Paid To Create Podcast
Fireside chats with some of today’s best and brightest Creators
Welcome to Paid To Create, a podcast that features insightful conversations with some of today's most successful entrepreneurs and small business owners.
Join us as we delve into the minds of coaches, consultants, agencies, and experts from various industries to discuss their experiences, strategies, and journeys to success.
Our guests have a wealth of knowledge and expertise in their respective fields and will share their insights on what it takes as a creator to build and grow a successful business.
Each episode is a chance to gain practical advice and inspiration from those who have been through the ups and downs of entrepreneurship.
Our goal is to provide valuable insights and actionable tips to help you take your business to the next level.
Paid To Create Podcast
S2E3 Q&A: Fan Engagement, Ad Success, and Staying True to Your Brand
In this listener-driven Q&A episode of Paid to Create, we break down the art of building a loyal fan base by staying true to your brand’s core values, rather than trying to please everyone. From crafting bold messages to leveraging shared beliefs—even the controversial ones—we explore how standing firm in what you believe can create strong, lasting communities.
We dig into practical marketing essentials across different platforms, like why Apple’s brand loyalty crushes Android’s and what really works for Facebook and Instagram ads. Expect actionable insights that will help you grab attention, avoid common mistakes, and optimize your SaaS business’s ad performance.
Here’s a peek at the questions we tackle:
- How do you appeal to both hardcore fans and people on the fence?
- How do you balance hype with tangible value when launching a new product or service?
- How can I bring certainty into my SaaS business marketing when features keep evolving?
- What metrics should I track in Facebook and Instagram ads, and what rookie mistakes should I avoid?
Whether you're a business owner or just getting started, this episode delivers real-world strategies to strengthen your brand, attract the right customers, and drive growth. Tune in on Apple, Spotify, or YouTube!
Welcome everyone to another episode of Paid to Create. Today we're going to be answering your questions. Hopefully we have some good answers. We'll find out 50-50. Yeah, so we'll dive right in this. First one is from Kelly in Nashville. Both of you have talked about the importance of connecting with the middle, whether in politics or in business. What's your best tip for growing a business when you're trying to appeal to both hardcore fans and people on the fence?
Speaker 2:What does she mean? Hardcore fans.
Speaker 1:So my interpretation of the question is just like you know, when you You're very popular, I get it.
Speaker 1:You've got your core group of people and then you've got the people on the outside that you're trying to attract in and would be the middle Right. So it's like you've you've got your first first responders or your you know, first buyers or whatever, the people who when you put a product out, they immediately go I want that, right. And then you have the people who kind of wait and they kind of see they're they're a little bit more cautious in their decisions or they're not as big of a fan of you as everybody else, right? So what do you do to satisfy both ends of the spectrum when building the business? So for me, like the way I look at it, is that you should actually just build your business for the core and the right people will be attracted to it.
Speaker 1:I think the big mistake people make is trying to please everybody and trying to think like that. I think the big mistake people make is trying to please everybody and trying to think like that. I think that in today's world, with the internet and the ability to reach people all over the world at the push of a button, there's enough people out there that you can essentially be very specific in the way you talk to your audience, market to your audience, that you literally push away anybody that doesn't align with that. And take like a t-shirt company, for example. Your slogan is it matters, right, and if you are timid in what you're saying, it's one of those things. Just say what you mean, right, and so you'll see. There's that company t-shirts from from hell. I would never buy a t-shirt from them, but there's a lot of people who who want that.
Speaker 2:They enjoy the offense of the shirt, right it's offensive, it goes the furthest you can go but it's a successful company.
Speaker 1:So think of all the people that are offended, all the people that would never buy a t-shirt. Yet there's enough people that people buy, right? They don't have to use PC words or dance around the subject. I mean, they're pretty graphic, they're pretty in your face and yet they still make money.
Speaker 2:They probably sell spaghetti strap shirts. Why don't you just launch the t-shirts from heaven?
Speaker 1:Why don't you just launch the t-shirts from heaven. Well, that's the other end of the spectrum, right, you got people walking around with shirts that have quotes from the Bible on. That's exactly what.
Speaker 2:I would do and, honestly, I would believe in it and think it would be helpful. So I'd be like, okay, they're over there, I'm going to do the opposite. That's exactly what I would do.
Speaker 1:The t-shirts from heaven that have the biblical scriptures that people relate to. That's awesome. And then in the middle is just, people are going to wear regular t-shirts. I wouldn't worry about that. Right, there's more, and the reason is is that a lot of times, um, the more polarizing you are and I don't even know if it's polarizing the more certain you are in in in what you stand for and what your company represents, the easier it is for people to align with that. Right, because you, you have those, those, those, uh, belief systems. And so if you're someone who likes to bargain, hunt and and get the cheapest deal, you're probably not going to go stay at a, a, an expensive hotel, right, you're going to, you're going to do a hotels tonight, last minute deal, whatever, you're looking for the cheapest in the area, because that's, that's what matters to you.
Speaker 2:On, the other end of the six out of the running, just in general.
Speaker 1:But. And then on the other end of the six out of the running, just in general but, and then on the other end of the spectrum, you've got someone whom price is in an option they're going to be looking at what's the most, what's the best experience they can have, um, or what's the most like like luxurious place that they can back in to feel a certain way right, like because they're more about the feel of the hotel than they are about just the price of the hotel.
Speaker 1:So I think, when you look at, you know people in the middle, and how do you get them to go? Either way, I think that, underlying, we all have things we gravitate towards, we don't gravitate to, and so when, when you see someone standing in their um, certainty, um and essentially being polarizing because if you're saying one thing, someone else, like if you're wearing a t-shirt from hell, you're going to have people who are offended. If you're wearing a Bible quote, you're going to have people who are offended. So the thing is, though you want, you're going to attract more of those people the more you lean into it than you are if you wishy washy or try to please.
Speaker 2:How do you think the coexist sticker is on all those cars? All those religions are equally offended by the sticker being next to each other. I don't know how it got made. You're offending everybody at once.
Speaker 1:Well, there's shared belief in that right, there's a lot of people who believe all of that is ridiculous, and so that's all those people with those stickers, right, and it's kind of, again, people like to belong to something that they identify as, again, people like to belong to something that they identify as we are inherently. You know, go through most of our life labeling ourselves as certain things when in reality we're just human. You know, everything else is a learned experience.
Speaker 1:That's your high school kitty cat in California. But my point is that that's all added on as you grow, right? When you're first born, you don't have any of these labels, you're just a baby. You know, that's your first label. I guess you're a baby, right. And then as you grow, you know terrible twos like we immediately add. We add labels as we go, but we identify as things and some of those labels we don't want, some of those labels we do want and I think that you know, even as I approach my 40s, like I'm still looking at who do I want to become Like?
Speaker 1:What version of me when you grow up? Well, what's the best version of me? Right, what's the best version of me? And that leans me to being attracted to other people who are on that path and listening to them and paying attention. And I reject some things, I accept some things.
Speaker 1:If you look at my circle, there's a lot more commonalities between people I'm listening to than there is. You know differences, because I'm attracted to a certain mindset, I'm attracted to a certain work ethic. That doesn't mean I think the other people are wrong, it's just if and I say this all the time you have to protect your inputs. Right. And for me, if I want a certain thing in my life, I don't want to listen to someone else who has a different opinion on what, whether that's right or wrong, because I don't want to get confused.
Speaker 1:You know like, and it's I kind of say this like when you hire a mentor if you hire a mentor who's done the thing you want to do and they're telling you what to do and then you go work with three other mentors, you're screwing yourself because what you've done is now you've got four inputs and those inputs are all going to be different because each one of those people have a different experience. I'm not saying the one mentor is going to actually get you the result, but you have to go all in with them first to determine that it's not going to work, versus half dabbling with three, four different methods. So my opinion is you don't worry about the people in the middle. You lean harder into the extremities, harder into your tribe, and the people in the middle who have those tendencies or the attraction to certain things will be pulled over, because as your core grows, there's more noise, there's more attention.
Speaker 2:This is going to be weirdly specific. But you have an audience based on your specific niche that fits the narrative. So if you change your core products, you're turning away the people that are hardcore into what you're going to suggest for successful powerlifting. But I see the same thing in Apple. When they launch the Apple, whatever 11, 24, 16, whatever we're on, it's going to be for every Apple user who's a diehard fan. They won't look at the comparatives that Android already has all these features. It's that Apple finally does and they're happier and they'll buy the newest one no matter what. So they're like Apple fans, right. So that's kind of the fan thing.
Speaker 2:But then you take my perspective as software and you go okay, we're great for dressage or any other fitness if they're using the calendar system and the surveys or whatever. But then you want to get into a new line of industry for the software because it's such a basic. You can use the iPhone for any software you want. Whether you're teaching kids swimming at home or whether you're selling kittens, like you, can use the Apple iPhone, right. So software if the question comes from getting into a different market and changing your branding message, I don't know that the branding core differs if you're staying the course, so for you it's a specific niche, but the core message is the same.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I think that's like. It's like when you have principles right, like I teach from a place of concept and theory, not from a place of like necessarily specifics. And so take advertising, for example. There's like principles of advertising that play true whether you're on Google, facebook, youtube, no matter what the platform, they play true. Now, each platform then does have specifics right, because depending on how the ad's shown, you know, google is text-based, unless you're doing banner ads, but text-based.
Speaker 2:Unless you're Coca-Cola, which I'm not but like search ads.
Speaker 1:Search ads are just text-based Facebook. You've got an image to stop people. You can do video too, youtube. You're bumping on the front of a video. You're not in a newsfeed, so people aren't scrolling. You're showing up before the video, so oftentimes you're an annoying pest because they're trying to watch a video. So you have to have something to interrupt that thought process to make them interested, and you've got to do it in 15 seconds or less, otherwise they're just going to be upset and skip. My point is is, though, what makes a good?
Speaker 2:ad, a good ad is the same, and I think that that's really to your point like you can take.
Speaker 1:Take marketing right. I can teach marketing to a dentist, to a chiropractor, to a, to a personal trainer. I can teach dentist marketing to all those people. But there's going to be some specific differences, right, clients versus patients, language, we use those kinds of things, but the actual principles of marketing remain the same.
Speaker 2:Sorry about human behavior. I'm right in.
Speaker 1:Yeah, there you go, there you go. All right, let's take this next question from Amid in London, and Amid said that he's just getting started running Facebook and Instagram ads for his SaaS business. He wants to know what metrics he should measure at first to make sure that his strategy is on point. Is there any rookie mistakes he should avoid?
Speaker 2:This is a question for you.
Speaker 1:Well, you can kind of answer it too.
Speaker 2:I like your answers better.
Speaker 1:Well, with Facebook and Instagram, you've got to test a lot, and really what you're testing is those hooks.
Speaker 2:We found that anything with puppies or babies actually clicks higher than anything else. Even whatever your headline is, if it meets the message and your picture is a puppy or a baby, you win.
Speaker 1:I would say the reason that works.
Speaker 1:we'll just lean on that. The reason that works, though, is a patent interrupt, so you have to understand that. Advertising on Facebook and Instagram people are scrolling, right. They're either in their stories on Instagram or in the feed, or on Facebook same thing. I don't think many people use stories on Facebook, because I've cross-posted and you get like, hardly any views, so most people are scrolling news feeds on that, or they're getting suggested stuff, right?
Speaker 1:So when you think of it like that, you have to understand that, like, the imagery you use is the first thing that grabs their attention. Now, you don't want it to be such a disconnect that, when they see the image and then read the post, that they immediately go well, what the fuck was this, right? Um, so you do. You want some some like thing that like ties it together, right, and especially if they're going to click through, the imagery should be pretty similar to what is on the landing page or the sales page, whatever you're driving traffic to, um, because there there is that consistently, again, it's subconscious communication of it being the same. There's no bait, and switch.
Speaker 2:There's no different and if you're paying for the click you cook on the baby and they're looking. For sure, the baby of sweet potatoes are right. So you're gonna, you're not, they're gonna stay in the ad long and it's going to hurt your algorithm.
Speaker 1:And so that's where you want to lean in on that, and so, really, what you're looking at and we could go on forever, right?
Speaker 2:Successful system of raising your child with the right income. Now it becomes a baby. Picture Makes sense.
Speaker 1:I could teach this for three days, but when it comes to metrics, what you got to understand is like what's the first job of the ad? Right, it's views. Like the first job is to get someone to stop and actually consume the ad right, and so that's like metric number one. If you're getting people to stop and consume the ad and you're not getting any clicks, well, metric number two is click-through rate right, and then metric number three, depending what you're driving to, is going to be conversion right, Like how many people opt in, how many people purchase.
Speaker 2:What about sharing?
Speaker 1:Well, engagement can be good, but it depends on what your, what the purpose of your ad is, depends on what. So everybody runs ad differently. Some people they just drive straight to the sale. I'm just going to use that as the example because otherwise it gets confusing If you're driving straight to a sale sale like you're really looking at like how many impressions you've got, how many clicks you've got, how many sales you've got, conversions you got and then the value of that and does it equal, right. But when you're first starting, the mistake is to think it's all going to work right off the bat, right? You have to understand you got it.
Speaker 1:You got each, each, each uh point of conversion is something to measure and tweak, because you know if you've, if you've got a hundred thousand views and no sales, then then you know that there's a disconnect there. So you have to figure out is the disconnect on the ad? Are you getting the clicks? And if you're getting the clicks so you've had a hundred thousand impressions, you've had ten thousand clicks and you've had zero sales well, your ad's not doing too bad. So you know that Now your sales page is. The issue and that's where most people mess up with advertising is that they look at it as an ad. So they'll hire an ad agency and they'll say drive traffic. The ad agency does exactly what they want drives traffic, and there's no conversions. Whose fault is it?
Speaker 2:You found the problem.
Speaker 1:Is it bad traffic or is it bad sales, I see? Well, you can't really tell if you're not split testing the sales page or if you're not paying. So again, the key really is running ads. You should probably not run ads to something that's not proven to convert, because you have no idea. But if you do run ads you have to understand that it's all in the whole system. Go beyond that. What's the follow-up system? You know you can land it. You can have a pixel on your page that if someone from Facebook comes and lands on it and then doesn't buy, you can run a separate ad. So sometimes you got to think beyond the first ad. But when it comes to metrics, really it's like you want to understand every conversion point, meaning every point. Someone has to take an action and those are the metrics you measure. Because sometimes it's like if you've got a hundred thousand impressions and you've got a thousand sales and you're getting a 10 to one ROI, you ain't going to worry about anything.
Speaker 2:All day long. Do that all day long.
Speaker 1:And so the real key there is how quickly do we scale up Because the numbers make sense? We don't need to do a thousand split tests here because we could just hurt us and let's just fucking run with it, right. But when it's not like that, it and uh and uh um, frank Kern's cousin, uh, trey Smith, I learned this from him. Oh yeah, good old Trey, cousin Trey, um. But um, what, what he?
Speaker 1:When I was learning stuff from him around YouTube ads back in the day, they had a screw Google product. It was all about YouTube ads. I don't even know if YouTube does ads anymore, but essentially it was cheaper search traffic. But one of the things that he really hopped on was that you have to understand all of the conversion points in a funnel because your numbers on the front it might look like you're losing money, but if you just raise the price of your product, you'd break even. Or if you just had an upsell or a couple of upsells, if you just improve the upsell take rate. So, like oftentimes, you can think it's a failure, but it's not, and you only know that by knowing at each point the conversions for everything that someone has to take an action.
Speaker 2:We've realized that with software, especially the things that are done for you, that we advertise, are awesome. We have figured out that when someone's using a competitive product and they see our ad seven-ish times, that's when they click and it becomes a potential sale because they've thought about us a couple times. They're already using something that works. Now they've decided to explore. But it takes when you're going for someone that's in the competitor product, it takes a lot more clicks.
Speaker 1:And that's a great point, because a lot of people, when they run ads for products, they don't understand the importance of familiarity, of stuff like that.
Speaker 1:So the truth is is if you're running an ad for a product, you also should be running ads with testimonials, or if you can, depending on the industry you're in or or running ad with positive, like you know feedback, or running ads showcasing what it is like that that's the biggest mistake people make is they see an ad as like oh, I just do this one ad. They have to see it as part of a system and you can. You know, depending on where a user is in their buying journey meaning are they, are they someone who has an urgent problem, needs an urgent solution, or are they further down on the path and depending what type of product you are really determines where they are on their path, and so your advertising should reflect that. If someone doesn't know who you are and doesn't have a problem, trying to sell them off the gate is probably not going to work. And that's where your ads might move to lead gen or just video views to get people interested in you, and then, if they watch a certain amount of the video, you retarget them.
Speaker 1:So it's a very complex thing, but the real way to win is just knowing the numbers, so that you can look at it and go, oh, okay, if this funnel metrics changed here and here would be okay. What do we need to do? You know, and a lot of times you can just add, add again, add uh upsells to the products in order to get more money so you can get, you know, recoup your investment quicker. Because if your product is, you know, a couple hundred bucks, you got to have a really high conversion. But if your products, you know, can be worth a couple of thousand bucks, now you've got more wiggle room with your ads, you know, and and that's kind of, that's kind of the big thing people don't realize is that you know you got to know what.
Speaker 1:How much are you willing to spend to buy a customer? You know what's your, what's your lifetime value and how much of that are you willing to spend? How much cash flow do you have to float before you get that back, before your profit? Well, these are all things that have to be taken into account. So, all right. Next question is from Naomi up in San Francisco, I've noticed a lot of influencers seem to use hype over substance in their marketing. What's your take on balancing hype with real life, tangible value, especially when launching a new product or service, especially when launching a new product?
Speaker 2:or service. I think when it's hyper value usually it's clothing, jewelry, cars it's something that you can see the difference in the levels of. I mean, if it's makeup, it's the less chemicals, more organic or more-lasting or more like stain, tattoo, whatever. So they've got benefits that are specific to the product they're selling. So the overhype does work. If you're doing it, like for the iPhone 16 versus the iPhone 11, that's not hard either. Go for the hype that the new one has, that the other one doesn't, and all of the things that you can use to your advantage. That's the only way I can see to do it successfully. Really is if you're comparing, like the YouTube videos, which one's better? And no matter what you pick, there's a positive outcome probably, but this one has these three or four things that may relate to their customer best. That's probably the winning answer.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's a tough question to answer because I think it comes down really to what you're selling and who your audience is. The age of your audience, right. The younger an audience, the more they respond to kind of some of this hype stuff. Right, the older the audience, the more that has to be more subtle and not so in your face, right. So there's that. And then when you look at it and I'm looking at launches you know launches that don't have have never had customers before. It's a new thing. Right, they have to rely more on hype, but once you have results, you can rely a lot more on results-based marketing. And I'll share a story of one of the companies that was on Katra. They did a launch, a favorite story.
Speaker 1:They did like $50 million on this launch it insane. So I was like I gotta watch the webinar. I gotta understand how they did this. How do they position this so well? So I watched the webinar and Jason Flattion had had done the webinar.
Speaker 1:He's one of the world's best at webinars but literally the webinar was hey, we beta launched this, we're going to just show you the results, and the entire webinar was them inside the dashboard showing client results, and then they just explained what it was and put it on sale. There was zero hype.
Speaker 2:That is the same thing as hype. If you do this makeup, it stays on longer. This is more organic for your skin. If you do it for the software, this will give you better photos for your advertising. It'll increase your client base as much. Where this will give you better photos for your advertising, it'll increase your client base as much, it's still the positive.
Speaker 1:I guess you could see it like. I guess I guess what I was. What I was getting at is that, like, usually what you would see is like oh, this thing's incredible, you can make tons of money, you can do this, you can do that, and it's like here's what it's going to do for you and and like you don't have to do anything, it's push of a button.
Speaker 1:But there's a magic bullet, so it hits all the talking points, but the actual, like evidence that it's going to work is not there Right, and so they hype it. The less evidence you have, I feel like, the more hype naturally has to happen in order to sell.
Speaker 1:Right. But then when you have case studies, testimonials, proof that it works, like your results can do the selling for you. Because there's no, that's proof. That's like proof you don't have to say anything. And I'm thinking even like a weight loss product. What's more effective? Like saying you're going to lose a bunch of weight because it's got these ingredients, they're going to do this. Or just showing 60 people that have lost weight, like meet jill she lost 30 pounds. Meet john, he lost 20 pounds. Like just go through that. People are going to be like I want those results. So that's how I think of it.
Speaker 2:I see. So the hype without the proof, the hype of just do the magic bullet, of just do this and you'll get all the stuff, versus someone saying, hey, this thing worked for me, based on these things. So so hype versus testimonials and reviews.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and again, it just depends on where the product is and the type of audience, right, some things sell themselves.
Speaker 2:Kartra will not let you lose weight, that's true.
Speaker 1:But there is people on Kartra who can help you.
Speaker 2:For sure.
Speaker 1:This one's from Chloe in Miami. I really like South Florida you do not yeah. I love it there. I'm going to get you to move there with me. You move your family, I'll move my family.
Speaker 2:Mine's bigger.
Speaker 1:Sarah, you mentioned the importance of being decisive and strong in your messaging. How do you recommend finding the confidence when I still feel like I have to figure out my niche and my messaging?
Speaker 2:Oh crap. Figuring out your niche and your messaging is the very most powerful thing you can do. Whatever you're selling there is, honestly, to me, if you're looking at your competitors or you're looking at what it does for the person regardless of what it is, whether it's the weight loss pill or the how to raise your pony into being a dressage pony you know where to look and so if you find that niche, then you can target that audience very clearly on the benefit of following this system, like you do with working out. If I said, okay, aj, I'm gonna be a powerlifter, you'd be like, okay, sure you are.
Speaker 2:There's no way I'm gonna follow all the things you say with the protein and the dumbbells and all the stuff that you do, all the time that you work so hard to get these results. You know I'm not that way. I see the gym enough I can say I go to the gym and it's shown nice enough results. I'm not going to power lift. So you're not talking to me, your ads are not going to hit me about what protein and what stuff to do to get power lifting status. So if you know your products, if you don't know your product, you need to figure that out first, and what niche is that going to be to get the reward for the client buying it?
Speaker 1:And I'll just add to that. I think that a lot of times, if you're still trying to figure that out, what you actually need to do is look at your own journey. I'm a big follower of the hero's journey. I believe we live many hero's journeys. We have one big hero's journey that's made up of lots of little heroes journeys, and the biggest thing you can do as a leader is share the experiences you've had with people who are on the same journey, but behind you. Right, and that doesn't matter what gender you are, it doesn't matter what age you are, it doesn't matter what culture you're from. If they're having a shared experience that you've already gone through, you have value to add to them. Right, and again, it could be building a business, it could be losing weight, it could be keeping a marriage, it could be finding a partner.
Speaker 1:Every individual has a unique experience in their life and there is something there that is valuable. There is something there that someone else is charging a lot of money for. So if you want to be confident in what you do confidence comes from a place of experience, like if you've already done it you can speak with conviction and clarity because you've figured out a way to go through that If you've yet to do it and you're teaching up, so to speak, right, like, let's say, you've built a business that's doing a hundred thousand a year, okay, and you decide that you're going to teach businesses how to grow to a hundred million, and you go and you read a hundred books, right, and so your knowledge is there. The problem is is you've never done it, just because you have the knowledge.
Speaker 1:And so, yes, you could be a professor at a university and teach these things and people don't seem to question you. But the reality is, in the real world, people are going to want to see what you've done, and there is people making money, teaching up, right, but you don't hear about them, right? They're doing it under the radar and they're getting a few suckers to buy from them. But the people who, the people who really do well, and doesn't matter what industry, doesn't matter what product they're selling, like it's they're teaching from a place of actually achievement and accomplishment. And so when they say something, it's them sharing their own experience that they think will work for you too.
Speaker 1:And so that confidence that they have isn't something they've had to gain, isn't something they've had to go create, isn't something they've had to. They just have it because they put in the reps, they put in the work they've, they've got the scars to show. And so when you question them, there's no crack in their armor because they're like, yeah, this is what I did, this is what worked. Whereas if someone asks you a question and you're like, well, I don't really know, like here's some things you can try. Well, they sense that lack of confidence in you because you have no confidence, because you have no clue. You've never done it. So that's what I reckon.
Speaker 2:You're selling clue. You've never done it. So that's what I reckon when you're selling something, you're selling a solution to a problem. Even if it's a reward base, even if you're selling the solution to getting more clients and more finances for your family, it's going to be you're solving a problem. So if they can show that they've solved the problem, that is where the confidence comes from.
Speaker 1:Yep, I agree. Let's see what another question. We got a lot, I'm just gonna do one more, okay. Well, this is good. It follows them, um from kevin in denver. Aj, you talk a lot about how certainty is a powerful marketing tool. How can I apply this concept to my SaaS business, where my features are constantly evolving and it's hard to be certain about anything?
Speaker 2:Ooh, that was to you.
Speaker 1:I know you're going to share something, but so that's a great question, and I think the issue there is. You mentioned how your features are changing, right. I think that the way you succeed as business is you operate from a place of vision, right, and that vision and mission that you have is your guiding compass. The products that you sell help people achieve what your guiding compass is. So, for example, for us with Kartra Kartra came about because we were tired of having tech stacks and we were tired of tech stacks breaking when we were sending a lot of traffic launches, things like that. We're spending a lot of money to get custom code. We're spending a lot of money to build things that nobody else has, because we want to have upsells and downsells and then cross-sells and we want to have limited access to a product for trials that then they can click a button and get full access, and so all these things that weren't in existence. Now they are, but but back then there wasn't Zapier. You couldn't just plug into something, and so we wanted to.
Speaker 1:We came to the conclusion that how are we supposed to teach our customers how to succeed when they can't do like, when we're saying you need an upsell, but there's no product that allowed them to have an upsell easily, right? It was like well, here's how you do one. It's really freaking difficult and you've got to get custom coding and you've got to have web hooks and all this stuff. I didn't know anything about back then. So the concept was well, let's simplify business online, Like. That was the concept, right? And I think that when you look at Webinar Jam, how that came about, it was well, there isn't a platform built specifically for what we're trying to do, and the one that exists that we're kind of using but isn't designed for it is very expensive. So how are we supposed to teach our clients to do webinars when it's going to cost them $1,000 a month to just have an account, when they've never made any money online before? We're trying to get them started here, right? So Webinar Jam came around as a cheaper alternative specific to what they wanted, but again, simplifying business online. And so when you have a guiding compass, it doesn't really matter what features you have like. The benefits are what matter, and the benefits are what it does for the client, and so as long as the features continue to um push towards that mission, then there's no lack of confidence because you like, if you come out and you say like, uh, um, I want to build.
Speaker 1:Oh, I heard someone say the other day they, they built a QuickBooks for advertising. So basically the idea with QuickBooks is it simplifies your taxes. You go to one place, you do it all, everything's there. Their platform. The idea is you can come to their platform and you can run your ads everywhere. Just simplifies running ads, right. So that was the concept Simplify advertising. So what features does it have? I don't care. I understand what the platform does. Just from that, they could add 100 features. Does it simplify advertising, yes or no? If the answer is yes, we're on the right path. If the answer is no, then it's not a good feature. I believe that's how you end up having, I guess, confidence in your marketing around. Something is when you know what the mission is for that product or for that company.
Speaker 2:Especially software. It's easy to have the mission down, but if you're improving, you know that you're finding the better solution within your own software to make the solution of their problem easier to get to or cheaper to get to. If you're improving, it's not to make your product more expensive, it's not to make your product harder to use, it's to make it easier.
Speaker 1:And if you're curious about, curious about like, look at it further. What I'm saying? I'm a big fan of the virgin brand, right, but you can look at disney, you can look at any of these major brands. Everything they do has to follow a certain thing. Right there there is a pulse or a uh personality to the business that like has to align. I just got back from Vegas and, um, you know, I went, I got up, I used to when I lived there, I used to walk the strip and um, the, the group I was with do walk, do a walking group every morning. Um, but the guys they were at the other end of the strip, their hotel. So the first first day I was there, I just walked on my own, like cause, I was like it's pretty far yeah.
Speaker 1:I was like I'm just gonna walk cause I was in the middle of the strip. So I went up and I went through Excalibur, you know a giant castle, and as I'm walking in to go through there to the Luxor, like to go across to the Luxor to the Mandalay Bay, I literally thought to myself man, this hotel needs to be bought by Disney and they should do something because it is outdated, like this, is already a castle like Disney.
Speaker 1:And then it hit me I was like Disney probably would never come to Vegas because, even though they would do well there, there's a stigma that it's Sin City and I'm not sure it fits the brand vision if it, if there's a couple of licensing deals there that have some Disney experiences but is an actual Disney coming to Vegas? It would have to be seen as a family-friendly place. It would have to be seen as, not as what Vegas typically comes across, as With Virgin, richard Branson's cheekiness and every Virgin product has that side of it. It has that sassiness, it has that like screw the big guy right. It has these elements that it doesn't matter what business that Virgin goes into.
Speaker 1:They take that philosophy with them and I believe that that's where the confidence comes that they can do so well, because you know, you know, yeah, you're different, but you also stand for something and when you stand for something, even if people don't agree with you, like other people are attracted to that, and that's really what it comes down to. If you're like, if someone says to you you know what's your software the best at and you're like, eh, it's just, I mean, it does the same as all these other ones. Why would I buy your software? But if, if, if someone said what's your software the best at, and you literally said marketing or automations for online marketers, boom, that's something right. And so go back to the category of one conversation, like the red ocean versus blue ocean. You always want to create your own uniqueness, but at the same time, sometimes you can be unique by just being specific to what that mission is. Your mission can be what makes the product unique.
Speaker 2:And software is not that hard to do and you narrow it down that way.
Speaker 1:Yeah, exactly, we got some experience with that.
Speaker 2:A little bit.
Speaker 1:All right, everyone that's it for this episode of Paid to Create Enjoyed answering your questions. If you have more, go ahead and leave those on. You can leave those on, on our inbox. Yeah, I guess. Go to paidcreatecom and you can submit those questions there or leave them on the YouTube channel. For those of you listening on some other podcast platform, please like and subscribe and we'll.
