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Demand-Geniuses is the podcast for revenue-focused B2B Marketers. We bring you the latest insights and expert tips, interviewing geniuses of the B2B Marketing world to bring you actionable advice that you can implement to accelerate growth and progress you career. The role of Marketing in B2B go-to-market strategy has changed drastically. It's more important to revenue generation than ever as buyer engagement becomes more digital. We equip you with the information you need to thrive in this new, revenue-critical role.
Tom Rudnai (00:00)
episode of Demand Geniuses. don't know why I always say another episode as if it's a hard slog that we're dragging you through. Welcome to another episode. I'm joined today, I'm going to introduce my guest straight away, Nathan Thompson. So Nathan is the Senior Director of Product Marketing and Content at Copy AI. First of all, hi Nathan.
Thank you for joining us. guess, first, before we get into it, and I want to hear all about the journey you've been on at Copy.ai, talk us through a little bit. What brought you up to this point?
Nathan Thompson (00:20)
Hey, Tom, thank you so much for having me.
Yeah, I started at a totally Vista, excuse not VC back to a totally bootstrapped startup had no money. And so I had to get really scrappy learned about organic marketing and SEO in particular, moved to a different OptinMonster, which is still bootstrapped, but had a lot more money, which was kind of cool. They were very profitable. So got to learn more about running that. And then went to an agency and did a bunch of stuff with companies with so much money that they were just throwing it left and right. It was wild to see.
Like blog posts for like $2,500. Maybe it worked, maybe it didn't. And people were just coughing that over. So I went from that world directly to copy AI where I was like, this is so inefficient. I think we could do it better. And for the past two and a half years, spent the time trying to make it better or what I call better, at least.
Tom Rudnai (01:14)
Nice, mean, copy AI must be a pretty wild journey, so I wanna hear about that.
Is there a step in your journey up to that point that you would say was the most formative in terms of your thinking and your progression and development?
Nathan Thompson (01:31)
Yes, it was at OptinMonster and it was with a woman, my manager there, and her name was Angie Meeker and she's awesome. She really got me thinking about systems. And so it's not just like if the goal is revenue from a blog post, it's not just like, let's write a blog post and see what happens. It's a process. And when you treat it like a process, even if the process isn't working, you're still learning something and you can look at each link along the way to figure out which is the weakest.
and build that process, so you never lose. As long as you're tracking and tweaking, you never lose. that was really her that instilled that in me. It's really cool.
Tom Rudnai (02:06)
That's funny. So yeah, cause I was having a little look through your LinkedIn just before
this, just to get a sense of kind of where interesting conversations might lie. And that was, that was like the overwhelming theme that I took from it was a strong belief in systems thinking, which is very much how I always look at content and marketing more broadly. I think moving away from campaigns and towards thinking of it as an engine is a really powerful thing. Like, I guess, what do you think is the key then to a great content system and how do you prevent it devolving?
over time into something that feels a little bit more checkboxy.
Nathan Thompson (02:44)
this is gonna sound so bad and I apologize. It really is the humans that you have on your team. It just is. Okay, well here's why. I think to me, it all comes down to strategy. Do you have a reason for making what you're making? I actually wrote about this yesterday or talked about it and it was like the difference between checkbox marketing and a content system both require.
Tom Rudnai (02:46)
come on.
Nathan Thompson (03:12)
checkbox like both need the same types of things. To me, the difference though is checkbox marketing is there's just no direction behind the chaos. It's like one little team is working to traffic. One other little team is kind of worried about pipeline. Then you have your sales team worried about hitting their quota. Everything's kind of disconnected. Whereas like with a system, okay, we're trying to get more traffic, but why we're trying to get traffic so that we can generate pipeline so that sales can have that. Well, okay, we're to make this piece of content. What
What is it even going to do for us if it works? What does that mean? And so like every piece of content in the system, you should be able to tell me what is the other person going to get out of it? What are we want from it? Because otherwise it's like, there's no plan behind that piece of content. Now you're just making a blog because you should or LinkedIn posts because you should. And for me, sadly, especially with AI, I see time and time again, people that kind of don't want AI to work. And so they give up quickly. They don't give it the chance to work or they don't give it enough context or enough.
feedback and so they just say meh. But really if you want AI to work or not work you're probably right and so I it was not popular as popular last year it's much more popular this year so people are I think are starting to hop on that train.
Tom Rudnai (04:21)
Yeah, I think it's funny because it's almost it's
counter to the promises of AI, but I think AI takes quite a lot of patience to use well. It's something I'm not very good. I wouldn't say it using AI. It's a lot of trial and error and a lot of like, it takes an indeterminate amount of time to achieve the output that you want. And I hate that. It goes against everything that like the way that my mind works. But it's how you have to think, right?
Nathan Thompson (04:46)
Yes.
In my view, absolutely. it's it's and look, I need to preface this with I was just the luckiest kid locked inside of the coolest candy store for two and a half years. Right. It was just like, hey, our leadership was very big in 2023, 2024. Just recklessly and inefficiently try to rebuild and break things and then track what you broke and rebuild it better. But they no one was looking over my shoulder. You use this many credits for this experiment. Use this many credits for this.
They just said, go experiment, have fun and break stuff. And I refuse to let that opportunity get lost on me. So I broke a lot of shit in 2024, like a lot of stuff. But then I rebuilt it way better. And it was through that annoying process of trial and error. And so I'm hopefully this year able to share it so people don't have to waste as much time and be the goal.
Tom Rudnai (05:38)
Nice. Well, before I want know what you broke and what you rebuild. But I'm also really
interested just in the experience of joining copy AI. I'm looking at their growth chart now 10 million users in four years. There's actually a very nice little, little tick up in June, 2023. So we're to call that the Nathan Thompson effect. think that was around when around when you joined, but it's the ultimate hockey stack. Right. And it is it's hyper growth in every sense of the word. Like what is it like joining a company like that? Cause it must be quite different to
Nathan Thompson (05:58)
that's nice.
Tom Rudnai (06:08)
but you come in to solve a problem, copy AI thinks we're going pretty well. It's like don't break this.
Nathan Thompson (06:18)
Yeah, I know, right? that's yeah, that's well, yeah. That was an interesting my experience coming on was very interesting. I worked for a manager, Zach Harris, SEO expert. You find him on LinkedIn. He's awesome. And he did great things with building out some free tools, which drove tons of traffic. And I came on actually as a freelancer. First, I'd started an agency, but then I fell so much in love with the product that I was like, you're going to pay me to work on this all day every day. Let's do that. So I hopped into there.
And it's been a wild ride. Honestly, the weirdest thing for me was watching the attitude shift from 2022 and 2024 to where it is right now. And I will say that has been the wildest part for me.
There were people who did not like things that I was posting about AI in 2024. AI can't do this, it can't do this. It's not, it's soulless, it's not creative, it's not whatever. But I was convinced in 2023 that it was going to be the future. Like if this thing can find cancer solutions or cancer medication, like breakthroughs, it can write your damn LinkedIn posts. It's not that stupid. It's pretty good. I was so sure of that.
I refused to be like brow beaten on my AI posting. So I did. Now the same people that were saying that AI is soulless, it's garbage, and then you're seeing posts on like, hey, buy my course on which LLM to use for the favorite thing. And they total 180 on it, which is fine. People are allowed to change their minds. But the wildest thing has been seeing how people change their minds, not because of the tech, but because of the culture. And I would just encourage people just play with it for yourself for a long time. And then.
let yourself be pleasantly surprised. It's awesome technology.
Tom Rudnai (07:58)
find that really interesting, people changing their minds
not because of the tech, but because of the culture. And it must be a really difficult thing to do. In a sense, copy AI is the easiest and best place for a content person to do content, right? But in a sense, it's the hardest because there's a lot of people that are very resistant to the change that you're helping to create. Like how much blowback was there? Has it got better? Like you talked about the attitude shift. What's the attitude that you get now?
Nathan Thompson (08:30)
It's funny, it depends on who we talk to. So if we talk to like the head of a department, the attitude is, this is awesome, we're gonna move so much faster, this is great. When we talk to the person on the team who's supposed to use it, they say, it's complicated, it's said this word wrong and I don't like that word and it's not perfect. And the nitpicking gets out of control so quickly. It's almost like there's this weird expectation of, I don't want this thing to take my job. So I don't want it to be awesome.
But then when I use it, if it's not perfect, it's worthless. Get rid of it. And it's like, well, do you want it to be perfect to do your job or do you want to still have a place in stuff? In other words, do you want it to work for you or do you want to work with it? There's a huge difference. And I think heads of department, their attitude has shifted to like, we got to get going because our competitors are starting to pass this up. think end users and marketers are still very nervous that it's going to take their job. And I think it will take some jobs for sure.
I think we can't even pretend like that's not the case. If your job is to produce the first draft of a piece of content or copy full stop, like that's the job, that's probably gonna go away. I would think.
Tom Rudnai (09:38)
Yeah, and I think you have to embrace that with any big technological change. Those jobs are
going to change and it's the people that change with it and embrace the change that do well and it's always difficult if you're the one there kind of railing against it. It's interesting, it reminds me of a conversation a couple of weeks ago though where I do think it's a very difficult time for particularly more kind of end users, like marketing execs, because I think you're really caught in a bit of a vice where AI still in a lot of instances isn't perfect, like you said, it doesn't quite use the word that you want.
So you're on the hook for that inaccuracy, right? And the culture hasn't quite changed in content to accept inaccuracies, okay? We use AI a lot and it gets some stuff worse, but you're also under this intense pressure now to deliver on all the promises that AI has in terms of output and efficiency. Is that something that you pick up from people who use the product, maybe? what's your take on that?
Nathan Thompson (10:28)
Peace.
Hold.
totally. And hallucinations are such a huge concern, like for folks. I, the heart, okay, the hardest thing with AI, to me is, and I've been using this metaphor a lot recently, it's a sociopath. It will scale whatever you give it without thought of empathy or trust or anything. It will just do at scale, huge. And so now, like, instead of embarrassing yourself to 50 people, you can embarrass yourself to 100,000 people super easily. Nicole emailed that. Yeah, right? Like, it's crazy. I,
I just think that when it comes to AI inputs, folks would do better to use transcripts that have original thoughts and insights if they don't want it to hallucinate, than they would by typing out a few words and hoping that this thing reads their mind and fills out the gap. I don't think people have fully got that yet. So the attitude from a lot of users, I still get a lot of pushback and I'm still on demo calls where I'll show something and people are like,
but it used an dash. I'm like, I okay, we'll hit delete. get it. But we're missing the forest for the trees here because outside of that dash, have 1500 words of pretty awesome and informative helpful stuff in your brand voice. So there's like, there's always a give and take. And I just think people don't want to really work with it yet as much. But they're getting more more
Tom Rudnai (11:51)
It's funny how quickly expectations reset,
right? Because now it's like, yeah, the M-blast is a problem. We've missed the 1500 valuable words and we're like, oh, I hate that fucking M-blast. Like, we're so spoiled.
Nathan Thompson (12:06)
Yes, exactly. Yes, it's like it's the ultimate toss the baby out with the bathwater, which is I know an horrible expression, but it's almost like people forgot that they they have a job to do as well. You have to edit it. And I don't know. I'm a broken record. I think I said this when we chatted last week a little bit. But it's like if you see a bad piece of AI on LinkedIn, on a blog post on something, that's not an AI problem. That's a human problem. A human decided.
This is good enough for me. And then hit publish. So I just think that we need to be on the one hand more forgiving about what AI does when it messes up and also take some responsibility for its hallucinations. Did we give it enough so that it could do its job accurately? And oftentimes, look, nine times out of 10 when I get outputs I don't like, it is my fault. I go back through the prompts and I'm like, I messed that, I needed more X, Y, or Z. I just...
I don't know if it's like growing up with religious guilt or what it is, but for some reason I just default to somehow this is my fault. And I noticed that people who tend to do that move faster. They just own the mistake.
Tom Rudnai (13:12)
Yeah well and it is Nathan, it is, it's all your fault, so you
should...
Nathan Thompson (13:19)
Yeah, all of it! I'll get back to perch. Alright.
Tom Rudnai (13:22)
So one thing I've been struck by, we've released
a new AI product recently and it's a lot more aligned than anything we've done before and the end user and their ability to prompt. And so it has been a bit revealing of like the extent to which a lot of people out there still don't know how to prompt. And so we've been looking a lot at like how can we educate people on that, obviously content is huge part of that, but also how can we build into the product.
putting people on rails a little bit more. And I wonder whether that's a little bit also of the next evolution of a lot of these kinds of products, which is where actually it becomes a software engineering job and a UX engineering job to eliminate bad prompting a little bit.
Nathan Thompson (14:04)
That is really a clever way to put it. Because I've been thinking about that same coin maybe from a different side, but I really liked how you just thought of it. I kept thinking that a lot of people think that they suck at prompting. And I think that was probably true like GPT-3 or 3.5 or whatever it was in the early. Like, it's getting so good now that a lot of the times I'm finding it's just a lack of context. And so you'll have like one part of the team has
these guidelines loaded into their system and then the sales team has these assets into their chat, GPT or whatever. I've been fascinated lately with a turn. It's kind of cheesy. I apologize, but like building a brand brain and just in any system, open AI, copy AI, whatever AI you're using where it's like, okay, what is our brand voice? And what does that mean? Like what's an example of our brand voice?
What is the editorial guidelines? Meaning, do we use title case, sentence case? Do we use the Oxford comma, the dash? What are those nitpicky grammar rules? Do we know about the audience? Like who we're targeting? Do we know about our value propositions, the product, not just the features, but the benefits of the features and which segment of our audience? Once you have that, like in a Google Drive or a doc, and you pop that into any AI system, the outputs just shoot right up.
like regardless of the prompting because it just knows your brand so much better. It just gets it. So I think you're right. And I think a lot of the software engineers role in that will be what context is needed in which part of these workflows to get the best results for this department. And how do we use it in a way that the results of that are connected to the other departments so we're not just building huge silos across our team.
Tom Rudnai (15:50)
Yeah, it makes me think a little bit of like,
I think I hear a lot more, it might just be because I'm little bit new into the space, but I hear a lot of talk about content IP these days and things like that, right? And that connects a bit to the idea of a brand brain, right? It's just fleshing that out more into an actual tangible thing that you can use to educate.
Nathan Thompson (15:54)
I try.
Tom Rudnai (16:11)
humans and robots. It's another thing that struck me about your role. Like, so you changed a little bit from just kind of running the content team to moving into more content and product. I absolutely love that. It's one of my beliefs is that that's basically those two functions should be one because it allows you to create like a consistent narrative. We talked about this a bit the other day. Like, has that transition helped you a little bit with building that brain and defining like what what copy AI's brand brain is?
Nathan Thompson (16:42)
Yeah, it really has. Part of that is just as I was telling, as I was talking with a few customers about the brand brain, I was like, do we even have that? What would that look like? And so I took two days and just built a mock one inside a copy AI. Like, what would this look like? And all I'm really asking myself is what first party data would I expect a perfect intern to know? imagine an intern with a photographic memory.
Tom Rudnai (17:10)
Mike Ross.
Nathan Thompson (17:10)
What's that guy from
Suits, that kid Mike or whatever, like the main character? There you go, yes. Imagine that guy walks into your building, photographic memory, and says, I'm ready. What would we want that perfect marketer to know about our brand? And perfectly. So is our voice the same in blog verse, verse LinkedIn, verse X or Twitter or whatever we're calling it now? Are there differences? If there are, we need to have those written out. Like there's a difference between there are and we want there to be.
If there are, we need to write it out and write the rules for it, like we would want our intern Mike to have and understand. We want that person to understand our audience, like who are we solving for? And all of these different first party pieces of data that live in someone's head on the team. And then in some cases, we'll need some third party data. Like if we're writing a blog post, what are other people saying about this that we can use to help our argument with external links? So we'll add some research steps. And then it's just laying down the pipes of like, I want this blog post.
Here are all the steps I would do by hand. Here are the things that I think AI could do responsibly. And then here's where I need to step in as the checker at each of these little phases for quality control. It is so tedious and it is so easy. It's both of those things. So it's hard to get done because it's just kind of a slog at the start. But once it's set up, holy crap, can you get moving?
You just get moved. We were doing like 20 top of the funnel blog posts a week at one point with our editors and consistently for months and months and months. And then I hit stop and I said, okay, we've got this year, 750 new blog posts. They're doing well. Let's do a refresh sprint and prune 25 % of those away that we can combine with other articles. And it became this like, let's start making content for our audience and not for Google anymore because the Google side of it's already baked into the equation. Like our workflow's already taken care of that.
So now let's choose things on topics that people care about in our audience. It was kind of a fun shift.
Tom Rudnai (19:07)
I'm going turn this into a bit of a therapy session now. There's something that
I experienced that I want to know whether you do as well. cause I think everything you've just described is something that comes up a lot. And I think it's the actually these days, because so much of the execution layer of what we do is being taken off our plate, or at least sped up massively. There's a lot of value and impact that comes from slowing down in order to speed up. Right. And again, putting, taking the time to put better systems in place. There's also a shitload of noise from everywhere about how fast you should be.
going and that in me creates this like I think I was just thinking of it as you as you talked I listened a little bit as well but like this like split because you're under so much pressure to do things faster you know you should slow down at times it's really hard and it leads to this like inner turmoil almost
Nathan Thompson (20:00)
You're absolutely, it's the overwhelm is huge. Also for the record, if my voice does nothing else, then kick off good ideas. I'm so happy about that. You don't have to ever listen to what I talk. Seriously. That split though is huge. And there's this idea, but look, that phrase slow down to speed up. I love it. I heard it for the first time a few weeks ago, I'm embarrassed to say, which is why it stuck out when you said that. I was trying river surfing. I don't know if you've ever tried it. It's a...
Tom Rudnai (20:04)
you
All right.
Nathan Thompson (20:28)
There's a constant wave on a river. There's one in a canal. It's really cool. It's incredibly hard to find the pocket to get in there. Like I like surfing. I tried river surfing. I suck at it. And the guy kept saying, you're trying too hard, too fast. Don't try to stand up. Just hang out on that board and catch the body wave for a little bit. just flow with it a little bit. And then once you start flowing with it, you can start to get up and move faster and do some cool stuff. But like slow down. I think just foundational.
A lot of brands aren't even aware of how unclear their current messaging is and how disparate their documentation is through Slack, through Google Drive, through Notion, all those different places. I think most people just need to like clean up their home first before they start scaling a bunch of garbage.
Tom Rudnai (21:13)
Yeah, that's really interesting.
No, no, no, no, I think it's fair and it's that flow with it point that you made, I found really interesting because some people do that with grace and I don't think I do particularly. I think I'm an angsty person who always wants to feel like I'm moving at a million miles an hour and I'm deeply uncomfortable with sitting still. Maybe I should take up surfing is what you're saying.
Nathan Thompson (21:17)
That was a mean way to put it, sorry.
Same here.
Well, okay. yeah, no, was that. look, the guy this and this was very helpful. I took a surfing lesson with my kids in Tofino. Didn't know you could do it in Canada, separate from river surfing. Sorry, this turned into surfing podcast. The instructor told me I kept falling on these bigger waves. I like really bad. I'm not a great surfer. And he kept saying it's because you're looking back at the way you keep looking back at the wave because you're scared of it. You will go where you look. So you need to look up and out.
and just trust that you can ride it. I think there's a great life lesson in that of a lot of people are looking back to 2023, 2022. What were we doing then that was working? And there's a lot of comfort in that. But there is this idea of there are changes happening. We got to look where we want to go and kind of just flow with that with that new change and figure out the best way we can have a good ride with it. And so for me, that was trial, error, experimentation.
And this belief that the technology was smarter than I in terms of that first draft, but I was going to be smarter in understanding why we're making the draft in the first place and who we're going to send it to. I think just figuring out where everything fits as we're moving forward into this new, it's a new phase of marketing. It just is. It's like never going to be the same again. Pandora's out. And, and I think that's harder for people to flow with than they want to admit.
Tom Rudnai (23:04)
Yeah, and help me understand what that looks like for you then
day in and day out in a more practical sense, right? Because everyone has a day job and we're under pressure to achieve targets and at some point put out a certain amount of output, right? That people do look at that for better or worse. How do you kind of manage it so that you're delivering now but still able to carve out time to look forwards?
Nathan Thompson (23:33)
Yeah, it depends on which part of the funnel I'm working on. So our top of the funnel, like our blog post, our top of the funnel blog post. I was very aware that a post like content marketing 101 is not going to kick off the type of conversations with a CMO that we want. I would assume most CMOs don't need to type in content marketing 101 to Google. You would hope. That's the goal. But we still want that content because we don't just serve CMOs. We serve all content marketers at every stage. And maybe somebody's just entering when they want, you know, our unique take on that.
Okay, so I built a workflow. took a couple months. Now I'm really happy with it. It does a lot of different things. Gets a first draft directly into Webflow that our editor goes and looks at. But now Mondays I'll batch that. And so I'll go into Ahrefs. I'll look for the keywords that we want. Not by volume anymore, but really by topic. What have we covered? What haven't we covered? But making sure that there is keyword data behind it. So like, I'm not worried about if it has 15,000, you know, pieces of traffic, it's the wrong keyword.
But I also don't want to target keywords without any potential at all. So I'll spend an hour or two finding the right keywords for that week, pop them into the workflow and I'll let the freelancers know, hey, we've got these 20, you know what to do. They've got their editing rhythm that they take on and I just trust that they're going to have it done by Friday. And at the end of the day, I just look at the articles that were scheduled for an hour or so and that's in there. But then that frees up time for like, if we have a campaign or a webinar, a lot of our prep work now gets done like we're doing right now. And so we'd say, hey, what's the new product launch that we're going to do?
What's the new feature? What's the benefit of that feature? And we talk through it all for 30 minutes. Then we take that transcript, pop it into a workflow so it makes a brief. I edit the brief to make sure like this is exactly what we want. We take that and we can pop it into another workflow to get the first draft of all those things. And then in the same day for the webinar, whenever we have it, we have all the text-based copy we need. Now we can just start refining it and figuring out how do we make this way cooler? And so we've been playing with like video.
tools and different audio tools and we start to experiment. I'll be honest with you though, in terms of the new things that are coming out, it's the Wild West. I feel there's no real expert on this yet in terms of the new content marketing, but it's really fun to watch people start staking their flag into that dirt, if that makes sense, with some of this new stuff. We're seeing some cool marketing plays come out, I think.
Tom Rudnai (25:53)
Yeah for sure and I think there's more and more people setting themselves up like I think it's a pretty universal
pain point that basically how the fuck do I keep up with all of this stuff I meant to do my job build kind of vibe code stuff I meant to know all the latest and greatest tools that can change things like people need help with that right
Nathan Thompson (26:13)
Yes.
Tom Rudnai (26:16)
for
Nathan Thompson (26:16)
Vibe coding
is the funniest thing to me because I love doing it. so addicted to it. It's like I am and it's so silly because I know, I know that it is like me bringing my vibe coded tool to our product, like our actual coders is like me bringing a crayon drawing to my parents to put on the fridge. It doesn't actually work in the museum for what it's like. It doesn't impress anybody when it's going, but it feels so powerful. And you just wonder how long it's going to be before.
everyone can build their own private little apps within Google and start doing whatever they need. It's gonna be a weird world.
Tom Rudnai (26:48)
Yeah, I have the same experience with my CTO. I hadn't
thought of the analogy, but yeah, it's like I take him my colouring book and I'm like, look, look, I mean, he pretends to be impressed and I really appreciate that actually. Because it's not impressive.
Nathan Thompson (26:58)
Yeah, he's like gold star. Great job, man. That's cute.
Yes, yes, I think mine does the same. Yeah, whenever I show somebody, like, that's cool. That's not gonna work for more than five people, but it's cool.
Tom Rudnai (27:08)
Nice. Thank you. Good job.
Yeah, for sure. It's funny,
mentioned, going back a little bit, sorry, I I zipped all over the place, welcome to podcasting with ADHD. You mentioned, you mentioned it of depends a little bit on where in the funnel you're working. It was something that came up in my research before was I was doing just like copy of AI's Journey and it was a quote that came up that I was very interested to get your take on with Paul, your CEO. And what he said was all this stuff is a flywheel and none of it is a funnel.
Nathan Thompson (27:24)
yeah, no.
Tom Rudnai (27:41)
and that was his way of talking about what drove copy AI's growth in the very early days. And it's something I think about a little bit recently. Like, what's your take on the funnel? Is there a place for that in B2B marketing today?
Nathan Thompson (27:51)
Yeah.
That's a great question. I'm going to need a second to think about that so I don't just make something up. Because it's a really good question. is. I want to say yes and no, because I do like the idea of both a funnel and a flywheel. And they serve me in different times. I understand what he was saying with the flywheel. And he's absolutely right. I think I don't want to speak for Paul. I think what he was getting at was with our content engine, for example, every time we made a new post, it would go into a table.
Tom Rudnai (28:01)
Thank you.
Nathan Thompson (28:28)
and that table would then feed into a sales enablement workflow. So anytime they needed to find a piece of content, they could quickly pull it up topically. And so anytime I made something, it would go into their background. Anytime they had a sales call, it would get turned into a how-to blog post, because they're walking through a process or a demo or something like that. It would get turned into a bottom of the funnel. This is how you fix this problem with copy AI. And that would go to Notion. So now their sales calls are informing my...
content, my content is helping them move the deals. And then we could take all of those calls, run them through a workflow and analyze it for, dude, what product updates keep coming up that we haven't addressed yet to help our product team come up with a roadmap. And we can prioritize like, man, out of our hundred calls, 35 people brought up this feature that we don't have. So we got to prioritize this one pretty quickly. And so it was really using our own tool to create a flywheel where every system is, is working together.
That's really cool. But I almost think it only works because our team was so small. When you're working with a team of 40 people, you can coordinate that well. When you're working with a team of 4,000 people, it's way harder. So in B2B, like enterprise, it's, I think the funnel still makes sense because you can say this part of the marketing team, your job is top of the funnel traffic, but now probably a bit of pipeline. Middle of the funnel, we are going to work on getting more concrete demos from the webinar and we're doing X, Y, and Z. Bobbin of the funnel.
How are we, know, how are we, how fast are these deals closing? What content is getting those deals to close? What content is starting those calls? I think there's both, but I think people would do better to just say, what's our customer journey look like and map it out from that, whether it's a flywheel or a funnel or whatever, just what is your customer journey look like from nothing to they are screaming your name from the rooftops sort of a thing.
Tom Rudnai (30:18)
Well, it's interesting because your brain goes to a slightly different place. So you come at it from a content
lens and thinking about the content flywheel, if I'm understanding right. So we produce a piece of content, but actually it's impacting everywhere and there's a kind of flywheel effect within our content strategy. I came at it more from the perspective of the buyer and the way that people buy these days is kind of my background in enterprise sales, lot more than content historically.
It's very looping process, right? So I actually think there is a concept of funnel. If I buy something, my journey is relatively linear. I hate thinking about it because there's something about Brits we hate being marketed to. Like even the ones who do marketing, we hate the notion that we are ever being marketed to and that we fit into all the stuff that we know. But I probably am pretty linear in how I make a decision. The challenge is an organization isn't because there's 15 people and they're all...
Nathan Thompson (30:57)
Yeah
Tom Rudnai (31:11)
coming in, coming out of the process. So I think there probably is a funnel, but what I always take issue with is any marketer believing that they have any idea where anyone is within it. I think that's super hard to tell. one person, my linear funnel buying process is very different to yours. And the questions that will come up in my mind are going to be very different. So that's where that same use case video might be how you hook you in and how you close me, but they're going to be different things to different people.
Nathan Thompson (31:22)
You're 100, right? Yes.
Yes.
You are totally right. To the point where, with your example, yes, I could classify a piece of bottom of the funnel content on my side and it could act as a top of the funnel piece of content for a customer because every customer is unique and maybe somebody starts with that bottom of the funnel video and it sparks their curiosity. So they go check out a webinar, which is I classified in my head as a middle of the funnel when I was making it. And from that, they see a blog post and they go backwards from bottom of the funnel to top of the funnel. And yet
they still make the sale. You're totally right. And I do think that a lot of people have way too much false confidence in their ability to track individuals through that funnel. I don't think many are nearly as good as it is they think. I've not seen any company be great at it, frankly. I'll just say that. I've never seen a company say, know exactly how to communicate with everybody at each stage of the funnel, no matter where they are, based on where they are in our journey. I've heard a lot of people talk about it.
Tom Rudnai (32:41)
Yeah, well, think increasingly,
Nathan Thompson (32:43)
seen it.
Tom Rudnai (32:44)
that's why I think that I think increasingly the funnel is a less helpful framework for thinking about marketing because it kind of leads you down that pathway of the the understandable to just invent a word.
you
Nathan Thompson (33:02)
I've really got to think about this now. This is great. The funnel or the flywheel? And I think the flywheel should win.
Tom Rudnai (33:06)
How does it make you think about distribution?
Because I think also we tend to associate particular distribution channels with particular stages in a funnel, or points in a flywheel. Do you care where people engage with your content, or do you just care that they engage with your content?
Nathan Thompson (33:28)
really just care that they engage. I'm so aggressive. We're a series a hit. I'm just like, talk to us. Like, talk to us, man. It's awkward. That's all I care about. That I will say though, I was playing around with the cadence for our LinkedIn posting, our tweets, our blog posts. This sounds weird. I felt like when it was well targeted, though, with SEO, and I'm going to steal this phrase. Well, I don't know if he'd want me to be a mentor of mine.
Tom Rudnai (33:31)
Thank you.
Nathan Thompson (33:57)
once that SEO is one of the only places where more is more in a lot of ways. It's just the more you put out there that's made high quality, the more chances you have of the algorithm picking you up. It sounds a little soulless and people don't like to talk about it, but quantity does kind of matter in SEO. You have to have stuff going out at a good pace if you want results to come back, especially now as all the top of the funnel traffic is going away from the AI overview stuff. I do think that's case in other areas though.
Does Copy.ai need to show up on LinkedIn twice a day? Just because? No, probably not. If we have a really good conversation, yeah, let's clip it down and show some good stuff. like, if I'm editing a video and I'm not excited by like the clip, why would I share that with anybody if I'm not even excited by it I'm supposed to make it? I just think a lot of brands could be more honest with themselves and say like, this actually isn't as insightful. And so it doesn't need to be posted 19 times across this social media platform probably. So I...
But I'm a hypocrite because I, I...
Also understand that you gotta get your name out there and do brand building and all that stuff. And sometimes you overreach. I know we certainly did at one point. So.
Tom Rudnai (35:06)
It's a fine line, right? And there's one thing that you said is I just want people to talk to us.
And I think there's different ways of looking at engagement, right? So I agree. I don't care where people engage with my content as long as they talk to me. But what a lot of people increasingly look at a view as an engagement. They've not talked to you. It's a slightly different thing. think that's all.
with third-party platforms is it's engagement but you don't feel it and it takes so much trust to have faith that 36 months from now that will pay dividends like do you see it paid
Nathan Thompson (35:31)
yeah, yeah, I don't count men at all.
Yeah.
No, I- the page views in traffic really bums me out. I'll be honest, I hate that that's any kind of a meta- Think about it, it'd be like me saying... You personally, you live in London? Right? You walk around London?
Tom Rudnai (35:58)
Sometimes I limp at the moment of her many,
but yes.
Nathan Thompson (36:05)
I'll bet the last time you went for a public walk that was an hour long, I could make the argument, a thousand people saw you today. Who cares? What does that mean? Nobody talked to you. Nobody knows who you are. Nobody knows Tom or what he does or what. Who cares? Unless there is some kind of like a relationship building. Obviously starting with a conversation, but like let's, that relationship I think really matters and it's gotta go deeper than just this person clicked on.
Tom Rudnai (36:08)
You
Nathan Thompson (36:34)
this on Google and came to my site and that was a view and so we're winning. I obviously want all those metrics to go up but I swear to God if I hear anybody start bragging about traffic I'm just gonna lose my mind. just gonna lose it. It's Semrush. Look it up later on Ahrefs and Ahrefs to a certain extent. Some of their highest traffic pages we're talking millions of page views are from adult website keywords where they do
a review of the adult website in terms of SEO, but they are ranking for the keyword that is very inappropriate and not good. It's like Mr. Porn Dude or whatever. And they just write the website, but they get millions of people going to that every year. How is that helpful? That is not engagement. That is not an actual relationship being built. That's hacky growth. And I love SEMrush for the record. But like, I'd love to see those plays start going away. And I think AI is actually going to help because it's going to be like,
Why are we making this? If we can make anything, let's get really intentional with what we make, if that makes sense.
Tom Rudnai (37:37)
least absolute sense. really like the analogy actually of like, I think
the internet has trained us to believe that output and attention matter, and kind of to focus on that over impact. And I think the analogy of going for a walk is actually really good. Like, what does it do for you? What impact does it have on you when you go for a walk? Yes, you see 1000 people, they see you, no impact. You get nods, the tiniest little bit of impact is like the classic on the tube. Not really though. You have a meaningful conversation makes a huge
impact it can change your day and I think there's a very it's a good analogy to a business and how you should look at what your content is doing for you.
Nathan Thompson (38:20)
I had fleshed that out with the nod or the meaningful conversation. That's really funny. There's a, yeah, okay. I'm gonna flesh that out. That's good. That's awesome. Yeah, this is good. This is really good. No, I do think it's really important. And I use this expression a lot. I don't mean to, but I think many people, especially in B2B, have missed the forest for the trees. And they're focused so much on like,
Tom Rudnai (38:21)
Right, we're coming up with some metaphors today, I like this.
Nathan Thompson (38:51)
the little corner of their responsibility in the business and I get that, that's very important. But I think that teams are gonna start moving toward a more like, instead of teams, I think it's gotta become more of a team sport. And so your content team needs to understand deeply what does your sales team need so that they can move deals forward? What does the product team need so that we can announce this new feature or the benefits of this feature to our existing audience?
And in that way, once you start to make that flywheel where everything is connected, instead of a bunch of broken silos, gosh, you can really start to help more people and have better conversations, because you're not going in blind on it.
Tom Rudnai (39:29)
And how do you think about that within a product
led growth organization? Because I think about that a lot in a sales led context. I'm like, look, at the end of the day, if you're a led go to market, everyone's job is to support sales. You can do that without being subservient and being kind of strategic and proactive, but your job is to help them close deals. For you, it's a little bit different. So like, how do you think about your goals for content? Like what do you measure and how do you balance, yeah, say,
words about that.
Nathan Thompson (40:05)
Pipeline. Yeah, pipeline is my big, like my big thing. I am so shamelessly obsessed with revenue as a marketer. don't... All right. Hopefully I don't piss off too many people here. And so I am sorry. I do think that AI divided the world of marketers into pretty clear camps. And there were people that wanted to become better marketers and people who wanted to become better artists.
And I found that better people wanted to be better artists, wanted to focus on their writing. All of that is good. But art, the goal of art is never to make money. The goal of marketing, I hate to say it, is always, eventually, to meet the business goal of driving revenue. Always. And so I've noticed a lot of the marketers that are trying to get better at marketing are doing better. And I naturally gravitated toward pipeline. So if I can set up...
you know, if my part of the chain here is to make sure that sales has enough good conversations to close, and I can make sure that I'm not the weak link in that, then we can start to look at the sales conversations. What's the blocker here? But if I'm in charge of something, it can't be traffic, it has to be revenue. So pipeline is what I measure it by, and then I let the sales do their thing. And then if we kind of look at the end of the month, like what's working, what's not, then we can review and evaluate. But I do think.
Tom Rudnai (41:26)
Yeah, my thinking is always like revenue should be absolutely
everyone's goal across go to market if it's not what are we doing here? Again, yeah, what we're doing is part art and science. If you hate the science that much, then you're not a content marketer, you're a writer. And that's absolutely fine. Good for you. But it's a different thing and you're probably in the wrong place.
How do you think about those, and I always think so pipeline is probably the furthest removed from revenue you can get back towards more marketing metrics where there is still a clear link there and it's related and that still serves the business. How do you think about pipeline versus free signups? How much value would you put as a free signup and would you say to a product led business actually we can extend that link even further back to a signup or?
Nathan Thompson (42:18)
Totally. Yeah. if, if it was like, because we do have our right now the chat, it's like $29 a month or something. So if we were saying like, this is going to be our maybe a B2C corner almost, or like a smaller PLG play over. I look at the convert. So this is the time adopted monster with the copywriting and the conversion copywriting obsession. I really look at where do I want those people to sign up from? Like, what's the page that they are supposed to self serve if they're self serving or sign up?
Tom Rudnai (42:27)
Yeah.
Nathan Thompson (42:48)
for a demo even, whatever it is that needs them to get into that like serious engagement step. And then I reverse engineer from there. But oftentimes if we have a dedicated page that is designed to take that person to that step, I will look at that page. How do we get people to that page? Can we get the email? And then I will start to track the conversion rates of whatever CTI I have. And so it's obviously different if it's a free signup or a demo or even a webinar signup, but it's looking at that conversion rate.
and then month after month, like, can't we get that a little higher every month and can we just consistently bring it up? It takes a lot of patience and it's annoying and it moves slow at first, which is why I think people give up on doing it so consistently. It feels like you're doing nothing at first. However,
If you are selling something through product-led growth and you have a sales page for that exact offer or whatever it is, and then you can measure the CTA on that and you can figure out which channels are sending people to, it's just a system and then optimizing the system, looking at the weakest links. And if you view even the failures as this is just a learning, I'm just learning more stuff about my business, it gets a lot less depressing in the slow period when you're figuring stuff out. It's like,
Apparently this channel's not working as well, or maybe it is and I'm not approaching it right, but I have a learning this is not working on this channel, so let's try something else. And that's how I think of everything as a chain. And can we fix the weakest link one link at a time?
Tom Rudnai (44:11)
Yeah, well, I think a lot of content marketers don't operate in that,
like you described it, a copy AI, the move fast and break things kind of mentality. And I think a lot of writers don't operate within that environment. I think we do a very good job in the tech world of creating that environment for the engineers, but on go to market, we want a little bit more predictability than that.
which I understand. I guess it comes back, and before we get into some quick fires, I want to briefly talk a bit more again about the experience coming into copy AI and moving fast and break things. I still just find it quite a mental and rare thing to join at that phase of a company's growth, and not a lot of people have been through that. What would you say were the biggest challenges that threw at you?
Nathan Thompson (45:00)
We had shiny object syndrome as a company in 2023 for sure that got really tiring because it was like oh we're gonna do this pivot oh the new markets talking about this pivot and AI was just so huge it felt like trying to toss a dart with a blindfold and you're just like I hope we hit something here like that's not a child like let's hit something on the board and it was just got exhausting Kyle Coleman came in
as our CMO for a little over a year was with us and brought a concrete vision that helped us stop pivoting so much. And that was incredibly valuable to me as a marketer. I feel like I got an MBA under him just listening to him for a year, which was very cool. So the challenge was getting everyone on the same page, but from the marketing department, like how do we make marketing a driving force for the narrative that we're trying to tell now?
And that was a challenge, but I think we did it. And we did it by a lot of conversations like these, taking the transcripts with AI that we trusted, building the workflows that we knew could deliver, and then really meeting up as a team and saying like, what are we doing and why are we doing it? And then using those conversations to drive messaging to the rest of the company.
Tom Rudnai (46:17)
It's interesting. It really aligns with like stuff that I've been thinking about recently,
which I feel like we've made a really good step forward in how we operate at Demand Genius. And I think it's because I've understood a little bit better about how momentum is built. I think you think momentum is something that's done to you, that the market gives you. It's not, it's something you create and you create it with clarity, consistency. If it's a formula, it's clarity plus consistency. And then the multiplier is creativity. But the bit that you can immediately control is get yourself, get clarity on what you're going to do.
week to week, do that consistently and then blend in the creativity over the time. It sounds like that's exactly what Kyle came in and established.
Nathan Thompson (46:59)
That is a great way to put it, any formula that should be a lot more known. Yes, absolutely. Clarity, consistency, multiplied by creativity. Yes, that's exactly it.
Tom Rudnai (47:08)
You can't have it. I've written a newsletter or written 80 % of the
newsletter already in that one. right. I'm not releasing this until that's gone out.
Nathan Thompson (47:18)
Damn it! Damn it! was just gonna go... I was just gonna rush off right after this and start posting on it. I just live-readed it, so hopefully...
Tom Rudnai (47:24)
Knowing you, you'll have something out in about 50 seconds before
I've even made a copy.
Nathan Thompson (47:32)
Yeah, before the end of this conversation, it will be posted on LinkedIn. That's hilarious. No, I love that. I love that and will shame, ruthlessly cite you on that. think that's, I think it's a brilliant formula and exactly what builds momentum. Can I ask you, do you think, I said this sometime, I said with AI system, I think people give up too soon. Do you find people do that with their own brand? Like their,
Tom Rudnai (47:34)
We can move on.
Nathan Thompson (48:02)
Branding stuff, do you find that people pivot too often or was that just a copy AI thing?
Tom Rudnai (48:03)
That's good question. I mean, can only speak to
so many people, I think generally speaking, yes, people on just about everything give up and pivot too quickly. I can say from my experience, it's a big mistake I made in the first like year or so of building Demand Genius, really like longer, is...
chasing shiny objects, not persevering with a strategy and yeah, pivoting constantly. And you're kind of told, it's a really difficult thing in the early stages of building a business or building a brand or building a go-to-market engine. You're trying to balance being open to feedback with being stubborn and kind of staying to your course. And that's a really hard thing. And I think you have to systematize it a little bit in order to get the balance right.
Nathan Thompson (48:51)
That is such a struggle for me on a personal level, not as a business builder, as just an employee of... It was incredibly hard for AI for me. I tend to assume that other people just know more than I do. This was the first time I hit the brakes and I thought, think they're wrong. it was Kyle Coleman, he gave me a book, it was called Pattern Breakers. And there was a chapter in it that specifically talked about how real leaders like Steve Jobs...
like that. They see the future very clearly. They build that future and then they invite you to step into that future. And so we're living in what Steve Jobs saw in 2000 with his iPhone vision. Everyone's going to walk around with a smartphone. That didn't have to happen. Like there's no reason why we have to have smartphones right now. It's because someone saw it, made it happen, and now we live in his future. I was walking my dog so many mornings thinking about what's the future going to look like in this?
And I was very confident that AI was gonna have a huge piece of that future because it's just too powerful to not use. It's just too good to disappear into the background. It's so good, in fact, that I think it's going to change everything. it was the first time I had a lot of confidence in myself to say like, no, they're wrong. They are wrong on this one. And so I fully believe that if you haven't already...
Now would be the time to get serious about building a good found AI system. Not just a chat GPT, but like a good system. Even if you're not using copy AI, anything. Because otherwise I just don't see how you keep up at this point. I don't know.
Tom Rudnai (50:27)
And also for me, I always think like start from the system,
not from the AI. So build the system and it's fine. There can be human elements within that system. That's fine. You need to know that within the time you're a human with 40 hours, 50 hours, whatever you're willing to commit to it each week. And so, you know, that just impacts how big the system is.
Nathan Thompson (50:50)
And I, people, they think I'm kidding. Every system I write, pen and paper first, every single time. And then I will try to offload it on the computer. Really, if I do it on a computer, I get too excited. And then I start to click different things. And I'm like, oh, I should research this. Can I do this? Can I do this? If I have pen and paper, I'm just like, this is what I want. This is how I'd build it. And I'm very focused on the process. And then when I rebuild it on a computer, I'm like, oh, okay, this is...
Tom Rudnai (50:52)
Mm.
Nathan Thompson (51:16)
I don't know, I just sounded like a boomer when I rebuilt it on a computer. I don't know why it made me sound a million years old, but when I rebuilt it digitally, yeah, I then let myself get excited and see how far I can push it, but it's always pen and paper first, every single time.
Tom Rudnai (51:27)
Nice, that's fine, you're allowed to be a boomer on this show.
Before I let you go, I want to cover up a couple of our quick fires, I always end up chatting too long and forget to do half of them. First one, actually I'm going to skip this because you're unbelievably biased, it's normally an AI use case that you love, it can't be copy AI.
Nathan Thompson (51:50)
it can't be copy AI. Okay. I love using 11 labs for making an agent and I made it. And so it does tie into copy AI, but you don't have to make a tie in a copy AI. would, I built an 11 labs agent for my morning walks with the dog and I just trained it on my profile, who I am, what I'm interested in, copied, pasted my LinkedIn, different little things in there. And then it just asks me thought leadership questions. Like, what are your thoughts on X, Y, Z today? Or I can't think of anything. And then we talk.
and I come back and I've got this 25 minute transcript and the dog is very happy. And now I can go take that transcript and make some LinkedIn posts or something that I want from the day. But all of the content came from an actual conversation, like from my real human brain. So I'm not outsourcing the thinking at all, but I'm having it pull out my thoughts better with that 11 Labs agent. So those are fun.
Tom Rudnai (52:36)
Nice, I love that. You've had a bit of a loophole in the
question of still linking it to copy AI, but now I love anything that is a use case of AI that isn't about just more output, it's about more impact and improving quality. And I think that it's hard to do, right? It's very easy to use AI to churn out more. And that's a cool example of using it to do better stuff and think better. Second question.
Nathan Thompson (52:46)
I did. I totally did. Sorry.
Tom Rudnai (53:04)
For you personally, what skill or trait would you say has been the biggest needle mover in your career?
Nathan Thompson (53:14)
stubbornness, just rote stubbornness. I'm not kidding. I talked to somebody, Sam Jacobs runs Pavilion, and he asked a similar question about this thing I was building, of like, did you get to where this normally doesn't work? And it's just stubbornness, just, I know it can, so I assume I'm doing something wrong, and I just spend the three hours sitting down, hitting test, test, test, until it gets it right. It's annoying.
It's annoying sometimes, but it does let me move a lot faster.
Tom Rudnai (53:45)
Nice, that's a refreshingly honest answer. We normally hear
like curiosity and all that kind of stuff. You're like, no, I'm a stud-
Nathan Thompson (53:54)
Great quality, great quality. That's a great quality, but if you don't do anything with it, you know, that's, gotta execute.
Tom Rudnai (54:00)
Agreed. then, actually, finally, I
normally ask at this point for a recommendation, whether it's a podcast or a book or a thought leader. Obviously, we've had pattern breakers, which it sounds like is one that you'd highly recommend. Is there anything else you'd recommend people go and check out?
Nathan Thompson (54:20)
this is gonna be a weird one, I'm sorry. But you should absolutely go read. Before all of this, I loved Roman rhetoric. That's what I got my masters in, and it's the silliest, I just loved it. There is an old teacher called Quintilian, who has the Orators Institute. It's the perfect training for an orator and writer, and it's a pretty quick read. You can find it online. There's like 12 of these little volumes. I'm telling you, it is creepy how much writing advice.
he gives from 2000 years ago that's like spot on to today. Everyone could do themselves a favor by reading some of those classical writing advice, because they think about arguments differently because the stakes were so much higher on the arguments they were having. Do we go to war or don't we go to war? And so they really cared about the word choice, how persuasive they were. It mattered to them in a deep way. Go check out Quintillion. It's awesome.
Tom Rudnai (55:12)
super cool and another student of ancient history I studied in
ancient history at university it's my kind of secret secret passion so that's cool I'm a sissies for a guy personally but cool look Nathan I've absolutely loved this I'm gonna let you go now quickly before I do anything that you'd like to plug that you're doing whether it's for you or for the company
Nathan Thompson (55:23)
Yes! That's Okay, good! Yes, alright! My teacher's teacher then, yes. Quetillion's teacher, yes. This is great!
I feel okay pitching this cause it's forever free sub stack. can find on my LinkedIn. It's just always going to be free. And I just share stuff I'm doing on it.
Tom Rudnai (55:48)
That's awesome. Everyone go check out that. Nathan, thank you for joining.
Thank you for the bundle of energy that you've brought to the conversation. makes it really fun for me.
Nathan Thompson (55:59)
Thank you so much, Tom. This is awesome.
Tom Rudnai (56:00)
Awesome. Bye everyone.