Welcome to another edition of the Always Be Testing podcast with your
host, Ty De Grange. Get a guided tour of the world of growth, performance
marketing, customer acquisition, paid media, and affiliate marketing.
We talk with industry experts and discuss experiments and their learnings in growth,
marketing, and life. Time to nerd out, check your biases at the door, and
have some fun talking about data driven growth and lessons learned.
Hello. Hello. Welcome to another episode of Always Be Testing. I'm
your host, Ty DeGrange, and I am really, really happy to have Chase
Messenie on our show today. What's up, Chase? What up, my brother? How are you? Good to be here. Thanks
for having me. It's good to see you. Yeah. Good to see you too. Thanks for having me. It's awesome
to have you and, feel like you've brought so much podcast
love, so much knowledge to so many communities. And, it's just awesome to
have you on the call and dive in with you and talk about all the things. Yeah. Hundred percent.
Very, very excited to do that. I appreciate you, having the gumption to wear the the
Padres hat today. It shows some shows some guts, and I appreciate that. Yeah. You
know, this is what we do. This is what we do. We, we try to poke our friends in the ribs to remind
them that, you know, just because you got more rings than us doesn't mean anything. We're still out
here. We're still fighting. Still in the arena fighting. It's Yeah. I love it. I love it,
baby. You, man. Awesome. Chase, for those of you who don't know, he's very active
in a number of amazing, growth, performance marketing, SaaS, and d to c communities.
He's the current CMO of Heatmap. He's been active and awesomely helpful
to a ton of folks, including myself, on d to c Twitter.
He's a b two b SaaS growth and performance marketing pro. Prior to Heatmap, he
was leading marketing for Pencil, awesome AI ad tool. He's
run performance marketing at brands like Guthy Ranker and Houzz, and so he's just got a wealth of knowledge.
I'm fired up to dive in with him today. Yeah. Thanks, man. I'm really excited. How'd I do? Yeah. Not bad.
Not bad. I I'm more impressive than I think, maybe. I think so. Chase, you you,
you talk a little bit about vibe check. I know it's a term that might get a bit of an eye roll,
maybe be a question mark for some people. Like, how would you define that, and how do you
kind of think about that when you collaborate with people and you talk to individuals?
Yeah. It gets an eye roll because it's not it's nontechnical. I'm doing air
quotes. There's a lot of things that go into that that are technical, which is, let's just say
it's a personal vibe check. Well, say you've been in the game 10:12, fifteen, twenty
years, you essentially have a certain amount of rigor around the people you associate
yourself with, both in terms of their kind of personality, but also
their rigor with which they employ kind of business practices. And so when I say vibe check, it's just a fun way of saying, does this person kind of
cross the floor of what your expectation of your inner circle would be on a personal
level in terms of business, or are they kind of outer
circle people? In terms of businesses, ecommerce is also especially interesting
across this because how much of an insular community even at the really scaled
enterprise levels it is. People are always watching what everyone is doing and
trying to get an edge or learn something new that they can take back home. So if it's them watching
rising seven figure brands and their nine figure, ten figure brand, they're they're trying to figure out what everyone is
doing. And so as one of their partners in growth across all of these
companies, you're essentially trying to say, hey. Look. We are absolutely
fantastic at what we do, I e, what our software provides, but we also make it delightful to spend
time with us providing said software to your company, whether you have some sort of
issue or you're trying to become part of kind of our marketing, you know, like, part of our
marketing sphere where we push your personal brand, etcetera, you're not gonna have you're gonna have a delightful experience either
way. And so the vibe check goes on your personal side, but it also goes on the business
side. And, I don't know how many deals I have won that have been say, okay. Well, I mean, you
can speak to this. How much you how many years we've been in business together? And it's been, hey. Maybe this
platform isn't giving me all the value that I can extract from it from a dollar ROI, but because we have a great
personal relationship, I'm able to know that I can extract said value plus have you as an add
on bonus to the value that I'm receiving from the platform. So I think Yeah. It
sounds nontechnical, but it one hundred percent is. It's just predicated on you know, I wouldn't
twenty two year old me wouldn't be able to have as good of an answer to that. So I was like, oh, it's just my it's my homies. We
we do business together. Now it is, do we all seem like we're pointed in the right
direction together and we are willing to only provide value? Like, that is the floor Yeah.
Of the ability to pass the by. You're touching on all sorts of great important things
that I think are are real real valuable. You know, there's the
saying of, like, you're not gonna hire an individual unless you can, what is it, be
stuck in an airport with them or something like that. There's a lot of these barometer
gut checks, if you will. And I think as you get more mature in your
professional career and you get more comfortable with your own gut check and your
own gut level assessment of things, And, obviously, you're looking at data. You're looking performance. You're
looking at all sorts of metrics as we do in our industry. I think it just is a
good reminder that one's gut is a really important data point that
sometimes I think as you mature and improve in your judgment, in your career and
in your life, becomes an even more valuable measurement. I think that,
what you just said is probably the most important one, which is this ability to
listen to your gut matures as you mature. And so, you know, you heard that
don't overthink through kind of thing, and I have done it many times. And so there's this old saying that
I heard from a filmmaker back in the day. So I'm repeating what he said. So if anyone wants to cancel me, this is from
him. It's not from me. It says if nine Russians tell you to lie down, you lie down. And the idea
is, like, if you're if you have, like, this very visceral response to any sort of situation, whether
it's, like, situation you've been put in, one that you go into with the person in interaction,
and you have a very visceral response to it, you should probably listen to that because you will either regret it later
or you'll regret it in the moment because you did it or you'll pay the piper kind of down the road.
Like, generally, generally, because people say don't listen to your don't listen to your gut. I
think when it comes to people, always listen to your gut. When it comes to partnering
companies, always listen to your gut. If it's just you versus you, that's another conversation because that's a whole host of other
things that we're not gonna deal with on your own personal psychology. But when it comes to kind of this
outward, the different spheres of influence that are kind of trying to attack the
inner castle, those things, I think, you can listen to your gut a little bit more. Inner castle, you
versus you, that's the whole, you know, talk to your therapist. That's that's not for us here. Yeah. We can provide
some recommendations for, pros, but we're not gonna dispense, legal,
tax, or psychological advice on today's Yeah. This is not therapeutic advice.
Maybe jumping to a more tangible topic Yeah. Perhaps. What would
you describe in a very simple terms? Like, you've really operated at a very high level in
driving marketing for b to b SaaS brands in the last last two roles with Pencil and
now with Heatmap. Can you distill it down into the really core of what
you what you do in your current role and your in your previous role? Yeah. So,
there's a lot of the whole technical. We drive leads. We do this. We do that. So the best way
I heard someone say they said it to me recently is they think of b two
b marketing as surround sound marketing, I e, you have to be
ubiquitous and ever present in everyone's minds.
And the idea is they won't be in funnel yet,
but the minute they are, you're the first person they speak to. And
so how do you do this? Well, there are multiple channels across organic that you can interact
with. There are multiple ways across paid that you can essentially kind of blend the numbers,
and there are multiple ways through product growth that you can do these things. And so my
job essentially is to look at kind of the different tranches of interactions with
people and understand where we can hit them that's gonna have the highest impact for today and the
future. And so, like, a a way I look at it is I've been working on this. This is early
stage. It's the first time I'm talking about this out loud. I've been working on this framework called, like, reasons to contact or or
RTC. And the idea is, like, what what spheres do people sit in that
allow you to contact them? And so it's like, there's your product, there's your organic marketing, there's your paid. And
people say that might be a little too, a little too simplistic in terms of the different spheres.
The way I look at it though is it's my job to understand the spheres, understand the
impact of all of the different the different activities we can do under those spheres and kind of benchmark
it against what we're trying to hit downstream and then take a couple big bets every
time we kind of go into that and have and have the vision for those
specific things. So TLDR. I like the surround sound. Yeah. TLDR.
You wanna essentially be ever present and ubiquitous in people's lives and have a kind of a
surround sound marketing approach. And it's my job to make those things happen, and there's gonna be
some really tactical stuff we can do. And then there's gonna be some stuff where you brute force it around some organic
things that aren't, quote, unquote, scalable, but will have a lot of impact, especially when you're starting out. So
Love it. There's some you you know, you listen to other podcasts, and we'll give you very, very, like, you do this, you do this, you do this. I think
Sure. That is so company and category dependent
that it's unfair to paint with such a wide brush. What I will say is you just wanna be on top of people's
mind. That's it. Yeah. So how do you do that? I like that. The surround sound
is a nice, I think, succinct understanding. And I I also wanna tip the
cap to you because I feel like with your work in your last, you
know, in your last few years, you have really, I think, cemented yourself
as a really trusted voice. You have you have shown just
awesome support, integrity, empathy,
marketing knowledge to the DTC Twitter community, to the
SaaS b2b knowledge community in terms of how you market, how do you go to
market, how do you think about growth, how do you how do you take action, You
kind of combine a lot of that into a pretty awesome like,
we joke and have sports analogies about Giants versus Padres, but you're kind of like a a good
athlete and a good player on the field and a good teammate, and I wanna wanna commend that. Oh, thanks, man. Thank
you. I appreciate that. Coming from you, it means, it means the world. I think the only thing we can
do is try our best to such a cliche analogy, but it's like Sure. At the
end of the day, the business is the business. You don't leave with
that scorecard. You leave it like, did I leave it all out on the field today? And
so forgive all the cringe, sports analogies Ty and I are gonna make. We're we're still in
the early innings. We're in the early innings of the podcast. Yeah. Grab grab a seat. Grab a
water. Corn. Yeah. Yeah. Grab a Bud Light. Maybe we'll have a seventh inning stretch. Sorry, guys. It's
just dad jokes all around here. Yeah. It's gonna inter
interweave sports, salary cap, free agency, performance marketing,
Twitter. It's gonna get it's gonna get weird. You name it, it's gonna yeah. Absolutely. Totally
weird. Well, probably People can only see our text message. Like, talk. Yeah. Yeah. We hopefully, those
don't don't get leaked. Yeah. I don't have to show a lot of data. I,
will spare you the Napoleon talk. We'll we'll see maybe maybe for another episode. There's
so much to talk about. And then, obviously, we'll get into some good stuff, not just
for our own amusement. I wanna come back to the front row, back row concept because I I think
it's interesting in terms of, like, people you associate yourself with. So maybe we'll put a pin in that
one. Sure. You dropped a a really good one on kind of what you do. Maybe
we talk a lot about learnings, you know, career, individual experiment learnings, life learnings.
Yep. As you kind of made this kind of progression from
running paid marketing in a consumer brand to really, like, building a
SaaS brand for what used to be the the consumer and the
the the d to c e com brand, and now doing
it, in spades for Heatmap. Can you discuss a little bit what that was like
for you? How did you navigate that transition? What do you maybe some of the
learnings you you gathered through that process? It's really easy to look back and connect all the
dots and say that, you know, this this map was incredibly linear, and it let it was always leading
here and all of these things. I think the the real truth of the matter is when you look back, it's
all kind of atoms exploding across the universe and, like, you just hit on something. You're like, oh, shit. I'm gonna double
down on said thing. I just worked really hard.
That sounds crazy. And I am a, I'm a learning machine.
And so if I you ask my wife, she literally hates it. If I don't, if I'm not
spending time with her or the kids, and sometimes when I am, I have an AirPod in and I'm listening to a
book or a podcast. If I'm not watching something with her or talking to her, I have my nose
in a book or I'm reading some sort of blog post. And the idea is
I have always felt, like, not the smartest person in the room, and I used to think that was a
detriment. Now I know it's a huge, huge benefit to me because it means I'm willing to work
harder than almost anybody. And so most people and it's
it gets cliche, work the hardest in the room. It really just comes down to the old Elon Musk. If I work
twelve hours in every a day and everyone else works eight hours a day, I'm getting however many
percent what what is that? Like, I'm getting fifty percent more work done every single day. So for every two days they work, I
work three. For every four days they work, I work what is that? I work five or six. And so
the idea is, like, well, if you're a learning machine plus you're willing to do more, what does that make
you, and what how does that compound over time? And so I always come back to the thing I tell myself all the time,
and maybe this is just me saying it to myself so I feel good about it. But Ben Franklin said,
compound interest is the eighth wonder of the world, or I'm paraphrasing a little bit. But this goes for anything that you're
essentially allowing to compound in the positive and the negative. So that's my macro
rant. In terms of tactically, what I did is I looked at the people
that I really respected, and then I looked at the people that they really respected. And I went and
figured out what where they went for their knowledge. And so one of the things you and I have
bonded on a lot is Reforge. And so Reforge was an incredible two things. It it it really helped
me have a base floor understanding of all of the component pieces.
What these companies have allowed me to do is have a playground with which to experiment through
all of the different learnings and figure out my version of them. Right? Like, frameworks are just a jumping off
point for all the things you figure out as you build and what becomes unique to you.
So I I frequently come back to those things to kind of reassess how I'm looking at things. You know, they
built an amazing product called Artifacts where it's a fun thing to go and look at other people's the way they look at things.
And the the funny thing is if you look at every single one, the heart of everything is kind of the same, but the way they do it is
different. And so you can kind of go and say, okay. I'm gonna Frankenstein all this shit and put it together. I think the
other big one is how have you done this? Well, I have a a
framework that I go with any job or advising or anything, which is, does
the problem excite me, and do the people challenge me?
And so the problem excited me. Yeah. There are a lot of exciting problems that you can
solve. But, like, do you think about it before you go to bed? Do you think about it when you wake up?
Are the people there make you feel like, oh, man, I've gotta really up my game because I'm not
even close to their level, and I don't think I will be for a long time. And so
those two things that requires a huge amount of humble pie to say, I know I'm
great, and I wanna be around people who make me feel like shit. Because it's people just wanna
feel good all the time. Right? It's it's a pretty natural state of being. So it's a very nontechnical answer
I just gave you, but, essentially, the the kind of the core thread of what I have said
is be a learning machine, understand who your influences are and
then what their influences are and go study their influences to figure out those things, and just rigorously
test every single thing that you can. I'm not a numbers person by trade. I've
turned I've become one. And really where I find my,
and I can I'm sure former bosses could tell you I'm not a numbers person by trade. What I have
learned is I find a lot of truth in numbers that then I can go and, dance with.
On the other side, which comes more natural to me, which is branding or all all these other things that that is the
world I came from and speak more naturally to my personality Yeah. What I value. And so I think
you just gotta figure out what's the language that everyone speaks, learn how to speak it very proficiently, and then layer on
what's magic about you. Love it. There's you folks that know us both are you know, who
are listening are probably thinking like, yeah. I could see
why these guys are clicking because, like, the the work ethic, the the
lifelong learning and be a learning machine aspect, the love for,
Charlie Munger and and, you know, history. Like, there's I know that these are maybe cheesy to or bro y to folks, but I think they're
real and genuine and come from a good place. And and it's it's good for
good for a lot of folks, and it it fuels us. So it's impressive to hear, and it's appreciated that you're sharing
that. Hundred percent. No. Thank you. Yeah. The what's your favorite do you have a
referred framework that kinda maybe jumps out at you that you wanna share with the the
group or one that just is, like, what's on your greatest hit list there? It's not framework
within. It's it's an article written, by Michael Taylor and Yousef Baidji.
It's about word-of-mouth coefficient, and how to measure, like, k factor and
virality. So as a SaaS company, my and it sounds crazy because a lot of people, I
think, will disagree with me, but my my god metric is can I build something with a really
powerful k factor? Because that means that I built something that has impact for customers and
that they're willing to share, which brings down my CAC. And so the same way
people are trying to find amazing ad hooks and and better, landing pages and and
websites through the software that I've provided, I similarly wanna provide something that makes them
wanna say, oh, fuck. Let me tell my friends about this or community that I'm in
or get all of my teammates on here so that, essentially, our retention gets better and then they
have the ability to tell their friends and, you know, teammates and and communities about it. And
so that's probably the biggest one. It had a really huge impact on me. I I was very lucky at that time
as a fledgling b to b marketer to just because,
again, lifelong learner, people start talking about stuff in communities. Like, I'll help. You know, I'll just whatever.
Let me be a fly on the wall. And so when they were concepting that entire framework and structure, I was in, like, a
Slack chat with them somehow. And I've I've come to become, buddies with both of them,
and it was a real it made a really indelible impact on me looking at
the the data behind what they were talking about. And so that's probably the one that has the
biggest impact biggest impact on me. I think the other one is just a standard growth loop. Like, how do
you actually build something that has continuous inputs out of outputs? I think,
like, you can sit here and say, oh, there's all these other big, really, like, more
intense detailed bills on top of that. But it's the same thing as any sort
of meat and potatoes type sports analogy you wanna make. To have a good passing game,
you gotta run the ball well. To be able to score runs, you gotta hit singles and doubles
and move runners move runners across. And similarly, to build all these other advanced frameworks,
you have to have a naturally occurring growth loop or one that you know that you can spend in
some sort of meaningful way once you get customers into your into your product. And so
just constantly thinking about that because all the other things are just icing on top of that cake, to be honest with you.
Yeah. I think that the the loops emphasized by Reforge were so
foundational. I think there was a lot of other kind of, like, you know, common language, you know, intelligent
thinking and systems thinking that I think was not necessarily revolutionary,
but I think it gave a lot of people a chance to kind of build upon it, prove it. There's a lot of,
like, specific wins and learnings that I think people gain, and it kind of allowed it to build
on on top of itself. So it's been it's been pretty awesome part of with you and
with others and love to hear your thoughts on it. What a good example. You talked a little bit
about being a learning machine. Can you maybe give the audience a little you've given me
personally Yeah. Some great book recommendations over the years, and I think we're,
like, sharing books, like, just minutes before this call hit Yeah. Hit record.
Is there one in particular or a couple that maybe you wanna share with the audience? I'll give a
couple that have really impacted my thinking recently. I just finished listening to Only the
Paranoid Survive, which is a quick Andy Grove book that I think, he wrote it twenty
five, thirty years ago. And some of the stuff is really funny because how salient it was
back then and how essentially all of his predictions came true. But at the core of that book, it is, like,
very, very impactful. What are ten x factors that are gonna change your business in some way? And so it's, like, always trying to
look over your shoulder to say, is there something coming that I can use? Is there something coming that's trying to kill me? What
do I do? Another one is seven power laws. So you can see kind of there's a string here going along
between those two things, which really, really helpful in terms of thinking, like, what actually makes
you the possibility to make an enduring, durable business. I'm reading one right now
that I've been finding really fascinating and good called trillion dollar coach about old
Intuit CEO, Bill Campbell, that, I don't know, speaks to my soul because it's about coaching and
he was a football coach and then became a a tech CEO. So those three
have been really, really fascinating. I'm I'm reading a book called The Beautiful
and the Vile, and it's about, Churchill in the first year of the blitz.
And so that's been that's been fun. I've been I've been a little slow on that one, to be honest
with you. And then I'm reading an I'm reading a thing called the daily dad,
which is essentially a build on the daily stoic by Ryan Holiday. And so it's
essentially about, like, what should you think about on a daily basis. And it's really funny. Not not every day
reframes your thinking, but every once in a while. And it's such a funny, like, if I hadn't read it, I
wouldn't have thought this way. It's just one page a day, but there's these days you just need it.
It's weird how, like, the page, you know, the the teacher arrives or the master arrives when the student is
ready. It's like that page arrives when when I'm ready to, to accept it. So those
are some of them, but I would say the like, if I had to in terms of just books, it
really indexes on business history and philosophy. Like, those are the three things
that I spend, most of my time reading about. And then on blogs,
it's really just, like, all growth marketing related. Love
it. There's so much good stuff in there and a lot for people to dive
into. Yeah. I'm I'm a huge I'm a huge fan. More more to share.
Yeah. More to add to the RBL reading list, my reading list, all good stuff. Hundred
percent. You know, you obviously spent a lot of time with ads, you
know, running ads in in in house, talking agencies like
ours, just going so deep with the Pencil experience and
building that out, improving. What are your thoughts on kind of, like, the AI ad
ecosystem for those interested in it? There's a lot to unpack there, but I'm curious to
know maybe what what are people maybe missing that they could should know about
AI applied to paid ads? I'll give a more macro view on AI and
then dive into ads. And so I think if you don't understand where or what
you're trying to do and accomplish, like, an AI is not a good partner in
crime. If you have a very, very direct focused
output that you're looking for and you can give it a very rigorous input, you'll be able to
have a really good outcome. And so what does that mean? It means shit in, shit out, gold in, gold
out, just more gold faster. And so I think the the way
that this whole thing has been positioned is, oh my god. AI is the most incredible thing ever. And when you really
see people getting massive impact out of it, it is, oh, they're
like, people are not prompt engineers. Right? This is on their LinkedIn. And so people have an amazing prompt that they can
get chat GBT or Bard or something else something else like that, one of the other LLMs. They have the whole
Midjourney community. It's like, okay. They have classes about doing good prompts in Midjourney now
on Maven, and they're great classes. I have friends who have taken them. They have an an amazing time. And so
the idea is when I first started, it was just this expectation that there was
magic. And I still think there is a huge expectation of magic from
the audience writ large. I think what builders are starting to learn is, like, how to
frame that by forcing people into something, but giving them an easy
on ramp to that. So I'm using something called, called Cast Magic right now, which you should check
out. It's by the guys who started Trend, IO, which got bought by Suna.
And they built this thing. So you just upload your it's similar. It's kind of Riverside, which
we're using right now, has similar kind of stuff where, like, Riverside now, for instance, will get it
has AI built into it. So it builds these show notes for you right away. Right? And it logs time
stamps, etcetera. Oh my god. Like, that is huge value. Before I had to
go through it, I had to have a VA do it. It's like it was just a horrible fucking experience.
Now it's done. Okay. You wanna make some AI clips, so there's Opus or which has gotten quite good,
or you can do it in Riverside, which is getting better and better. Are the clips perfect? No. But it cuts
something that's eighty percent of the way there and they've made it really easy to do that. So it's an on ramp to getting something
faster. But if I expected it to cut something perfectly and I expected the description
that I wrote for me to be perfect, I would always be angry. But if I understand, like, look, I'm just getting eighty
percent of the way there, that cuts out if I was gonna work on something for an hour, now I gotta work on it
for twelve minutes. Like, that is a fantastic outcome for me in my life. And so
with ads specifically, if you're trying to make a video ad, there are a lot of
inputs you need to you need to make it work. There are a lot of
preconceived notions about the ad creative that come in with years of building said ads for your company.
What I would say is understand what the AI can do for you and don't get
frustrated that it didn't do the thing that's in your head. The point of it is to get you closer
to the end of the experience than you would have been if you had not done it at
all and be able to scale that to, say, 10:20, thirty different outputs that
you wouldn't have had. I also think a lot of small companies are looking for a
silver bullet, and there's no silver bullet other than
testing and having a good product. And, like, that that is not what people
wanna hear, but it this is just eating your Wheaties. Right? Have a good product. Have a good
value proposition. Have a good funnel. Stop fucking around with hacks. Like, they they never
actually work Yeah. Term unless you want to just make a quick buck, which is, by the way, totally
fine. Again, everyone has done it a little bit here and there. But you're trying to build something build,
enduring and durable. The basics will always apply. AI is just an
accelerant to those things. It may be a good segue of when you say
enduring, durable. Yeah. We talk about long term things, like, not to get
too philosophical, but what are you what kind of has your eye on the horizon ahead
for Chase? Like, what does what does the future hold for you that you can share
with the audience in terms of what you're aiming for and what you're striving for? Yeah. I mean, I
think we're just trying to build a heat map into the, into the best CRO
software the world has ever seen. That sounds like really lofty. I can't I think the thing
we talk about internally is can we help every brand in the world that works
with us have a better outcome by simply using our software? And can we make it a
delightful experience along the way? Whether they're interacting with us through our content, whether they're interacting
which as most people know, making more money is generally not a delightful experience. It's a very difficult experience.
So our job is to make that easier and faster for people. That's awesome. What's top of
mind for that? Essentially, it's like building an incredible go to market engine that,
has has an incredible, virality coefficient. And I think my
business mission in life is to just help entrepreneurs have an easier time. And so it's just really trying to
unlock that through building useful companies. So Heatmap dot com is top of
mind on doing that right now, but also just helping any friends that I have that are
doing the same thing. Make sure that, you know, just asking them questions that might help them do that in a
in a make it easier for them or maybe it's been harder for me. That's awesome. I love that.
Yeah. Are there particular things as you think about building Heatmap to
what the goal is? And it's it sounds like it's it's super exciting. What are some of the things you're kinda
like, okay, I'm hoping to kinda line out the following this coming
year? What are you looking forward to maybe in twenty twenty four as it relates to heat map? It's a
good question. We've been doing some, our annual planning, looking at kind of our revenue
projections, what we need to do. And so I always laugh at revenue projections because essentially, like,
between current revenue projection and next revenue projection is a lot of human
things that need to be done. But it's like, here's a number figured out. And that's not a bad thing, by the way.
That's more of a, like, this is a good thing. And so I was talking to a friend of mine who's CEO at a pretty a
CMO at a pretty big company. He says, look. This whole annual planning thing is like a dance. And so
here's my version of it. It's like a the way I heard it in my head was like, it's a dance during,
West Side Story where it's essentially like the two warring factions going back and forth.
Like, here's my version. Here's my version. Obviously, it doesn't have adversarial. But
Sure. What do I wanna accomplish this year for us? Obviously, there are certain numbers that I I can't
share that I wanna hit. Yeah. What I do wanna do is essentially build this whole
surround sound marketing engine so that we become
the predominant ecommerce solution for
for heat mapping and CRO software. And so lofty vision
but whenever we get inside of a, or we get attached to a website,
within a week, we can give them stuff that's gonna, like, double their conversion rate. And
so my whole thing is, who is stupid enough not to wanna do that?
Yeah. If they're there, then I have not done my job at making it feel so easy that they
can do that. And so it's just building out the channels that essentially allow people to
allow people to have a really easy I keep saying on ramps, but I really mean it. Like, a really easy on ramp
into the, into the business. Yeah. I do all the product stuff we work on and all the,
all of the tactical things, but on a macro level, I just wanna make it super easy
for businesses to feel like they have their business and their analytics
are in good hands so that they can make really, really impactful decisions that drive, you know, drive
business results. Love it. I love that. And I think you have I've been impressed at
your ability to go go in deep with rigor,
get nerdy, and go through get your hands dirty with conversations,
execution, data, knowing a lot of the levers that can
be pulled and and suggesting, recommending helpful ways for people to pull those
levers. But I also commend you for there's
a ability to distill down the message to people in a simple way
that cuts through the noise and really, I think, helps people digest,
helps people make buying decisions. It's yeah, I just wanna give you props for that
from my observation. Thanks, man. I think it's, it's just about spending time with
customers. Like, by the way, that's not just everyone's like, go interview your customers. I don't mean that. I mean, like, watch
user sessions, have surveys, talk to them through, you know, Slack. You have
that as as a part of it. Talk to them through social. Whatever ways you can get feedback
and understand what's going on in the market at large, but also what's going on individually with
your customers. Because Yeah. Really a lot of times what companies do is they say, like, oh, okay. Well, this is
this is happening in the market or, you know, my customers are churning. It's like, well, have you what if
companies shut down? Like, Smile Direct Club just officially shuttered. What if they're one of your clients? You're like, oh my
god. We lost an enterprise clients. Like, no. They went fucking bankrupt. Like, that's actually what happened.
Had nothing to do with you. You don't know that, unless you're reading the trades. And, I mean, who if you don't know
that, you're not really reading or paying attention, but you kinda get what I'm saying is there's a lot of different
headwinds and things that are going on internally at companies that, you know, dashboards don't show you Yep.
At going to an event or talking to someone that you won't get unless you really have a pulse on
what's going on. And so you say like, okay. That's not that's not scalable. We have
x amount of customers. Okay. We have a team. You can train your team to have a
pulse as well on everything that's going on. If you can build an army of people that
are keeping a check on it and maybe they only do it, you know, thirty percent as well as you, but you
have five people. That's one and a half versions of you out there in the world. I
think it is understanding that, you know, you wanna be same thing. We're talking about being a learning machine.
You wanna be kind of built a customer centric engine within your business. And this comes
top down, by the way. Like, you really have to say, okay. The top level people have to care about their customers at a really
deep level. So anyway, that is, that's that's what I think. I love
it. I was gonna kinda segue into the customer asking of questions and
learning about their challenges and pain point and journey and all that fun stuff. Yeah. Can
you share some, maybe, examples through your understanding of the Heatmap
customer or perhaps, you know, previous roles? Like, I'd love to learn a couple
examples that really just jumped off the page for you either in a Zoom call or
in a, you know, Loom or or looking at user testing dot com. Like,
what's what's a customer experience that really, like, hit you hard that made
them you know, that really kind of was an moment for you with heat map or with other
experiences? I'll use a data centric example
from Pencil where we were looking at our, I would look at our our daily dashboards and
weekly dashboards, monthly dashboards to see you're like, okay. Is this a trying to figure this out. Is this a weekly,
monthly, daily kind of active usage platform? We don't know because we're, you know, we're building in the dark
because we're this is not 05:10 years worth of data. We're we're building all of the,
data runway that we have. So what we found was, okay, we're watching
exports. This is kind of the kind of key metric that we have. How many people have exported on a weekly
basis? What we found was if we can get someone into
a bimonthly so we wanted weekly, but just bimonthly cadence of
exporting their LTV, like, doubled. So, like, okay. Let's go talk to people
now and understand. Alright. This is a data insight here. Let's go we have a quantitative piece of feedback. Let's go get some
qualitative feedback. So if anyone's tried to do this, it's very hard to get customers on the phone because no one wants to
talk to you because they have hard things going on in their lives. What I had been doing on the back end is a lot of these
people we had closer relationship with. So you're cultivating them through Slack, you know, text, whatever.
And, essentially, like, this sounds very pointed, but you wanna just give as much
value away as you can. So, like, hey. I thought about this for you. I thought about this for you. And I really do mean it when I do
it, but you can look at it and say, like, okay. There is a business imperative around it as well
so that when you go bake the ask, people are willing to say, like, an hour? Fuck it. Let's spend three hours together. I'll show you
everything. And I can't tell you the amount of times that I've had people be willing to lift the veil
on their business, what's going on. In a really surprising degree, when you start asking
questions, you say, look. Our goal in doing this is say, like, we understand that we get the benefit of
you exporting because you stay around longer. But how can we make it even more delightful either so
that you wanna do it once a week or that even they're doing it twice a week, you do it at a higher
scale and you tell your friends about it. And so then you start saying, okay. Well, this is this. This
is this. These these three things are incredible, but these four things kind of add
friction. Alright. Let's go now let's go to the product and, hey. I've had these conversations. It's from this
cohort. These are the most valuable people. Let's go and look at how we have
designed this engine. Okay. What are the things that I can do right now that are kind of duct
tape that are duct tape versions of this? What are the things that are gonna take a long time? Anyone has built any sort
of product. You understand implementing product changes always two to
three times as long as it is scoped to be. Oh, it's gonna be two weeks, four weeks guaranteed.
Right? And that's if that is a main focus. If it is something kind of middle road map or you have something else
that you're shipping, six weeks, eight weeks, these kind of things change, so you have to find a new way. So,
like, there are there are things for onboarding, for instance. You know, you can build
the Notion workspaces. You can go, there's a company, called Ever After, which Ever After AI,
which you can build kind of no code onboardings. You can use intercom. Some of these other intermediaries
that aren't owned solutions, and they aren't final solutions, but there are things you can
do in the interim to get to forty, fifty,
sixty percent of the answer. They won't feel good. You won't say they're not branded well enough, all of
these things, but they at least are helping the cuss you get your customers into a
world that you want them to live in. So the way I always look at it is, you know, New York used to be just New
York City was this island with a bunch of trees. I read this book called the City at the Center of the Earth or
something, and it's about founding of New York. And it's like, oh, it just used to be this
little outpost that was covered in covered in trees. Would you believe that there was only
trees on Manhattan Island four hundred years ago? Absolutely not. But, like, they went
and built a city, then they went and built some streets, then they went and built this and this and this and this. And
so a place that was just trees now is a a metropolis, an urban metropolis that is
made of concrete. And the same thing goes for same thing goes for products. So that's a
very, I don't wanna say linear, but like a a TLDR version of something that happened over the course of, like,
two and a half, three months that had a a huge impact on the company.
But it all comes down to grounding yourselves in either some sort of quantitative or qualitative feedback from
your customers, understanding what their wants versus their needs are.
And, essentially, this is how I look at it. Build what they need, but couch it in what they
want so that they feel like they made the decision to get you this thing and it feels really
good to them, but they're actually doing the thing that you know they need more. And so,
again, very nebulous answer there. That's gonna mean something for everybody,
but let's just say, you know No. We're trying to make this podcast. What do we want to do? Well,
we want just two friends want to share. What do we need to do? Well, we need to share very deep learning so that someone else
who's listening gets something out of it and learn something or passes it along so that the next person who's
having this problem doesn't have to have the same problems. Right? That's for me my want versus my need. Right? Same
it's all it's all kind of work from there. You just you just dropped, quite a lot of
knowledge of what you learned through the test. So Yeah. You know, honoring the the namesake of the pod, and,
I I love it. Yeah. Absolutely. What gets you most fired up about twenty twenty four as
we approach the the new year? I mean, you know me, man. I'm like perpetual fired
up. I think, if just speaking towards
heat map dot com, it's really the early innings of that game. And I think, Yeah. The
more I spend time with companies understanding their needs, I still
think people are very not undereducated, just, like, unenlightened about
what CRO does for businesses Mhmm. And what the actual impact
is over time. So I think when people think about ads or they think about optimizing, you know,
their shopping cart, it's like automatic. We get money, and they
don't think about what happens, you know, upstream, downstream to their customers, to their like, the size of their funnel,
all of these things. It's like, well, I'm gonna get better customers today. Okay. What happens when the
river runs dry and there are no more trout? Right? Because you overfished. Or you put a dam on it, and you're
like, oh, go. Only need this amount of, only this amount of, a fish.
So Mhmm. What does a website do? It is the conduit from your traffic to
your money. And so what I wanna do is help people understand as much as
possible how much they need that that bridge to actually lead them to
the promised land. It's a ridiculous thing to say. But, like, revenue land, is probably profit land is a
better way to say it. So we oh, and that should be our conference. True. Profit land. I like that.
So that's really I I'm very excited about being able to educate and enlighten, as many
people as possible on the the impact CRO has on their business. And they wanna use heatmap
dot com. I'm I'm not angry about it. But on a macro level, just make sure people are not
leaving their website behind because far too many people do. Yeah. One
hundred percent. I could not agree more. I love that. Do you have any, any any predictions
for twenty twenty four? It can be bold and crazy if you'd like, and there's no wrong answer. I think we'll
see the investment market swing back a little bit, not twenty twenty, twenty
twenty one levels by any means, but kind of this valley we've seen in twenty back half of twenty twenty
two and twenty twenty three. Interesting signals I've been I've been seeing and and talking to investors,
etcetera. So we'll see. Maybe I'll you know, six months, you'll be like, you fucking moron.
I think the other one is companies like, everyone
swings very quickly between pendulums. I I always say, like, look. I'm just a history guy. So I I
sit back and I say, like, okay. This is just a cycle. And so we spent a lot of money.
Now we're being really fiscally conservative. And then we spent a lot of money. Now we're being fiscally conservative. Then we spent a lot of money that we're being
fiscally conservative. And so we're in a fiscally conservative cycle right now.
I think the companies that got early, that were early on being fiscally conservative
are gonna start spending again because there's there's opportunity to to win because
people are saying, okay. I wanna push towards profitability. I'm trying to watch these numbers, and there's just, for
instance, ad inventory or other things that it's gonna exist at a more efficient cost
than it did before. One thing that I am, I'm always very
bearish on in the long term is every time anyone talks about a channel,
they're like, it's crushing. And nine months later, they're like, oh, it's not that great anymore.
And it's like, okay. You have first mover advantage. Yeah. It's it's just arbitrage. And so right now,
one thing and I don't know when this is gonna come out, but everyone is talking about TikTok shops. And it's like, alright, dude.
Cool, man. This is just another placement on channels. Instagram stories used
to quote, unquote slap before it got saturated. Oh, okay. We're
gonna like, every single one becomes just another placement.
And so what I'm bearish on in the in the extreme
is anyone saying that any placement is a panacea for their business.
Just being good at what you do is a panacea. There's no other
there's no other silver bullet. There's nothing else that is going to actually save you or your business than
being really good at all the fundamentals. Everything else is just an accelerant that
will eventually die down. So for instance and this is a throwback, Ty. Maybe the
kids listening to this won't remember, but fast and the furious one. You hit the NAS to have a ten
second car. Right? Well, you hit the NAS. Okay. You get that ten second car, and then the
NAS is gone. And so all these channels are just NAS or gasoline, but the fire eventually
needs kindling, and that is being great at the basics. And so I would
just call out everyone, be great at the basics, use the accelerants, understand what they can and can't
do for you, but don't fall prey to hyperbole. Like, it's just Yeah.
Doesn't it doesn't help anybody, like, say, hey. This is a great channel for me. You should test
it. I don't know how long it's gonna be like this. Okay. Easy money. Yeah. Absolutely
can do that. That is a great, great callout. But business fundamental, companies that have done well
for a hundred years, they spent less money than they make, and they make
exceptional products, and they take care of their customers. Pretty simple. Yeah.
Back to our friend, Munger and Buffett and, you know, kinda
calling out that that law of shitty click click throughs concept. It's Mhmm. These things rise
and fall. You have to have that long term view and be ready for when
they do come back around. Hundred percent. I think I'll post a hot take on Twitter saying that,
anyone who says any sort of channel or placement is, gonna save their business like TikTok
shops is, an asshat. Let's see how that goes. Yeah. I think that'll that'll
play well Yeah. With, you know, the Twitter community. Valid. Yeah. We're definitely gonna have a lot of churn on
heatmap dot com after that that tweet. Let's keep the conversation
going. Yeah. I love it. Who inspires you? I'm gonna have some cheesy ones and then some good
ones. Yeah. All of the above. My wife inspires me a lot because of kind of, like, endless
compassion and willingness to keep going, like, when things are tough. I mean, I think anyone who
Love it. Is married and has kids will pretty much say the same thing as, like, dude, my wife
is way cooler and better than me. You should be pumping punching above your weight class, by the way.
Wise words. Yeah. See, my parents, a lot of things they've done, and gone through. My dad's an
immigrant, so just seeing stuff him and my mom went through to build our lives, like, endlessly grateful
and just kind of, like, a endless reservoir of, you know, get up off the mat from watching
them. Yeah. And then, like, through history, I think there's a few different people who kind
of will endlessly inspire you. One of them for me and people might disagree with this one, but just watching
someone, you've heard me say this a thousand times, so forgive me. But Mhmm. There's a few people who
have had impact on history, have not as much impact on
history as people like Napoleon Bonaparte. So I think coming from very humble beginnings and being
able to essentially rule all of all of Europe is a really
incredible story. I think also apocryphal in that if you become too big for your
britches, as my grandfather would say, no matter how much you think you're in power, it's pretty
fragile. And so Yeah. Over the last few years, how many people have we seen
that thought that they were invincible and because of some mistakes that they made that were
heinous at hell because they thought they were invincible. You know? They lost all they
lost everything. Now they hurt people along the way, so fuck them, obviously. But I
think my kind of big one is every time you read these stories that are histories,
it's stay humble and stay hungry. It's kind of a thing my brothers and I say to each other all the
time. So stay humble. Don't get too big for your britches. Stay hungry. Like, you gotta
keep going. You know? Like, a shark never stops swimming and looking for food. Mhmm. Like,
you gotta keep just swimming and looking for food, and then you'll be this dense
muscular thing that's a machine. And, it's a very visceral kind of
example because, like, over the sharks are kinda killing machines. But if you look at it like learning, growing, all of
those other things Yeah. That's what they're doing. They're essentially trying to stay alive by kinda keep swimming
forward and growing, and they grow by obviously eating other fish.
But that's kind of the entire point of life in my opinion is you keep moving forward and you keep growing as much as you
possibly can. Obviously, financial outcomes are just an outgrowth,
that growth if you're pointed in the direction of commerce. I love it. Yeah. If you were a teacher or
something else, you would just be writing papers and helping students and all of those things, same same concept.
We're just pointed in the direction of dollars. You know? Yeah. Just so happens. Yeah. Things
things change and ebb and flow. And I think it's that constant search and
quest for improvement and learning and betterment of yourself and your family
and others and your clients and teammates. And that's that's kind of what we're essentially
doing, and love that answer. Hundred percent. And if you grow and
get strong enough, eventually, you can become the forty niners. You know? That that's
that could happen too. Ninety five, man. Never forgive you. Never forgive you.
The charger niner rivalry, the padre giants rivalry. What rivalry? We suck.
Like, the chargers suck. I was like, maybe a little more with the Giants and the and the Padres
over over the last thirty years, but Chargers and Niners, it's a tale of
people who couldn't win and people who could win. So it's not no rivalry. It's just jealousy.
I appreciate the honesty. You know? And, hey, live to fight live to fight slash
play another day. Right? Yeah. Fingers crossed, man. It's a good one to end on right there. Yes, sir. While
I'm ahead. Yeah. Hundred percent. Well, I appreciate you, man. This was this was lovely. Thank you for the amazing questions. Chase,
you're you're so well respected within a number of communities. There's been
awesome awesome life and work lessons dropped. Thank you for
those that wanna learn more about you that don't know about Chase Mosseini. Where can we find
you? LinkedIn, you can find me there. Twitter, I'm my handle is I'm
Chase Mosseini. And if you know You are. Yeah. I that's that's what it is. And if you know how
small companies work, you probably can figure out my email address. Heatmap dot com is our URL,
so you might be able to figure it out. Challenge accepted. Yes. I'm excited to
see what you guys are building, in particular as an agency. We're gonna be plugging in and going
ham on the product and helping our clients improve all the things and pages
and conversions. And I'm excited to see what you guys are building. There's a lot of exciting things
happening with heat maps. So congrats to you and the team, and I'm sure you'll
be it'll be dropping updates for us all as we follow along and and and
work with you on it. Feel sad for everyone who's gonna have to deal with my tweet storm. So
enjoy, and, yeah, remember, everyone, always be testing with There it is.
Thank you. Thank you, guys. Bye. Bye.