Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
Always Be Testing explores the experiments, insights, and growth stories shaping the future of affiliate and partner marketing in B2B SaaS. Hosted by industry veterans, the show dives deep into real-world lessons from the people driving measurable impact at companies like Google, HubSpot, Ramp, Webflow, G2, and beyond.
Each episode uncovers what happens when today's most innovative marketers challenge assumptions, run smarter experiments, and build programs that scale revenue through meaningful partnerships. If you’re in affiliate, partnerships, or SaaS growth — this is your front-row seat to how the best do it (and what they’ve learned along the way
(upbeat music)
Hello, hello, hello.
Welcome to another episode of
the Always Be Testing podcast.
I'm your host, Tye DeGrange,
and I've got none
other than Peep Laja today.
Peep, how are you?
Doing great, man.
Thanks for having me.
It's good to have you.
It was a pleasure to be at your
conference in the spring,
called spring, hosted by
you and your company Winter.
Looking forward to the next one.
It was our pleasure to host you.
In our city nonetheless.
Mm-hmm.
You were in Europe a bit
for the summer, is that right?
Yeah, so when, you know,
kids are out of school,
take my whole family, fly to Estonia,
you know, that's where I'm from.
And for two months, I
don't do any work, you know?
That's one of the benefits
of being a business owner,
where a lot of business owners, I think,
forget why they got into
business to begin with.
And I guess, like, if you
talk to people, you know,
it's like, "Why'd you, you know,
want to become an entrepreneur?"
It's like, "Oh, you know, freedom."
But then they're like stuck.
They're not free, you know, like,
because you carry on
with your responsibility.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
A lot of people have
actually a hard time getting out,
so I'm always reminding myself that, yes,
the business is there
to serve my interests.
I'm not here to serve business.
I mean, I am, but not 24-7, you know?
Yeah, you're serving your clients
and your stakeholders
all throughout the year.
You can block off that summertime to-
I mean, I have a team.
It's not like the business stops working.
You know, I'm taking a pause.
The business keeps on doing the work.
It's the beauty of it.
And I tip my cap to your European roots
to maybe help you with that.
Us Americans have a
harder time, apparently,
with that, I would
think, generally speaking.
Yeah, yeah, it's true.
It's true.
Just the other day, I saw
this company, User Gems,
their CEO posting, "Oh,
when did you do something
for the first time?"
I, for the first
time, took two weeks off.
I'm like, "Excuse me,
sir, for the first time
and two weeks, and this is like..."
And he was worried if
the company would survive.
And this is, you know, I don't know
exactly how big they are,
but like tens of millions in revenue.
Multiple tens.
I'm like, "Wow."
That would be not a great look.
If you think that your
business wouldn't survive
at that size, like you've
done something really wrong,
and also like check your mind,
this is a European guy, so I don't know.
I would agree with you.
I would agree with you.
A good reminder of all the
entrepreneurs out there, too.
Maybe take a moment.
Well, for those of you who don't know,
Pep is one of the leaders, in my view,
in SaaS marketing, in
performance marketing,
thinking about
messaging, testing previously,
now market business
research, the CEO of Winter.
Tell us about what
you're building at Winter,
what you've created.
It's been quite a ride.
Yeah, well, as you said,
Winter is a B2B market research platform.
So we're a two-sided marketplace,
kind of like Airbnb, Uber.
So one side, it's B2B companies
looking to find something out,
to answer some questions.
And the other side is people with jobs,
director of this, VP of
that in different industries.
And so because we have
this two-sided marketplace,
the research, the
exchange between the two sides
happens extremely quickly.
So, you know, normal
traditional market research,
it takes time because you
need to recruit the participants,
like the respondents to
your service or whatever.
And we already have all these people.
One demand, you know?
So any market research study,
survey-based research you wanna conduct,
we know our turnaround
time is like 12 to 48 hours,
which is almost AI speed,
but this is real humans.
Amazing, the value of
humans keep coming up.
So look at us.
That's great turnaround.
Absolutely, I mean,
synthetic research, you know,
is a thing now and it's slowly growing.
But just a couple of weeks ago,
Antropic, you know, the maker of Claude,
ran their human-powered study.
You know, like you would think that if
you're an AI company,
maybe it makes sense
to just do synthetic AI
respondent research, but
no, humans are still there
because the AI, synthetic, I mean,
we can go into the discussion here,
but there are some strong
limitations there, yeah.
It's a good segue.
I mean, obviously AI is
the wave that's hitting us
so many things, it's
headlines, it's in our daily jobs.
It's obviously not
fully replacing everything
as you just noted,
and anthropic is essentially
utilizing humans, go figure.
You talked about this a
lot, like AI is not crushing
a SaaS company's ability to stand out,
but you've talked about
how it's kind of exposing
some of the SaaS brands
that you see out there.
What's like a test that
you kind of see as like
a barometer to gauge
whether a company's sort of
getting it and not
getting it in the ability
to sort of stand out when
there's a lot of copycats,
there's a lot of AI
stuff, there's a lot of slop,
there's a lot of lack of thoughtfulness
around how you're positioned and
messaging your users.
Like how do you kind of grade that
and think about that for SaaS companies?
Yeah, I mean,
differentiation and standing out
is very, very hard.
I mean, the companies who have been
around for a long time
and they're not like the
leaders in their categories,
I mean, I think HubSpot or
like whatever their category is,
they have the easy way
now that they're known,
of course, a lot of hard
work happened in the past
to get there.
So AI or no AI is the
market leaders always have
the most mental
availability is the term, right?
Like people can name a CRM HubSpot,
it's on top of mind.
For smaller brands,
which is most companies,
it's very, very different.
So the answer of like, what are we the
best in the world at
for a particular type of buyer,
for a particular use case,
like the classic positioning formula?
I'd say that's a tough one to answer.
I built this completely free tool AI,
a sameness checker.
So basically you put in
your URL and your competitors
and it will measure how much what you say
is exactly like what
they say and not verbatim,
but like the meaning.
So, the AI doesn't read like,
are you using the same exact wording,
but communicating the
same idea, the same message.
And on average in SAS,
it's like 65% of what any
company says is exactly the same.
And it's worse in some categories,
it's a little better in some categories.
It's absolutely
terrible for agencies actually.
Agencies are some of the most
undifferentiated businesses.
Because imagine, let's say you're a
LinkedIn ads company.
Yeah.
So we do LinkedIn ads, great ROI.
(laughing)
10 years in business.
You know, like everybody says that.
And it's his name.
Is it someone we've managed?
Yeah, you do SEO or
whatever, it's very hard.
So differentiation is just hard period.
Yeah, I mean, we can go into like--
I mean to come to you
for a tear down myself.
Yeah, it is.
I mean, and it's not
like us winter we score.
We also score more than 50% the same.
Some of it is unavoidable.
Let's imagine, let's say you're a CRM.
You have certain expectations
of what a CRM platform does, right?
You add context and
deals and track the pipeline.
I mean, it's the table stakes.
So every company needs to communicate
that we have the table stakes, right?
So that's automatically an overlap.
We have the basics.
So the question is, are
you leading prominently
also with something that is different?
And that different needs to be something
that is value adding
and something that the
target customer cares about.
Because you can be--
we have the most blue website,
but nobody cares about that, right?
So it needs to be meaningful.
And a lot of companies don't have that.
But any company, I believe, can get there
if this is a strategic priority.
And should it be a priority?
I think yes.
You know, at winter we run a lot of our
own original research.
And one of the studies that we do every
year is how buyers buy.
And we look at all
the different functions
marketing, engineering,
and so on and so forth.
And so what we do know is that when
companies are choosing
between vendors--
you know, I'm talking
only B2B context here--
they truly try to understand how is
vendor A different from vendor
B?
They truly try to
understand beyond the price.
Beyond the price.
And they're ready to work hard to
understand these differences.
And because they want to
make a rational decision.
They want to justify
it to their superiors,
whoever wants to know inside the company,
like how did you choose
this vendor versus another one?
You need a rationale, right?
You need the explanation.
So they try to understand.
And so, yes, the
buyers really care about it.
And also what we learned that most
websites fail at it.
I think the number was
that more than 90% of buyers,
like VPs and C-level people,
feel that every vendor looks
just like every other vendor.
That is a big problem.
Wow.
You talked a little bit
about ICP is a big focus in terms
of what winter does.
You talked a little bit
about matchmaking a SaaS brand
with the right prospect
buyer in their vertical.
You talked a little bit about meaningful.
How do you make something
mean something to the buyer?
What are some ways
that you tease that out
in the ICP, in the
conversation, in the matchmaking?
Maybe not fully, but tell us more about
your thinking on that
with the ICPs.
Like how to differentiate?
It's a little bit about that.
I think when you said
it has to be meaningful,
you think that's important.
It really jumped out at me.
And so I'm thinking to myself,
maybe how do brands find
that meaning more effectively
than they are now?
Because we know a lot of them are not.
A lot of them are sort of
swinging and missing a bit.
Absolutely.
Well, I mean, it starts with
knowing your target audience.
How do they think about
the problems you solve
or the problems your
category that you compete in solves?
And of course, not
every buyer is the same.
So you cannot satisfy all
the needs and preferences
and so on and so forth.
So for instance, let's
take to make it more tangible,
the stick market
research, like my category.
So we differentiate in
terms of that we have a focus
in terms of like who we serve.
So we're not for everyone.
We serve B2B SaaS
companies as a market segment.
And so that
immediate, and if we say that,
hey, we are for B2B SaaS companies,
then immediately B2B
SaaS companies are like,
okay, this is a
specialist for our use case.
And now within that market segment,
then of course you need to
do your own time calculations
like the segment you're going after.
Is it big enough to serve you?
Can you grow?
And then why prefer you?
We're not alone serving
that segment of the market.
We focus on the speed of delivery.
The speed of delivery
as well as the quality
of the respondents.
And so some slides of
the market will prefer,
oh yeah, like I want fancy reports
and I want beautiful presentations.
Come and present something to my board.
Like this is the wheelhouse of like huge
market research agents.
I've seen that.
And you know, like this to
come with a polished deck
and seasoned presenters
and it will cost accordingly.
You'll pay hundreds of thousands of
dollars for a study.
But it will take a long time.
You know, it will take
anywhere from like minimum six weeks
to like up to three months to do a study
and get the nice presentation.
So we don't serve that market.
You know, so people who want,
well buyers who want that,
they go to somebody else.
We serve the market who care about,
oh shit, like should
we launch our campaign
or the new website or the
new landing page next week?
Should we launch it
like this or like that?
And we are like, okay,
you need to make a decision.
Like we can get you that
answer really, really quickly.
So you can just keep on shipping, right?
So you wanna
understand how people decide,
how the buyers decide and some,
there's certain things that they value,
speed or quality or the
polish or do everything for me
and I don't do anything.
You know, there might
be many, many things.
Yeah, that's super interesting.
So I would start with
a segment of the market
because like you cannot serve everybody.
Like let's be honest, right?
And then that slice of the market
that you wanna serve,
what matters to them?
And it's, you know, there
are many different things
and you cannot be all
those things you gotta pick.
Like, and how you pick is like,
can we actually be better or the best
at this competitive
advantage, this capability?
And how do you know
whether we care about or not is,
I mean, it's quality research.
It's interviews, it's
sales call transcripts
and it's service.
So it's your customer research,
but more importantly,
target customer research
because most of the future revenues
will come from future customers.
Yeah, absolutely.
It resonates with me as
we've evolved and matured
as a business for quite a
while over the last 12 years.
And for us to hone in on
SaaS over the last, you know,
five years now and really
double down on that market
as we think about,
we're also matchmaking,
just like you
mentioned, we're matchmaking
between SaaS brands and partners
and review sites and creators.
And for us, it's very,
very focused on ICPs as well.
So the depth that we go
on that is really critical
just like it is for you guys.
So I think this came up
in spring at the conference
and it was such a great conference,
a lot of good debate conversation.
People, what are some
things that you feel are the,
maybe the spicier
takes that are sort of like
just noise on LinkedIn
versus where do you think
the SaaS leaders need to be focused on
and the smart
operators should be focused on?
Because there's a lot
of things that I think
are being shared that are
like, okay, thanks for that.
But curious to know if there are,
how do you kind of think
about maybe some things
that are a bit noisier
versus some of the things
that SaaS operators
are kind of honing in on
that are very critical to their business?
A lot of founders are
overly focused on distribution.
How can we scale the ads
and how can we get more SEO,
traffic, things like that?
Whereas if you haven't nailed a
differentiated offer,
none of that's gonna really matter.
I mean, because PPC is
very expensive, right?
And standing out on
organic social, very difficult.
You know, so the distribution,
I mean, I'm not saying that distribution
is not a challenge, it
is a very big challenge.
But before you worry about distribution,
you wanna know that you have
an offer that is compelling.
And a compelling offer
is once they hear it,
they're like, oh, well, how does it work?
Or like, tell me more.
You know, like it creates some curiosity
and it stands out.
And it might be a point of view based,
like back in the day when Chris Walker,
a refined labs was like making waves.
He was like, hey marketers,
the way you've been
doing marketing is wrong.
Like lead gen is bullshit.
It's all about demand gen.
And this was before people
really knew what that was.
And then, oh, well,
what's the demand gen?
How do you do that?
You know, like it was a
message that stood out
and created curiosity.
So, but if you're like,
hey, we'll send you more leads.
You want 40 more demos next week?
Like, you know, our inboxes are filled
with this appointment
setting, you know, cold emails.
I mean, do I actually
want 40 more demos next week?
Hell yeah, I want it.
But that message will
not resonate to get through
because we've all been burned.
Just the other day, I was
speaking to a new AI company.
The problem they're
solving is shadow AI, you know,
like where AI is kind of like not allowed
or there's a big restriction.
So people have the personal chat,
chat, GPT subscription or whatever,
and they upload all the
company shit in there,
even though they're not
supposed to, you know?
And so they went to
market with a message,
one AI for your whole company.
So, you know, so people
wouldn't use their own AI.
And some looking at this message,
one AI for your whole company,
one account for your whole company.
Isn't that how chat, GPT
team account works and Claude?
It's like that message basically
is not, it's like, it's more of the same.
Even though your product
maybe is solving a real problem,
the good market message is like,
would not, you know, imagine now spending
tens of thousands of dollars
running ads with that message.
So you got to nail that
offer and positioning first.
And how do you know you have nailed one?
I mean, there are many,
many different ways, you know,
like you do message testing where
you basically can
score how well it resonates
and how many ICPs want
to learn more about it.
And I mean, in real go-to-market,
you pitch it in sales calls and so on,
which is a more accurate
but much slower way to learn,
you know, like actually
going to market with the message.
You might burn tens of thousands of
dollars or more, you know?
So the, but the quality research upfront
is actually the faster
and cheaper way to do it.
Yeah.
And is that the move for you guys
when you take a look at a
brand that is basically,
you know, coming out,
flat if you will, and
saying something that is
not standing out or not resonating,
how do you think about the
process of diagnosing that?
How do you suggest it?
It's that market research, there's the
qualitative research.
What's kind of that, the
steps that you think about
either before, during, or after the
qualitative research
to go, okay, how do you
land on a better value prop
or a better hero message?
Yeah, well, the message that, you know,
the old school idea of the big idea,
what's the big idea?
You know, you need to be
able to verbalize that.
And your overall
company messaging and the way,
you know, what is messaging?
It's like three to maybe five key ideas.
You want the market to know about you.
Like what is it that
you want to communicate?
And there are layers to this, you know,
like layer one is clarity,
like it needs to be an
understandable message
because in B2B, you know,
we tend to use too many
buzzwords and jargon, you know,
so can we actually
understand what does this mean?
Seems like obvious, but
like so many companies
don't even pass that bar.
And then it's relevance.
Like, is it for me?
You know, like when I read that message,
does it say, hey, you know,
we are for a market research companies
or like marketplaces
like, oh, it's for me.
So the readers gotta
understand this for them.
It doesn't need to be about what you do,
but the problems you
have, like relevance,
it can be created in many, many ways.
And so once I believe
that this is for me,
I might want to keep
reading, I understand it.
It's for me, I understand it's for me.
And then we get to the value.
And the value really asks
the question, do I want it?
Like, oh, this is interesting.
Like, I want that, you know?
So it makes us some sort of a promise
of value to be delivered.
And then the fourth layer
is then differentiation.
Because like, if it's, you know,
I'm using HubSpot as my CRM,
it's like, hey, store all your, you know,
customer data in a database.
I'm like, well, yeah, that's needed,
but I already have one, I have it.
You know, like, that's not a, you know,
so like you gotta be also, you're
replacing something, right?
You're either replacing an
existing thing I'm doing,
like a tool I'm using or a process,
or you're replacing my
current way, you know,
I'm doing it the old fashioned way,
and you have a better way
of doing things, you know?
So you gotta spell it out,
then why you over something else.
So that's the lens you should have.
And that's what message
testing then, as a methodology,
that's how much you score
each of these dimensions
separately and then you get the data back
and it's, you know, it's open-ended data.
You learn what's missing in clarity,
you learn what's missing in value,
or you might not learn how
to make it more valuable.
Your message will increase the value,
but like you'll learn
that current messages,
they don't perceive
you as valuable enough.
So it's like, "Hmm, how else?"
So I'm not, the data you get back
is not telling you what to do,
it's telling you how the
existing message is working.
So it's not replacing human thinking.
Which one's the most
common trap in your opinion
out of those four?
Well, with the differentiation layer,
most companies fail
completely at that one,
because if you take an average P2B site,
they don't mention a single
thing about the competition.
So most companies are
talking about themselves
as if they are the only
one doing what they're doing.
You know, so, say like
in my sameness study,
we did a sameness study,
we analyzed, you know,
like top 200 categories in G2
and looked at the top 10
players in each category.
And what we learned, like the most,
the category with the most
sameness is email marketing,
you know, so mature category,
everybody uses email marketing, right?
It's a huge market.
So, but like, if you
look at like MailChimp
and you know, companies like that,
they all say the same shit.
Send emails, increase open rates,
or track open rates,
track click rates, you know,
like personalized segments,
you know, like table stakes,
like everybody does those things.
And that's it, sign up.
Like what?
It's, yeah, so you got the YSH,
for mature categories, you
know, like email marketing,
people already buy the value.
Like I don't need to explain why you
should do email marketing,
everybody already knows.
For a newer category, you do
need to also sell the idea,
like why you should be
doing this in the beginning,
in the first place, you know?
So really depends on the
maturity of the category as well.
You know, like a lot
of agencies, you know,
agency world is in flux
because of AI, you know,
some agencies are like
tanking and some are thanks to AI
or flourishing,
especially those doing the GEO
or whatever you want to call it, you
know, like new wind.
And then a lot of, I've
seen a lot of agencies
try a new value prop.
And like I've seen like,
hey, we help you build
your company brain, okay?
But like how many buyers
know what that is, right?
And so, I mean, if you're
like AI-pilled, you know,
you know what that is like.
And, but if you're not,
this might be the first
time you ever come across
that language, build
your company brain and like,
never heard of it,
then why do I need that?
And then you need to
explain how it is and why it works
and how's it, yeah.
So you always gotta take
that into account as well.
I can see why you have such demand
because I just, I could not agree more
that the amount of companies that don't,
they're not doing those
things is extremely high.
For those that are doing those things
and you get into the
research and you realize,
oh wow, this isn't so much
of a messaging issue perhaps.
What do you kind of find is,
are some of the
blockers, are some of the issues?
If in fact you find that
maybe they're nine out of 10
in each of those
categories or even 10 out of 10
or doing them better than maybe expected.
Like what, are there times
when something else arises
as more of an issue based
on you've had so many reps
and experiences across so many brands.
To paraphrase this, are you asking like,
which of these layers
is hardest to nail or?
When you dig in, you find
out messaging is not the issue.
What usually is the issue for a SaaS
brand and their growth?
If messaging is not the issue,
meaning that you have a
message that people are like,
oh yeah, that's interesting.
Well then odds are that you
have a distribution issue.
Then it's about getting it
out there in whatever ways,
which is also difficult and expensive.
But if your offer--
We can help with that.
Yeah, if your offer converts better
than the competitors offer,
essentially you can
afford to run more ads
or you get a better
ROI on your ads, right?
Because your thing converts better.
I may have some people to send you.
It's often that we have
conversations with individuals
that would benefit
massively from that learning
and that real messaging assessment.
And then it's time to
really push the go to market
even further to your point.
Because you could save significant
dollars in that way.
What are you excited
about for what's next?
What do you think?
I know a lot of it, you're
getting back into things,
that you're back in Austin.
What are you most excited
about to wrap up the year
and looking ahead?
I mean, for
businesses, I'm driving growth
like anyone else here.
Yeah, I mean, I'm excited
about all kinds of things AI.
I'm not in the doom and gloom camp.
And I'm also--
We don't know how it's
going to all work out.
All these chips up in the air.
This truly is like
we're really in early stages
of with all of this stuff.
And yes, a bunch of businesses are going
to go out of business.
It's a fact.
And some things get
more relevant over time
and some get less relevant.
I mean, change is
tailored as time, right?
We ran this-- we do a
weekly webinar at winter.
And last week, we ran on--
I had a topic on how do
you build product marketing,
like an OS inside a
company essentially is like--
if you have a team of
100 product marketers
and they need all to
produce text and whatever
in a content assets that
are on brand, on message,
so there's no deviation.
And basically, how to use cloth for that.
Project files for
context and their skills,
and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
And this was one of the
most successful events
of--
I mean, maybe the most
successful event of this year.
And when I posted a summary of the
webinar on LinkedIn,
it really resonated.
They got so many connection requests.
And this is a really basic use of AI.
It's like project and skills,
like prompt level usage of AI,
which I think if you're
just prompting the AI,
you're a very low level AI user still,
which is what most people are.
Because there's-- but the
fact that this webinar was so
successful just shows me
like so many people or companies
are still struggling
with the basics of how do we
make this thing useful for us beyond AI
answering your
questions really fast, right?
We'll drop a link to the
webinar in the comments
because that sounds like a killer.
Yeah, and then there's other things
that we want to think
about for the future.
And we don't know the answers to,
but we want to start maybe
doing some scenario building,
like for instance, OK, AI is the worst
it's ever going to be,
right?
It's only going to get better.
And there's talk about
AI agents buying stuff
instead of humans.
And right now, it seems
like kind of far fetched.
Like, I mean, people will buy
stuff, and especially in B2B,
things cost thousands,
tens of thousands, hundreds
of thousands of dollars.
So do we see a future where
a $20K a year deal is done
by an AI agent?
And I think it's not
actually that distant of a future
if you think about it.
So there's an overall
trend of how we humans
want to avoid humans.
We don't go in the supermarket.
We order grocery delivery, right?
We don't call to--
we want to get food delivered home.
We used to call a
restaurant for a pickup order.
We don't want to do that.
We'd do that with DoorDash, Uber Eats.
We prefer to text over calls.
We don't pick up calls from strangers.
Whereas in like when
you and I were young,
and then the landline
phone rang at the house.
Somebody's calling me.
Pick up the phone.
Who's first?
Pick up the phone.
Now it's like, holy
shit, somebody's calling me.
There's an increased trend of humans.
They want to avoid human interaction.
If there's a--
I'm looking at a vendor
website that they don't have pricing.
Call for pricing.
Fuck, I'm not going to
call for pricing, right?
And if there's like an
anonymous way through a live chat
or something to figure
out how much something--
I want to use that route.
I don't want to get on a
high-pressure sales situation.
And look at teenagers, right?
They're just on their phone.
Even when teenagers are hanging out,
they're on their phones at the same time.
It's kind of weird.
So there's a
generational behavior shift as well.
So all these signs like--
and then of course, like
ordering grocery delivery
is not same as buying a
five-figure SaaS deal.
But it's a part of the
bigger story, I think.
It's a fragment of a bigger story.
And so if an AI agent is
also told to be frugal,
and there are set
parameters, you cannot decide
if it's over this, or whatever.
And my AI agent is
negotiating with your AI agent.
And let's say I'm the
buyer and you're the seller.
Your agent has rules about the discount
and what you can give away.
And my agent has rules
about ask for a discount.
And so they negotiate, right?
And then my agent also talks to other
alternative vendors,
right?
We have well-defined,
like what do we need?
And so checks--
so I think it's coming.
I think $20,000, $100,000 a year deals
are going to be made by--
without human involvement.
Yeah, that's crazy.
I think that's fair.
I saw a recent post talking
about how the customer service
inbound is going to
be exploded with volume
and probably has already seen
it with the rise of instinct
in various agent tooling
that have risen with AI already.
And I think that's absolutely real.
I think for what we do as a counter,
it's so much a relationship that I
think you're going to see
agents do a lot of the pushing
and negotiating and gathering of data.
But I think there's still going to be
this type of a conversation, obviously.
But you're right.
I think-- and the trends are crazy.
I see some little glimmers
of hope where, if I dare say,
or younger generation
are starting to go, OK,
I'm going to put down the smartphone.
I'm going to go and interact with people.
But there's a massive
amount of volume and trend
towards what you're describing.
And I would not be surprised.
I mean, for every movement,
there's a counter movement
as well.
I mean, I see some young
people are very anti-AI.
But they're still addicted
to social media and shit.
[LAUGHTER]
Yeah, exactly.
Exactly.
This has been amazing.
You're dropping knowledge and helping
and kind of educating this community.
I'm excited about our next conference.
You've seen so many
good people come through.
You've seen so many good
keynote speakers and little groups
and workshops.
And what are some nuggets you can drop
that was like, whoa,
that speaker just absolutely ripped.
I associate that with you from our
experience in Austin,
which was a great
venue for winter or spring,
which I tend to be at again.
Is there something that you
recall from some of the past
that you're just like,
wow, that was amazing
to share with the group?
Yeah, I mean, as we
think about, let's say,
content and messaging and the rise of AI
and how easy it is now
to produce content, right?
We see AI slop on
LinkedIn and the comment spam
and all that stuff.
So in our minds, they're getting trained
to really figure out
what was AI and what was not.
We're learning the patterns.
Even if we can't articulate
really well, why is this AI?
This looks like AI.
So this is happening.
So what we're looking for or
yearning for is this humanness.
So if you pay attention to what content
marketing people are--
what trends are is that--
I mean, it's no news,
but short form of video,
that's the format where you put
personality into it, right?
And with video, it's so
much easier to do personality
or show your personality
than text posts to LinkedIn,
where it's competing against AI slop
and people are always like, is this AI?
And so at the spring conference, we
had a big storytelling workshop.
And in that
storytelling workshop, the key idea
is that every good story
is about transformation.
I was like this and now I'm like that.
It used to be like this
and now it's like that.
There's some sort of a change.
And there's a moment that led to the
change and realization
and things like that.
And also a tidbit that stuck with me
is that every story is so much better
if you add some personal touch to it.
So you're not talking
about a bigger industry trend.
Like, oh, most people are
doing grocery deliveries.
You talk about your story of--
put yourself into the
story, like how wise.
But if you do that
and then what happened,
then I used to believe
this and I would believe that.
So I think that is the
future, kind of like where
if AI content is on the rise and we're
already no stopping,
then we need to really lean
into the human personal side
marketing or everything.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And I think you've done
an amazing job at that
throughout your career.
You've dropped so much
learnings and knowledge.
And that's really the inspiration
for this conversation for the pod.
Your survey data is very much aligned
with how we think in our organization
and how we can help you with that.
And I think that's just appreciated.
And I love the
conversation, the back and forth.
And obviously excited to see you in
Austin hopefully soon,
hopefully at the
conference coming up in the spring,
maybe before that.
But yeah, I appreciate you.
Where can people connect
and find you and learn more
if they want to
inquire and connect with you?
Yeah, I guess I'm most active on
LinkedIn, so look me up.
There you go.
And definitely check out
Spring Winter Conference,
which is what in March of 2027?
Is that right?
Yeah, coming up next March, yes.
Awesome.
And you'll be at CXL
conference coming up in October?
Yeah, now it's called The Circus.
So if you Google Circus
Austin, yeah, October 20, 2021
in Austin, Texas for it.
If you're into AI and experimentation,
that's the place to be.
Beautiful.
Tapp, it's always a pleasure.
Appreciate you coming on.
And we'll talk to you soon, man.
Thanks, Ty.
Thanks, everybody.
[MUSIC PLAYING]