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288: Run Through Walls with Adam Coughlin
https://youtu.be/rADiqnrhgrk
Adam Coughlin, Co-founder, CMO, and Managing Partner of York IE, is on a mission to help startups beat the odds by building strong, capital-efficient brands that resonate with their markets.We explore Adam’s Drumbeat Marketing Framework:
Messaging & Positioning, Develop Unique Point of View, Execution, and Scorekeeping.
He shares why brand consistency beats shiny-object syndrome, how vertical AI is redefining SaaS, and why startups need to balance storytelling with measurable impact. Adam also explains how to foster entrepreneurial thinking early and why founders must lead with a deep sense of purpose.
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Run Through Walls with Adam Coughlin
Good day, dear listeners, Steve Preda here with the Management Blueprint Podcast. And my guest today is Adam Coughlin, co-founder, CMO and managing partner of York IE, where he works with startups on foundational messaging, content, communications, go-to-market strategy, website and digital marketing, revenue operations, and corporate storytelling. Welcome to the show, Adam.
Yeah, thanks for having me, Steve. Appreciate it.
Yeah, you guys are really a full-service shop. You do almost everything. So tell me, how are you guys unique, and what is it that makes you a superior solution for people?
Yeah, absolutely. So the founding team of York IE, we all work together at a company called Dine here in New Hampshire that did the domain name system. And we built that company to about a hundred million of annual recurring revenue, got acquired by Oracle. While we were inside of Oracle, we kind of reflected on the growth journey that we took at Dine. And we felt that a lot of the legacy institutions that we turned to for growth help, whether that was our investors, our advisors, our vendors, they were operating out of antiquated models so that were really good for them, but not necessarily for us as the operators. And so that’s what we wanted to disrupt. So in 2019, we launched York IE. We are an advisory and investment firm. So we help technology companies grow. We do that through investing in early stage exclusively B2B software companies. And then because we were operators, we also built a strategic advisory firm that does strategy and execution across the functional areas of R&D, go to market and G&A.
Because we feel like we want to roll up our sleeves and help companies be successful.
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Yeah. So you’re basically investing companies that advise them, help to improve them, and some you just advise them and don’t invest. So it’s a combination.
Combination. Exactly. Right. And I think in addition to the advise, it’s really important to get across that we do the execution because that is where companies need help. Especially early stage companies. A lot of those teams are small, they’re dynamic, they have a good strategy, they just need help and take some things off their plates and we’re there to help them with that.
Sounds great. So that leads to my question. What is your personal “Why” and how are you manifesting it in your business?
Yeah, absolutely. I think this is a great question. And my personal “Why” is I love entrepreneurs. I think that they are both visionary and builders and that they are pursuing their dreams in the effort to create something and build something that makes the world better. And I think that if they build good companies, then they hire good employees.
Good companies have impacts on communities. Good companies build wealth.
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Yeah, well, I couldn’t resonate more with that. I call it Business Covid or these companies that fail, and I think they can be saved as well with the right structures and processes and approaches. So let’s talk about how you do that because you do a lot of stuff. But one of the things that we talked about was your framework called Drumbeat Marketing and marketing is difficult these days because there’s so much noise out there. So how do you overcome that noise? How do you get your message heard? I like the visual metaphor of drumbeat marketing, you’re beating drums. So how do you beat the drum and how do you get the message resonating?
Yeah, absolutely. So this is actually a concept that I came up with in my previous life when I was a journalist. And so I was covering the New Hampshire primary, and in New Hampshire, we’re the first in the nation primary, so there’s a lot of retail politics that happens. And I talked to Jon Huntsman, who was running for president in 2016, former governor of Utah, former ambassador to China, and he said, in New Hampshire, you have to shake someone’s hand 10 times before they’ll consider voting for you, and then 10 more before they actually do. And that really resonated with me because it’s true about messaging.
Only when you are sick of saying something does it actually begin to resonate with anybody outside of your own walls. We live in a very noisy world. And what happens with a lot of new companies is that they get a little bit of shiny object syndrome. They say this, they say that, they’ve said everything and they’re known for nothing. And so that drumbeat marketing framework is all about discipline. So the first step in that is coming up with your messaging and positioning. We work with a lot of founders that take a product-out approach to their company. They had a problem personally, they solved it, they then assume that everybody else needs that solution. But the reality is that every company is but one player in a larger ecosystem.
We always advocate that you should take a market-in approach. Understand the market landscape, the competitive landscape, and how you fit into that.
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Love it. So, basically, it’s very easy to fall in love with your product. They say that you should fall in love with your market instead and to conquer this urge of this personal bias about what you think other people will react to test the markets. Okay, so market in, whereas product-out, that makes sense. So what’s the next step?
Yeah, so then once you’ve kind of surveyed the market and the competitive landscape, you’re in a better position of power to see sort of where is the green field space and then what is our unique point of view. And I think that this is very important and it’s only going to become more important in the world of AI and marketing. Like there is just so much noise and the barrier to putting stuff out is basically zero now. And so then what is going to resonate? What is going to have you stand out? It is having a unique point of view that you become known for and you’re doing that because you’re telling that story. And that’s the key word, storytelling. Particularly in technology, we can often think about speeds and feeds, but at the end of the day, no matter what you’re selling, you’re selling to a human being. And since the dawn of man, people have learned and engaged with stories. And so being able to tell that story, back your story up with data that’s unique to you and your company, and it’s a story that is unique, not just to yourself, but into the broader market, you’re going to be in a really good position to be successful.
Yeah, I love it. And it’s so easy, especially when you’re a tech entrepreneur, you may have an engineering background, or you may be a very smart mathematician and you want to focus on objective facts rather than stories, kind of have the implication that maybe it’s made up and no, but this is the medium of communication. It is through stories. So you have to articulate the stories. That’s very important. So what’s that? You articulated the story. You have a unique point of view. So that’s kind of a differentiation already through your story. Then what’s next? How do you get this Drumbeat Marketing to be impactful?
Now once you have your story and this point of view that you want to get across, you need to disseminate it through all sorts of integrated marketing channels. People consume information in a variety of different mediums. If you’ve done your marketing research, you kind of have an understanding of where are the watering holes that my prospects are gathering. And then you can tell that story, that point of view, in the way that they’re going to consume it the most. Sometimes, though, you’ll talk to a company and they’ll say, here’s my marketing strategy, and it’s just a bunch of different channels. The biggest hurdle for success for companies is that they have such fragmented audiences.
And if you try to reach those audiences in the 10 or 12 different places that they’re gathering and you tell them 10 or 12 different stories, then they have no idea who you are. But if you take that story that we talked about and now you just kind of slice and dice it up in the different ways, whether that be social, whether that be media relations, whether that be ads. Now that bubbles up and it’s telling one story, you’re just reaching them in different ways. And I think that’s the best way to sort of gain that strength and not introduce confusion to the audience. And to your point that you made, depending on the founder,
it's also about finding the channels that you're comfortable with. I've worked with a lot of deeply technical people.
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Yeah, and it’s so important. I mean, you see big companies, fortune-ranked companies, when they rebrand, for example, then they make this huge campaign, they plaster the airwaves, and the internet, television, everywhere, they push it at the same time so that people, wherever they are, they’re going to get those impressions from multiple directions and then it’s going to start to create that knock-on effect of breaking through with their consciousness and start to make a mark. And if you just sporadically do it, then it’s just part of the noise and nothing happens.
Absolutely. Like, we’ll talk to a company and they’ll have a big announcement, maybe a new product, maybe a funding announcement. And then I always say, great, we will help you with that launch, but what’s the next announcement? Because you can’t go dark for a period of time. Most of us aren’t launching the iPod or something revolutionary. It’s that consistency. Like a brand isn’t made in a moment. A brand is when you look at a company over three, six, nine, 12 months, and you just see all of this momentum. Success is a giant boulder that needs to be pushed and it’s really hard to get it going. But once it starts building some of that momentum, suddenly it’s going downhill. And now everybody wants to be a part of pushing it. Nobody wants to be a part at the beginning. And so
you just need that consistency and discipline over time to have it actually be meaningful.
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Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Okay, and then how do you iterate? How do you know that you are on the right track and you are doing well or how can you do even better?
The part that I always find when it comes to marketing and storytelling is that it has to be both art and science. And I think it can be very easy for creatives and people like that to like, hey, we’ve done something now we want to go on and create something new and do something else. And it’s like, well, like what is working? And so that is really important to get some of the fundamental dashboards and reporting and things like a HubSpot CRM and things like that so you can kind of track what’s effective. Because like in this world that we live in now where there aren’t infinite resources and
everybody has to work smarter because they can't work any harder, you have to know exactly, the impact of the things that you're doing.
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Because again, this is about human beings and storytelling and, trends and data can put us in the right direction. But at the end of the day, there has to be some things that are being done without immediate giant ROI. And I think that’s one of the things that is a struggle for early stage companies is that you need to thread the needle between sort of brand building, which takes time and lead generation, which is like more immediate because you don’t have an infinite runway and finding that balance where you don’t take too long, but you also don’t become too transactional that you cannibalize your potential of a long brand. And I think that’s where that marriage between the art and science is really important.
Yeah, that’s really tough, especially when you’re burning cash and how do you build the long game and how do you then keep feeding the beast as well? Wow. Okay, so let me take a step back. So this is the framework, like messaging, positioning, that’s Drumbeat Marketing Framework. Messaging and positioning, develop unique point of view, execution and scorekeeping, so that’s great. Now, what you said about the efficiency of, especially startups is really important, and you talk about capital efficient versus growth at all costs approach. So what do you mean by that? And how does one become capital efficient and keep capital efficient growth?
Yeah. So I think that like, again, I’m in the tech space. And so there was a period of time, say a few years ago, where everything was about growth. How do you become the next decacorn? They used to have the triple-triple, double-double model. Like triple your growth, then triple your growth, then triple your growth, then double, then double. And it was growth at all costs. Like HubSpot, for example, when it was growing, it was spending 120% of its revenue on go-to-market sales and marketing. And some of that was driven by sort of the investment profile. Like these funds raised so much money, they invested so much money, they needed that decacorn to get the return. And then it kind of became clear that maybe that’s not the most efficient way to grow a business. And kind of added to our problem of those models were like, hey, if one company becomes that as an investment firm win, even if the other nine in our portfolio fail.
Now I think there’s like this more movement towards what we call like Rule of 40 companies, which is like, hey, can you, between growth and profitability, get to about 40%? So that might be like 20% growth, 20% profitability, 10% growth, 30% profitability. And that is just prioritizing sort of like efficiency and pragmatic growth, which I think at the end of the day, we kind of lost sight of like what a healthy company looks like. And I think
healthy companies give the entrepreneur and the founders more option. And I think when a founder and an entrepreneur feels like they have a lot of options for their company, that's in a really good place to be.
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I love it. This “Rule of 40”, I’ve not heard of it. So basically your profitability and growth should add up to at least 40.
Correct.
And it could be any combination.
Right. And I think that flexibility, as opposed to like we needed to have 200% growth. Well, there’s only so many certain ways. And like, at the end of the day, like these companies that are seeking these giant billion dollar valuations, like have to go achieve them too. And it’s actually very hard to scale at that way with like a very strong foundation. And I think that “Rule of 40” allows you to build. You may get to a point at some point where you’re like, wow, this foundation is good, this business is healthy. There is this opportunity to go for it, but it’s not go for it or fail.
Yeah. Well, I love this balanced approach. So how do people even learn this stuff? Where should entrepreneurs go and learn how to be an entrepreneur? Do you think it could be taught to people?
Yes, I think that, yeah, I’ve talked with this woman named Dr. Julie Gerner. She’s a professional coach and she, she often says that businesses fail most likely from internal factors, not external factors. And being a successful entrepreneur means that you can handle adversity. You can iterate and change in mid-flight. You can handle failure and rejection and learn from them. You are persistent and determined. You can operate in chaos. You can motivate people. These are skills that I think are best learned through experience and they are obviously the kind of skills that will help you navigate successfully in a business, but they’re also the skills that will help you navigate successfully in life.
And I think that that entrepreneurship mindset, that thinking outside of a box, loving solving problems is a skill set that would be super beneficial in every industry.
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So if only experience can teach entrepreneurship, resilience, overcoming adversity, then how can you teach it? So can it be reduced to a theoretical formula?
Well, I think that the mindset can be taught. And you’re seeing this. My brother works at the Magnuson Center of Entrepreneurship at Dartmouth College. And we’ve always been in the space and you’ve obviously seen tons of successful college age students starting companies. But now he’s seeing that entrepreneurial mindset that creates your own path and the frameworks to that, how you view things, even just the exposure to that way of thinking, moving down market and high schools are beginning to teach entrepreneurship, beginning to have business pitch competitions, beginning to celebrate some of those things. I always remember a story of an entrepreneur that when he was in grade school, he bought a pack of gum for a dollar and he sold each slice or each piece of gum for a dollar.
So he was making profit on his gum pieces and his teacher yelled at him and told him to stop doing that. But he was laying like, well, if I showed promise in sports or music, I would be celebrated. I would have been nurtured. But when I was showing promise in business, it was kind of rejected. And I think that mindset is changing. And I think that’s just going to help kids have longer period of time for that experience with a little bit less risk, but then also being exposed to sort of the frameworks and some of these things. I have a nephew who’s a freshman in high school and he’s reading Atomic Habits in some of these books that I was never thinking about when I was 15 years old. And I think that’s a great headstart for them.
Yeah. Atomic Habits is great. And I like to think of businesses that they should also be developing atomic habits. Stack their habits and make sure that they implement the process and they make it stick and then build the next one top. Okay, but we digress. Another topic I wanted to ask you about is entrepreneurship. A lot of people talk about AI as being a big engine of entrepreneurship and people can now use AI to create a company with a much lower cost base. So what is your view on this, on how AI can be an engine of entrepreneurship? And also, what is your view, it’s kind of two questions in one, about SaaS companies? Are they being threatened by AI? Is there going to be a disruption there?
Yeah, so I think AI is going to have an impact in entrepreneurship in two ways. I think when it comes to SaaS companies and the products that they build, we have as an investment firm always been very interested in vertical SaaS, taking sort of the software approach to legacy institutions or industries that were ripe for disruption like pest management, or we work with a company that’s involved in the shellfish industry. But now I think vertical AI is gonna be a real big opportunity for companies. So I think of horizontal AI, like the long, large language models of ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini. They’re very horizontal for certain things. Vertical AI is gonna be when you have very specific data sets that you’re working in that are in very specific industries, and those will end up being the platforms of which decisions in those spaces like law, finance, healthcare are made.
So I think companies that are thinking about vertical AI are gonna be super successful. Then AI itself is going to help kind of manifest this sort of efficient growth that we talked about. When I worked at Dine, which I talked about earlier, I was part of a 40-person marketing team. Like, I just don’t see that happening because teams are gonna be able to leverage technology and tools to get them a little bit farther. And again, there’s a saying like AI is not going to take your job. Somebody that knows how to leverage AI and get the most out of it is going to. And so I think having those understandings of how to do them. Like we mentioned, you’re doing a Zoom call, you have a great point, it’s recorded, you’ve now taken that transcript, you’ve put it into a Jasper or a ChatGPT, you’ve now made a blog post, you’ve edited it with your own personal touch and now you’ve done that. In the past, that could have been a multi-hour, multi-person process that can now be done pretty instantaneously.
So it will impact, you’re seeing AI being leveraged obviously on go-to-market teams, you’re seeing it on development teams, you’re seeing it even in back office functions.
It's just gonna give people who have the strategic thought and the vision an opportunity to sort of make themselves stronger, which I think will be ultimately a positive.
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Yeah, no, I think AI is a huge thing. And also outsourcing. I think outsourcing is also a very powerful force because when you can have people in South America, in Asia, in India, Europe, they all can work for your company part-time and you can basically pick experts. You don’t have to commit to having them full-time, potentially much lower salaries.
As an entrepreneur, you can leverage it much better than as a big company and that’s also a huge good thing.
I think that’s such a great point. And especially in this world that we’re living in right now, I’m in New Hampshire, I know you’re in another location. It’s like a global workforce. But like so many companies are being built remote first, whether they’re full-time employees or whether they’re outsource vendors. And I think that skill set for the entrepreneur and the founder, the ability to galvanize the team and get everybody rowing in the same direction when they’re all in disparate is going to be really important for them to understand. But I think that it does allow the teams to be built and that combination, I think, of a great idea, leveraging technology and outsourced expertise is going to be the model for sure.
All right. With that, let me ask you my final question. What is the most important question any entrepreneur should be asking themselves?
Steve, I think you nailed it at the beginning of this interview, the “Why.” There are a lot of easier ways to make money than being an entrepreneur. I’m a big Dave Goggins fan, and that guy puts himself in a lot of extreme situations. And when you are running a hundred mile race and you’re at 65 miles and it sucks, you can’t lie to yourself. You have to know why you are there. And that’s the same thing with entrepreneurship. When you are late at night, it’s three o’clock in the morning, you’re awake because you’re worried about the 18 different problems that you have. You have to know why you are doing it. Because it’s going to make you uncomfortable. It’s going to push you beyond what you think you are capable of.
And if that’s your “Why,” like you want to do something, you want to make the most out of life,
you want to have like learning and skills and have an impact and feel like you've built something, then you're in the right spot.
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So is it really a spiritual dimension that we are bringing into companies where we asked “Why?” Is this that we want to provide people with not just the intellectual stimulation, not just the financial, obviously, you have to feed your family, your career progression, but then the bigger “Why” is it’s more of a spiritual thing. Can you emotionally connect to a purpose that is bigger than yourself and doesn’t necessarily have to be religious. It can be something that you really strongly believe in, it’s kind of a spiritual dimension.
Yeah, I mean, literally, life is just about how you fill your time. And right, like I love my wife, I love my children, yet I spend a lot of time at work. And so if I’ve chosen that I have to spend that time somewhere besides there, I want it to be meaningful. And it’s one of the reasons when we go back to the Drumbeat Marketing plan and having that market in and having that unique point of view, we try to always bubble that vision up to something more meaningful beyond just the thing you’re selling. We worked with a company that did digital notary. What we’re trying to do is provide peace of mind for people in their most intense moments. Like when do you need a notary? When you’re buying something, when you’re doing like some medical thing or something, like there’s these really big moments of your life.
And if we can make that process easier for you, then we’re allowing you to be focused on the biggest moment. It’s that connection, It’s that thing. That’s what people want to work for. They want to work with people and they want to work on something. I think they want to work with something that’s meaningful. And that’s the little bit extra that gets you to run through the wall, as opposed to just stopping and saying like, eh, it’s kind of hard. And that’s in the end of it, that’s the difference between the companies that make it and the companies that don’t. And so that’s why I think it’s a really important thing to have.
Love it. Love this metaphor running through walls. This is very powerful. Adam Coughlin, co-founder, CMO and managing partner of York IE, helping startups to go to market and beat the drum on marketing and increase their revenue and tell their story. Thanks very much for sharing your wisdom on the show. And if you enjoyed this conversation, then make sure you follow us on YouTube, you subscribe as well, and give us a review, please, on Apple Podcasts, so we can beat the drum louder going forward. So Adam, thanks for coming and thank you for listening.
Thank you very much for having me, Steve. And if anybody’s interested, we are just york.ie. And please hit me up on LinkedIn. I’d love to carry this conversation on with anybody.
Yeah, do check out york.ie and you’ll find great resources. Thank you, Adam.
Thank you, Steve.
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By Steve Preda
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https://youtu.be/rADiqnrhgrk
Adam Coughlin, Co-founder, CMO, and Managing Partner of York IE, is on a mission to help startups beat the odds by building strong, capital-efficient brands that resonate with their markets.We explore Adam’s Drumbeat Marketing Framework:
Messaging & Positioning, Develop Unique Point of View, Execution, and Scorekeeping.
He shares why brand consistency beats shiny-object syndrome, how vertical AI is redefining SaaS, and why startups need to balance storytelling with measurable impact. Adam also explains how to foster entrepreneurial thinking early and why founders must lead with a deep sense of purpose.
—
Run Through Walls with Adam Coughlin
Good day, dear listeners, Steve Preda here with the Management Blueprint Podcast. And my guest today is Adam Coughlin, co-founder, CMO and managing partner of York IE, where he works with startups on foundational messaging, content, communications, go-to-market strategy, website and digital marketing, revenue operations, and corporate storytelling. Welcome to the show, Adam.
Yeah, thanks for having me, Steve. Appreciate it.
Yeah, you guys are really a full-service shop. You do almost everything. So tell me, how are you guys unique, and what is it that makes you a superior solution for people?
Yeah, absolutely. So the founding team of York IE, we all work together at a company called Dine here in New Hampshire that did the domain name system. And we built that company to about a hundred million of annual recurring revenue, got acquired by Oracle. While we were inside of Oracle, we kind of reflected on the growth journey that we took at Dine. And we felt that a lot of the legacy institutions that we turned to for growth help, whether that was our investors, our advisors, our vendors, they were operating out of antiquated models so that were really good for them, but not necessarily for us as the operators. And so that’s what we wanted to disrupt. So in 2019, we launched York IE. We are an advisory and investment firm. So we help technology companies grow. We do that through investing in early stage exclusively B2B software companies. And then because we were operators, we also built a strategic advisory firm that does strategy and execution across the functional areas of R&D, go to market and G&A.
Because we feel like we want to roll up our sleeves and help companies be successful.
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Yeah. So you’re basically investing companies that advise them, help to improve them, and some you just advise them and don’t invest. So it’s a combination.
Combination. Exactly. Right. And I think in addition to the advise, it’s really important to get across that we do the execution because that is where companies need help. Especially early stage companies. A lot of those teams are small, they’re dynamic, they have a good strategy, they just need help and take some things off their plates and we’re there to help them with that.
Sounds great. So that leads to my question. What is your personal “Why” and how are you manifesting it in your business?
Yeah, absolutely. I think this is a great question. And my personal “Why” is I love entrepreneurs. I think that they are both visionary and builders and that they are pursuing their dreams in the effort to create something and build something that makes the world better. And I think that if they build good companies, then they hire good employees.
Good companies have impacts on communities. Good companies build wealth.
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Yeah, well, I couldn’t resonate more with that. I call it Business Covid or these companies that fail, and I think they can be saved as well with the right structures and processes and approaches. So let’s talk about how you do that because you do a lot of stuff. But one of the things that we talked about was your framework called Drumbeat Marketing and marketing is difficult these days because there’s so much noise out there. So how do you overcome that noise? How do you get your message heard? I like the visual metaphor of drumbeat marketing, you’re beating drums. So how do you beat the drum and how do you get the message resonating?
Yeah, absolutely. So this is actually a concept that I came up with in my previous life when I was a journalist. And so I was covering the New Hampshire primary, and in New Hampshire, we’re the first in the nation primary, so there’s a lot of retail politics that happens. And I talked to Jon Huntsman, who was running for president in 2016, former governor of Utah, former ambassador to China, and he said, in New Hampshire, you have to shake someone’s hand 10 times before they’ll consider voting for you, and then 10 more before they actually do. And that really resonated with me because it’s true about messaging.
Only when you are sick of saying something does it actually begin to resonate with anybody outside of your own walls. We live in a very noisy world. And what happens with a lot of new companies is that they get a little bit of shiny object syndrome. They say this, they say that, they’ve said everything and they’re known for nothing. And so that drumbeat marketing framework is all about discipline. So the first step in that is coming up with your messaging and positioning. We work with a lot of founders that take a product-out approach to their company. They had a problem personally, they solved it, they then assume that everybody else needs that solution. But the reality is that every company is but one player in a larger ecosystem.
We always advocate that you should take a market-in approach. Understand the market landscape, the competitive landscape, and how you fit into that.
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Love it. So, basically, it’s very easy to fall in love with your product. They say that you should fall in love with your market instead and to conquer this urge of this personal bias about what you think other people will react to test the markets. Okay, so market in, whereas product-out, that makes sense. So what’s the next step?
Yeah, so then once you’ve kind of surveyed the market and the competitive landscape, you’re in a better position of power to see sort of where is the green field space and then what is our unique point of view. And I think that this is very important and it’s only going to become more important in the world of AI and marketing. Like there is just so much noise and the barrier to putting stuff out is basically zero now. And so then what is going to resonate? What is going to have you stand out? It is having a unique point of view that you become known for and you’re doing that because you’re telling that story. And that’s the key word, storytelling. Particularly in technology, we can often think about speeds and feeds, but at the end of the day, no matter what you’re selling, you’re selling to a human being. And since the dawn of man, people have learned and engaged with stories. And so being able to tell that story, back your story up with data that’s unique to you and your company, and it’s a story that is unique, not just to yourself, but into the broader market, you’re going to be in a really good position to be successful.
Yeah, I love it. And it’s so easy, especially when you’re a tech entrepreneur, you may have an engineering background, or you may be a very smart mathematician and you want to focus on objective facts rather than stories, kind of have the implication that maybe it’s made up and no, but this is the medium of communication. It is through stories. So you have to articulate the stories. That’s very important. So what’s that? You articulated the story. You have a unique point of view. So that’s kind of a differentiation already through your story. Then what’s next? How do you get this Drumbeat Marketing to be impactful?
Now once you have your story and this point of view that you want to get across, you need to disseminate it through all sorts of integrated marketing channels. People consume information in a variety of different mediums. If you’ve done your marketing research, you kind of have an understanding of where are the watering holes that my prospects are gathering. And then you can tell that story, that point of view, in the way that they’re going to consume it the most. Sometimes, though, you’ll talk to a company and they’ll say, here’s my marketing strategy, and it’s just a bunch of different channels. The biggest hurdle for success for companies is that they have such fragmented audiences.
And if you try to reach those audiences in the 10 or 12 different places that they’re gathering and you tell them 10 or 12 different stories, then they have no idea who you are. But if you take that story that we talked about and now you just kind of slice and dice it up in the different ways, whether that be social, whether that be media relations, whether that be ads. Now that bubbles up and it’s telling one story, you’re just reaching them in different ways. And I think that’s the best way to sort of gain that strength and not introduce confusion to the audience. And to your point that you made, depending on the founder,
it's also about finding the channels that you're comfortable with. I've worked with a lot of deeply technical people.
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Yeah, and it’s so important. I mean, you see big companies, fortune-ranked companies, when they rebrand, for example, then they make this huge campaign, they plaster the airwaves, and the internet, television, everywhere, they push it at the same time so that people, wherever they are, they’re going to get those impressions from multiple directions and then it’s going to start to create that knock-on effect of breaking through with their consciousness and start to make a mark. And if you just sporadically do it, then it’s just part of the noise and nothing happens.
Absolutely. Like, we’ll talk to a company and they’ll have a big announcement, maybe a new product, maybe a funding announcement. And then I always say, great, we will help you with that launch, but what’s the next announcement? Because you can’t go dark for a period of time. Most of us aren’t launching the iPod or something revolutionary. It’s that consistency. Like a brand isn’t made in a moment. A brand is when you look at a company over three, six, nine, 12 months, and you just see all of this momentum. Success is a giant boulder that needs to be pushed and it’s really hard to get it going. But once it starts building some of that momentum, suddenly it’s going downhill. And now everybody wants to be a part of pushing it. Nobody wants to be a part at the beginning. And so
you just need that consistency and discipline over time to have it actually be meaningful.
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Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Okay, and then how do you iterate? How do you know that you are on the right track and you are doing well or how can you do even better?
The part that I always find when it comes to marketing and storytelling is that it has to be both art and science. And I think it can be very easy for creatives and people like that to like, hey, we’ve done something now we want to go on and create something new and do something else. And it’s like, well, like what is working? And so that is really important to get some of the fundamental dashboards and reporting and things like a HubSpot CRM and things like that so you can kind of track what’s effective. Because like in this world that we live in now where there aren’t infinite resources and
everybody has to work smarter because they can't work any harder, you have to know exactly, the impact of the things that you're doing.
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Because again, this is about human beings and storytelling and, trends and data can put us in the right direction. But at the end of the day, there has to be some things that are being done without immediate giant ROI. And I think that’s one of the things that is a struggle for early stage companies is that you need to thread the needle between sort of brand building, which takes time and lead generation, which is like more immediate because you don’t have an infinite runway and finding that balance where you don’t take too long, but you also don’t become too transactional that you cannibalize your potential of a long brand. And I think that’s where that marriage between the art and science is really important.
Yeah, that’s really tough, especially when you’re burning cash and how do you build the long game and how do you then keep feeding the beast as well? Wow. Okay, so let me take a step back. So this is the framework, like messaging, positioning, that’s Drumbeat Marketing Framework. Messaging and positioning, develop unique point of view, execution and scorekeeping, so that’s great. Now, what you said about the efficiency of, especially startups is really important, and you talk about capital efficient versus growth at all costs approach. So what do you mean by that? And how does one become capital efficient and keep capital efficient growth?
Yeah. So I think that like, again, I’m in the tech space. And so there was a period of time, say a few years ago, where everything was about growth. How do you become the next decacorn? They used to have the triple-triple, double-double model. Like triple your growth, then triple your growth, then triple your growth, then double, then double. And it was growth at all costs. Like HubSpot, for example, when it was growing, it was spending 120% of its revenue on go-to-market sales and marketing. And some of that was driven by sort of the investment profile. Like these funds raised so much money, they invested so much money, they needed that decacorn to get the return. And then it kind of became clear that maybe that’s not the most efficient way to grow a business. And kind of added to our problem of those models were like, hey, if one company becomes that as an investment firm win, even if the other nine in our portfolio fail.
Now I think there’s like this more movement towards what we call like Rule of 40 companies, which is like, hey, can you, between growth and profitability, get to about 40%? So that might be like 20% growth, 20% profitability, 10% growth, 30% profitability. And that is just prioritizing sort of like efficiency and pragmatic growth, which I think at the end of the day, we kind of lost sight of like what a healthy company looks like. And I think
healthy companies give the entrepreneur and the founders more option. And I think when a founder and an entrepreneur feels like they have a lot of options for their company, that's in a really good place to be.
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I love it. This “Rule of 40”, I’ve not heard of it. So basically your profitability and growth should add up to at least 40.
Correct.
And it could be any combination.
Right. And I think that flexibility, as opposed to like we needed to have 200% growth. Well, there’s only so many certain ways. And like, at the end of the day, like these companies that are seeking these giant billion dollar valuations, like have to go achieve them too. And it’s actually very hard to scale at that way with like a very strong foundation. And I think that “Rule of 40” allows you to build. You may get to a point at some point where you’re like, wow, this foundation is good, this business is healthy. There is this opportunity to go for it, but it’s not go for it or fail.
Yeah. Well, I love this balanced approach. So how do people even learn this stuff? Where should entrepreneurs go and learn how to be an entrepreneur? Do you think it could be taught to people?
Yes, I think that, yeah, I’ve talked with this woman named Dr. Julie Gerner. She’s a professional coach and she, she often says that businesses fail most likely from internal factors, not external factors. And being a successful entrepreneur means that you can handle adversity. You can iterate and change in mid-flight. You can handle failure and rejection and learn from them. You are persistent and determined. You can operate in chaos. You can motivate people. These are skills that I think are best learned through experience and they are obviously the kind of skills that will help you navigate successfully in a business, but they’re also the skills that will help you navigate successfully in life.
And I think that that entrepreneurship mindset, that thinking outside of a box, loving solving problems is a skill set that would be super beneficial in every industry.
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So if only experience can teach entrepreneurship, resilience, overcoming adversity, then how can you teach it? So can it be reduced to a theoretical formula?
Well, I think that the mindset can be taught. And you’re seeing this. My brother works at the Magnuson Center of Entrepreneurship at Dartmouth College. And we’ve always been in the space and you’ve obviously seen tons of successful college age students starting companies. But now he’s seeing that entrepreneurial mindset that creates your own path and the frameworks to that, how you view things, even just the exposure to that way of thinking, moving down market and high schools are beginning to teach entrepreneurship, beginning to have business pitch competitions, beginning to celebrate some of those things. I always remember a story of an entrepreneur that when he was in grade school, he bought a pack of gum for a dollar and he sold each slice or each piece of gum for a dollar.
So he was making profit on his gum pieces and his teacher yelled at him and told him to stop doing that. But he was laying like, well, if I showed promise in sports or music, I would be celebrated. I would have been nurtured. But when I was showing promise in business, it was kind of rejected. And I think that mindset is changing. And I think that’s just going to help kids have longer period of time for that experience with a little bit less risk, but then also being exposed to sort of the frameworks and some of these things. I have a nephew who’s a freshman in high school and he’s reading Atomic Habits in some of these books that I was never thinking about when I was 15 years old. And I think that’s a great headstart for them.
Yeah. Atomic Habits is great. And I like to think of businesses that they should also be developing atomic habits. Stack their habits and make sure that they implement the process and they make it stick and then build the next one top. Okay, but we digress. Another topic I wanted to ask you about is entrepreneurship. A lot of people talk about AI as being a big engine of entrepreneurship and people can now use AI to create a company with a much lower cost base. So what is your view on this, on how AI can be an engine of entrepreneurship? And also, what is your view, it’s kind of two questions in one, about SaaS companies? Are they being threatened by AI? Is there going to be a disruption there?
Yeah, so I think AI is going to have an impact in entrepreneurship in two ways. I think when it comes to SaaS companies and the products that they build, we have as an investment firm always been very interested in vertical SaaS, taking sort of the software approach to legacy institutions or industries that were ripe for disruption like pest management, or we work with a company that’s involved in the shellfish industry. But now I think vertical AI is gonna be a real big opportunity for companies. So I think of horizontal AI, like the long, large language models of ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini. They’re very horizontal for certain things. Vertical AI is gonna be when you have very specific data sets that you’re working in that are in very specific industries, and those will end up being the platforms of which decisions in those spaces like law, finance, healthcare are made.
So I think companies that are thinking about vertical AI are gonna be super successful. Then AI itself is going to help kind of manifest this sort of efficient growth that we talked about. When I worked at Dine, which I talked about earlier, I was part of a 40-person marketing team. Like, I just don’t see that happening because teams are gonna be able to leverage technology and tools to get them a little bit farther. And again, there’s a saying like AI is not going to take your job. Somebody that knows how to leverage AI and get the most out of it is going to. And so I think having those understandings of how to do them. Like we mentioned, you’re doing a Zoom call, you have a great point, it’s recorded, you’ve now taken that transcript, you’ve put it into a Jasper or a ChatGPT, you’ve now made a blog post, you’ve edited it with your own personal touch and now you’ve done that. In the past, that could have been a multi-hour, multi-person process that can now be done pretty instantaneously.
So it will impact, you’re seeing AI being leveraged obviously on go-to-market teams, you’re seeing it on development teams, you’re seeing it even in back office functions.
It's just gonna give people who have the strategic thought and the vision an opportunity to sort of make themselves stronger, which I think will be ultimately a positive.
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Yeah, no, I think AI is a huge thing. And also outsourcing. I think outsourcing is also a very powerful force because when you can have people in South America, in Asia, in India, Europe, they all can work for your company part-time and you can basically pick experts. You don’t have to commit to having them full-time, potentially much lower salaries.
As an entrepreneur, you can leverage it much better than as a big company and that’s also a huge good thing.
I think that’s such a great point. And especially in this world that we’re living in right now, I’m in New Hampshire, I know you’re in another location. It’s like a global workforce. But like so many companies are being built remote first, whether they’re full-time employees or whether they’re outsource vendors. And I think that skill set for the entrepreneur and the founder, the ability to galvanize the team and get everybody rowing in the same direction when they’re all in disparate is going to be really important for them to understand. But I think that it does allow the teams to be built and that combination, I think, of a great idea, leveraging technology and outsourced expertise is going to be the model for sure.
All right. With that, let me ask you my final question. What is the most important question any entrepreneur should be asking themselves?
Steve, I think you nailed it at the beginning of this interview, the “Why.” There are a lot of easier ways to make money than being an entrepreneur. I’m a big Dave Goggins fan, and that guy puts himself in a lot of extreme situations. And when you are running a hundred mile race and you’re at 65 miles and it sucks, you can’t lie to yourself. You have to know why you are there. And that’s the same thing with entrepreneurship. When you are late at night, it’s three o’clock in the morning, you’re awake because you’re worried about the 18 different problems that you have. You have to know why you are doing it. Because it’s going to make you uncomfortable. It’s going to push you beyond what you think you are capable of.
And if that’s your “Why,” like you want to do something, you want to make the most out of life,
you want to have like learning and skills and have an impact and feel like you've built something, then you're in the right spot.
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So is it really a spiritual dimension that we are bringing into companies where we asked “Why?” Is this that we want to provide people with not just the intellectual stimulation, not just the financial, obviously, you have to feed your family, your career progression, but then the bigger “Why” is it’s more of a spiritual thing. Can you emotionally connect to a purpose that is bigger than yourself and doesn’t necessarily have to be religious. It can be something that you really strongly believe in, it’s kind of a spiritual dimension.
Yeah, I mean, literally, life is just about how you fill your time. And right, like I love my wife, I love my children, yet I spend a lot of time at work. And so if I’ve chosen that I have to spend that time somewhere besides there, I want it to be meaningful. And it’s one of the reasons when we go back to the Drumbeat Marketing plan and having that market in and having that unique point of view, we try to always bubble that vision up to something more meaningful beyond just the thing you’re selling. We worked with a company that did digital notary. What we’re trying to do is provide peace of mind for people in their most intense moments. Like when do you need a notary? When you’re buying something, when you’re doing like some medical thing or something, like there’s these really big moments of your life.
And if we can make that process easier for you, then we’re allowing you to be focused on the biggest moment. It’s that connection, It’s that thing. That’s what people want to work for. They want to work with people and they want to work on something. I think they want to work with something that’s meaningful. And that’s the little bit extra that gets you to run through the wall, as opposed to just stopping and saying like, eh, it’s kind of hard. And that’s in the end of it, that’s the difference between the companies that make it and the companies that don’t. And so that’s why I think it’s a really important thing to have.
Love it. Love this metaphor running through walls. This is very powerful. Adam Coughlin, co-founder, CMO and managing partner of York IE, helping startups to go to market and beat the drum on marketing and increase their revenue and tell their story. Thanks very much for sharing your wisdom on the show. And if you enjoyed this conversation, then make sure you follow us on YouTube, you subscribe as well, and give us a review, please, on Apple Podcasts, so we can beat the drum louder going forward. So Adam, thanks for coming and thank you for listening.
Thank you very much for having me, Steve. And if anybody’s interested, we are just york.ie. And please hit me up on LinkedIn. I’d love to carry this conversation on with anybody.
Yeah, do check out york.ie and you’ll find great resources. Thank you, Adam.
Thank you, Steve.
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