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Becoming an entrepreneur takes grit.
Deciding to do it solo takes courage.
This is 1,000 Routes, the podcast where we explore the stories of solopreneurs who have made the bet on themselves to build a business that serves their life. Every episode you'll hear about the lessons they've learned and the uncommon routes they've taken to stand out in a world that is purposefully trying to commoditize them.
Anthony Pierri [00:00:00]:
This is where the co-founder piece comes into play, which is really hard if you're a solopreneur. The thing that you have to do is limit the scope of what you do as much as humanly possible.
Nick Bennett [00:00:19]:
This is 1000 Routes. Every episode, a solopreneur shares how they're building, what they're building. We'll hear all about how they've made the bet on themselves, the uncommon route that they're taking to build a business that serves their life, and the reality of building a business of one. I'm your host, Nick Bennett. Before we get started, I'm excited to share a new program that I've been working on called Full Stack Solopreneur in partnership with my friend and legendary entrepreneur Erica Schneider. Now, unlike other programs, Full Stack Solopreneur is a hybrid digital program for independent professionals who are too far along for another course to be really all that helpful, but not far enough to invest in a private coaching or consulting service. In here, you'll gain access to both the full curriculum.
Anthony Pierri [00:01:07]:
So my name is Anthony Pierri. I'm a co founder of FletchPMM, which is a product marketing consultancy. I run it with a guy named Robert Kaminski. We primarily work with early stage B2B SaaS companies to help them figure out the best way to position their products. And then we help them translate that positioning to a rewritten homepage that can showcase it to the world. And we've gotten to work with over 300 different companies. And that's not like, you know, you'll see some people who sell courses and stuff. They're like, I've worked with thousand companies.
Anthony Pierri [00:01:41]:
And you're like, well, not really sold a thousand courses, but no, like literally in the trenches, me and Robert running workshops with over 300. So we've seen pretty much every slice of complicated positioning issues, go to market problems, founder battles against each other, investor expectations, all sorts of crazy stuff. And that's where we built our process around, was to help sort through all those complicated decisions of who do we want to focus on? How do we want to show up to them? What are the reference points we would choose to help them understand our value. But we also do work with service companies, solopreneurs. Anyone who's selling something and is trying to figure out the best people to sell it to and the best way to explain it to them, that's sort of our domain.
Nick Bennett [00:02:23]:
And I think that is the absolute perfect place to start because you and Robert have a insanely compelling way of describing all of the Insane shit that you see working with all of these companies. Have you always been a content creator? Like, I feel like every time I open LinkedIn, you or Robert have some elaborate graphic with a post that makes me actually laugh. And I don't know if you're trying to be funny, but it's. It's hilarious to me that you're just ripping on something. Your ability to distill this information is ridiculous. Like, where did that come from?
Anthony Pierri [00:03:01]:
Yeah, great question. So me and Robert, as we were chatting before this started, it's less common to have two people running a consultancy. It's usually a solopreneur with freelancers. So we truly are like 5050 partners, which we think is kind of a huge strength. And in the early days, we sort of rounded each other out where Robert brought all of the actual startup software experience. He had been working with companies like Oracle, and at the last agency that actually launched Fletch, we launched out of another agency. He was doing like, product strategy for all sorts of different software companies. So he's deep, deep industry experience.
Anthony Pierri [00:03:43]:
I had come into tech late in life, so I was doing a bunch of other things. Not in the tech world, came into the tech world. But the thread, as you pointed out for all my different jobs, was always some element of content creation. And so Since I was 10, I've been obsessed with trying to get large numbers of people to interact with my content online in every platform that you could imagine with varying degrees of success. So I sort of brought the content element of how to actually translate the concepts out into the world. He brought all the actual expertise. And now as time has gone on and we've both worked with so many companies and he has posted so much, we've both sort of rounded out the absences that we came into the business with, where I probably am similar level with positioning as him, and he's for sure similar level of content as me. But that was the initial genesis of the two things.
Anthony Pierri [00:04:33]:
And obviously creating content for different platforms. Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, over the years, the bar of content quality is so unbelievably high. My favorite example from recent days was I opened Instagram reels and someone had made this giant picture of a bridge, like a photorealistic bridge, all with perspective and everything. And then he shows how he made it. And he had a typewriter with a long piece of paper and was using the letters on the typewriter one row at a time to draw this perfect photorealistic bridge. So that's the level of content you are facing on Instagram, when you're trying to get noticed. Then I open up LinkedIn, and it is a person with a really weird angle selfie being like, here's five things running a marathon taught me about B2B sales. And so we were like, maybe we could get some audience on LinkedIn because the quality is so unbelievably low.
Anthony Pierri [00:05:36]:
And so we started making content that we were like, this seems kind of interesting. And it exploded. So the first two posts I ever did on LinkedIn both went viral. The first one and the second one. And I had Never posted on LinkedIn really before, but, like, when we actually, like, let's try to start posting as a way to get better business. The first two both went viral and it was basically like, I just put in a little more effort than pretty much the average. And people were blown away because the quality is so unbelievably low on this godforsaken platform. Now I feel like, you know, there's more people who are doing good stuff, and obviously there's some people who are really killing it and doing amazing work.
Anthony Pierri [00:06:17]:
So I don't want to disparage other creators. There are people who are really, really adding value. But in general, the general level, like, if you're just scrolling through Instagram reels, you're like, this is our TikTok. This is blowing my mind how interesting everything is. It is not the same scrolling through the LinkedIn algorithm. So people sleep on LinkedIn, especially if you're coming in from somewhere else, people don't really see it. They're like, oh, that's such a cringe platform. It's like, don't fear the cringe.
Anthony Pierri [00:06:40]:
Lean into the cringe. Realize that there's a huge opportunity. If you just try a little harder, you'll start building an audience pretty quick.
Nick Bennett [00:06:48]:
You and Robert developed this style that you can see. I mean, I see it everywhere now. This whole idea of, like, the color coding, the way that you point out and highlight certain things, the way that you deconstruct stuff, like, you guys created this form of content deconstruction, or, like, in the way that you visualize and analyze shit and you can see it show up in a lot of other creators. And I think that's really how you know, like. And I don't necessarily think it's. You're being ripped off in that way. I think it's like, that's how you know you're doing the right things, is that people see that and go, oh, that's a really simple way to process information. So I think the fact that it's just like visually interesting also helps because like you said, the bar is so low on LinkedIn that it's like very few things actually stop to scroll.
Nick Bennett [00:07:32]:
Like you get one line in your text post and it's like there's so much text on this platform that the visual with the super vibrant colors definitely makes a difference.
Anthony Pierri [00:07:41]:
That was a over time thing, right? That was a total iterative development. Like if you go back and look at our original posts, they did not look pretty bad. Like we started just using Miro, which was like a whiteboarding software, sticky notes, taking screenshots. We follow Elena Verna, we think her content's great, although in recent years she stopped posting as much now that she has like an in house role somewhere. But when she was solopreneur she was posting like incredible diagrams, frameworks and things like that and so she would just use Miro. So we just started with Miro and we started taking pictures and then we were like, maybe we want to uplevel the design a little. And I've always pretended to be a designer, even though I'm not. Like every job I've ever been in, I'll try to do a little bit of design, but they always are like, you know, the designers are quick to tell me, well, you're not really a real designer.
Anthony Pierri [00:08:26]:
And I'm like, yeah, you're probably right. So over time I was like learning these platforms like we use. Figma is our main design tool and so it was iterative that style. It was not like overnight we just had some cool revelation. We just kept trying to visualize these things. We started with these boxes from sticky notes and things like that and then recreated them, tried to get the different vibes and then it came about and now, yeah, we do see it all the time, which is, it's funny because it's like this happens with everything, right? Like the moment you find something that kind of works in a platform, other people start doing it and then the effectiveness of it diminishes. So we're already like, you know, well, what are we going to do now that even our posts will start doing a little? Probably not as good as they were at the beginning because I think there's just more of that type of content. So it's like we probably got to start thinking about what's our next big innovation.
Anthony Pierri [00:09:13]:
We can. Maybe it's short form video, I don't know. So. But we're still in the, in the diagram phase.
Nick Bennett [00:09:18]:
Well, I think it helps that the work that you do is so highly visual, whereas a lot of people just don't have that. The pinnacle of all the work that any company really tries to do is on their homepage. And so the fact that you get to deconstruct them and you get to rebuild them for people and showing people, I tell them, it's like, how do you make this problem highly visible to people? So I think you guys have found a really interesting way to do that and people will move on from that tactic at some point. And if you guys are still doing it, I think there will also be a lot of value where everyone else is still trying to chase it. Like, you see LinkedIn video feed is saturated with like all of the junk from Instagram is starting to make its way into that video feed. And it's just like not the type of stuff that is going to make anybody much money. The fact that everyone's trying to chase that stuff and it's like, if you can stay, stay in your lane long term, you will most definitely survive it. But what you said was super interesting, which was Fletch was launched out of another agency.
Nick Bennett [00:10:20]:
So I'm curious, how did you meet Robert and how did Fletch come to be?
Anthony Pierri [00:10:23]:
Yeah, so it's a long, winding story, but I'll try to keep it as concise and interesting as I can. Before coming into the tech world, I actually worked about 12 years in church ministry, so grew up going to churches, mostly like Christian Evangelical you might want to call them, but worked in churches doing all sorts of stuff. Made my way through the ranks, eventually actually became a pastor, which was like a crazy thing to think in retrospect. But through a long string of events I was like, I want to take a break. I don't want to do this anymore. And so I started looking for other options outside of church world. So a former boss also had made that transition, left the church world and was now doing consulting for different companies in like the tech space. So he introduced me to the company that I actually met Robert at, which was this agency called Headway that primarily did product development, product design and product management.
Anthony Pierri [00:11:21]:
And they would use those three arms to do all sorts of cool projects with companies big and small. And so I came in as actually an entry level sales role. And it was really funny because, you know, 12 years of promotions in nonprofit church world, I still was getting a pay increase, taking this entry level role that they give to high schoolers because it's. The tech world is just way higher floor, I guess I should say of where they pay you. So I was like, this is great. I was at the pretty high up in that world and I can start right at the bottom and I'm still getting more money than when I came in. And so I was in the sales role. And my background, I'm very, like, entrepreneurial.
Anthony Pierri [00:12:01]:
I like jumping into very ambiguous circumstances, doing things new and trying to figure them out. So this company was like, we had never done outbound as a way of getting new clients. The founder, highly connected in the tech space, has all these different people in his network. He's constantly building his network, really good at that. And so what he said was, we should try to add this alpha on ARM to see if we can have it be a little bit more predictable so it's not just reliant on me. And they were totally honest with me. They were like, we don't know if this is going to work. We don't know if this model makes sense for our type of business.
Anthony Pierri [00:12:33]:
But we've heard that you're a guy who can figure out new stuff, so let's try it. So I come in, I'm reading all the books I can on sales. I'm trying to get up to speed on everything in software. And basically, for nine months, we get hardly any real sales opportunities. I'm getting some meetings. No one's closing. We got to the very end of the sales process with like, five different people, none of them close. So I'm getting, like, a little nervous.
Anthony Pierri [00:12:58]:
I'm like, you know, I don't know how much longer I'm going to be in this position. So basically I convinced them. I'm like, hey, maybe this is not the right angle. We all came in saying we're not sure that this is going to work. And it came down to the fact that there was a custom service element to their offering. It was always different for everyone. And so doing outbound is all about predictability, repeatability, and things that are always different and custom are by definition not repeatable. So it's like we solve this highly specific, weird problem for this type of company.
Anthony Pierri [00:13:30]:
There's a completely different company over here that needs something different. You can't really use the same outbound sequence, right? So we were trying to find these, like, threads that would connect them all together. And like, man, if you could see some of my old cold emails, they were like, hey, are you guys working on innovation? And they're like, what? Get the. Who are you? You know, like, what is that like? And so, because I'm like, well, how do, how do I, how do I square away, you know, the giant 50,000 person enterprise that's building something for logistics with like a two person startup. Like what's the thread between those two? Innovation, I guess. But that didn't really work. And so we basically were like, I don't know if this model is going to make sense. And so I begged them, basically, hey, put me somewhere else in the company, right? You've seen how I've learned all this stuff really quick.
Anthony Pierri [00:14:16]:
Obviously not too much success, but if there's any more social capital that I've accrued, give me someplace that I can go. And so they were basically like, all right, well what if we put you on the product team, like the product manager team, as like a product owner, like basically a project manager. So I have a ton of project managing experience, right? Like having been a pastor, I oversaw this big, the church was big. The service that I oversaw was like maybe 150 people, you know, tons of volunteers that we would have to recruit and train. We had all these systems and stuff. So like project management, I was like, if I don't care what the field is, I will be able to project manage. I'll learn the stuff that's needed for that. So I go through, do some training around like product ownership and things like that, get the certification, whatever.
Anthony Pierri [00:14:56]:
So it's like, didn't matter though, like that stuff, I don't know, I don't think it's very important now in retrospect. But basically I'm on the product team and I'm basically sitting on the bench and there wasn't a project for me to go on. So I'm like really getting worried, right? I'm like, nothing happened in sales. There's not really any work for me to do on this product team. So the founder floated this idea and was basically like, could we try to figure out something that we could sell that the service itself would be repeatable because we always do different work? Is there some sort of, you know, productized thing that we could offer that would have a consistent message and positioning for different people? And so at this point I had met Robert, he was like a senior level product strategy person and me, him and one other guy all kind of banded together to see if we could solve this repeatable service offering problem. So we tried making this giant video series about like early stage startup entrepreneurship. Stuff that didn't really do anything. Then we did, we were like, maybe we just need to get a bunch of conversations with people in startups.
Anthony Pierri [00:15:58]:
To figure out what they need. So Robert and the other guy came up with this really cool process of like building. They called them the ecosystem maps, which was like all the different tools in a specific space. And they would pick these hyper targeted groups and we would get tons of meetings with like high level executives at all these different companies. But they would be like, all right, great, this is super interesting stuff. Like, what do you guys do? And we'd be like, what do you need? And they're like, I don't understand. You booked the meeting? Like, don't you have something to offer me? And we're like, well, you know, what are you struggling with? And they're like, I don't know, a ton of stuff. It didn't work either.
Anthony Pierri [00:16:33]:
So that was, that was a complete flop. But it was like, it was cool because we were able to get these meetings. And then I was like, I keep reading stuff online. I'm like, maybe, maybe this content idea would be a way to do it. So I start posting on LinkedIn and like I said, those first ones get a ton of traction and all of a sudden all these people are connect requesting with me and are wanting to get connected. And these posts were like, not about anything like specific. They were like just crazy ideas I had around tech and things like that. So I'd post these things.
Anthony Pierri [00:17:00]:
There wasn't like a grand master plan. But then we started ideating a little bit more and we were like, maybe we could do positioning work. Which we didn't even know that that was a subset of product marketing. We didn't even really know what product marketing was. We were just like, we could do this positioning work. We love that lady, April Dunford. We had read her book and we figured maybe that would be something that we could help people with because it helps guide the product strategy and stuff like that. So we start posting about positioning work and then we realize we need a way to see how our company is positioned.
Anthony Pierri [00:17:30]:
So we would look at people's homepages just to try to understand. We'd be like, well, how does this company position? So we look at their homepage and then we started trying to extrapolate like, you know, the positioning mad libs that people do. We're X type of company for X type of customer. We offer they value and this is how we do it. So we started to try to like extrapolate from what people were putting on their homepages to say what, how are they positioning? And then we realized very quickly nobody says anything on their homepages. They give no useful information. You cannot figure out who they're for, what they do. And so we just started posting about that with these audits being like, what is this?
Nick Bennett [00:18:04]:
What is it?
Anthony Pierri [00:18:05]:
What are you guys doing? And then all of a sudden, people would see it, they'd react, and then they would be like, can you help us with the positioning? Like, can you help us with our homepage? And so we were like, maybe there's something here. And we start feeling this market pull. And so we start making more content along those lines, More content along those lines, bigger audience. People start reaching out, and we start selling these audits that were basically, like a couple hundred bucks, where we would look at your homepage and basically do what we were doing in the LinkedIn post, but at a deeper level. Give analysis, give recommendations, things like that. And then eventually people will be like, all right, the audit was really helpful, but can you actually just help us rewrite the homepage, too? And so then we start throwing together this process. Like, if I could go back and see what we did in the first, you know, 10, 20, 30 companies, like, it must have been just an absolute shit show. Like, not helpful.
Nick Bennett [00:18:51]:
Who.
Anthony Pierri [00:18:52]:
Who knows? But we were charging way less money then. So maybe it's a little bit of you get what you pay for the. In the early days, but the process starts getting better, we start getting more clients, and we start realizing, wait a minute, this actually falls. Like, this is a marketing activity. We were doing basically marketing consulting, and then we realized there was sort of a disconnect because the company that we were launching out of didn't do marketing. That was not one of their services. And they had a bunch of services they were doing design, development, you know, product management, all these types of stuff that were not related at all to marketing. And so over time, people would come on their website looking for us, and they'd be like, I was confused.
Anthony Pierri [00:19:24]:
I thought you guys did this, like, marketing stuff. But everything I saw was about, like, building apps and, like, I guess you guys were a software development company, and we'd be like, well, you know, kind of sort of, you know, it's a little different, and vice versa, right? Like, if people came to us, they'd be like, wait, I thought you were part of that development agency. Like, it doesn't look like you guys do any development stuff. And we're like, no, no, we do, we do. So it kept getting kind of pulled in, like, weird directions. And so eventually we talked to the founders, and we were like, I think this just makes sense for this to be spun off as its kind of own thing. So me and Robert, we were able to work that out with them, thankfully, without any, you know, big legal battles or anything. We're still on good terms with them.
Anthony Pierri [00:20:01]:
You know, we'll. We'll still collaborate on projects and stuff. But then it spun off, became its own entity, and now that's kind of, you know, brings us more to today.
Nick Bennett [00:20:10]:
Whoa.
Anthony Pierri [00:20:12]:
Long.
Nick Bennett [00:20:12]:
I know.
Anthony Pierri [00:20:13]:
I was like, I'm not going to make it long. And then, of course, it's way too long.
Nick Bennett [00:20:15]:
No, no, no, no, no. That's insane. So you're running basically the, like, earliest Fletch playbook with Robert in house at this other company. And then it's like it becomes too conflicted. Like, the positioning of it was all off. You're inside of this other company. Exactly. At some point, you were like, let's.
Nick Bennett [00:20:34]:
You said, let's spin this thing off. How'd you get the name Fletch? I feel like this comes up and I see this, like, in comments all the time asking about, like, asking about this. How'd you get there?
Anthony Pierri [00:20:44]:
It's not the Chevy Chase movie, which is the most common thing that people say, like, did you get it from this 80s detective movie? And I was like, dude, I was born in 92. I don't even. Never even seen this movie. A friend of mine, we're in a band together and done music together for a really long time. Very creative guy. Not in the tech space. He came up with the name and he said. He told me, basically, Fletch is like what you do to an arrow that goes in a bow and arrow.
Anthony Pierri [00:21:10]:
When you put the feathers on the back, you're fletching an arrow in order to make it fly straight and hit the target. So it was like this whole kind of metaphor. Fletch is helping guide the messaging to fly straight, hit the target. It was really funny. We came up with that logo. Actually, a guy at the last company, at the agency we worked with, he did the logo for us. And my friend was so upset because he was like, you should have done something with an arrow. Like, why did you missed such a great opportunity to incorporate the name with the arrow? And he's like, this was a big flop.
Anthony Pierri [00:21:43]:
And then we're like, yeah, yeah, maybe, maybe. But we did that little square because it kind of looked like all of our LinkedIn diagram. So, you know, it went back and forth. But yeah, that. That was basically the origin of the.
Nick Bennett [00:21:53]:
Idea that is, like, so deep.
Anthony Pierri [00:21:57]:
I don't.
Nick Bennett [00:21:57]:
Has anyone ever Gotten that just, like, intuitively.
Anthony Pierri [00:22:01]:
No, absolutely not. I mean, this is the. This is the funny thing. Sometimes I talk to Rob and I'm like, we should have done branding. And this is no shade to brand people. But truly, like, people doing brand work are charging a lot more money than we do. Right. Like, I think calendly spent a million and a half dollars on their logo.
Anthony Pierri [00:22:24]:
And, I mean, they didn't think they were buying a logo. They're buying a brand narrative and a strategy and all this stuff. But, like, when you read those things of, like, people explaining the brand, we were talking to one guy and he was like, yeah, he's like the eyeballs in the logo of this one company. They're looking to the right, and that signifies that they're looking to the future, because the company is looking to the future. Get the fuck out of here with that shit. I'm like, we should have been brand people, man. You can just make shit up, charge a million bucks, you know. No, this is not just a logo.
Anthony Pierri [00:22:53]:
It's a. It's a way of life. You're creating a, you know, a tribe, like, for such an easy thing. No way to measure if that's helpful.
Nick Bennett [00:23:00]:
Or you guys are doing the Lord's work by shitting on branding all day. I don't care what anybody says. I love it so much. Because, dude, you saw the Jaguar ad that just came out. I know you saw this thing. Like, this is insanity. I hope that agency never gets another job ever again. We have totally lost the plot, and.
Anthony Pierri [00:23:22]:
You and Robert are the only people.
Nick Bennett [00:23:23]:
Out here calling it out, like, what is happening.
Anthony Pierri [00:23:27]:
Yeah. To be fair, though, right, like, people have pointed out to us when we do those posts about brand and stuff, they're like, you have a very distinct brand with Fletcher. Really distinct visual style, really distinct approach and tone and how you talk about things. And we're like, yes. And. And so it's like, I don't want to disparage the concept of, like, vibe, aesthetic, design, all that stuff. I think that's extremely powerful and important. But I just.
Anthony Pierri [00:23:53]:
The thing that makes me so upset is when brand people are like, no, no, no. Brand is everything. It's how you build your product. It's what. And I'm like, okay, well, if it. If it just means a company like the company, then there should be no brand agencies. Like, unless we're considering, like, a private equity firm that buys your company. That's the only close thing that's like, we do brand work.
Anthony Pierri [00:24:14]:
We buy companies and run them. You Know, the thing that makes me so annoyed, too, is, like, when you see people just inflating what they're actually doing, Just say, I'm going to help you come up with a badass design aesthetic vibe. Like, way that you show up in the world. Like, that's it. That's fine. That's super important. Just don't go beyond and say, like, at one. On one side of your mouth being like, yeah, brand is everything.
Anthony Pierri [00:24:38]:
It's like, how you treat your employees. It's your. What's in the handbook. It's, you know, what software you build with. It's your marketing. It's, you know, I'm like, okay. And then at the same time, they're like, and we sell logos, and we'll give you a color palette.
Nick Bennett [00:24:51]:
Yeah. You'll get a really sick slide deck.
Anthony Pierri [00:24:54]:
Yes. Just sell them a slide deck and say, I'm giving you a slide deck of your colors and your settings. That's fine. It's very valuable.
Nick Bennett [00:25:01]:
I totally agree with you. And I think. I mean, yeah, Fletch has a very distinct brand. This is where I think people get screwed up on this one. They sacrifice or they, like, overlook just what the thing is, or even the category in which they play in. And for brand, it's like, category first. If I don't know what it is, I don't care about your brand. Like, people under.
Nick Bennett [00:25:22]:
And this is where people look at you and they go, anthony, you and Robert built a phenomenal brand.
Anthony Pierri [00:25:26]:
Yeah.
Nick Bennett [00:25:26]:
But everyone knows what you guys do.
Anthony Pierri [00:25:28]:
Yeah.
Nick Bennett [00:25:29]:
That's why the brand works.
Anthony Pierri [00:25:31]:
Yeah. And we talk about this. That it's. I think it's because most people who do brand stuff look to the great brands in the world. Nike, Apple. And the thing they forget is that when you sell software, when I'm looking at Nike and I see a shoe, we don't have to have a conversation of, like, wait a minute. What is that thing that I'm looking at? And they're like, it's a shoe. Because we all have a base level understanding when we see a mattress.
Anthony Pierri [00:25:59]:
Casper mattress. I know that that's the thing I sleep on. But with software, we don't have that a lot of times, because people come out and they say, especially B2B software. They're like, we've created tools for your workflows. And I'm like, I don't know what that means. And they're like, have you seen the brand? We stand for this. And this is what we're all. I'm like, I don't even know what this thing is or when I would use it.
Anthony Pierri [00:26:22]:
I don't really care what. I would first have to know what the thing is. That's the big hurdle that people forget because they're looking to D2C and B2C as the inspiration.
Nick Bennett [00:26:34]:
A thousand percent, man. I think you and Robert have built a absolutely phenomenal niche. I like, I just love it so much because people are like, you gotta go bigger or like, whatever. There's a lot of fear in niching down. And you guys have. And I've advocated for this for years now. I keep beating this drum. It's really specific niche.
Nick Bennett [00:26:54]:
Like, you guys solve a very specific problem for a very specific person in a very specific way. Like, and you guys are killing it. Like, I don't understand how people can't see that. And they go, must be the brand or whatever it is, or must be just, they're good at LinkedIn. Like, I just can't get there. So I'm a huge, I'm a huge advocate of it. And to see people killing it makes me so happy because we need more people. Fewer people would be struggling if they just ran that play.
Nick Bennett [00:27:21]:
Like, it's just too. It's so simple. And you guys did it because you just observed this problem in the world and then you just went out and did it. You're like, oh, this seems to be a very big problem for people. What if we went out and solved it?
Anthony Pierri [00:27:32]:
It's funny, I posted ones on LinkedIn. I was like, I think I'm going to change my LinkedIn headline to just advocating for the most basic marketing principles that you forgot. Because it's like, at the end of the day, that's all it is. It's just the most basic transaction. Go back 10,000 years and this was still true. Hey, you need help in your village? I'll go and help you in exchange for animal skins or whatever, right? Like, you have a problem, I'll solve the problem for you in exchange for money. And it's like, that's basically all we're doing is saying, pick one problem, solve it at a repeatable way, and then you're kind of off to the races. And it's funny too, because it's almost easier to make this case for service agency or services or agencies or freelancers.
Anthony Pierri [00:28:19]:
In some ways it's easier to explain it because it's like, you can only work with so many clients in a year. So, like, how many do you really need to make this business viable? And when you frame it in that sometimes it's slightly easier to get people to be like, oh yeah, if I just got 10 clients out of some sort of say it's a subscription type business, then I'd be doing great. And so it's like, do you need those 10 clients to be completely different and all having different problems and you're solving with different custom things? What if you said 10? They're all doing the same thing. So like that. Sometimes I feel like it's a little easier to get the service people over the hump. With software companies it's trickier because they're like, I want to get venture scale, right? I've raised $10 million. I told the people I was going to become a million or a hundred million dollars company. So I have to go after the world all at once.
Anthony Pierri [00:29:04]:
And people forget like how much money is in each specific little corner. Like each market is so big, so much bigger than we think. And usually what will happen is say someone is using a channel to grow their software business. They'll be like, I'm using maybe LinkedIn or something. They'll start seeing diminishing returns of the channel and they will confuse that of saying I've reached the whole market and I need to go to other markets to get the next level of growth. When it's like, are you really the market leader of this or did you just your, is your tactics not working as well? Because like you think of someone like Slack, right? Slack, we did a breakdown once. They say their total addressable market is 1 billion knowledge workers and they have 40 million users and teams, their biggest competitor has like 260 million users. So there's like 6 or 700 million people not using Slack or teams.
Anthony Pierri [00:30:04]:
And yet Slack is like man, we're like market leaders, you know, like, well we're not, we're right under teams. We can do this like cool, like brand messaging. We don't need to tell people what we are. Everyone knows what we do. And then you like meet someone just out of the little Silicon Valley bubble. Like my brother in law is an engineer and we were talking to him and I was like, do you guys use Slack? And he was like, what is slack?
Nick Bennett [00:30:28]:
You know what I mean?
Anthony Pierri [00:30:29]:
And they're like, you like, we have our own little bubble. We're like, you know, we've like reached the whole market, we need to expand, we need to add more products, we need to add more segments. And it's like, do you actually though, or maybe do you just need to get the rest of the people in this market who you're not getting right now. So the whole like niching down is kind of an oxymoron because the niche is often massive. And like people, you can become an extremely successful company around one product or service for one group of people. That doesn't really change. And you don't necessarily have to immediately jump and layer on all these different things and go after all these different people. You might need to layer on more marketing efforts to reach those people who are maybe not accessible in the one channel, but it's likely like for us, we will never run out of people who need help with their homepages.
Anthony Pierri [00:31:17]:
We will never, in a hundred years, we could never run out. And there's new startups starting every single year. So it's like we will never reach the tam. And we could scale ten or a hundred fold, just still doing this one thing for this one group of people.
Nick Bennett [00:31:32]:
And you could do it on LinkedIn. Like, you would never need to start even considering another channel to try and do that. Like just LinkedIn. You could spend the rest of your life doing this on LinkedIn and you would be fat and happy 100%.
Anthony Pierri [00:31:46]:
And it's like if we had some sort of crazy growth rate that we were trying to hit, maybe we would layer on something else. Like, I do feel like the tech companies on Twitter are a different group than the people on LinkedIn. I think, like people who are reading Twitter every day in the tech sphere, like dev tools and things like that, like, they're not really on LinkedIn in the same way. They're like all these sales tech companies and our tech companies are. So it's like if we wanted to double our growth rate or triple our growth rate, maybe we would have to layer on some other channels. But again, do we need to do that? Probably not in the short term. Right? We're not trying to scale this like huge agency at this point. We're liking what we're doing right now.
Anthony Pierri [00:32:24]:
So we're, we're trying to figure out what the next thing is. But I don't think it's going to be just scale exactly what we're doing. Tenfold.
Nick Bennett [00:32:30]:
Yeah. I mean, the economics of Flash are fantastic. I mean, it's you and Robert. I don't know, you might have like VAs or anything like on the, any back of office stuff, but it's just the two of you that split this. It's 10k to run this play. And I would imagine that there's more than enough demand to keep you guys busy every Single day. So I mean, even if you did 50 homepages a year, which I feel like is a lot, like, that's a phenomenal business. That's an absolutely fantastic business.
Nick Bennett [00:32:59]:
Like you guys are doing great and I think people really overcomplicate the economics of what it is to build a business like this that just works for.
Anthony Pierri [00:33:07]:
Your life a hundred percent for transparency, you know, we, we do between like 10 to 15 of these a month. It's a pretty high margin business and it's, it ends up being like you were saying, pretty lucrative. And it is, it's me, Rob, we have one copywriter who we pay basically full time and then we have one admin. So the four of us. And the software expense is what, a couple grand a year for Notion and Slack and our emails and stuff like that. So it's a nominal overhead. And then we all the marketing is from organic. So it's just time.
Anthony Pierri [00:33:39]:
We're not paying to get the views we do. You know, podcasts like this, we post our things on LinkedIn, but it's like there's no marketing expenditure. And if the funny thing too that people forget is that if you do the niche stuff and the business side and like the business model side, the product side, all that stuff really specific, it's also the hack to making the content work, right? Like those two things go hand in hand. The more specific your offer, the more specific the group, the more specific the content can be, the bigger the reach on the platform. Because like there's a misconception like we need to go broad in our content to make it work on LinkedIn. But the problem is like if you just post about generic marketing, now you're competing with like Seth Godin and New York Times authors and stuff who have like giant followings just by default, where if you do these really specific niches, you could very quickly rise to the top 1% of that niche without that much time, right? It took us about maybe a year, but like I think there's something like in LinkedIn it's like if you have more than like 20,000 or 25,000 followers, you're in the top 1% of all creators in the platform. And it's like in most niches there's more than 25,000 people who would be interested in a niche. So it's like you don't have to go after the 50 million person topic.
Anthony Pierri [00:34:55]:
You could go after the 200,000 person topic and just be way higher because it's a smaller pond, big fish in the small Pond concept. Right. Like the Competition for homepage B2B SaaS product marketing is very small. There's not much competition there. Where if we were like, let's be the marketing experts of all of the world, then it's a much harder piece to win.
Nick Bennett [00:35:19]:
Yeah, I think people get turned around on this because they're like, well, I can't just rewrite people's homepages. They're already doing that like there's nothing left. It's like there are a million of these micro problems that people will throw good money at to solve. Like not everything has to be this like $150,000 problem. It's just the mechanics of your business make sense for the problem. And it's like, I think this is where people get turned around on. They're trying to solve either really inexpensive problems at too high of a price tag or they're trying to drag out how much it should cost to solve this type of problem. Like you guys don't have people on retainer, you come in, you do your thing and then the job is done.
Anthony Pierri [00:36:00]:
Yep.
Nick Bennett [00:36:01]:
The struggle I see though is that people can't keep up with that volume. Like the rotation of clients is really, really hard because they're not creating at the same rate as you guys do. And therefore when projects start, the creation goes down and then when projects end, the creation goes up. But there's always like a gap in between clients. And just trying to manage all that just is really, really hard. So I generally advise people against running that model. How do you guys keep up with that?
Anthony Pierri [00:36:30]:
This is where the co founder piece comes into play, which is really hard. If you're a solopreneur. The thing that you have to do is limit the scope of what you do as much as humanly possible. From the beginning, we have both had to self correct each other on any time the scope started to expand, we had the other person had to be like, no, we will not do that. And so from the beginning we were like, should we sell the whole website? Rewriting all of it? Because that would be more money. But then immediately that introduces so much complexity. You can just imagine all the endless iterations of every single page, all the different stakeholders. You have to get involved.
Anthony Pierri [00:37:13]:
And so that project becomes highly custom and non repeatable versus when you limit the scope and saying no, no, no, we just do the homepage, that's it. And the way we get to it is through a series of workshops. And we do the same workshops for every single company. And so ruthless about the scope Is like you. We will run three live workshops with you over the course of two weeks. And we will do the audit pre research. We will watch a sales call, if you have one. We will watch your overview of the product, we will look at your website, we'll do all this research on the front end that is the same for everyone.
Anthony Pierri [00:37:53]:
And then we say, we're not going to set up interviews with your customers. We're not going to do all that because again, that's where the scope starts to balloon. And so if you say we're just running these workshops, they're the same for everyone. And we're even in those workshops, every single project, we're trying to hone in, hone in, hone in, hone in that it is more and more repeatable of how we even run them sometimes. That's a piece of like, if it's too divergent, it might be because you're working with too broad of people. That's why it's like, if you have already shrunk it to really mostly working with B2B SaaS companies, that reduces the complexity too. Where if you're like, no, we're working with hardware companies and B2C consumer brands, like, everything gets more complicated and you can't really use the same frameworks as much. You can't use the same examples, all that stuff.
Anthony Pierri [00:38:37]:
The case studies are different. So it's like you shrink it on the top end. You make the process as repeatable as humanly possible. And we would even say, too, this is where too the co founder is so good in your head. As a solopreneur, you would think, well, no, I have a great process. It's totally repeatable. But the moment you try to explain it to someone else and you see that they're confused and they're like, well, how did you get from point A to point B? And you're like, did you just kind of. Did you see that's kind of what you should do? Like, that's just logically.
Anthony Pierri [00:39:05]:
We would always just call that out. We'd be like, it's a black box. What you're describing is a black box is in your head. It is not a process. So we do that back and forth to this day. We're like, total black box. We have no idea how we jumped from there to there. Just intuition, right? Like anything that seems like it's just intuition probably means that it's not a real process.
Anthony Pierri [00:39:21]:
You ruthlessly restrict the scope, make the process as humanly repeatable as possible. Right? And Then shrink who you're bringing in. And what that allows you to do is make it so that the projects themselves are pretty much manageable. You know, kind of where they're going to start, where they're going to end, how long they're going to take. And then you can budget out the capacity to make sure that you have time to create the content to get more of those people. So, like, we only do a set number of workshops every single week. We have two slots every day, one in the morning, one in the afternoon to account for the time zones. And we have it set up in calendly that if someone books in the morning, it removes the slot for the afternoon for someone else.
Anthony Pierri [00:40:03]:
So at most we're taking five main workshops a week each person. We also do these, like, we call them like copy live homepage copy reviews, where we'll do a call, where we show them the homepage, stuff like that that's mostly led by our copywriter. So we will double up on that because it's not the same, like mental bandwidth. So by reducing the scope, shrinking it down, picking the specific spots, you can do so many more projects. And then what happens is, like, if you sell those cheap at first, which we were selling them relatively cheap, a couple grand, where people like, whoa, that's crazy. Like you're going to come in, do all this stuff, rewrite my homemade. She was like three grand. Like, that seems really cheap.
Anthony Pierri [00:40:37]:
Depending on the client, obviously. But for like the company that raised 5 million bucks, that's nothing. You do that, you get the reps, you make the process better, you get the experience, you get the case studies, you share the findings in the flywheel, and then you just gradually increase the price. We started selling these for a couple hundred bucks for these audits. Then we sold it for 3k, then we bumped into 5k, then 7500, then we just bumped it to 10. And we haven't even noticed anyone is batting an eye at 10k. People are like, oh, this is fine, this sounds great. Obviously really small companies will still be like, can we get the discount? Because we offer like an early stage discount if you're smaller.
Anthony Pierri [00:41:11]:
So we're like, yeah, that's fine, but we may bump the price again. And the margin just keeps getting bigger and bigger. And the amount of work we're doing is shrinking, right? And then it gives you the bandwidth to create the content, to get more people. And it's like if you're solving a repeatable problem that's really small in scope, there's so many people who will need it. And your fixed price tag makes you so easy to purchase, right? Like, most people can buy Fletch on a credit card. They can bypass all of procurement because a lot of executives have 10k spending time like, sure, I can pay for this without really anyone needing to get involved. So, like, you shrink the price tag, which people are always very hesitant to say anything about price because, like, I want to be value based pricing, I don't want to. And it's like, well, if you have one fixed price with a fixed process and you know exactly what you're getting, you're extremely easy to buy.
Anthony Pierri [00:42:00]:
And which helps with, again, the volume, which helps with the making the process better, which helps with creating the insights for the content, which gets more people in the door. So it's this giant flywheel where all these things are working together to make it really repeatable and not like a 60, 70 hour business. Like, we work, I don't know, nine to five, like five days a week. And it's like relatively easy. There's like days where I'm like, all right, you know, I've got my main work done. You know, I'm going to work on some content, I'm going to work on some new ideas. It's not like a grind where most customer service agencies, you're either in these feast or famine times where if you're in the feast, you're like, everyone's working 70 hours a week and then you, the client dries up. You didn't have time to do marketing because everyone's working 70 hours a week and then you have no work and everyone's freaking out and stuff like that? This is very repeatable and predictable.
Nick Bennett [00:42:47]:
Where did you guys learn this stuff? Is this trial and error? Is this stuff that you've kind of pieced together through just observing other firms operating like books like, how did you guys get this flow down?
Anthony Pierri [00:43:01]:
It's a combo. So a lot of trial and error. But some of the key philosophical things Rob brought from the beginning. There's a book that I would recommend to people you maybe have even. We maybe talked about this. I can remember. It's called Built to Sell. And it's all about productizing your service.
Anthony Pierri [00:43:18]:
I recommend it to anyone. They're basically saying, productize it so it's easier to sell it down the line. But even if you're not thinking about selling, it's just a really, really good breakdown of this exact process we're talking about. That was a really good one in the beginning. There's a guy named Justin Welsh who makes content. Rob was a big fan of his and he talks all about this type of scalable stuff. And then there was another podcast which now I'm totally blanking. I think the podcast may be called like Build a Better Agency or something.
Anthony Pierri [00:43:46]:
And the guy he talks about this was like one of our early principles. Was he. He's like, if you want to sell expertise based service, you need to publicly demonstrate your expertise. Which sounds like so obvious, but it is the opposite of how most consultants operate. They say, I have this big walled garden where all my expertise lives behind and it's, you come in, extend me the trust, pay me, and then I will show you the expertise where you take. We take the exact opposite approach when we say it's like more like open source software. We say we release all the frameworks for public consumption. We post them.
Anthony Pierri [00:44:22]:
We've done like LinkedIn Lives running our workshops with actual companies where we're like, you can watch us do the whole thing end to end. And what that does is the people who are really gung ho don't need to pay us, they could just do it themselves. But they will tell people about us, they will be big fans, evangelize it. And so any lost revenue that we would miss from not having those people hire us, we gain in the algorithmic distribution that LinkedIn will give you from sharing extremely high value content for free.
Nick Bennett [00:44:53]:
Right?
Anthony Pierri [00:44:53]:
You just put it out every single day. Hey, this is our newest canvas. We have this positioning messaging canvas that's like the basis of it. We release the new versions to just everyone. Hey, here's what we released, here's what we updated. This is how you use it. Here's videos of us using it, here's the examples and stuff like that. Like give it all away for free.
Anthony Pierri [00:45:09]:
And that just makes the trust level go up so high. So there's some people who will just do it themselves and then other people will be like, oh, these guys clearly know what they're doing. I don't have time to do this myself. Let's just hire them. You know, I don't have to worry. I don't know what they're going to do. What are we actually buying? Because it's all just public information. They can see exactly what they're going to get.
Anthony Pierri [00:45:27]:
We have tons of. We were big, robust, like before and after library on our website of like, hey, this is what they came in with. This is why we changed it. This is what they got at the end. And people always talk about that. That is like a really helpful thing for them to see it and they can vet if they like our work or not. Right. So we got a lot of those ideas from podcasts, books, and then some from trial and error.
Anthony Pierri [00:45:47]:
So it's not like we were some masterminds. Like the stuff around the content flywheel that was more discovered. It was like, oh my gosh, this it just does itself. Like by the end it's all helping. But yeah, like, Rob for sure brought in those crucial ideas around positioning for specific people niching down at based on stuff that he had been reading. And. And he was giving all this product strategy coaching to all these big companies and was seeing it from the product side, not from marketing. But he was seeing product teams get pulled in 10 different directions because the sales team was selling them to all these different industries who had different needs.
Anthony Pierri [00:46:20]:
And so the product team is like, well, how are we going to build this product to service these health tech companies, these logistic companies? So Rob saw the problems for the product side and then we sort of discovered it that it on the marketing side, it's equally bad.
Nick Bennett [00:46:31]:
I think what you guys are doing and how you've come to this. This is like the thing that I hear most people are trying to circumvent, which is just working it out. It is no more complicated than that. You guys are just working it out. I appreciate you guys sharing as much as you do publicly. And I've been beating this drum for a while now, which is people are not buying access to the information that you and Robert have. Like, that information is free and available. Right? The Internet exists.
Nick Bennett [00:46:58]:
They can get information anywhere they want. They're buying the probability of success with the information or they'll buy the organization. Like, you guys have your notion database that you sell. I buy it's like 50 bucks. I was like, yeah, I want organized in this information, all organized. It just makes it really simple. So it's like they'll pay for the organization of it. So it's easier to sift through and find stuff.
Nick Bennett [00:47:19]:
But the actual paying for the access, I mean, that's why books are 5, 10, 15, 20 bucks. And why people pay don't pay $10,000 for the buck is because. And I think people get this backwards. Like you said, they have this walled garden of information and it's the wrong lens. Give it all away for free. Share everything that you're doing in charge for helping them become successful. Like, it's a very simple, simple idea, but it's a very different approach. Than what most people are trying to do.
Nick Bennett [00:47:48]:
So let's end here. Looking back, what is something you would have done differently?
Anthony Pierri [00:47:54]:
Oh, man. I mean, it's funny because with, with hindsight, right? Like, it feels like, wow, look at this great strategy we did. It was totally by accident. A lot of it was just trial and error and beating our heads against the wall. Like, we spent so many hours debating these most esoteric things of like, what is a feature, what is a capability, what is a benefit? You know, like these, these things like, nobody cares about, but, like, they were so crucial to getting it up and running. So, yeah, I don't know. I don't know that I would have done something differently. And again, not because it's.
Anthony Pierri [00:48:27]:
We were so amazing foresight, but it's like we kind of got to where we got and it ended up really working out. Not by any genius of our own, but it's like, I don't, I don't know if there would have been another process that would have been better. You can't go around it. You just have to go through it. You know, it's like you just do the really hard work and it will hopefully pay off in the end. Right. That whole trial and error process, trying different things, you just can't really circumvent it. Yeah, I don't, I don't know.
Anthony Pierri [00:48:54]:
I don't. I don't think there would be anything that I would have done, like, different. It truly is just, you just keep trying different things. You don't lose hope about it. And then hopefully something starts to work. And I'll give, I'll give one side example to. Because my older brother, he wanted to start a side hustle. Just to your point where you're like, there's so many micro problems.
Anthony Pierri [00:49:12]:
He wanted to start a side hustle. So he was like, should I start posting on LinkedIn? And I was like, yeah, you should totally do it. So he's like doing the same exact strategy as us where he's making these infographics and big diagrams and stuff. He kind of find like his own visual style that doesn't look exactly like ours. It's kind of as its own thing. But the problem he is solving is he's giving public Speaking coaching to B2B SaaS leaders who are giving their first conference talk. So, like, incredibly specific. The niche is like so small in people's minds.
Anthony Pierri [00:49:47]:
In the last four or five months, he went from zero LinkedIn followers, he's at 6,000 now. He's doing like, already a couple Grand a month. Each month he's doing a little bit more. He's getting all these like, big names, people reaching out to him. Like, can you coach me? I've got this big talk coming up. So like you were saying, like, people, like all the problems have been solved. They really haven't. There's some really small niche things that have a lot of opportunity.
Anthony Pierri [00:50:09]:
And if he keeps doing it, like, it could totally be a full time job if he wanted it to be. And he'll only keep growing if he keeps doing it.
Nick Bennett [00:50:16]:
That is like the most beautiful little niche ever. And he will own it. That's the thing. He can dominate this little tiny corner, create a phenomenal life for himself just with that one thing. So what does the future of Fletch look like? Is there something you want to build that you guys haven't built yet?
Anthony Pierri [00:50:33]:
So it's funny, like some people live at a opportunity scarce mindset. Like, man, there's just nothing. There's no opportunities. We live in like an opportunity rich mindset, right? We're like, the problem is there's so many cool things we could go after. I've mentioned a couple of them. Like we could expand the agency and say we'll build the messaging and the positioning for all your pages. So that could be a way to grow it. You could also say, we'll keep just doing the homepage, but we'll also do your sales deck, because people ask us for that almost every project.
Anthony Pierri [00:51:02]:
Can you help us translate this to a sales deck? And we had to be really, really disciplined to say no. Right. Because people have been offering us money for the last two years around that specific service. So we could do that. There's like a software angle that we're talking about where we could potentially make software that would help us in the positioning process that we could release as like a SaaS product for hyper specific audience, like stuff like that. And then the last one would just be continue to do what we're doing but invest more in distribution, try to reach more people around the specific thing and maybe scale it that way. Or keep exactly what we're doing and just raise prices and tell people stop paying and, you know, do one project a month. Like April Dunford, the other big positioning lady.
Anthony Pierri [00:51:41]:
We're like mini aprils. She does one week with the company and charges 75 grand. So we are a huge bargain compared to April. Right. But there's a world where we go that route. We write a book, you know, we try to become bestselling authors and then we charge 75 grand and we only do one company or two companies a month and it only takes, you know, a tiny fraction of the amount of time. So there, there's all these different ideas. We're vetting all these things back and forth, trying to figure out what we think will be the next step.
Anthony Pierri [00:52:10]:
And in the meantime, just continuing to try to make the service better, more robust, more productized and things like that.
Nick Bennett [00:52:16]:
I like it, man. I feel this tension between, like, how do we continue to increase our earning potential but also make an impact. Like charging 75 grand is really, really cool and sounds like so much fun for a week of work, but it really diminishes your ability to make an impact. Like, I feel like you guys can help, you know, thousands of tech companies solve this problem. And so there's this tension between how much do we charge and how do we increase access to this, to this work? And so I get it, like you're saying, like this. The SaaS product allows for something like that versus hiring us to come out and do a one week workshop. So I'm excited to see what you guys do. I'm a huge fan of you and Robert and what you guys are doing.
Nick Bennett [00:52:58]:
I absolutely love it. So it's been a blast jamming with you. Thank you so much for coming on and sharing your story, man. I know more people feel seen because of it.
Anthony Pierri [00:53:07]:
Thanks, man. Thanks so much for having me. Super fun.
Nick Bennett [00:53:09]:
Right on. Hey, Nick, again and thanks for listening. If you've enjoyed this episode, you can sign up for the 1000 Routes newsletter where I process the insights and stories you hear on this show into frameworks and lessons to help you build a new and different future for your own business. You can sign up at 1000routes.com or check the link in the show notes. If you were to board a rocket ship and leave Earth today, what would be your last meal here?
Anthony Pierri [00:53:47]:
I love seafood, so I think like something really good in the seafood world. Really? Any restaurant I go to, I'll be like, what's on the seafood menu? So it'd be something probably in that world, you know, crab or something like that. I don't know though.
Nick Bennett [00:54:03]:
Do you do the raw seafood stuff?
Anthony Pierri [00:54:05]:
Yeah, if it's in the ocean, it's usually good, you know, or. Or a pond, it's good, you know, I like it all.
Nick Bennett [00:54:11]:
All right, all right. I'm. I dig it. I dig it. So, like, you spend. I spend a decent amount of time around some sushi.
Anthony Pierri [00:54:17]:
Yep, sushi's great. Sushi's really digging, but, you know, like, shrimp, salmon, all that kind of stuff. Is.
Nick Bennett [00:54:28]:
That.