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Interviews with top marketers sharing tactical tips, strategies, and lessons learned to help you grow your business. Hosted by Dave Gerhardt, founder of Exit Five, former CMO, and author of Founder Brand. Learn more at exitfive.com
Dave [0:00:01]: You're listening to The Dave Gerhardt Show.
Dave [0:00:02]: Hey, my guess on this episode is Ethan Clouser.
Dave [0:00:19]: He's head of marketing at bland.
Dave [0:00:21]: They're an enterprise voice Ai company focused on regulated industries.
Dave [0:00:25]: Ethan is twenty two and runs marketing for an enterprise tech company that just raised a hundred million dollars.
Dave [0:00:31]: And if you spend a few minutes with him, you'll see why he's a passion for the craft of marketing, especially building a brand and why you need to build a brand to win in the enterprise today.
Dave [0:00:41]: We talk about his approach to marketing at bland which is guided by their culture of getting as crazy as humanly possible will still walk in the line into credible enterprise territory, we talk about finding that third rail that electric fence We talk about their viral campaigns with Soldier boy, the red phone car and working with Toby from the office on their Series C announcement and how they measure these big swings and what channels they'll need to invest in as they move into an Ab motion and try to stand out in a sea of two hundred competitors in the voice Ai space, and we also talk about why it helps to do marketing at a company with a truly great product.
Dave [0:01:15]: Enjoy my conversation with Ethan from bland.
Dave [0:01:17]: Alright.
Dave [0:01:19]: What's up everybody back on the podcast?
Dave [0:01:20]: My guest today head of marketing at bland Ethan Clouser.
Dave [0:01:24]: I say your name at, Ethan Clouser.
Dave [0:01:26]: Nice.
Dave [0:01:26]: Bland Ai is an enterprise voice Ai company.
Dave [0:01:30]: You joined about a year ago as the only marketing person, team is now seven people, I'm gonna give you the punch run off the bat.
Dave [0:01:38]: I think it's...
Dave [0:01:38]: I've read off the bat.
Dave [0:01:39]: I think it's pretty cool that you're a a twenty two year old guy is the head of marketing at a company in the Ai space.
Dave [0:01:45]: I just raised a hundred million dollars.
Dave [0:01:46]: So I'm excited to talk to you.
Dave [0:01:48]: You're a member of our Exit Five community And you got a bunch of cool stuff in here.
Dave [0:01:52]: I'm looking to our prep doc from Soldier Boy to Series C Stunt with that that guy from the office.
Dave [0:01:58]: I don't know if you can mention that.
Dave [0:02:00]: I did the office, whatever.
Dave [0:02:01]: Billboard campaigns and talking about shifting from viral to Ab.
Dave [0:02:05]: So, Ethan, thanks for thanks for doing it.
Dave [0:02:07]: I'm happy to have you And in true startup up fashion, you were just at the office and there was a fire drill so now you're home to do this podcast.
Dave [0:02:13]: Correct.
Ethan [0:02:14]: Yeah.
Ethan [0:02:14]: Dave Big have me on evans.
Dave [0:02:16]: Yeah.
Dave [0:02:16]: We were just talking briefly off the record in the green room before this, but just some context as to, like, how did you get this job, first marketing hire at bland, head of marketing.
Dave [0:02:26]: You have a marketing backstory though, that everyone can relate to behind this.
Dave [0:02:30]: You started your own agency.
Dave [0:02:32]: Can you just give me, like, the couple minute overview of your agency story?
Ethan [0:02:36]: Yeah.
Ethan [0:02:36]: So I realized later in my life, like, around twenty ish years old that I wanted to be an entrepreneur, and I was sold the idea via Youtube videos that the best way to do this was be a software, and that you could just use fiber or upwork to hire software engineer.
Ethan [0:02:55]: This is, like pre Claude pre Ai.
Ethan [0:02:57]: Right?
Ethan [0:02:57]: You can't really five code things at this point.
Ethan [0:02:59]: And then I was like, oh, you know, if you just hire somebody on fiber, like, pay them five, ten thousand dollars, they'll build your whole software and then I can market it and become rich.
Ethan [0:03:06]: Yeah.
Ethan [0:03:07]: And if I tried that for seven, eight months.
Dave [0:03:10]: Well, then they're...
Dave [0:03:10]: There's the other one.
Dave [0:03:11]: They're they'll the other one which is, like, or, you buy someone You go to like, acquire dot com and you buy someone's, you know, someone's saying, and I'm like, wait a second.
Dave [0:03:19]: Some guy just spent, like, two and a half months, and they're selling this company for, like, six grand.
Dave [0:03:24]: It's not...
Dave [0:03:24]: It was not a company.
Dave [0:03:25]: It's not a product.
Dave [0:03:25]: What am I what's
Ethan [0:03:27]: free revenue.
Dave [0:03:27]: Yeah.
Dave [0:03:27]: James pre revenue.
Dave [0:03:29]: I love that.
Dave [0:03:30]: Yeah.
Ethan [0:03:31]: So that...
Ethan [0:03:32]: I I worked on trying to build a software as a non technical person for about seven months before I was, you know, several tens of thousands of dollars less in my bank account and no product to show for it.
Ethan [0:03:43]: That I thought, wow, The only thing that I've done up to this point I was working, like, a part time social media job.
Ethan [0:03:48]: Was, I kind of know how to market things.
Ethan [0:03:50]: And so I really went all into that started the marketing agency and grew it to six years and five months It was a lot of pure grit?
Ethan [0:03:58]: A lot of just, like, doing buying courses researching online, Like, how do you...
Dave [0:04:03]: What was the serve...
Dave [0:04:04]: What what was the agency?
Dave [0:04:05]: Sorry.
Dave [0:04:05]: I've typed...
Dave [0:04:06]: I talked...
Dave [0:04:06]: If you think I'm not looking at, I typed notes while we're talking.
Dave [0:04:09]: You're some lady flame...
Dave [0:04:10]: Somebody lady always blames me in the webinar chat.
Dave [0:04:13]: What was the agency?
Dave [0:04:15]: What were you doing?
Dave [0:04:15]: What was the service?
Ethan [0:04:17]: We primarily sold Linkedin marketing service.
Ethan [0:04:19]: So I got really good at that platform?
Ethan [0:04:20]: Everything for content to cold outbound?
Ethan [0:04:22]: And you have to figure out all the hack things.
Ethan [0:04:24]: Right?
Ethan [0:04:24]: Like, how do you scale Linkedin Cold out on, like, forty thousand messages a month.
Dave [0:04:29]: And Yeah.
Dave [0:04:29]: Right?
Dave [0:04:30]: Because I mean, I I don't know that many hacking things, but, like, Matt, and I...
Dave [0:04:33]: We were sitting in a conference room in new York, and I'm like, wait, to people And I didn't really know anything about Linkedin automation I'm like, wait.
Dave [0:04:39]: After ten messages, they'd, like, shut me off.
Dave [0:04:42]: Manually doing this so, like, how do people do that?
Dave [0:04:45]: Yeah.
Dave [0:04:45]: There's a lot there.
Ethan [0:04:46]: Yeah.
Ethan [0:04:46]: And I think I think one the core skill that skills that I learned through this process was how to continue to double down and make bets when things are working.
Ethan [0:04:52]: So, like, I got my first few clients got revenue in the door, but I always kept doubling down, which was, like, I kept hitting those exact limits that Linkedin restricts you with, and I found one guy who knew how to bypass them.
Ethan [0:05:05]: And I paid him all the them.
Ethan [0:05:07]: I think I paid him, like, five or six k.
Ethan [0:05:08]: A I month into the business.
Ethan [0:05:09]: Which for me at the time was most of the revenue I generated.
Ethan [0:05:12]: And all I had said is hey, Teach me how to do this.
Ethan [0:05:16]: He taught me how to do it and we became the best investment I ever made.
Ethan [0:05:18]: Because then that got me to the six figure range really fast was what allowed me to sell the agency and then before from there,
Dave [0:05:24]: what was it that told you that you were good at marketing?
Dave [0:05:27]: I think he said you're...
Dave [0:05:28]: I'm good at marketing, and I'm good at promoting things.
Dave [0:05:30]: And you didn't, like, grow up as a, you know, some people, like, the Gary v story of, like, you know, tu, like, you know, trading cards when you're, like, in second grade.
Dave [0:05:38]: What was it that gave you that marketing bug?
Ethan [0:05:42]: Yeah.
Ethan [0:05:42]: I I actually always tell people I'm kind of an accidental marketer.
Ethan [0:05:44]: Right?
Ethan [0:05:45]: Like, I wanted to build a software, and it I was forced to have started marketing company because it felt like it was the only thing I can control from client acquisition to sales to fulfillment.
Ethan [0:05:54]: It's like, I know how to do this.
Ethan [0:05:55]: And even if I don't, I can figure it out with, like, Youtube videos.
Ethan [0:05:58]: There weren't a whole lot of other businesses.
Ethan [0:06:00]: I felt like, with such a low barrier to entry where I could do that.
Ethan [0:06:02]: And so I got my foot in the door.
Ethan [0:06:04]: And then I built a track record for being a marketing guy because it was a marketing company.
Ethan [0:06:08]: And then when I tried to get in startups, that was where I continue the trajectory and ended up here.
Dave [0:06:14]: How did you...
Dave [0:06:14]: Okay.
Dave [0:06:15]: So bland, give me the overview.
Dave [0:06:17]: So bland is interesting because you have this specific positioning of voice Ai for regulated industries talk about how did you how did you find this company?
Dave [0:06:28]: How did you get the job?
Dave [0:06:29]: And then if you can just kinda talk about what bland does and that'll give us a good overview.
Dave [0:06:34]: And then I'm gonna ask you a bunch of questions about what you've done.
Ethan [0:06:36]: For sure.
Ethan [0:06:37]: I found bland through Linkedin cold outbound.
Ethan [0:06:40]: So I heard.
Dave [0:06:42]: He just sent sent forty thousand messages and found one company willing to hire you.
Ethan [0:06:46]: Pretty much know.
Ethan [0:06:47]: Our founder had made a post that he was hiring a marketer at that time.
Ethan [0:06:52]: You had mentioned I was the first.
Ethan [0:06:54]: I was actually the second marketing person.
Ethan [0:06:56]: But it's because there was a guy originally that went from from seed to Series B who had done all their marketing on that front end, and he was incredible, but had just left right before the time that I had joined, and so they had nobody to do their marketing, A Series B company growing really, really fast.
Ethan [0:07:12]: And so our CEO had put out on a job posting.
Ethan [0:07:14]: And what he had put in the description was really resonated with me because he was talking about how we're hiring somebody with no experience required.
Ethan [0:07:23]: Like, we're looking for these the, you know, the weird diamonds in the rough.
Ethan [0:07:27]: Like, you wouldn't really expect to be be able to mark it well, but have figured it out.
Ethan [0:07:30]: And so that...
Ethan [0:07:31]: I don't.
Ethan [0:07:32]: It resonated resonated with me.
Dave [0:07:34]: Resonates with me because I think especially when...
Dave [0:07:36]: And I think this this speaks to things that are changing in Silicon Valley, even venture back companies.
Dave [0:07:42]: I think, typically, five years ago, if you if you just showed me on paper there's this company.
Dave [0:07:48]: They just raised a hundred million dollars.
Dave [0:07:50]: They're going after this category, Series C.
Dave [0:07:53]: They're doing this new thing.
Dave [0:07:54]: I'd be like, oh, they're going to go hire the CMO that used to work at Salesforce or used to work at this company or that company.
Dave [0:08:01]: But it's almost like, Actually, maybe you you answered this.
Dave [0:08:04]: Why do you think they were looking for...
Dave [0:08:06]: Why why do you think they didn't want that?
Dave [0:08:07]: Why did they want someone more like you?
Ethan [0:08:09]: I think that that's the...
Ethan [0:08:10]: That's exactly who the founders are.
Ethan [0:08:12]: So Our founders started the company at nineteen years old, and I think twenty four and they are on almost.
Ethan [0:08:20]: Like, the story goes, they join y comb.
Ethan [0:08:22]: They flu out Yc, no revenue rejected by a hundred and eighty investors, like, not much of a track record or experience.
Ethan [0:08:28]: And then over the past three years, they've been able to raise over a hundred million dollars grow land where we are today.
Ethan [0:08:33]: And so I think that they early on started hiring people that looked like them, which were people with low pe, very young, super scrappy, and then they just found that it worked.
Ethan [0:08:44]: I think in that original job posting, he had mentioned that, like, their lead engineer used to work at Taco Bell three months before joining bland.
Ethan [0:08:51]: And, like, they just come from the most odd places.
Ethan [0:08:53]: And so that has been philosophy that we've carried out even to this day.
Dave [0:08:58]: And when you joined, there was already revenue ish.
Ethan [0:09:01]: Yeah.
Ethan [0:09:01]: Yeah.
Ethan [0:09:01]: Yeah.
Ethan [0:09:01]: So we we, were a larger sized company at the point when I when I joined had Better raised the series b, I think, like, six or seven months prior.
Ethan [0:09:09]: What I will say though is that bland at that time had almost entirely built its brand and its revenue off of viral marketing.
Ethan [0:09:15]: And so the guy who was there before was incredible at coming up with good ideas and then making sure that those ideas would get people's attention.
Ethan [0:09:24]: So the story of really how we were able to raise our first rounds the series A was we had roughly three million dollars in the bank account, and we decided to take one big bet that we thought would pay off well, which just to take a third of our runway.
Ethan [0:09:37]: And put it into a billboard campaign, and this was, like, two and a half years ago when Ai billboards weren't really a big a big thing.
Ethan [0:09:43]: But we threw up a bunch of billboards in New York and San Francisco that would literally just three words still hiring humans with the question mark.
Ethan [0:09:51]: And then we put a big phone number in the mail.
Ethan [0:09:53]: So you've probably seen some of the the ones that say stop hiring humans these days, that was a company that kinda stole the original idea that we had had of still hiring humans.
Ethan [0:10:02]: Many years ago.
Ethan [0:10:03]: But that billboard campaign took off.
Ethan [0:10:05]: And you
Dave [0:10:06]: I hate those ads.
Dave [0:10:06]: I've seen that...
Dave [0:10:07]: I've seen that companies that creepy looking like, robot lady.
Ethan [0:10:12]: Yeah.
Ethan [0:10:12]: And so our our our idea was, like, we put the...
Ethan [0:10:14]: We wanted to ask the question.
Ethan [0:10:15]: Like, are you still hiring humans and kind of have to be an open ended conversation and then we put the phone number there, so people could call and experience the voice Ai.
Ethan [0:10:22]: And did over a billion impressions on that campaign, I think from what I've heard from our sales team as we had full calendars booked out across every sales and person and executive for three to four months in advance after that campaign.
Ethan [0:10:34]: And so that got us to several million dollars in revenue help helped just raise a series a, and then we've just continued to do things like that.
Dave [0:10:40]: Okay.
Dave [0:10:40]: Wait.
Dave [0:10:40]: Hold on.
Dave [0:10:41]: So what what was the what was, like, the pricing?
Dave [0:10:43]: Was, like, a low end, like, are people buying, like, a nineteen dollar?
Dave [0:10:47]: I have no idea about the company.
Dave [0:10:48]: So if I call, tell me, like, who do you who do you who do you sell that to?
Dave [0:10:53]: Enterprise?
Ethan [0:10:54]: Yeah.
Ethan [0:10:54]: We we sell it enterprise.
Dave [0:10:56]: It seems like a nightmare to deal with.
Dave [0:10:57]: Just doing a sales ops standpoint.
Dave [0:10:58]: Like, everyone calling this number on this billboard?
Ethan [0:11:01]: It was fully Ai.
Ethan [0:11:02]: So that was the idea.
Ethan [0:11:04]: Like, we sell Ai voice agents.
Ethan [0:11:05]: And so the number was to talk to our Ai so that they could experience what it sounds like.
Ethan [0:11:10]: And at the time, Voice it was such a novel concept.
Ethan [0:11:13]: So if you pick up the phone and you talk to a robot that sounds just like a human It's that Aha moment that they get to have, which is why I think they all went and then booked the.
Dave [0:11:21]: Oh, I got it.
Dave [0:11:22]: So calling the number was essentially, like, experiencing the product.
Ethan [0:11:26]: Exactly.
Ethan [0:11:26]: It was a demo live right in front of
Dave [0:11:28]: them.
Dave [0:11:28]: That's awesome.
Dave [0:11:29]: Yeah.
Dave [0:11:29]: Okay.
Dave [0:11:30]: So that was the head start.
Dave [0:11:31]: Okay.
Dave [0:11:32]: That was before you.
Dave [0:11:34]: You did a good job of not taking credit for that.
Dave [0:11:36]: Shout out to that guy.
Dave [0:11:37]: But that's great.
Dave [0:11:38]: Okay.
Dave [0:11:39]: But you joined the company, in my head, like, okay.
Dave [0:11:42]: You're young you're this young guy, you're scrappy, you're a marketer.
Dave [0:11:44]: You started this Linkedin agency.
Dave [0:11:46]: I would have guessed, like, yeah, you would be good to be the zero to one guy, but I actually think like, joining and already having a big base of recurring revenue and then having to grow, like, that's more intimidating to me.
Ethan [0:11:59]: Yeah.
Ethan [0:11:59]: It was it was challenging because we had this really great base We had revenue?
Ethan [0:12:03]: We had decent kind of systems in place in terms of, like, how do you go viral?
Ethan [0:12:07]: How do we generate eyeballs?
Ethan [0:12:08]: But what we didn't have is any of the traditional marketing things?
Ethan [0:12:11]: So do we have email and set up?
Ethan [0:12:14]: Do we have any account based marketing motions?
Ethan [0:12:15]: Do we have, like, really good paid ad flywheel?
Ethan [0:12:18]: All these things were pretty much nonexistent existent when I had joined.
Ethan [0:12:21]: And so it was very different than the Linkedin and A agency world that I had come from.
Ethan [0:12:26]: And I think the reason I was able to make it work was because I had a really good mentor and our CEO who comes from a marketing and advertising background.
Ethan [0:12:36]: And so when he hired me, I think he was looking for a lot of raw intangible skills of somebody who can just figure it out.
Ethan [0:12:43]: And he was able to guide me through a lot of these things and give me kind the opportunities in space to learn the resources to learn.
Ethan [0:12:50]: He told me a story the other day where, like, his mom was a heavy advertiser.
Ethan [0:12:53]: And so at, like, seven years old, they'd be driving down town in La, and she'd be, like, Hey.
Ethan [0:12:59]: What do you think this billboard is trying to sell you?
Ethan [0:13:01]: And then they would do drills about, like, breaking down the
Dave [0:13:04]: Wait.
Dave [0:13:04]: What do you mean?
Dave [0:13:05]: His mom was a heavy ad.
Ethan [0:13:06]: I don't
Dave [0:13:07]: know Like like, for oh.
Ethan [0:13:08]: I don't know.
Ethan [0:13:08]: That was, like, all she did in her...
Dave [0:13:10]: Okay.
Dave [0:13:10]: Like, in her job, Like, she had experience like, buying at?
Dave [0:13:13]: Or she was in the weird industry side.
Dave [0:13:14]: Yeah.
Dave [0:13:15]: I just think it's a funny.
Dave [0:13:17]: His mom was a heavy energize.
Dave [0:13:19]: She just loved that.
Dave [0:13:21]: Yeah.
Dave [0:13:22]: Okay.
Dave [0:13:23]: So so you have this, like, viral motion.
Dave [0:13:25]: You had to...
Dave [0:13:25]: Like, you're kinda a company built on this Dna of, like, doing these viral word type of hits, but what you were missing was, like, the the machine.
Dave [0:13:36]: Can you tell me some of those things that you did, like, specifically people...
Dave [0:13:40]: I I wanna come back to the viral stuff?
Dave [0:13:42]: I I gotta ask you about, like, the the soldier boy stuff and the Series C stuff.
Dave [0:13:46]: But since we mentioned, I'll was just talk about some of the the systems And, like, what did you do and what's relevant today?
Dave [0:13:51]: Because I think There's a lot of legacy stuff, but you...
Dave [0:13:54]: I think especially being younger and joining a company earlier and joining a company that the founders are younger, and the company is like Ai pill.
Dave [0:14:03]: I'm sure there are some different decisions that you made than maybe some people that listen to this podcast and the past would make.
Dave [0:14:09]: So I'm curious like, what what what did you do?
Dave [0:14:11]: What do you what did you go work on?
Ethan [0:14:12]: Yeah.
Ethan [0:14:12]: I think for one, it was, like, how do we increase the surface area of channels that we are being able to be seen on?
Ethan [0:14:18]: Because with the viral stuff, typically are only well known on some the social media platforms like Linkedin or x or Youtube shorts.
Ethan [0:14:24]: Right?
Ethan [0:14:24]: Like, we had a lot of eyeballs and impressions through that, but we had no...
Ethan [0:14:28]: Like, people who go to events and aren't on social media had no idea who blank was.
Ethan [0:14:33]: People who only Google stuff had no idea who we were.
Ethan [0:14:36]: And so it was figuring out, like, how do we tackle each one of these channels one by one so that we can build up our presence here.
Ethan [0:14:42]: I...
Ethan [0:14:42]: One of the, you know, best things I did early on was hire an Seo agency who was absolutely crushed crushed it for us.
Ethan [0:14:49]: I think they've been at, like, twenty percent month over month growth since I hired them eight months ago.
Ethan [0:14:54]: And so dialing in that channel so we start ranking well on calling.
Dave [0:14:58]: I thought Seo is dead.
Dave [0:14:59]: I thought that doesn't work.
Ethan [0:15:01]: Not at all.
Ethan [0:15:02]: No.
Ethan [0:15:02]: I don't...
Ethan [0:15:03]: What do they do?
Ethan [0:15:03]: What what how do they
Dave [0:15:04]: do it?
Dave [0:15:04]: What do they do?
Ethan [0:15:06]: I think that because of all the viral things that we had built on the on the back end, Like, we had really good domain reputation already through people citing us and talking about some of these campaigns.
Ethan [0:15:16]: And so we had a good baseline in place.
Ethan [0:15:18]: And so All they've been doing then is restructuring how we build our H h1, how we build our H h2, what type of, like, back landing pages do we have.
Ethan [0:15:26]: They do three blog posts a day, Like, insanely high volumes so we can increase that service area, And I think all of that just has been compounding very well.
Dave [0:15:34]: So it's, like, if you have this brand that is well known and in the social sphere and has word, they're kinda, like, connecting the wiring everything up behind the scenes.
Dave [0:15:44]: So, like, oh, we should link to this page here, this key...
Dave [0:15:47]: This page should rank for this this keyword or that.
Dave [0:15:49]: Exactly.
Dave [0:15:50]: Yeah.
Ethan [0:15:51]: We...
Ethan [0:15:51]: I mean, the same thing that it kind of goes in pair with the Ae, Ge stuff that we've been doing.
Ethan [0:15:56]: We've had even crazier growth on that end, like, fifty percent month over month.
Dave [0:16:00]: Does the Seo company do the Ai Seo stuff or that separate?
Ethan [0:16:06]: It is more or less the same.
Ethan [0:16:07]: A lot of the output that what we've gotten is from the Ae Geo side.
Ethan [0:16:11]: It has been from the work that they're doing with the blogs.
Ethan [0:16:13]: And with the landing pages.
Ethan [0:16:14]: Right?
Ethan [0:16:14]: Because that's where the citations a lot times come from.
Ethan [0:16:17]: Simultaneously, though, we work with a reddit an agency because that's a huge place where these L are citing things.
Ethan [0:16:22]: I think one of the coolest and hardest parts of this whole process has been reforming what the O think about us though.
Ethan [0:16:29]: So in the early days of land, we were a heavy developer focused platform.
Ethan [0:16:33]: Not really known as the enterprise secure solution.
Ethan [0:16:36]: But as of lately, we have positioned ourselves in the market as you said Po Ai for regulated industry.
Ethan [0:16:42]: So we're working with some of the largest companies in the world who have the most secure environments.
Ethan [0:16:46]: And so that's a different positioning.
Ethan [0:16:49]: But, like, when you would look a land a couple months ago, it would say in the L, plan is, you know, for developers and not really for enterprises, and we've completely shifted that narrative.
Ethan [0:16:58]: To where I looked the other day.
Ethan [0:16:59]: I typed in Blend Eye I review, And it was like a marketer dream.
Ethan [0:17:03]: It said, this is the perfect company if you have you're a large enterprise with a huge call center.
Ethan [0:17:08]: And then even on the cons, it was like, don't touch this if you're an Smb, which is, like the exact...
Dave [0:17:13]: It's great.
Dave [0:17:13]: Right.
Dave [0:17:14]: Yeah, Handling the...
Dave [0:17:14]: Got you were not for you.
Dave [0:17:15]: We're not for the small companies.
Dave [0:17:17]: Yeah.
Ethan [0:17:17]: Yeah.
Dave [0:17:18]: Well, I I wanted...
Dave [0:17:18]: I pulled up your website because I think if I...
Dave [0:17:21]: And this is my first time looking at it.
Dave [0:17:22]: But, like, just based on our prep Right?
Dave [0:17:24]: I'm like, going through this.
Dave [0:17:25]: I'm, like, you know, viral Ai kinda crazy stunt billboards.
Dave [0:17:30]: But then when I go to your website, like, this website says to me, like, enterprise.
Dave [0:17:36]: High end.
Dave [0:17:38]: And so it's this interesting mix of, like, you can do those things and then you still come here and, like, this is the actual perception.
Dave [0:17:44]: And I thought this was great by the way.
Dave [0:17:46]: This five hundred and forty eight million, like, this this thing that's constantly taking up calls resolved.
Dave [0:17:50]: To date.
Dave [0:17:51]: I love little social proof like that.
Dave [0:17:52]: And then I think this is a this headline is a great example to me of...
Dave [0:17:56]: I think we always wanna search for, like, the really sexy or crazy or like, punchy homepage headline, but I'd love this one which is, like, if you can make a...
Dave [0:18:05]: If you can say something that clearly speaks to a particular type of buyer, like, oh, voice Ai for regulated industries.
Dave [0:18:12]: This headline, this is one, two, three, four, five.
Dave [0:18:14]: This is five words that says so much.
Dave [0:18:18]: You know what I mean?
Dave [0:18:19]: Like you're saying, like, regulated and that that speaks to...
Dave [0:18:21]: Okay.
Dave [0:18:22]: That must mean they can do this, it must mean they can do that.
Dave [0:18:24]: Like, I how did the line come up?
Ethan [0:18:27]: Well, I think for one, I get really frustrated as a marketer.
Ethan [0:18:30]: Every time I see a billboard I go to somebody's website and it's like, Ai infrastructure for, you know, Gt alliance and, like, I Don't know what any of those words mean.
Dave [0:18:41]: It would...
Dave [0:18:41]: That's a good Ai infrastructure with Gt alliance.
Dave [0:18:44]: Yeah...
Ethan [0:18:45]: Yeah.
Ethan [0:18:45]: I don't know.
Ethan [0:18:45]: It's just like a bunch of buzz words that don't really mean anything.
Ethan [0:18:47]: And so As was a marketing department.
Ethan [0:18:49]: I've just really pushed our team to try to make everything as simplified as possible.
Ethan [0:18:54]: We go by, okay.
Ethan [0:18:55]: Sure We're for enterprises, but, like, we try to make of our copy fifth grade reading level.
Dave [0:19:00]: Yeah.
Dave [0:19:00]: Built for high stakes, built for high stakes phone calls where security and trust actually matter.
Ethan [0:19:05]: Yeah.
Ethan [0:19:05]: And so, the goal of the website, copy is not to sound cool or esoteric.
Ethan [0:19:11]: Like, the goal is to clearly define what you do so that the audience understands immediately how you can provide value.
Ethan [0:19:17]: And that's kind of in the philosophy for how we do all of our content.
Dave [0:19:22]: Do you think that the website serves a different purpose today than it than it did a couple years ago Or like, how do you all think about the website in your funnel?
Ethan [0:19:30]: That's a good question.
Ethan [0:19:31]: I think that it has a very similar role personally, but I do know that a lot of people are maybe taking a different process after going to the website, whereas it used to be website, go to the Cta book of call so you can talk to a salesperson.
Ethan [0:19:44]: I understand that it may be much more closer now to go to the website, feed the website into your Of choice and then get whatever output you are looking for on a specific question.
Ethan [0:19:56]: And then finally, after you've done all your research, you might go talk to a salesperson.
Ethan [0:20:00]: So I think that the ai are I think that the copy and the content that's on the website is just as important.
Ethan [0:20:05]: If not more important than ever, but maybe the Ui, the design isn't as important if people aren't actually looking at it, and they're just feeding the the content to the L.
Ethan [0:20:14]: Yeah.
Ethan [0:20:14]: But I still think it's insanely important.
Ethan [0:20:16]: Yeah.
Dave [0:20:17]: More important than never is interesting because it almost...
Dave [0:20:19]: It has two audiences now.
Dave [0:20:20]: It's, like it needs to resonate with humans, and it needs to be crawl, you know, by all of the To properly understand what you do.
Dave [0:20:29]: Yeah.
Ethan [0:20:31]: Yeah.
Ethan [0:20:31]: Just a shout the guy on my team too.
Dave [0:20:32]: Shout him out.
Dave [0:20:33]: Shout him out.
Ethan [0:20:34]: We built this website.
Dave [0:20:35]: Shout out guy on the team.
Ethan [0:20:38]: A month ago.
Ethan [0:20:38]: His name is Cow.
Ethan [0:20:39]: And he had this idea.
Ethan [0:20:42]: We used to use web flow, but, like, web flow was such a pain.
Ethan [0:20:45]: Just in terms of I didn't know how to use it.
Ethan [0:20:48]: It was a very complex software for me to try and understand.
Ethan [0:20:50]: We had to hire out an agency, but they were offshore.
Ethan [0:20:53]: And so there was the time delay and, like, if I wanted a new landing page spun up, I would basically be a three day turnaround.
Ethan [0:20:59]: And this was unacceptable for the speed that we were trying to move, and he had this idea.
Ethan [0:21:04]: What if we just use Claude Code to build the entire website from scratch.
Ethan [0:21:08]: And so that's what he did.
Ethan [0:21:10]: So the entire website at Bland.Ai is fully custom code by a guy who had never built a piece of software at a day in his life.
Ethan [0:21:16]: And so he should the whole thing from the ground up to where...
Dave [0:21:19]: It's really good looking and professional too.
Dave [0:21:21]: You know, it's not like some
Ethan [0:21:23]: pieces really good.
Dave [0:21:24]: It looks like a company who raised a hundred million bucks.
Ethan [0:21:26]: Yeah.
Ethan [0:21:26]: They're website.
Ethan [0:21:27]: It took him a month to do.
Ethan [0:21:29]: He coded the whole thing from scratch.
Dave [0:21:31]: What's his role in the team?
Ethan [0:21:32]: He runs our brand, actually.
Dave [0:21:34]: Wow.
Dave [0:21:34]: So I love this.
Dave [0:21:35]: And was he...
Dave [0:21:35]: Not tech not a technical guy?
Ethan [0:21:37]: You said?
Ethan [0:21:37]: No.
Ethan [0:21:38]: Like, never done a piece of code.
Dave [0:21:40]: So like, if I'm if I'm, like, the P guy for a for big Ai.
Dave [0:21:43]: You know, like, that's the story, which is, like, person who is a brand person creative person.
Dave [0:21:48]: This is a story I think about Ai, which why it's cool.
Dave [0:21:51]: Can actually go do this now versus having a have an agency or all these other people do it.
Dave [0:21:56]: Like, you have the idea you go make it.
Ethan [0:21:58]: Correct.
Ethan [0:21:58]: Yeah.
Ethan [0:21:59]: And what's cool too is that it actually provided a lot of value because now, if I wanna make a brand new landing page from scratch for a specific ad campaign and for a customer.
Ethan [0:22:06]: All I do is I open my Claude, and I say, hey, make this landing page and I wanted to roughly look like this we're off and say this, and it'll do it in five minutes the entire page with our brand guidelines, everything fully optimized, and then I can push it to production and we're good.
Ethan [0:22:22]: And so, like, it allows the iteration cycle to have gone from three days to now five minutes, which is huge.
Dave [0:22:28]: When if it breaks?
Ethan [0:22:29]: It hasn't happened yet.
Dave [0:22:31]: So I don't even...
Dave [0:22:32]: I'm not trying to speak that Let me not.
Dave [0:22:33]: I'm not I'm not trying to speak that into existence, but, like, Dan and I've have had this conversation about, like, can we just, like, vibe code our website?
Dave [0:22:40]: And I always just get stuck on the, like, the only thing that I don't like is that inevitably something with the website breaks and, like, no one knows like, how to fix it.
Ethan [0:22:50]: Yeah.
Ethan [0:22:50]: That's a good concern.
Ethan [0:22:52]: Nothing's happened...
Ethan [0:22:53]: Yeah.
Dave [0:22:53]: I think look, It's a made up concern, dude because I've had a developer.
Dave [0:22:56]: I, you know, it still would be like, oh, we got the web developer, but, you know, he's in Ukraine right now and, like, tomorrow we'll get back to him.
Dave [0:23:04]: You know?
Dave [0:23:04]: So it's always something.
Dave [0:23:05]: So that...
Dave [0:23:06]: That's cool.
Dave [0:23:07]: That's that's promising.
Dave [0:23:08]: We'd like...
Dave [0:23:08]: I like...
Dave [0:23:09]: I like to hear that.
Dave [0:23:10]: Okay.
Dave [0:23:10]: Yeah.
Dave [0:23:10]: Yeah.
Dave [0:23:11]: There's a lot
Ethan [0:23:11]: of guard rails around it too of, like, we can't ever push things without our engineering team give given the okay and the approval and every everything's is very, you know, safe and secure.
Ethan [0:23:19]: So we did all the
Dave [0:23:21]: way why why is the engineering team involved in the website.
Ethan [0:23:24]: Just because it's it's in the github and, like, kind of all, you know, they're are separate places, but we just make sure we have all the right parameters in place not anything
Dave [0:23:32]: Okay.
Ethan [0:23:32]: Because I know nothing about code, so I just you know, type
Dave [0:23:35]: paper clause.
Dave [0:23:36]: You can basically learn it, You know?
Dave [0:23:38]: Pay reverse engineer me this thing.
Ethan [0:23:41]: Yeah.
Ethan [0:23:41]: True.
Ethan [0:23:42]: Okay.
Dave [0:23:42]: So how do how do you run marketing?
Dave [0:23:43]: You got a team of seven?
Dave [0:23:45]: Mh.
Dave [0:23:46]: Anything you learned about, you know, I think having ideas is great doing these viral campaigns is great.
Dave [0:23:53]: But every everybody that I've interviewed over the years that is a successful marketing leader.
Dave [0:23:57]: They kinda come down to, like, you gotta have an operating system.
Dave [0:24:00]: You gotta have some routine of, like, whether it's campaigns or meetings or from how do you do your one on one so how you set goals.
Dave [0:24:07]: Do you have any philosophy on this about a year into this company?
Ethan [0:24:11]: Yeah.
Ethan [0:24:11]: So I'll start by saying this.
Ethan [0:24:13]: Everybody in our team and almost everybody in the entire company is full time in office five days a week in San Francisco.
Ethan [0:24:20]: Yeah.
Ethan [0:24:21]: I know people have different opinions on this.
Ethan [0:24:22]: For us, it has worked really well because not only do I get to build an incredible culture with the team.
Dave [0:24:28]: Where's your office.
Ethan [0:24:29]: We're all on North beach down here in in S f.
Dave [0:24:31]: Okay.
Ethan [0:24:32]: And so we meet every day at nine thirty in the morning for fifteen minutes.
Ethan [0:24:36]: The entire team gets together, and we walk through a simple three step process, which is metrics, objectives, and blockers.
Ethan [0:24:43]: And so in that fifteen minutes, we make sure everybody's really aligned on where we are in terms of our metrics.
Ethan [0:24:47]: What are the objectives everybody needs to accomplish today?
Ethan [0:24:51]: And then what are the blockers that are stopping us from achieving those objectives that we need to solve immediately?
Dave [0:24:56]: Do you guys like kick a hack sack around while you do this or kidding.
Ethan [0:25:00]: I might do that next time?
Dave [0:25:02]: Some guys on, like, a bongo board?
Dave [0:25:03]: I had to say Always...
Dave [0:25:05]: Everybody hates me on Youtube Like, just guy keeps interrupting, like, it's my podcast.
Dave [0:25:09]: I'm gonna do what I want.
Dave [0:25:10]: On the metrics thing...
Dave [0:25:12]: So what what would be a daily update on metrics that somebody would give.
Ethan [0:25:17]: Yeah.
Ethan [0:25:17]: So everybody on the team has two Kpis.
Ethan [0:25:19]: The first is a shared collective Kpi for the entire department, which we have, called estimated pipeline value.
Ethan [0:25:27]: Which is basically how much pipeline is marketing driving for our sales team.
Ethan [0:25:30]: I'll tell you in a moment how we built out this this model because it's it's one of the coolest things we've done here at Bland.
Ethan [0:25:34]: But everybody reports on that, and that is our team goal.
Ethan [0:25:38]: There's bonus incentives tied to it.
Ethan [0:25:40]: This is my way of trying to make sure that everybody is oriented towards the same collective goal, and they know that that every action that they take, they will somehow be benefited for and the team will benefit for.
Dave [0:25:51]: So how would someone...
Dave [0:25:52]: How would someone like, the brand guy influence that.
Ethan [0:25:56]: With the brand one, it's a bit tough because his is not as attributable, but I think the whole thing that he did with the.
Dave [0:26:03]: Where know what I right?
Dave [0:26:03]: He made the website.
Dave [0:26:04]: That's the store.
Dave [0:26:05]: That's literally your store.
Dave [0:26:06]: That guy built your store.
Dave [0:26:07]: That's how it was actually.
Dave [0:26:07]: Right?
Ethan [0:26:09]: Yeah.
Ethan [0:26:09]: Yeah.
Ethan [0:26:09]: And so and he'll come up with, like, creative campaigns.
Ethan [0:26:12]: He's always working on what is our backdrop for the events.
Ethan [0:26:15]: What's the activation that we do there?
Ethan [0:26:16]: He's working on the gifting that we send out for Ab.
Ethan [0:26:19]: So, like, these are all things that maybe aren't directly attributable to him, but because we have...
Ethan [0:26:22]: A generic team goal, we have to increase pipeline value, he knows that every action that he does should have that end goal.
Dave [0:26:28]: So if I was on your team and I was like, hey, I wanna start a podcast for for for bland.
Dave [0:26:33]: Would I have to tell you a story about how I think that that podcast is gonna lead to pipeline in order for us to, like, do it?
Ethan [0:26:43]: I would say, yes, you just have to make a slightly compelling point.
Ethan [0:26:47]: But I...
Ethan [0:26:48]: What I will say is that, like, we we also have...
Ethan [0:26:51]: We have the team Kpi then we all have individual Kpis.
Ethan [0:26:53]: The individual Kpis are set in accordance to their specific role in the scope of that role.
Ethan [0:26:58]: And so, like, for our content marketing lead,
Dave [0:27:02]: all he's here to do
Ethan [0:27:03]: is make high quality videos that communicate our product well to our buyer.
Ethan [0:27:06]: And so his Kpi he has to do x amount of high quality videos every single quarter to have to get shipped.
Ethan [0:27:13]: Again, he has incentives tied to this and whatnot.
Ethan [0:27:15]: As long as he hits that Kpi, then he can do whatever he wants.
Ethan [0:27:19]: So if he wants to start his podcast on the side, he can do that.
Ethan [0:27:22]: Assuming, you know, if he's like, hey, it's gonna cost twenty thousand dollars to do to set up, and it's gonna take me an extra two hours of my time.
Ethan [0:27:28]: If there's nothing else that I have that I would prefer him doing, and I know he's still gonna get his main Kpi done.
Ethan [0:27:33]: Go for it.
Ethan [0:27:34]: I mean, I I think that everybody on our team is super capable and we're small enough where they can come up with their own ideas and take bets.
Dave [0:27:40]: So seven high quality video...
Dave [0:27:42]: Whatever the number of high quality videos.
Ethan [0:27:45]: Yeah.
Dave [0:27:46]: And are most of those, like, how do you...
Dave [0:27:48]: Is high quality, just a a word that you use?
Dave [0:27:51]: Or is it actually a qualifier?
Ethan [0:27:53]: Yeah.
Ethan [0:27:53]: We we we we try to define it the best way possible, and we have examples of, like, what the video should like in order to qualify.
Ethan [0:27:59]: But...
Ethan [0:27:59]: Yeah.
Dave [0:28:00]: I'm asking this because it is where a lot of things get stuck.
Dave [0:28:02]: It's, like...
Dave [0:28:03]: And I wanted to just hear you have an example because it's not always Oh, this person needs to make a video that leads to three new demos of bland.
Dave [0:28:11]: It's just like, it's just a little tagline on the project.
Dave [0:28:15]: That's like, oh, if we...
Dave [0:28:16]: Or, for example, how I would answer that podcast question.
Dave [0:28:18]: Be like, yeah, We wanna do this podcast because we wanna reach leaders in regulated industries, and we we think if we can interview on the pod we'll build relationships with them that'll help open door...
Dave [0:28:27]: It's just kinda like that.
Dave [0:28:28]: Right?
Dave [0:28:29]: It's like, oh, check.
Dave [0:28:29]: Like that our intentions are right for doing this channel.
Dave [0:28:32]: Doesn't necessarily mean, can we directly prove that these six videos drove x dollars in pipeline.
Ethan [0:28:39]: Correct.
Ethan [0:28:39]: Because that individual Kpis is what I've have established is the most important thing for their position to move the needle.
Ethan [0:28:44]: But then the estimated pipeline team goal is their freedom and ability to be able to determine what they think is most high leverage to help us to that goal.
Dave [0:28:51]: Okay.
Dave [0:28:51]: So daily stand up.
Dave [0:28:52]: That's key.
Dave [0:28:53]: Yeah.
Dave [0:28:53]: Yeah.
Dave [0:28:54]: No.
Dave [0:28:54]: Look, I have no no shade on the office thing Like, I was just talking to Dan about this yesterday.
Dave [0:28:58]: I'm like, you know what?
Dave [0:28:59]: I think that I am very tired of being here alone in my house and We have a team of eight people.
Dave [0:29:06]: We have a great culture.
Dave [0:29:07]: I think we would be at least fifty...
Dave [0:29:10]: We we would grow at least fifty percent more if we were all hanging out in the office every day.
Dave [0:29:14]: Yeah.
Ethan [0:29:15]: Yeah.
Ethan [0:29:15]: And everybody and really enjoy showing up to work.
Ethan [0:29:17]: You know, we have a weekly team lunch.
Ethan [0:29:18]: Where All go out and.
Ethan [0:29:19]: Just enjoy life and hanging out with each other.
Ethan [0:29:21]: I think what we've built there is really special.
Dave [0:29:24]: Okay.
Dave [0:29:24]: So that's that's a part of it.
Dave [0:29:26]: What is so daily stand up?
Dave [0:29:28]: What else is in your head of marketing mix.
Ethan [0:29:32]: Man, I I don't know.
Ethan [0:29:33]: It's pretty...
Ethan [0:29:34]: It's pretty overlap.
Ethan [0:29:35]: Like, every...
Dave [0:29:36]: Let me ask you a better question.
Dave [0:29:37]: Ask a better question, get a better answer.
Ethan [0:29:39]: Yeah.
Dave [0:29:39]: You do seem to do a lot of viral, you know, campaign.
Dave [0:29:41]: Right?
Dave [0:29:42]: Do you have a we...
Dave [0:29:43]: At adrift we did these things called marketable moments, and we try to do...
Dave [0:29:46]: We just said that we're gonna do one thing a month like, we're gonna get people to talk about it.
Dave [0:29:50]: Do you...
Dave [0:29:50]: Do you have anything like that?
Dave [0:29:51]: Are you running some type of regular.
Dave [0:29:52]: Once a quarter, we wanna do a big splash.
Dave [0:29:55]: Once a month, we wanna do a blank.
Dave [0:29:56]: We're gonna run a six month campaign about x?
Ethan [0:29:59]: Yeah.
Ethan [0:29:59]: I think that, like, at the stage the work that we're at.
Ethan [0:30:01]: We still have a lot of different channels that are untapped.
Ethan [0:30:04]: So this whole month, this whole upcoming quarter, my only goal is how do I build a really solid Ab program and then scale it.
Ethan [0:30:11]: And everybody on the team has usually specific tasks that when we get into the objective section on the on the daily stand up.
Ethan [0:30:18]: It's like, here's what you're doing.
Ethan [0:30:20]: In order to help us with this Ab thing.
Ethan [0:30:22]: So our events marketer is building out specific one off events or dinners that she's hosting that I can then invite our Ab list too.
Ethan [0:30:29]: Our growth coordinator is helping build out one zero one personalized outreach videos that we can send to everybody on the Av list.
Ethan [0:30:37]: Another events coordinator working on gifting.
Ethan [0:30:39]: Like, we have everybody that kinda ties into this core objective of what we're trying to solve as a marketing too.
Dave [0:30:44]: Okay.
Dave [0:30:44]: I got it.
Dave [0:30:45]: Yeah.
Dave [0:30:46]: So right now, you're trying to shift the mix from what you're were doing before to be more to do more Ab.
Ethan [0:30:51]: We're trying to keep the overall character of bland, which is this this company that's really exciting that that does fund things that will hire sol to come, do a wine tasting with which is something we have happening this Friday.
Ethan [0:31:02]: So we brought them back out to do a private wine tasting with some prospects and customers.
Ethan [0:31:06]: Like, who doesn't wanna meet him in this setting, like,
Dave [0:31:09]: I mean, I do...
Dave [0:31:10]: Yeah.
Dave [0:31:11]: I don't know.
Dave [0:31:11]: Look, I Am a a little bit of a music guy.
Dave [0:31:15]: I I fancy myself, you know, I I got into the game when Soldier Boy was coming out.
Dave [0:31:19]: So for me, that's interesting for an enterprise.
Dave [0:31:24]: I don't even know who your customer like, maybe, yeah.
Dave [0:31:27]: Cool.
Dave [0:31:27]: Can you tell me about this anyway?
Dave [0:31:29]: Because this is in my prep notes.
Dave [0:31:30]: You you guys bought soldier Boys voice rights for an Ai voice campaign in Atlanta.
Dave [0:31:35]: He's the first rapper to automated voice with Ai.
Dave [0:31:38]: And Wait, What...
Dave [0:31:41]: Where the heck did that idea come from?
Dave [0:31:43]: Why did you pick him?
Dave [0:31:44]: What did you do with that please tell me speaking of Soldier boy?
Ethan [0:31:49]: Social boy.
Ethan [0:31:49]: We we have a mutual friend.
Ethan [0:31:50]: I think he had, like, worked with him at some way?
Ethan [0:31:52]: And he kind of sent us the idea that there was an opportunity or let's just say quote away with maybe in a situation where he needed a little bit of money.
Dave [0:32:01]: It's an.
Dave [0:32:01]: First say he needed some cash.
Ethan [0:32:05]: And sold boys also this perfect figure because his time of peak popularity
Dave [0:32:12]: was early, Og, Internet, like, Og, like Internet, social media marketing.
Dave [0:32:17]: That's what people think of.
Dave [0:32:18]: Yeah.
Ethan [0:32:18]: Yeah.
Ethan [0:32:18]: Which for our Ic, you know, call anywhere from, like, thirty to fifty year old, you know, people that are executives in larger companies.
Ethan [0:32:25]: Like, this was the era in which they were, you know, in high school, at college listening to this type of music.
Ethan [0:32:32]: Yeah.
Ethan [0:32:32]: And so people have a lot of a a lot of positive with him
Dave [0:32:35]: this type of music that right.
Dave [0:32:36]: Goddamn rap music people listen.
Dave [0:32:39]: Yeah.
Dave [0:32:40]: Yeah.
Dave [0:32:40]: You should've got Mike Jones.
Dave [0:32:41]: This might have been before your error, but Mike Jones had that...
Dave [0:32:44]: He put his phone number out there.
Dave [0:32:45]: That was like, you know, a, what was it?
Dave [0:32:48]: Anyway, I'll get it later.
Dave [0:32:49]: I'll wrap for you, Don't.
Ethan [0:32:51]: We talked about that one too.
Ethan [0:32:52]: So so...
Ethan [0:32:53]: But at the same time, like, everybody knows who sold boy is.
Ethan [0:32:57]: I think Google is It's like, whatever fifty percent the Us actually knows who he is.
Ethan [0:33:00]: Yet, he has kind of fallen off for the last decade or so.
Ethan [0:33:04]: And so it's this weird in between point where like, Not as expensive as he probably should be, but he's still a celebrity that everybody knows his name.
Ethan [0:33:12]: And so when we had the opportunity, we talked to, you know, his manager and him and, like, it seemed pretty aligned.
Ethan [0:33:17]: And so what we did is we bought the rights to his voice.
Ethan [0:33:20]: With exclusivity, and we...
Ethan [0:33:23]: And we...
Ethan [0:33:24]: Sorry.
Dave [0:33:24]: What does that mean What does that even mean?
Dave [0:33:26]: Like, buying the rights of someone's voice.
Dave [0:33:27]: What does that entail?
Ethan [0:33:29]: It means that we can use his voice within our platform, and anybody can automate their phone calls with soldier boy now.
Ethan [0:33:36]: So this is like, a real thing that people do.
Ethan [0:33:39]: Customers of bland will use Soul boy to automate their phone calls.
Ethan [0:33:43]: So, like, if you call into a restaurant that is using this voice.
Ethan [0:33:46]: Soul boy will pick up the phone, and he'll take your order no process the pain.
Dave [0:33:51]: So I could create a support line for Exit Five, and we could use Soldier boys voice for that.
Dave [0:33:55]: Correct.
Ethan [0:33:56]: Yeah.
Ethan [0:33:56]: And so that's what it means for glenn to have bought the voice rights?
Ethan [0:33:58]: To that let.
Ethan [0:33:59]: Now anybody using Glenn can can
Dave [0:34:01]: use that.
Dave [0:34:01]: And can you use him anytime in your marketing that you want?
Ethan [0:34:05]: I believe so.
Ethan [0:34:06]: Yeah.
Ethan [0:34:07]: We had in the contract something about, I could fly out to Atlanta.
Ethan [0:34:10]: We did a full day of shooting.
Ethan [0:34:11]: I don't know if you've seen, but one of our big ideas early on was we bought a big red telephone car.
Ethan [0:34:17]: So this is a fully street legal vehicle that drives on the road, but it's a massive telephone.
Ethan [0:34:22]: If you just Google, like bland Ai telephone car, it was one of the best purchases that we ever make because we still use it, like two years later.
Ethan [0:34:30]: And we...
Ethan [0:34:31]: I I ship the telephone car out land.
Ethan [0:34:33]: You can see golden way right there.
Ethan [0:34:35]: Yeah.
Ethan [0:34:35]: I shifted it out to Atlanta and we did a full filming day with him.
Dave [0:34:40]: How do you drive in this thing.
Dave [0:34:42]: Where do you see?
Ethan [0:34:43]: Dude...
Ethan [0:34:43]: You have to look through the the numbers.
Ethan [0:34:45]: It's a stick shift.
Ethan [0:34:46]: It's like a nineteen sixty needle that we turned into a telephone.
Ethan [0:34:50]: Insured street legal, like, the whole thing.
Ethan [0:34:54]: So some sometimes will drive it around, San Francisco or conferences at the most recent conference we went to.
Ethan [0:35:00]: It was actually our activation.
Ethan [0:35:01]: So we figured out a way to get it inside the conference.
Ethan [0:35:04]: And we just let people hang out in it, take photos, call our number, like, do all that inside the phone card.
Dave [0:35:11]: This is actually crazy because you got so much, like, you know, double excel magazine, they don't care what your product is or who you...
Dave [0:35:18]: You know, but they're writing of Soldier Boys is the first rapper with telephone car, but that is gonna be something that increases your word about, which matters because L m's on the Internet.
Dave [0:35:26]: This is amazing.
Dave [0:35:27]: Right.
Ethan [0:35:28]: Right?
Ethan [0:35:28]: Exactly.
Ethan [0:35:28]: Yeah.
Ethan [0:35:29]: We had we had a lot of fun with this.
Ethan [0:35:30]: I think we did, like, sixty million impressions in the first week, which was really good Cpm for quote...
Dave [0:35:36]: So even though you're, like, going up market and doing Ab stuff and focusing on the enterprise, do you think you can still do this type of, like, marketing, done sc and marketing and B?
Ethan [0:35:48]: Yeah.
Ethan [0:35:48]: I think we can't afford to stop.
Ethan [0:35:50]: Every Ic customer that I talked to knows that this phone card's exists.
Ethan [0:35:53]: They know about the soldier boy thing.
Ethan [0:35:55]: They know about the recent collaboration we did with Paul with the Series C video.
Dave [0:35:59]: Is there a lesson...
Dave [0:35:59]: Is there a lesson there?
Dave [0:36:01]: Like, yeah.
Dave [0:36:01]: About what approach to marketing works today.
Ethan [0:36:06]: I think the brand is really important, and I define brand is the association that people make with the thing.
Ethan [0:36:11]: So if you're familiar with, like, the origin of the word brand.
Ethan [0:36:14]: Right?
Ethan [0:36:14]: It's the whole they used to stick brands on cows.
Ethan [0:36:17]: And so
Dave [0:36:17]: not school me.
Dave [0:36:18]: School me, young man tell me.
Ethan [0:36:20]: Very.
Ethan [0:36:20]: Okay.
Ethan [0:36:20]: Cool.
Ethan [0:36:20]: So, this is not my thing.
Ethan [0:36:22]: But, like, Yeah.
Ethan [0:36:23]: We,
Dave [0:36:24]: a student into the game.
Ethan [0:36:26]: The original way or where the the word brand comes from is farmers used to brand their cows.
Ethan [0:36:31]: So they would stick tag in their ear or somewhere on the cow, and it would be to determine that they were the owner of this animal.
Ethan [0:36:39]: And so what would happen is that people would be wandering around, they would see the cow and then they would make an association depending on what the brand was.
Ethan [0:36:48]: So if you saw the cow you're like, hey, it says John on it, depending on your association with John, whether it's positive or negative, you will treat the cow separately or differently, accordingly.
Ethan [0:36:57]: And so it'll be like, if you hate Paul, then you might kill a cow and eat them for dinner.
Ethan [0:37:02]: If you love Paul, you will probably return it back to Paul.
Ethan [0:37:05]: And so the brand is the association that you have with the stimuli or the thing.
Ethan [0:37:09]: And so what we try to do a bland is we try to create really cool viral experiences that create a positive association with bland.
Ethan [0:37:18]: And so we wanna stamp our logo, we wanna stamp a brand on it and so that when people see that thing they associate positively with the experience we gave them.
Dave [0:37:26]: And do you have like a full...
Dave [0:37:27]: That's great.
Dave [0:37:28]: By the way.
Dave [0:37:28]: I love...
Dave [0:37:29]: I I love just talking to people This what I...
Dave [0:37:31]: Like, people are gonna listen to this, and this...
Dave [0:37:33]: These interviews make me happy because it's, like, these are the things that I love in marketing.
Dave [0:37:36]: This is what make me love marketing.
Dave [0:37:38]: That's why I got into the job.
Dave [0:37:40]: It's not to, like, make sure that the nurture email campaign is sent out or to spend, you know, half of my year negotiating with Ga on, like, how to get them to talk about us.
Dave [0:37:51]: It's like, let's let's do this type of stuff.
Dave [0:37:52]: But on that thing, on on like, the what you want plan to be associated with.
Dave [0:37:56]: Are there are there guard rails for these campaigns, like, it doesn't seem like you're...
Dave [0:38:01]: A lot of people that do this brand type of stuff.
Dave [0:38:04]: It's very, like...
Dave [0:38:04]: They're trying to take shots at competitors or call out the old way versus the new way.
Dave [0:38:09]: Do you have a philosophy on doing this You're kinda like, hey, we got soldier jab boy in a car, and it's working.
Dave [0:38:14]: You know, you're not really like, being controversial?
Dave [0:38:17]: I guess is what I'm trying to say?
Ethan [0:38:19]: Yeah.
Ethan [0:38:19]: We ask a lot of our ideas.
Ethan [0:38:21]: Like, probably eighty percent of the ones that we come up with we have to cut because we don't think that they will capture up attention.
Ethan [0:38:27]: We don't think that the brand sentiment will be positive.
Ethan [0:38:29]: I think it's just a lot of throwing out ideas, giving people the space to come up with stuff?
Ethan [0:38:34]: And then we always just try to think from the perspective of our Ic.
Ethan [0:38:36]: So, like would they stop scrolling if they saw soldier boy in front of a big red telephone car?
Ethan [0:38:42]: If they would stop scrolling.
Ethan [0:38:43]: Then we can then figure out how in the video to communicate what we do as a product.
Ethan [0:38:46]: And then would they like that experience?
Ethan [0:38:48]: And so that felt like a good idea and a good bet to make us?
Dave [0:38:51]: And just sound like, the why now, do you think there's anything related to trends right now with marketing and Ai in the world and business in general that makes this approach even more relevant than ever Like, our our other...
Dave [0:39:03]: Do you have to do this to succeed?
Dave [0:39:05]: Or can you write a thousand blog posts and that can also work.
Ethan [0:39:09]: I think that can definitely also work.
Ethan [0:39:11]: In a crowded space like the Voice Ai landscape though, where the industry is moving so fast.
Ethan [0:39:17]: They're...
Ethan [0:39:17]: You know, Went to a commerce day their day, I think there was two hundred voice Ai competitors.
Ethan [0:39:20]: It was it was absurd.
Ethan [0:39:22]: But when I looked at all of their booths.
Ethan [0:39:23]: This is a really good example.
Ethan [0:39:25]: It all was the same buzz words the same jargon, voice ai that drives ROI.
Ethan [0:39:30]: Voice ai that actually saves you time.
Ethan [0:39:34]: And it's like, that.
Ethan [0:39:35]: I don't I don't care everybody's saying that.
Ethan [0:39:37]: So how do you stand out in an environment?
Ethan [0:39:38]: Well, one, you say something like Voice ai regulated industries.
Ethan [0:39:42]: So that the regulated industry's people identify with who you are as a company and you really niche down.
Ethan [0:39:46]: And then also, you get something that captures their attention.
Ethan [0:39:50]: So that was the one where we took our full phone car drove into the conference and stuck it there.
Ethan [0:39:54]: And nobody else had a car in the building let alone a a telephone car.
Ethan [0:39:59]: And so both of those things working together have served as well.
Ethan [0:40:02]: You making this...
Ethan [0:40:04]: Alright.
Dave [0:40:05]: So we're, like, forty minutes in and I got the hook for this, which is, like, it's how this B2B brand stands out in a c of two hundred competitors.
Dave [0:40:13]: And you're all well funded.
Dave [0:40:15]: And this is what makes a jump on.
Dave [0:40:17]: It's, like, why it's like a game.
Dave [0:40:18]: It's it's the game of our.
Dave [0:40:20]: There's two hundred other competitors all saying the same boring kind of stuff.
Dave [0:40:23]: What are we gonna do to stand out?
Dave [0:40:26]: I think that's a key ingredient to your approach to to marketing?
Dave [0:40:30]: Yeah.
Dave [0:40:30]: If you were in a different industry, may have it no competition then you might take a different approach?
Ethan [0:40:35]: Yep.
Ethan [0:40:35]: Yep.
Ethan [0:40:35]: It helps do that.
Ethan [0:40:36]: I'll just...
Ethan [0:40:37]: Say this point, like, our product team is phenomenal, and the direction that our founders went early on.
Ethan [0:40:41]: Yeah.
Ethan [0:40:42]: Helped a lot from a marketing perspective.
Ethan [0:40:44]: So every other voice ai provider in the space decided that they wanted to build some type of a wrapper around frontier provider.
Ethan [0:40:51]: So they take Open Ai, they take.
Ethan [0:40:52]: They stitch together with an with a Texas speech provider and some inference, and then they called it today.
Ethan [0:40:57]: What our founders decided to do was build the entire stack from scratch.
Ethan [0:41:00]: And so they took...
Ethan [0:41:02]: They they decided to build custom L to build our own text speech model in house so that we controlled full...
Ethan [0:41:10]: We had full reliability, we had full security since not none the data went to third party sources or we're bouncing from Api to Api.
Ethan [0:41:16]: It's more suited for voice because you can decrease latency.
Ethan [0:41:19]: Like, the whole thing was built for this idea that real enterprises need all these features.
Ethan [0:41:24]: They need reliability.
Ethan [0:41:24]: They need scalability.
Ethan [0:41:25]: They need ob.
Ethan [0:41:26]: And so that helps a lot too when you have a real product or in differentiator like that.
Ethan [0:41:30]: That I can just state the facts tell the truth and people want.
Dave [0:41:35]: State fact exactly.
Dave [0:41:35]: If if you have a great product, that's like, I'm mean, I I can tell you studied marketing and gone and read some of the classic books and understand that, but it's always been, like, own your facts?
Dave [0:41:45]: And if you have great facts, like the facts are the best marketing ingredient that you can have?
Dave [0:41:49]: Did these guys have prior experience in this space?
Dave [0:41:52]: Like, how did they go?
Dave [0:41:53]: Why why are they the ones to go and rewrite the rules and built this a new way?
Ethan [0:41:58]: No prior experience.
Ethan [0:41:58]: They started by trying to automate insurance denial appeals, which, you know, as you can imagine, was very unsuccessful, and our CEO one day, in typical engineering fashion, wanting to order takeout from a local restaurant, but they only took phone orders.
Ethan [0:42:13]: And so he decided he he didn't wanna actually call them.
Ethan [0:42:17]: He wanted to try and stitch together Ai to call it.
Ethan [0:42:20]: And this was...
Ethan [0:42:20]: Again.
Ethan [0:42:20]: This is, like, Cha g three had just come out.
Ethan [0:42:23]: Like, it's really bad, But he in the matter of twenty four hours figured out a way to get Chat to make a call to...
Ethan [0:42:29]: It was, like, five second latency at the time.
Ethan [0:42:31]: But his idea was, hey, I finally figured it out.
Ethan [0:42:33]: And if I can get value from.
Ethan [0:42:34]: Some other people might be able to.
Ethan [0:42:36]: And then they just started ob accessing over the industry and the the product for the next few years.
Dave [0:42:41]: Did you know the product was that good when you were interviewing?
Ethan [0:42:45]: Yes.
Ethan [0:42:45]: I think the ability to demo by just simply typing in a number to your phone and calling it?
Ethan [0:42:50]: Yeah.
Ethan [0:42:51]: Is really helpful both for prospects and for hires.
Ethan [0:42:54]: Every part of my onboarding when I bring on a new person into the org.
Ethan [0:42:58]: I spend ample time having them call the number, having them watch real live production calls.
Ethan [0:43:03]: Like, there's this one call that's my favorite that I show them, which is, like, a customer that we have did a call and on it, the customer who was ringing in was, like, three minutes into the conversation.
Ethan [0:43:15]: And then our agent says, also, if you would ever wanna talk to a real human, let us know when we can make that happen, and she was go, whoa, I thought you were the real human.
Ethan [0:43:24]: I didn't even sorry.
Ethan [0:43:25]: I've been on this call for like, five minutes.
Ethan [0:43:26]: I didn't even realize you were a robot.
Ethan [0:43:28]: And so those types of experiencing experiences being able to show them to candidates me getting to see stuff like that,
Dave [0:43:34]: Oh, my gosh.
Dave [0:43:35]: Well, what I think is so cool talking to you, is it's like, guy who's are really fired up about his company doing creative marketing.
Dave [0:43:41]: I think it's so underrated, and I write about this.
Dave [0:43:44]: Sometimes I've like, everyone talks about marketing in in B2B.
Dave [0:43:46]: Everybody talks about sales and marketing alignment, You know, and you're gonna go through this.
Dave [0:43:50]: As you do the Ab stuff.
Dave [0:43:51]: I'm sure.
Dave [0:43:52]: The really underrated.
Dave [0:43:53]: The most important is sales is marketing and product alignment and it's like, oh my gosh.
Dave [0:43:58]: Give me give me a great product.
Dave [0:44:00]: Give me good founders in the space.
Dave [0:44:02]: Like, let's go.
Dave [0:44:03]: That's all the right ingredients.
Dave [0:44:04]: It's harder.
Dave [0:44:04]: And I think this is the thing people don't often wanna say is, yeah.
Dave [0:44:08]: Of those two hundred competitors you have, like, probably a lot of those products are shitty products.
Ethan [0:44:13]: Yeah.
Ethan [0:44:13]: Really bad.
Ethan [0:44:14]: Yeah.
Dave [0:44:15]: I have two questions that I keep typing over that I wanna to get back to you because you you mentioned it.
Dave [0:44:18]: You mentioned acting...
Dave [0:44:20]: Like, you guys acts a lot of ideas.
Dave [0:44:22]: What's the forum for having these ideas?
Dave [0:44:25]: Is it in Slack as you have a weekly meeting where you throw a bunch of ideas out and then how do they come to be?
Ethan [0:44:30]: Yeah.
Ethan [0:44:30]: So I think there's two different types of ideas.
Ethan [0:44:32]: There's the ones that we come up with our and there's the one that...
Ethan [0:44:34]: That we use agencies to help us with.
Ethan [0:44:36]: So we can't take credit for everything.
Ethan [0:44:37]: What I will say is that we are the type of company who enjoy spending money on marketing, we think that there's really high return on investment even if it's not fully attributable And so if there's a really great agency that we've worked with in the past who can dedicate ample amount of time to just coming up with creative ideas, we're all willing to pay money to get that help.
Ethan [0:44:55]: And so those sessions are are really hope brainstorming or anything.
Dave [0:45:00]: That's a that's an important lesson of the game, though, that you've already learned, which is, like, you don't have to create ideas themselves.
Dave [0:45:05]: Most everybody, you look at every company that has a Super bowl ad.
Dave [0:45:08]: None of them came up with those ads themselves.
Dave [0:45:10]: They all had an agency that that did it.
Ethan [0:45:12]: And I'm a huge believer of contractors.
Ethan [0:45:14]: So our team is intentionally lean, and what I try to do is have one or two domain experts who run a department in marketing so events, brand, demand gen, etcetera, and then give them full access to whatever resources they need whether that be capital, whether that be contractors and agencies, because I just believe that you can hire contractors or agencies who are world class at what they do, and you can get their high leverage output at a fraction of the cost.
Ethan [0:45:39]: And so with a creative agency, we've always gotten great ROI from that.
Ethan [0:45:43]: So we continue to do it.
Ethan [0:45:45]: When it's just us coming up with ideas, we like to do round table sometimes, our kind of main ideas is let's just throw out everything we possibly can, and let's be as controversial as possible, and then let's dial it back.
Ethan [0:45:58]: So, like, go as far as you can, and then let's just figure out how do we bring it to where it's just kind of on that line where it's enough controversy or enough novelty to get people's attention, but people still have a positive association with the brand.
Dave [0:46:11]: Yeah.
Dave [0:46:11]: I like that.
Dave [0:46:13]: That's good.
Dave [0:46:13]: Yeah.
Dave [0:46:13]: You have to get to the electric fence to, like, Figure out where you should be.
Dave [0:46:19]: Right.
Dave [0:46:19]: And if Soldier boy made the cut, I'd love to know it didn't?
Ethan [0:46:23]: Yeah.
Ethan [0:46:23]: Yeah.
Dave [0:46:24]: But you also mentioned brand sentiment?
Dave [0:46:25]: Is that...
Dave [0:46:25]: Is was that just a a thing that you said or do you...
Dave [0:46:28]: Do you also measure that as part of your your marketing efforts?
Ethan [0:46:32]: No.
Ethan [0:46:32]: I think it's more anecdotal.
Ethan [0:46:33]: I get to customer
Dave [0:46:35]: gut feeling, like, man.
Dave [0:46:36]: People people did not like that that did not go well.
Ethan [0:46:39]: Yeah.
Ethan [0:46:39]: And, thankfully, you know, we we have a large sounding word that we use.
Ethan [0:46:43]: And if And if there's multiple people who are like, this is not going to go well.
Ethan [0:46:47]: Like, we've had times where our CEO or one person's like, we have to do.
Ethan [0:46:51]: We have to do this.
Ethan [0:46:51]: Within the rest of the team is like, I I don't think people will appreciate it, we usually won't veto toe it.
Ethan [0:46:56]: And then sometimes when we need to call them the big guns will have the investors, and then it usually all almost always gets shut down.
Ethan [0:47:01]: So that's that's always a good rubric rig.
Dave [0:47:04]: Yeah.
Dave [0:47:04]: Like, what do you what do you all think of this?
Dave [0:47:06]: Yeah.
Dave [0:47:07]: Yeah.
Dave [0:47:07]: Alright.
Dave [0:47:08]: Ethan this was great.
Dave [0:47:09]: I could spend hours with you.
Dave [0:47:11]: I'm hoping there'll be more forums for this, and it's fun.
Dave [0:47:14]: Doing this podcast gives me an insight into, like, which companies are doing interesting things, and I got...
Dave [0:47:19]: I'm gonna hit the...
Dave [0:47:21]: Don't I don't do this.
Dave [0:47:22]: I I'm gonna hit the follow on the bland.
Dave [0:47:23]: Oh.
Dave [0:47:24]: Brand Company page.
Dave [0:47:26]: Because, you know, I wanna...
Dave [0:47:28]: I wanna see what's going on over there.
Dave [0:47:29]: But thanks for coming on the pod.
Dave [0:47:31]: I'll, obviously, see you in our community see around Exit Five, but keep doing an awesome job.
Dave [0:47:35]: I love stories like this, which is company kind of in a traditional space, lots of competitors, Outs smart people and innovating with fun marketing, which is like, that's that's what a why a lot of us got into this job, and I hope people get that sentiment from the podcast.
Dave [0:47:49]: If you do, send us an email hide exitfive.com will link to Ethan stuff right here.
Dave [0:47:54]: The best thing you can do is like, send him lots of messages and Linkedin connections after our podcast goes out because that makes me...
Dave [0:47:59]: Makes it really happy and let us know that this landed.
Dave [0:48:01]: So alright.
Dave [0:48:02]: Go.
Dave [0:48:02]: Gotta get back to the office.
Dave [0:48:03]: Fire over, get out of here.
Ethan [0:48:06]: You, Dave.
Dave [0:48:06]: Alright, man.
Dave [0:48:06]: But
Dave [0:48:11]: Hey.
Dave [0:48:11]: Thanks for listening to this podcast.
Dave [0:48:13]: If you like this episode.
Dave [0:48:14]: You know what?
Dave [0:48:15]: I'm not even gonna ask you to subscribe and leave a review because I don't
Dave [0:48:19]: really care about that.
Dave [0:48:19]: I have
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