)
Great. Connect. Do that as a wrap up. Cause I promise you I'd get you outta here
Speaker 2: (37:04)
On a high note.
Speaker 1: (37:05)
Share a couple tips.
Speaker 2: (37:07)
All right. So first, um, bad news travels. People love it when you've got something to share that's not super happy amazingly enough. And it travels better than happy news. So, um, that post that I wrote that was like 22,000 views. Um, I think I, it started like today's VC rejection letter,
Speaker 1: (37:29)
.
Speaker 2: (37:31)
And then I wrote about how this idiot like called my company namely
Speaker 1: (37:34)
Oh my god.
Speaker 2: (37:37)
And other things. Um, which is like, uh, God kill me now. So, um, also, God, whenever I've mentioned God in any way, all the algorithms pick that up, it's kind of interesting. Um, I love to really think about statements and um, use statements as the leader. So all women especially are, are guilty of undercutting, um, and undermining their own authority. I do this too. It's just a habit that we get trained into by the culture. So when you're writing, if you can examine your writing before you push, send and remove words that are like need a needy team needs. So you don't wanna need anything. Um, I just wanted to, so like, just probably you don't think you know. Right? When you remove these out, oftentimes you'll see a statement there. So the next thing thing you can do is look at your statement and go find the verb and push the verb to the front of the sentence.
Speaker 2: (38:42)
When you do that, you'll have to change the verb probably into an active verb. And now you have a, a command and commands are authoritative. And all of these components that we're talking about are about trust. Right? Trust is why we buy. If that's in place, then you're at golden. So when I'm writing content online, I'm almost always using a series of statements. Statements, get the re-shares, like I'm thinking of the re-share or the click. There's only two objectives you can have. It's harder to get clicks cuz if you don't know me, why the hell would you trust me enough to click my content? You know? But re-shares are super easy cuz it's about the ego Gary v's. A great example. Like everyone shares his content cuz they're one liners that you wanna be known for. So if I'm thinking, how do I make you look good? If you share my content, often statements have that you've read. You just read that. Read the one again. What did I say? Will you read that again?
Speaker 1: (39:37)
Yeah. You said imperfect marketing is the most powerful. Stop polishing and let it rip. Humans react to humans. So be one.
Speaker 2: (39:47)
Okay, so we got a statement in the front and a statement in the back, and I've got two calls to action in the middle.
Speaker 1: (39:54)
Right?
Speaker 2: (39:55)
There you go.
Speaker 1: (39:56)
So tell me how you feel about the words checkout
Speaker 2: (40:00)
the lead. You're so funny. , I hate it. I hate it. It's so, it's the most lazy vapid call to action on the planet. And the reason is it's like awesome, which I'm guilty of. We've, we've stripped checkout of its meaning. When you use checkout, what you do perhaps unintentionally is you communicate laziness, you know, I mean there's a whole theora full of lovely verbs. You are perceived as spammy because you're not actually telling me what happens. Should I actually check out your thing? Like what do I get? What's my, what's the value for me? What's in it for me? So I don't have any idea there. So it's, it's a risk, you know, it's, you're untrustworthy, you're wasting my time also by not telling me this, you know, what's the, this is a gotcha thing here, you know, garbage.
Speaker 1: (40:57)
Yeah. I mean if your content's written well, I'm gonna wanna check out lately. Yeah, yeah. I'm gonna wanna click on the link. I'm gonna want to go look at your profile. I'm going to want to visit your website or whatever the call to action is. So yeah, I, I I love that. So, okay, I, like I said, I promised you and then we've gone over. Tell me where's the best place for people to connect with you online and see what you're putting out there for the masses.
Speaker 2: (41:31)
I love you. So I'm met lately, AI Kailey on Twitter. That's a great place to, to find me and please let me know that you heard me with Brad. Um, I'm on LinkedIn of course as well. And um, I love it when people DM me with my own rules. So.
Speaker 1: (41:46)
Cool.
Speaker 2: (41:46)
Give me a chuckle,
Speaker 1: (41:48)
. Okay. I'm gonna put all this in the show notes and thank you so much. It's such a delight to see you again and be with you. I really appreciate it.
Speaker 2: (41:57)
Love you. Bye.
