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This Meeting Could've Been a Podcast drops you smack dab in the middle of the closed-door sessions where Jess Cook (Head of Marketing) and Joshua Perk (CEO) are working to turn their company, Vector, into B2B marketing’s next big thing.
In each episode, they tackle a real, strategic decision together—"Should we hire an agency?", "Should we push free trials or demos?", "What are we going to do with all the swag Josh bought?!"—dishing out pros, cons, knowns, unknowns, wins, challenges, and stories along the way.
Come for the big picture strategy and day-to-day tactics, stay for the jokes that make HR nervous.
[00:00:00] Josh: Hey Jess. You know, funnel Vision, the product that we just launched?
[00:00:02] Jess: Yeah. The one that I spent months planning and
[00:00:05] Jess: naming and creating all of the assets for, and blood, sweat tears. That one?
[00:00:09] Josh: Yeah, that one. We're gonna kill it. What the.
[00:00:17] Jess: Hey, Josh. Remember when you led our company down the totally wrong path for a while? What, what was that like?
[00:00:24] Josh: Well, I don't like it when you say it like that, but Yeah, I do, Jess, I remember it pretty well. Uh, yeah. That sucked. Yeah, we, we spent a long time building a product, getting ready to market it.
[00:00:38] Jess: Uhhuh.
[00:00:39] Josh: Getting into the market.
[00:00:41] Jess: Yep. We
[00:00:41] Josh: didn't beta it, we just like sent it out to everyone. Yeah. We wrapped our entire messaging around it. Yeah. And then we're like, oops, that didn't work. Sorry folks. We're closed. This is the second time in the season. I know that I've said it. I just love it. It still works. It
[00:00:57] Jess: worked there too.
[00:00:58] Jess: Yep.
[00:00:59] Josh: Yeah, [00:01:00] that was brutal.
[00:01:00] Jess: Let's take people back to, oh. The beginning
[00:01:04] Josh: kind of blocked
[00:01:04] Jess: it out where it was a good idea, where we felt it was a good idea, when we
[00:01:08] Josh: thought it was a good idea. And
[00:01:09] Jess: just like the decisions we made along the way and how we ended up where we are now.
[00:01:13] Josh: We sunset eventually a product called Funnel Vision.
[00:01:15] Josh: Yep. And at the time, like you said to, to take people back at the, at the time we had a problem with our product, which was, we were in our really early infancy where our product basically did two things. There was site de anonymization and contact level intents. And we felt like we weren't able to consistently get our customers to figure out how to adopt those two things.
[00:01:38] Josh: Right. It just felt like these two like loose, bespoke things we did,
[00:01:41] Jess: they would like get the data. Yeah. They would see who was on their site and they would see, um, who was researching things. Then they'd be like. Now what? Yes. They wouldn't really know what to do next. That's
[00:01:52] Josh: a great way to phrase it. Like they, they, we didn't have the answer to now what?
[00:01:55] Jess: Yeah.
[00:01:55] Josh: And in retrospect, we talked about this in a previous episode, like the, the correct [00:02:00] answer to now what was just picking one use case for them and like driving everyone to that consistent thing. Yep. But at the time, in all of my wisdom, I was like, you know what the real answer is? Is like, take this data.
[00:02:12] Josh: And figure out the 16 different things that they can do with it.
[00:02:16] Jess: Yes.
[00:02:16] Josh: And I wrapped it into what I like. At the time it was this like beautiful story Yeah. That we were all really excited about, which is like, and, and this part is still true, like our thesis was that because we're at the contact level, we.
[00:02:31] Josh: We thought the way the contact journey went was different than the account level journey. Yeah. Like the account level journey for most marketers is this like linear thing of like they're in awareness, they're in consideration, they're purchasing something, right? And we were like, no, no, no. The reality is when it's contact level, you have all these different buyers that are totally different parts of their journey and it's actually on like.
[00:02:51] Josh: Two axes. Like one is like how much they, uh, need you. So like, do they know they have a problem? Are they trying to [00:03:00] solve a problem? And then the other axis is like how far they are in your selfish journey. Yeah. Are, are they marketing engage, are they sales engaged? And so like we built this thing called funnel vision.
[00:03:10] Josh: Yeah. That basically would like visually represent like where they were across this like four by four grid. Yep. And it sounded so good.
[00:03:18] Jess: It sounded good. It looked good. We built it into the product. Yeah, it was lovely. Like it allowed you to like click on one of those 16 boxes, see who was in there. Yeah.
[00:03:30] Jess: And then it was kind of like, because you knew where they were in their journey, the idea was it would get easier to understand what to do next.
[00:03:37] Josh: Yes. Yeah.
[00:03:38] Jess: Did it
[00:03:39] Josh: it? No, it didn't. It did. It didn't. For a lot of reasons. One is like when we shifted to market, it was just horribly. Bucky. Yeah. Like it just, our customers were like, the page doesn't load.
[00:03:49] Josh: We're like, yeah, that happens. Sometimes. They're like, it should load. And we're like, yeah, we get that.
[00:03:55] Jess: Mm-hmm. Yeah. And
[00:03:56] Josh: then when it did load, what we found out was that. Two [00:04:00] things. One, we hadn't built out that that technology enough for it to be meaningful. So like basically all the people ended up just in like one or two boxes.
[00:04:08] Josh: Yeah. They weren't actually like distributed across these like 16 different things. 'cause we just didn't have enough signal to know where they were and. I think even more scary is we realized like even if we went and solved that problem, which we could have, right? We could have gotten more data, more signal spread people across the grid better.
[00:04:23] Josh: It still wasn't solving the underlying issue, which is like to, to activate the 16 different phases someone would be in. You need a. Tons of different stakeholders. Yeah. Tons of different use cases. Like, oh, pump it into your executive team, push it into Slack, get your marketer to do ads. Right. It was just too much.
[00:04:41] Josh: Yeah.
[00:04:41] Jess: We went from people don't know what to do with the data to, there's too many things I could do with this data. Yeah. And I'm, I'm, it's now it's analysis paralysis. I'm not sure which one to pick.
[00:04:52] Josh: Yeah, a hundred percent. Yeah. And I had to go through this. Like soul searching. 'cause like, founders do this thing that we all know they do, which is [00:05:00] like they fall in love with the problem they think they're solving.
[00:05:02] Josh: Mm-hmm. Right? And, and it's just like, no my way or the highway, I've thought about this problem a lot. Like you're just a dumb marketer. Yeah. You just do. And I tell you to market. Right. And, and I, I, I had to really kind of go through that acceptance process of like, I was wrong. Like I, I didn't solve the right problem.
[00:05:19] Josh: This is not how our customers actually wanna operate this tool. Um. And luckily for me, that was the hardest part of the journey. Then I just went to you and said like, Hey, we're done with this. Go figure it out.
[00:05:28] Jess: I was like, wait, what?
[00:05:32] Josh: I'm trying to remember, was it like a, was it like a moment that we like said, we're pivoting this, this, or like removing this, or what was it?
[00:05:39] Josh: I
[00:05:39] Jess: remember it more as like. Hey, because we're now moving to, we, we wanna focus on one use case. Yeah. Which is ads. Yeah. Funnel vision is part of the problem, and we're going to be removing it.
[00:05:51] Josh: Yeah.
[00:05:51] Jess: And yeah, it was a little like soul crushing. Yeah. Uh, for I think for a lot of people and not for like, not 'cause like, oh my gosh, I worked so hard on that.
[00:05:59] Jess: What [00:06:00] the hell? It was just like, oh man, we, we collectively didn't make the right move. Yeah.
[00:06:04] Jess: Yeah. Which
[00:06:04] Jess: happens in every company. Yeah. Um, I mean, I think, you know. I know this backstory, but like you and Nick spent the first 18 months of Vector trying to figure out what Vector even was, right?
[00:06:16] Jess: Yeah. Yeah.
[00:06:16] Jess: And I think for you and Nick, this felt like just another kind of like, this is just another moment where we're still trying to figure out what it is.
[00:06:23] Jess: Yeah. For the rest of us, it was kind of like. Oh my gosh, this is so scary. Like we'd never been kind of part of a, a company where we had to react this intensely to something that just wasn't working,
[00:06:34] Josh: and I didn't know that at the time. Yeah, and I think it was you that gave me that feedback of like, Hey, you, you should, you should be aware of how people are perceiving this.
[00:06:42] Josh: And because for, like you said, for 18 months. Nick and I had a profession of just getting punched in the face, essentially. Yeah. Like that's what the first like, like couple years felt like. And, but there were no employees. Right. So it was just him and I getting punched in the face and we would call each other and be like, oh, that kind of sucked, didn't it?
[00:06:58] Josh: And like, and it's like, [00:07:00] well, we have no other option, I guess. We'll just. Keep, get up and keep going. Yep. And you forget that you're like, you hire these incredible people. They have options. They can work other places. Right. They're not locked into the fact that they quit their job to start a company. Yeah.
[00:07:11] Josh: And so, you know, I, I went and I was just like, Hey guys, no big deal. I know we spent like six months building this shit, but we'll just, we'll just sunset it and move on. Yeah. And people looking at me like, dude, that's. Kind of terrifying. Yeah, right. Like, what are we gonna do? Yeah. Um, and we had parts of the answer, but not all of the answers.
[00:07:28] Josh: And I think that was also really scary is, is like, often people I think are looking for like resolution. There's, there's a big bang, uh, theory episode where like, uh, Sheldon like loves doing things to completion. So like he does like tic-tac toe and right before he solves it, his girlfriend like erases the whiteboard.
[00:07:44] Josh: And it's like people want the answer to things or else their brain feels broken. And it was more of one of those like. We don't really know the answer, but it's not this. Yeah. And people are like, Ugh,
[00:07:53] Jess: that uncertainty is really scary. Yeah. Yeah. But I think we had to put that aside for a minute because the reality was we knew it [00:08:00] wasn't right and we needed to change course.
[00:08:01] Jess: And so like now the works begins Yes. To make that happen. Yes. And this was really like if you go back and listen to the episode about having to reposition the company, this was really like the first step of that. Yeah. Was like, yeah. The, we need to reposition the company around this one ads use case. The thing that's holding us back in the product, and then therefore in the marketing and the messaging is this.
[00:08:24] Jess: Piece of it. The funnel vision piece. Yeah. And so the first thing, really The first step,
[00:08:29] Jess: yeah. In
[00:08:29] Jess: this repositioning product project was ripping funnel vision out.
[00:08:34] Josh: And boy did we rip it out. Yeah. Like, um, I mentioned this I think very briefly in a previous episode, but like the thing that was. So incredible but also scary about the way you and our executive leadership team went about like this whole repositioning project.
[00:08:48] Josh: The first thing you all did was was say like, let's stop the bleeding. Yes. So within like weeks, your guys' solution was like, pull that thing. Yep. Out of the product. And what I [00:09:00] loved, although it was terrifying, was. We didn't let how hard it was going to be. I shouldn't say we, I didn't do anything. You guys didn't let how hard it was going to be affect what the right answer was.
[00:09:11] Josh: Yeah. Right. Because pulling the product out or pulling it out within like weeks meant that we were gonna have to have 180 different conversations with our enterprise customers to tell them why we did it. Yeah. Um, deal with a lot of angry people that were actually using it. Some people. Did say, Hey, I was getting value out of that, but we knew the masses weren't.
[00:09:28] Josh: Yep. You were gonna have to redo the website, redo the positioning, all this sort of stuff. What, actually, say more about that. What had you guys in marketing built around this particular product?
[00:09:37] Jess: Yeah. Well, for a while we thought it was like the next. Big thing in Vector.
[00:09:43] Jess: Yeah.
[00:09:43] Jess: And so we built quite a bit around it.
[00:09:47] Jess: Um, so, you know, I mean, one, we had a launch, right? Yeah. So we had, um, social posts that had gone out. You and I had both done, uh, posts of our own and Nick, um, we [00:10:00] had, uh, kind of an announcement blog we had. Um, all kinds of just like visuals on the website that had kind of that grid.
[00:10:08] Jess: Yeah.
[00:10:09] Jess: Um, you know, it was like the, in the homepage hero, it was on product pages.
[00:10:14] Jess: We made it part of like our banner on our company page on LinkedIn, which like four people go to, but like still it's part of the brand, right. So it was just like we had to kinda identify all the places where it lived. I think the biggest thing was Alex Verdin had spent a ton of time, it was like one of her big projects when she first started building out.
[00:10:33] Jess: 26 different playbooks that aligned with the different squares in that grid, right? And that was like, ugh. Like that was like a dagger to the heart. Right. I'm sorry, Alex. Hey. You know, she took it like a champ. Yeah. She's been places where worse, way worse things have happened. Yeah. And she's like, I get it.
[00:10:51] Jess: Like, yeah. Let's see which ones we can. Yeah. Uh, pivot and salvage. Yeah. And turn into, you know, uses ads, use cases. We already had a couple that were [00:11:00] ads use cases. Yeah. We just had to strip a couple things out. Right? Yeah. So there were things where we just had to kind of go in and do cleanup on like, what's in here that doesn't make sense anymore.
[00:11:09] Josh: You know what I think is interesting, we talk a lot about brand and how like investment and brand is really important across all different facets. But like, I feel like this is one of those like unspoken helpful things about investing in brand. Our customers, a majority of them, not even our customers, our prospects, the people that follow us.
[00:11:26] Josh: Yeah, they know us as this like very. Authentic, real like scrappy, approachable company.
[00:11:34] Jess: Yeah.
[00:11:35] Josh: And because we've put that into our brand, it helps a little bit on sort of like the reversal thing here, right? Yeah. Like it was part of our brand. Like I imagine there's some enterprise sort of like. Stuffy brands where it's like if you have to pull a product out, it's like it takes a year.
[00:11:50] Josh: Yeah. You gotta figure out how many people you're gonna like piss off. Yeah. Right. Like you have to sunset it very slowly. Maybe you even have to like support it for several years going on further, even though you don't have it in the product anymore. [00:12:00] Right. Like for us, it was sort of one of these things where we could just be authentic and be like.
[00:12:04] Josh: Hey guys, we're trying our best out here. We're trying to build the best things. We're moving quickly. Right? Like we, we really believe in like the, if you're not embarrassed by your product when it launches, you've moved too slowly. Yeah. And like, Hey, we made an oopsie. Yeah. Right? Like, this wasn't valuable.
[00:12:15] Josh: We're gonna take it back. And I feel like that did help take the pre It still sucks.
[00:12:20] Jess: Yeah. But
[00:12:20] Josh: like that helped a lot. Take the pressure off of that mistake we made.
[00:12:23] Jess: And I think people appreciate that too. Like they know. Most of our customers, we have the luxury of our customers are in a very similar space as us where they're like in SaaS, they're also trying to break things, fail fast.
[00:12:35] Jess: Right? Yeah. And I think there's, um, a tolerance of that where it's like, okay, we get it. Like we've done similar
[00:12:41] Jess: Yeah. Things
[00:12:41] Jess: before and we've had to kind of like backpedal or like figure something else out.
[00:12:45] Jess: Yeah.
[00:12:45] Jess: Um, so yeah, I think we have that, that luxury, thankfully. But yeah, I think when you're moving.
[00:12:49] Jess: Quickly and trying to build a company, it's going to happen. Yeah. You are going to fail. Make the wrong decision. Go down the wrong path. Have to come back and go the other [00:13:00] direction. Like it just happens.
[00:13:01] Josh: Yeah, it does. And I think going back to some of the things that we had to switch the, the thing I think is interesting.
[00:13:05] Josh: So you had the playbooks that Alex had made? Yeah. We had like the website with all this imagery everywhere. We had messaging, which we talked about in a previous episode. We had
[00:13:12] Jess: customer testimonials. Oh. That's painful. But we did, uh, we did give it to a handful of customers early. Yeah. And there were, were a couple like Sydney Waterfall, I remember.
[00:13:22] Jess: Like her quote was wonderful. Yeah. I remember. Um, we were actually filming season one. I remember when you got it back from her.
[00:13:28] Jess: Yeah.
[00:13:28] Jess: Approved on your phone. And we were both like, kind of celebrating. Yeah. Um, and she said something about how she'd never seen that level of granularity. And I was like, oh my gosh.
[00:13:36] Jess: It's amazing. Yeah. We'd like, you know, take that down. 'cause she's talking about this. Specifically. Yeah.
[00:13:40] Josh: Well, and speaking of Sydney, this brings me to the other thing that we had to, to do, which is marketing ultimately owns all of comms. Yes. Right? What, you know, the brand reputation, PR communications.
[00:13:52] Josh: Right? And, and you do it in partnership with. Ally who leads our customer and our solutions team. But one of the things you both push me on [00:14:00] really hard is like, yeah, we might have 180 enterprise customers, but we're early enough that we should talk to them. Yeah. So instead of you saying like, Hey, I'm gonna whip up a HubSpot template and announce that we're sunsetting this thing, you and Ally were like, have fun, Josh.
[00:14:13] Josh: Go talk to all of them. Ellie's
[00:14:14] Jess: like meeting, meeting, meeting, meeting.
[00:14:17] Josh: She did like literally and um. Shout out Allie, because she, she made it super easy for me, um, where, uh, she was, she was basically my temporary chief of staff for Yeah, a couple months there where her whole job was just getting these things scheduled with customers and I would spend eight hours a day Yeah.
[00:14:34] Josh: Talking to customers. And, and two things came out of that that I thought were really interesting and I'm glad that you, as our, as our marketing leader, pushed me to, to do it that way. And, and Ally did as well, is one. It's so much more authentic to go to customers and say, here's why we're doing this. Yeah.
[00:14:52] Josh: And I think if we would have just sent a a letter, I think a lot of people would've been upset.
[00:14:58] Jess: Yeah.
[00:14:59] Josh: But when you sit [00:15:00] down with the CEO of a company and say, and. Hey, Sydnee, I know you were getting value out of this. Here's, here's what we saw in the other 179 people that weren't. Yes. And here's my fear as this, like a human building, a company that if we continue down this direction that the company will end in X, Y, and Z position.
[00:15:19] Josh: Yeah. Right. It's just, it's so much more like. Okay, Josh, thank you. Like, thank you for taking the time to do this. Yeah. Like, I'm with you. Like I, I see where you're going. Um, and that was, that was huge. And then the second thing that came out of it is frankly, a lot of them were like, oh yeah, I did also run into that problem.
[00:15:35] Josh: It didn't work for me in that way. I understand why you're sun setting it. I'm excited about where you're gonna take it instead.
[00:15:40] Jess: Yeah. And also give you an opportunity to tell them where we were going next. Yes. So we didn't wanna just come to them with the kind of bad news of, Hey, we're taking this piece out that we.
[00:15:49] Jess: Relatively recently just put in, yeah. But this is why, and here's where we're going next. Yeah. And we were really like, I remember Ally and I talking about what's gonna happen on these calls. Like we were really [00:16:00] nervous about that.
[00:16:00] Jess: Yeah.
[00:16:00] Jess: And then to hear that everyone that you talk to, the majority, the vast majority of.
[00:16:05] Jess: People you talked to. Yeah. Were so excited. Yeah. For this new ads direction, like, I'm gonna use this. Like, they could see a very clear path to value from that.
[00:16:14] Josh: Yeah. Uh, it, I think people love, uh, on your post and on the show, sort of like when we get into the specifics of numbers, I'll get as close as I can here without pissing off our, our investors.
[00:16:23] Josh: But like when we were making the larger pivot with Funnel Vision being one of the things we were removing. In that Boston meeting we were talking about, you know, we had millions like sub 10, but plurals of millions dollars of revenue. Yep. And we had to accept that, like at the time we thought less than half of our customers were using us in either the right way or a healthy way, or would come on board with us in this journey.
[00:16:49] Jess: Yeah. And that was really scary. Like I remember there was kind of a collective like. Like in the room.
[00:16:56] Jess: Yeah.
[00:16:56] Jess: Um, but I think what we realized [00:17:00] was. We kinda underestimated our customer's. Like need Yeah. And desire for this new kind of ads venture that we're moving into. Yeah. And it was really exciting to hear that like we, we were wrong again.
[00:17:14] Jess: Yeah. That like, we really, um, we were very conservative about the number of customers we thought would come along with us.
[00:17:20] Josh: Well, in similar to what you did with like. Ads in the survey where you were using like, um, ads to pressure test our messaging, or you were using our messaging survey to create content.
[00:17:30] Josh: Yep. We were almost able to use these conversations with our customers to immediately pressure test where we were, if we were going the right direction. Yeah. Because ultimately, even if people didn't buy us for the direction we ult went, went. If the new direction wasn't something valuable, we would've found out really quickly.
[00:17:49] Josh: Yes. And a majority of our customers were actually like, you know, ultimately we bought Vector because like we're struggling to generate revenue. Yeah. If it's in advertising instead of sales outbound or whatever, like [00:18:00] sick, we still need revenue. We still have the core problem, and I think that this new solution is a better alternative to the way we were approaching it before.
[00:18:06] Jess: Yeah.
[00:18:11] Josh: Dear marketer, when you write product launch emails, the unsubscribe link puts in for early retirement.
[00:18:17] Jess: Do you think the unsubscribe link, it's like a retirement gift,
[00:18:20] Josh: like a does that a pension?
[00:18:21] Jess: Ooh, what
[00:18:22] Josh: do you give it? Thank you for your years of service here. Yeah.
[00:18:25] Jess: Nice. Although we didn't
[00:18:26] Josh: really like you that much.
[00:18:27] Jess: We didn't. But you get like a shiny Yes. Rolex.
[00:18:30] Josh: Thanks for protecting us from cans. Spam laws.
[00:18:32] Jess: Yes. Dear marketer, your automation workflows are so good. They make time feel inadequate for being so inefficient.
[00:18:42] Josh: Your automation doesn't even need that little workflow where it's like, wait two days, doesn't even need that.
[00:18:46] Josh: No, just skips right through it.
[00:18:47] Jess: Like, why can't you just be more like your brother space?
[00:18:50] Josh: Damn, that one. I felt that one. Jeff,
[00:18:54] Jess: what made you realize that? It wasn't that we needed to like, add more features to Vector, to like [00:19:00] fix this problem that it was actually something we needed to take out.
[00:19:03] Josh: Yeah, I, I went, th going back to that like 18 months of pivoting, I learned a lot about.
[00:19:10] Josh: What good products look like and how to drive value. I, I was the opposite for a long time. I, I thought like a product needed to be a platform and broad and do everything and have this huge narrative. And the, the more we came to like realizing that the moral was like, oh, this kind of sucks, right? This, this means we have like 16 different things we have to be good at.
[00:19:30] Josh: Yeah. Um, and it's really difficult to be consistent and drive value. And so for me it was this like aha moment of like. Okay. We have a handful of customers that are driving a ton of value here. Yeah. Like let's just simplify, pull out. And sometimes it's about as much about what you're known for as it is what you're not known for.
[00:19:50] Josh: Yeah. Right. And I think, like you and I talked a lot about this because in the early days, something we were known for was site de anonymization. Yeah. Right. And like we still have a huge part of [00:20:00] our product that leverages that, but we realize like. It wasn't as differentiated. It was a noisy space. The use cases were for sales.
[00:20:06] Josh: And so we, you and I spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to like undo a brand reputation, be be known for something else. Yeah. Be known for like ironically less. Yeah. Which means we were better at it. I think you have a quote that's going on the new website, uh, soon and I forget exactly how it was, but this customer was basically like, vector does like the exact thing I want it to do and like nothing more.
[00:20:28] Josh: Like how, how do they say it? It wasn't those exact words.
[00:20:30] Jess: Yeah. I think it was actually Alex from. Fingerprint. Yeah. And it was something about how like Vector really cuts the noise. Yeah. And just makes every campaign more targeted, more effective, more nuanced, right? Yeah. And so it's really exciting now that we've kind of found the one thing.
[00:20:45] Jess: Yeah. That. We're already hearing from customers that like, that is it, that is the one thing they need and want.
[00:20:51] Josh: Yeah. I love that. We, um, every time we prep for the show, we have like a couple like notes of things we wanna hit. One of the notes in, in the prep for this one was the things that [00:21:00] broke your heart.
[00:21:00] Josh: Yeah. What, what
[00:21:02] Jess: A little bit of a soul dead that they
[00:21:07] Josh: That's brutal to hear and say more, uh, you
[00:21:09] Jess: know what I'm Okay. Well, I think when you're to create a field, you have to get used to it. Yeah. Um, so you know, it, it's okay. But uh, yeah, I think. Funnel Vision had like a special place in my heart. Um, one, I named it.
[00:21:21] Jess: Yeah. And I loved that name. I thought it was really fun. I thought it kind of told you what it did. It gave you x-ray vision into the funnel. Yeah. You'd see all the people in it. So I don't know. There was something about that name that I was just like, Eureka. Yeah. And it was like, so fun. It was good. Um, we got a lot of really positive feedback on it, so to hear that it was like going away was like, oh, dagger to the heart.
[00:21:42] Jess: Mm-hmm. Um, you know, I think the. Long term like goal, it's like, okay. Way bigger than any one little piece that you've, you've touched or had some creative influence on.
[00:21:54] Josh: We talked about this, um, yesterday after we, we cut recording in a previous podcast. We were sitting [00:22:00] down, we were talking about like, you came from a very creative field of copywriting and it is like a, like littered with feedback.
[00:22:06] Josh: Yeah. Right. And I asked you like, how, like, do you have any advice on like how to deal with feedback? I'm curious like. In this case, like you had something cut that you loved. Yeah. That like for the greater good was the right decision, but was hard. Like I need tips on how to deal with just like either hard feedback or stuff like that where you don't agree or like maybe you love something so much.
[00:22:27] Jess: Yeah, yeah. I absolutely agreed. Yeah, so that, I think that helps. I think that thing that really. Helps you get over when things like that happen, when something you really love, like gets killed. Like they can never take away the fact that you still came up with that thing.
[00:22:42] Jess: True.
[00:22:42] Jess: Um, you can still have it in your book of work, in your portfolio.
[00:22:45] Jess: You can still share that story as you move on to the next role or move up the chain. Um, that can never get taken away from you. Yeah, so I think that's something to keep in mind. And then also just remember like. Yeah, like if you are a [00:23:00] creator, if you're creative, if you, you know, work in a space where like you are.
[00:23:06] Jess: Work is getting consumed by the market. Yeah. Like there is going to come a day where at least one thing is going to have to come back down.
[00:23:15] Jess: Yeah.
[00:23:16] Jess: Um, and so, I don't know, I think you just have to kind of prepare yourself for that. It, it happens, but it, it will always be something you did and created.
[00:23:23] Josh: Did you ever watch the Office?
[00:23:24] Jess: Oh yeah.
[00:23:25] Josh: There's a, there's a scene where Kelly's getting interviewed for like, some executive role. And I think the, the interview question is like, uh. What's your, what's your biggest flaw? She's like, I don't fucking have any asshole.
[00:23:35] Jess: She was perfect, Kelly. She was
[00:23:37] Josh: perfect. Oh my gosh. So is your copywriting.
[00:23:39] Josh: Thank
[00:23:39] Jess: you.
[00:23:39] Josh: What else broke your heart?
[00:23:42] Jess: I had this image that was like the launch image. Whenever I, um, I do a product launch, I like to, I like to come up with something. I like to call this, uh, creative centerpiece. Okay. So just some visual video, whatever it is. It is like. The thing that the [00:24:00] campaign creatively kind of gets, uh, centered around.
[00:24:02] Jess: Yeah.
[00:24:03] Jess: And for this, it was this ridiculous gif of, it was like funnel vision and it had the, it, the image with the grid and kind of like it's some ui. Yep. And the ghosts. And, um, in the top corner there were like these two ghosts, like floating around. And then I was like, it needs a little something. And so I made lasers come out of their eyes, funnel fishing,
[00:24:26] Josh: which people loved by the way.
[00:24:27] Josh: They loved it. Yeah.
[00:24:27] Jess: And um, even like Devon Reed, who's like, one of my heroes was like, I saw that and I stopped scrolling. It was amazing. I was like, yes. So like, that was like, oh, another dagger, right? Yeah. But like, again, like. Shoot. I'm still talking about it. It it's not that it was a bad piece of creative.
[00:24:44] Jess: Yeah. It was just like the product wasn't right. It wasn't the right direction. We need to move on from it.
[00:24:48] Josh: You just have a dartboard with my face on it in your house of just like, it was great. It was this guy's fault. Yeah.
[00:24:54] Jess: It's just like, never forget funnel vision. Forget
[00:24:59] Josh: you have like a [00:25:00] t-shirt with the American flag waving on it.
[00:25:03] Jess: I just wear it to our one-on-ones. Yeah. Outta spite. Like, what's your T-shirt say? Nothing.
[00:25:09] Josh: Nothing. Just holds it up higher. Uh, anything else? Break your heart?
[00:25:14] Jess: Uh, the, the playbooks were tough. Yeah. Um, just to have to watch Alex like, it, it, that was, that was hard. That was a lot of work. Did she take it? I,
[00:25:21] Josh: I didn't really participate in the, in the, uh, the shit that rolled downhill kind of thing.
[00:25:27] Jess: I mean, she's a total pro. She took it like a champ. Yeah. Um, and also like agreed that it was the right. Way to go if it's not delivering value for customers.
[00:25:37] Jess: Yeah.
[00:25:38] Jess: Um, but yeah, I remember being like, so the playbooks are all built around funnel vision, and she's like, mm-hmm. Yep.
[00:25:46] Josh: Did she start smoking like six cigarettes at one time?
[00:25:49] Jess: Um.
[00:25:49] Josh: For, for those of you out there, Alex does not smoke. No. However, she loves, what is the meme?
[00:25:54] Jess: The Ben Affleck. Like le. Yeah. They catch him. Just the hopeless Ben Affleck. Yeah.
[00:25:57] Josh: They catch him in all these scenarios. Yeah. Like smoking a [00:26:00] cigarette. This like drag look on his face. Yeah. And
[00:26:02] Jess: she just loves it.
[00:26:02] Jess: It's your favorite.
[00:26:03] Josh: So anytime we piss up Alex, I think she was
[00:26:04] Jess: like the epitome of that. Yes. In that moment, right? Just, yeah. Right, right. The idea of like everything you just built in your first month at a new job now has to like get reworked or brought down. But you know what? We have landed in such an amazing place and like, um, it was one of those things.
[00:26:23] Jess: I remember when we were. First realizing we needed to make this pivot and pull out funnel vision. Like I think it was Allie who was like, this is gonna solve so many problems for us. Yeah. And I think that she was right. Like we have now seen kind of the light at the end of the tunnel. Yeah. We're getting really close to kinda being done with this repositioning work and launching.
[00:26:42] Jess: Yeah.
[00:26:42] Jess: This kind of, um, what Nick calls Boo Point. Oh,
[00:26:45] Josh: boo point. Oh.
[00:26:46] Jess: I, so
[00:26:47] Josh: we have this like, because of our brand, everyone inside of the company has become a, a pseudo marketer. Mm-hmm. In coming up with like silly ideas for things. And so anytime we have like a new project or product or [00:27:00] initiative, everyone tries to name it.
[00:27:01] Josh: Yeah. Ally's pretty good. Ally is the,
[00:27:03] Jess: she's their chief naming officer. She is? Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah. Every
[00:27:06] Josh: once in a while Nick throws a good one out there and he did have a good one. Yeah. Boo Point Oh. Oh
[00:27:11] Jess: yeah. It's good. It's good. I love it. Um, so yeah, I think once we get to that point and we start to kind of feel that pressure come off of like actually having to run the project and like get to the finish line.
[00:27:24] Jess: Yeah. We'll start to see the fruits of the labor
[00:27:26] Josh: in season three. I want to have a, an uh, episode that's either like Josh was right or Josh was wrong.
[00:27:33] Jess: Ooh,
[00:27:33] Josh: yeah.
[00:27:33] Jess: Okay. You heard it?
[00:27:34] Josh: Yeah.
[00:27:35] Jess: Season three, I'm
[00:27:36] Josh: curious, right? 'cause in season one we were talking about this. Yeah. Was, oh, I forgot. We forgot to mention that.
[00:27:41] Josh: Yeah. Okay. There's another
[00:27:41] Jess: heartbreak. Yeah. We did a whole episode about funnel vision for season one and we're
[00:27:47] Josh: not gonna delete it. We're not gonna like rewrite history. Go back to it. We were probably like, this shit's the fucking, it's gonna be amazing.
[00:27:54] Jess: Oh my gosh. About
[00:27:55] Josh: to rewrite history. So we'll, so we'll leave that one [00:28:00] in here.
[00:28:00] Josh: Uhhuh. This was, this was our admittance that like, no matter how great you see our brand, no matter how much it looks like we're crushing it, we are making mistakes. Yep. And doing a lot of brutal stuff. Yep. In season three, we will let you know if we were right or wrong about this one. That's right. I love it.
[00:28:12] Josh: Or we'll run outta money. We just won't be here. This is our last season.
[00:28:16] Jess: That's not gonna happen. It won't happen. No,
[00:28:18] Josh: it won't wanna happen.
[00:28:19] Jess: No. Okay. Josh, if you could go back and do this all again. Mm-hmm. Would Funnel vision have even been a thing?
[00:28:26] Josh: Hmm. It's, it's, yes. Yeah. I think yes. Yeah. Um, and, and that's split into two sub answers.
[00:28:35] Josh: Like obviously if I could prevent the pain your team went through and all of that, like yeah, of course I would do my best to like, avoid potholes, but I think there was a. Like there was a learning curve that had to happen. Yeah. And in fact, you and I kinda laugh because there's some, some competitors that often like try to mimic things that we're doing.
[00:28:56] Josh: Yeah. And. There are a couple steps behind us [00:29:00] in the learning curve, right? They're talking a lot about contact level intent and send it to your Teles, and we're like, ha, this shit doesn't work. We already did that. We already did. It doesn't work. We already ran into that wall. And so I think there's, there's something about like, man, yeah, that pain really sucked, but do we have some sort of interesting.
[00:29:17] Josh: Insight now. Yeah. About how the market works and this like bifurcation of sales versus marketing and like why these, um, oh, here's an interesting one. Are you familiar with the concept of a tar pit idea?
[00:29:30] Jess: No. Oh. This was like
[00:29:32] Josh: when we went, teach me, teach me when we went to, so this is a Y Combinator thing, like, or at least they teach it in N yc.
[00:29:38] Josh: I think you can, you can learn about it in their like free startup school. But also when Nick and I went through the program, this is something to talk about. So. Tar ideas are things that look really good from afar. Mm-hmm. Like they're like a mirage on the horizon. You're like, oh, there's water over there and it just sounds so good and they're almost too good to be true.
[00:29:56] Josh: You're like, why hasn't anyone else thought of this? Right? Yeah. It's so obvious, and it [00:30:00] sounds like such a good idea, and this is one of them, right? Like, oh my god, contact level intent. De anonymization, plot it on a grid, know when they're in market, know all this sort of stuff. Like why hasn't anyone done this before?
[00:30:11] Josh: Yeah. Right. And like some good examples of this is like, uh, I think YC gives, like the common target idea is like most college kids that become founders, their first idea is an app to arrange. Parties and social life with their friends. Right? Yeah. It's this like obvious idea of like, oh, I had this problem in college, right?
[00:30:32] Josh: Yeah. Every time we wanted to go to a, a party, like we didn't know who was gonna show up and we, like, we didn't know like where we were gonna go and we didn't know how to like split the money across it. Right? So we're gonna have an app that allows like you to put all your friends together and you'll like vote on places and then you're like, divvy money, right?
[00:30:47] Josh: Yep. And like, this is Y C's most common. Um. Idea when people apply for yc, really it's like the one everyone has that's.
[00:30:56] Jess: Crazy. And
[00:30:57] Josh: they always reject it. Yeah. Because it's like e, [00:31:00] everyone's tried it and there's all these like really obvious things that like don't work. Yeah. Which is like college students don't actually want a separate app for it.
[00:31:07] Josh: College students like don't actually take the time to like organize their friends. Yeah. They get drunk and say like, it's the
[00:31:12] Jess: spontaneity of just like, we're going here and we're going there and who's there We're
[00:31:15] Josh: I'm drunk. Let's get a cheese. A cheese steak. Right? Yeah. Like it's just like that's how college gets work.
[00:31:18] Josh: So it sounds like a good idea on premise. Yeah. But it just doesn't work at all. And so I feel like. Sometimes you have to go run into the tower pit to be like, oh, that's why this didn't work.
[00:31:29] Jess: Yeah.
[00:31:29] Josh: So, yeah, I probably would've done it again.
[00:31:32] Jess: Yeah. I think that I, I'm like, really glad you said that because I don't know if we would've ended up where we are now.
[00:31:40] Jess: Mm-hmm. Um, if we hadn't gone that direction. Yeah. So I think it was one of those like kind of necessary evils for us to Yeah. Get to the right spot.
[00:31:48] Josh: It's about the journey, not the destination. That's right. Hey, just one more question. Yeah. Before we part ways. Should we bring funnel vision back?
[00:31:56] Jess: I'm literally holding myself in this seat right now [00:32:00] to not hurt you.
[00:32:01] Josh: You've shake me well outside of that physical threat. This was a great meeting. It was
[00:32:06] Jess: a great meeting. This
[00:32:07] Josh: meeting could have been a podcast.
[00:32:08] Jess: It could have. It was, and it was. It was. This meeting could have been a podcast as a vector production vector lets you build ad audiences from real people that visit your site.
[00:32:18] Jess: Click your ads and research your competitors. Imagine seeing exactly who will see your ads by name before you spend a dime. It's a great time to be alive. Marketers go give it a whirl@vector.co. See you next time.