Podcasting Secrets

Today we are joined by Andrea Fryrear. Andrea helps innovative marketing leaders transform their teams into agile marketing powerhouses. She is the author of Mastering Marketing Agility, and the co-founder of AgileSherpas, where she helps business leaders implement marketing agility within their organizations. 

In today's episode, Andrea shares three core principles of agile marketing. 

Andrea’s Journey to Agile Marketing

“Like many marketing professionals, I did not go to school to be a marketer,” Andrea said. “I sort of fell into it. I have an English degree and took my first job as an editorial assistant for a newspaper syndicate. Then when they needed a website redesign, because I was the most digitally savvy person in the building, I was put in charge of that project.”

With website design comes the need for search engine optimization, which eventually leads to the need for marketing. As content marketing grew in popularity, Andrea’s English degree became very useful. 

While she was working on a content team at a software company, she convinced her boss to let them try agile marketing. Her boss agreed and let her complete specific training to fill the new role. She started experimenting with her small marketing team and wrote about the process and her journey. Eventually, people started reaching out to her asking for her advice. Enough people reached out to her that Andrea was able to leave her software company and create AgileSherpas, something she has been working on for more than four years.

The content they create brings in all of their clients. Agility became the way to monetize content marketing. 

What is agile marketing?

“Agile marketing is about setting up systems that allow you to deliver value to an audience faster and more consistently,” Andrea said. “It's a much more iterative continuous value stream than more of those old school styles of marketing work.”

It includes working with a team to identify high-value projects on which to focus our collective efforts. The teams often use sprints (short periods on intense work) to complete projects and then measure the impact afterward to continually improve (Source: Work Front).

Instead of planning a campaign for months that costs thousands of dollars and releasing it with the hope, it is a success, the goal is to get content in front of our audience right away and see what they think. 

Once the content is distributed to our customers, we can get their feedback and input. If they like it, we can continue to build similar content. If they don’t like it, we can take their feedback and try something different. 

Agile marketing focuses on responding to change while following a plan, implementing numerous experiments, collaborating without regard to hierarchy, and using tests and data over opinions (Source: Work Front).

“It’s really all about customer-centricity,” Andrea explained. “It becomes that ongoing point of connection. You de-risk a lot of your activities if you can test and learn in an agile way.” 

Andrea gave three core principles of agile marketing: experimentation, radical transparency, and courage. 

1. Experimentation 

Agile marketing is strongly focused on experimentation and action. “It's things like a bias towards action—a bias towards experimentation and learning as opposed to ‘Well, we're going to do it this way because that's the way we've always done it,’ and it seems to work pretty well,” Andrea said. 

Agile marketing is about trial and error. The goal is to learn from our mistakes, in the beginning, so we can produce successful content faster. 

In order for experimentation to work within a team, there needs to be a high degree of trust and empowerment. Within the teams, the leader gives members a goal or objective to focus on and then sets them off on their own. We must be able to trust that every team member will do their best work to accomplish the task they are given. 

The reason we do marketing this way is to deliver better value to the customer sooner. 

“Agile became a way to communicate,” Andrea said. “It's like a conversation with your customer more often. [You] show them something and get their feedback and then take that into account for the next phase of work.”

We should always be focused on learning and adapting to the feedback we get from our audience. One of the biggest patterns to avoid is simply doing things the same way because “it’s always been done that way.” There will always be opportunities for improvement, and we will miss those opportunities if we don’t look for them.

Because agile marketing is so focused on adaptation and experimentation, it helps teams deal with organizing, managing, and optimizing uncertainty. The teams that are set up with an agile marketing system should be able to handle challenging situations better than others. When COVID-19 hit, Andrea saw that businesses that implemented agile strategies were able to get back on their feet a lot sooner compared to other businesses that hadn’t implemented agile strategies. 

1. Radical Transparency

Radical transparency helps enable trust and accountability within the experimentation process. 

“You have boards—visualized workflows that show you what's being done. You should have regular readouts where you say, ‘This is what we tried and this is what worked and what didn't.’ So you're not just letting [your team] go to work blind. You are still having a line of sight, but you trust that they're doing the best work that they can and you let them get on with it,” Andrea explained. 

These visual boards help keep the team in line and on track. Having radical transparency creates a system of accountability. In addition, it also gamifies the system. As we complete goals and reach milestones, we get a shot of dopamine. The visual work helps create this feeling of progress. 

If someone is struggling on their part and we can see they are stuck, we can ask what we can do to help, and find the problem right away, rather than having them struggle with it alone. 

Another big pattern to avoid is withholding information. “You have to be able to create that focus, and unless you have it all out in the open, you can't do it,” Andrea said. “You've got to . . . say it's not about me—it's about the team's success. And if I openly share what I know and remove myself as a bottleneck, we can go faster as a group, and that's actually better for everybody.”

1. Courage 

Implementing agile marketing requires us to be courageous. 

“To put all of your work out in the open for everyone to see is a courageous act. For a leader to trust that a team or an individual contributor will do what they were asked to do in a timely and high-quality way is a courageous thing to do,” Andrea said. “To call out your teammates . . . you need to be courageous. They all require different kinds of courage, but being ready to step up and do what needs to be done helps make things go a lot more smoothly.”

We need to be ready to step up to the task at hand. It even takes courage to set our goals, estimate projects, and get our content out there because there is the possibility that we might fail. Courage is essential in all marketing strategies, not just agile marketing. 

Key Takeaways

Thank you so much Andrea for sharing your stories and knowledge with us today. Here are some of my key takeaways from this episode:

1. Agile marketing is designed to get value out to customers consistently and quickly. 
2. Agile marketing is focused on experimentation. The goal is to learn from our mistakes, not fear them. 
3. As we experiment, we can adapt to customer feedback. 
4. Radical transparency is essential when working in a team. It helps everyone stay on the same page and move at a faster pace.
5. It takes courage to implement agile marketing and put our work out there, especially when there is the possibility of failure. 

Connect with Andrea

If you enjoyed this interview and want to learn more about Andrea, listen to part two of this episode or connect with her on LinkedIn or her websites, Fryrear.com and AgileSherpas.com.

Want to be a Better Digital Monetizer?

Did you like today’s episode? Then please follow these channels to receive free digital monetization content:

1. Get a free Monetization Assessment of your business
2. Subscribe to the free Monetization eMagazine.
3. Subscribe to the Monetization Nation YouTube channel.
4. Subscribe to the Monetization Nation podcast on Apple Podcast, Google Podcasts, Spotify, or Stitcher. 
5. Follow Monetization Nation on Instagram and Twitter.

Share Your Story 

Have you tried agile marketing? If so, how has it worked for you? Please join our private Monetization Nation Facebook group and share your insights with other digital monetizers.

Read at: https://monetizationnation.com/blog/100-5-steps-to-implement-agile-marketing-effectively/ 

Welcome back to another episode of Monetization Nation with Justin Rondeau. In the first episode, we discussed the tectonic shift of Software as a Service (SaaS) and why businesses are shifting towards it. 

In today’s episode, I asked Justin to talk me through his top secrets and strategies we should know when creating a new SaaS product. Here are three tips he shared: 

1. Know the Problem

In order to begin creating a new SaaS product, we first need to determine what problem our product will solve for our audience. 

Before developing a new product, Justin always asks, “Why are we doing this? What's the very specific problem we’re trying to solve by developing this product?”

Once we have determined the purpose of our product, and the problem we’re trying to solve, we can move on to the next step.  

“Be very intentional about what you're trying to build, what you're trying to solve, and make sure you are certain that you have access to the audience that you're trying to solve those problems for,” Justin said. 

1. Have Access to Our Audience and Get Their Feedback

After we have found a central purpose for our software, we need to make sure we have access to an audience who would actually buy it. We need to build demand before we create a code. 

“Do you have any visibility in the space that you're trying to provide value in? Do you own the media and some of that space or are you starting completely from scratch?” Justin asked. 

We can begin by offering free value to our customers in order to get a feel for what they want and like. Create a website. Create social media accounts. We should start building our audience even before we launch our software product.

“If I were to do anything over again . . . I wouldn't even start developing the tool yet [until] I started building up a content site or a media site to build an audience of people who would be interested in the tool I'd want to sell in about a year,” Justin said. “Once you have that list of people, you are able to work with them.” 

Before we officially launch our product, we should start with a trial. We can do a walk-through with somebody and make sure it is simple and easy to use.

“Right at launch of something, regardless of the price point of the product, what you need to be doing is one-on-one onboarding with people, even if it's dead simple, and walk them through it, because that's going to give you conversations with the customer . . . to see what you missed.”

Once we get feedback from a couple of different people and make the necessary revisions, our product is ready to be initially launched and tested. It doesn’t have to be perfect to be launched. In fact, when we get our software out to customers sooner and get their feedback on how to improve it, that will help us to build much better software than if we were trying to build it in a vacuum without client feedback. 

“Get constant feedback. Don't be afraid to get on the phone with people; don't be afraid to do anything. If you're not willing to jump on calls and do demos, you're in the wrong business,” Justin explained. 

1. Keep it Simple

As we are building our product, we need to remember to keep it simple. 

There is a power in simplicity. If we are willing to take the time to make our product simple, the adoption curve will go a lot faster. What are the features our audience is actually going to use?

Our product should be understood without a manual. If we have to really explain how to use it to our customers, we’ve failed. This is why implementing a walk-through is so important. It gives our customers a chance to show us what is missing. That is where we’re going to get our main breakthroughs. We need to have an onboarding process in the early stages. 

“Keep it simple, stay on point, and avoid scope creep at all costs,” Justin said.

Scope creep means adding additional features to a new product that go beyond the agreed-upon scope (Source: Project Management Institute). 

Sometimes we try to build our software with every single feature we can think of, but we don't realize our audience is only going to use about 20% of those features. By adding five times as much as they really need, we add an unnecessary and counter-productive level of complexity. 

Disciplining ourselves to really identify the 20% of the features that our clients are actually going to use can help the development, growth, and profitability of our product. 

Additional Tips

In addition to the three steps above, Justin gave me some extra tips to take into consideration when building a new SaaS product. 

He explained that we need to create a solid hand-off process between development and product. We should create milestones and have a unified definition of what “done” is. 

If we do this, the process will run much smoother as we have better communication with our teams. 

We also need to be aware of how the market is changing. The SaaS market is becoming much more saturated. Because of this, it may be harder to get customers to subscribe.

“I've been finding a lot that people just don't want another subscription. So one of the things I've been doing is trying to find . . . those nuggets of things that could almost stand alone by themselves,” Justin said. 

Instead of offering a single SaaS product, Justin makes sure to provide more value. He created additional products his customers could purchase for a flat fee—without a subscription. This was the first step in his marketing funnel. Once a customer entered the funnel—bought a product, he implemented a follow-up sequence. He offers them more. If they want full access to even more products that would help them, they simply need to buy a subscription.  

“We're front-ending simpler pieces of technology, and then back-ending the larger subscription. That's been wildly effective for us, and that's what I've been starting to look at,” Justin explained. “How do we create these more hyper-focused single applications that work within our tech stack that we could then use to upsell later into a subscription? I think that's going to be more of a movement. You're going to see more people start creating one-off payment applications that then funnel into the overarching SaaS company or SaaS product they're looking at.”

Key Takeaways

Thank you so much Justin for sharing your knowledge with us today. Here are some of my key takeaways from this episode:

1. We should start building an audience even before we build our product. The most important thing to do to have a successful SaaS product is to have a following of targeted customers who know, like, and trust us before we launch our SaaS product.
2. Before we begin developing a new SaaS product, we need to know the problem that the product will solve. 
3. We should create a demo or walk-through of our product and get customer feedback before we officially launch it. 
4. We need to keep our product simple and avoid adding additional features that aren’t essential. 
5. As the market is changing, it may be smart to offer hyper-focused, single applications that customers can purchase for a one-time fee. These hyper-focused products can then be used to up-sell later into a subscription. 

Connect with Justin

If you enjoyed this interview and want to learn more about Justin or connect with him, you can find him on LinkedIn, email him at [email protected] or find out more about his company at Scalable.com.

Want to be a Better Digital Monetizer?

Did you like today’s episode? Then please follow these channels to receive free digital monetization content:

1. Get a free Monetization Assessment of your business
2. Subscribe to the free Monetization eMagazine.
3. Subscribe to the Monetization Nation YouTube channel.
4. Subscribe to the Monetization Nation podcast on Apple Podcast, Google Podcasts, Spotify, or Stitcher. 
5. Follow Monetization Nation on Instagram and Twitter.

Share Your Story 

Have you created a SaaS product? If so, what is your best story and secret about the SaaS development process? Please join our private Monetization Nation Facebook group and share your insights with other digital monetizers.

Read at: https://monetizationnation.com/blog/98-how-to-create-a-new-saas-product/ 

Justin Rondeau is the general manager for Scalable Labs and manages several software companies including Recess.io, TruConversion.com, Praxio.com, and powers the technology behind DigitalMarketer.com.

In today's episode, we’ll discuss the tectonic shift of SaaS and why businesses are shifting towards it. Many different companies have adopted SaaS because of the tremendous opportunity it provides to develop recurring revenue streams.  

What is SaaS?

Software as a service (SaaS) is a way of delivering software online. Instead of installing and maintaining the software on our own computers, we simply gain access to it via the internet (Source: SalesForce). 

SaaS customers usually pay a monthly subscription fee for access to the software (Source: Digital Guardian). 

When we purchase software and install it onto our computer, we only own the specific version we purchased. But what happens when that software is updated? In the past, if we wanted the newest version, we would have to pay for it again and reinstall it onto our computer. However, now, when we purchase software as a service, we pay a small monthly fee to have access to the newest version of that software. When the program is updated, we get instant access to the updated version. 

Adobe is one of the best examples of SaaS. We pay a small monthly fee for Photoshop (or their other software) and continue to get the updated versions, rather than buying Photoshop 4 and then, when they make a new version, have to repurchase Photoshop 5. 

More than two decades ago, I was the CEO of a publicly traded SaaS company. Back then, we had to do everything ourselves from scratch. Everything involved custom coding. Now the world has changed. It's so much easier to create SaaS products than it was two decades ago. It has created a tectonic shift that many businesses are taking advantage of. 

Here are some of the reasons businesses are taking advantage of SaaS:

The Benefits 

The software is designed to solve a problem. 

When Justin starts a new SaaS project, he asks himself, “What's the problem we're trying to solve? How is this software going to solve that problem?” Once he knew the problem, he would start building the software to solve it. 

SaaS is designed to help us solve our problems while saving us time and money at the same time. 

“The reason why a business would want [SaaS] . . . [is because] they have a need for something that needs to be done. And this tool does it. They don't have to pay massive upfront costs to build it themselves or have large license fees or anything like that. And then . . . they're never really out of date. It's always an evolving product, so they always have the latest edition,” Justin explained. 

Time and Money

SaaS can save us time and money. 

It is so much easier now than ever before to create SaaS products. Before, in order to create a product, we would need to rely on multiple developers who would code from scratch. Now, we can pull from other frameworks that are already out there. Something that would have taken days now takes minutes. 

“Now you'd be able to create your own apps yourself without having to rely on developers,” Justin said. “[It’s] all based off of other frameworks that are out there . . . It would normally take multiple front-end developers to handle because they'd have to code from scratch. Now [we] can pull from libraries of different elements.” 

The ability to develop our own software products not only saves time but also money. Instead of paying massive, upfront costs, businesses can build software themselves or pay small recurring fees to have access to constantly updated software. 

“It takes minutes now. It's a different world, and that's why I think everyone's moving towards the software side of things because you can generate something fairly easily,” Justin explained.   

As software is becoming easier and easier to make, it is starting to cost less. 

Justin said, “It may have taken me $2 million to get my first product out the door when I started two decades ago. But nowadays, maybe for $200,000 you can get a great SaaS product out the door.” 

In today's remote work environment, my companies, Adoption.com and Monetization Nation, don't even have physical offices for headquarters anymore. Everybody works remotely, and in that type of environment, a software product that is not SaaS or cloud-based makes it really hard to work. 

For example, we’ve been using Google Docs and Google Drive for a long time. We migrated many years ago from Microsoft products to Google Drive for that reason. That SaaS product is so much better than a Microsoft document that is sitting on your computer. With SaaS programs like Google Docs and Google Drive, I don’t have to worry about having the recent version. I can also have four different people editing a document at the same time as it is shared on the cloud. This saves me time and money and makes remote, collaborative work so much easier.

Recurring Revenue 

Justin referred to recurring revenue as the gold standard for a business, and SaaS makes it easier. However, as the market becomes more saturated, it can be harder to achieve. We need to be more intentional about what we are asking our customers to subscribe to. 

“We always talk about getting recurring revenue and subscription revenue is one of the best ways to make sure you're going to stay in business. It is harder to front-end those types of offers though, to try and get people to take you up on a subscription. Especially now that people are more used to this in the SaaS economy,” Justin said. 

Subscription is one of the best ways to have recurring revenue. At the beginning of each month we know we will have a certain amount of money deposited into our banks. 

There are a million different things we can subscribe to. With so many options, what is going to make us choose one subscription over the other? For example, think of subscriptions to streaming services. There is Netflix, Hulu, Disney Plus, Vudu, HBO Max, Amazon Prime, Apple TV, Peacock, Paramount Plus, and more. Which should we choose, and why should we choose one over the other?

If we’re going to charge for a recurring revenue stream, we need to make sure we are providing recurring value. How do we keep subscribers with us longer? We have to have a consistent reminder about why they decided to sign up. We need to be delivering great value all the time. This works best when our customers have a recurring problem that needs a constant solution, not something that is a one-time issue. 

This is why so many people are willing to pay for a subscription to streaming services. Consumers have a constant need for entertainment, and streaming services provide constant new value. They also don’t necessarily all offer the exact same thing. For example, the only place we are going to find The Lion King or Mulan is on Disney Plus. The only place we are going to find a Netflix Original such as Stranger Things is Netflix. This is why it is so common for people to be subscribed to multiple streaming services. 

So, are we providing consistent value? Are we providing value that our consumers can’t get anywhere else? 

Think about resume builders. There are many resume builders out there that ask for recurring revenue. However, we really only need to build a resume once when we’re looking for a job. If we have a problem that can be solved in one day, we aren’t going to want to sign up for a subscription. How many of us are subscribed to a resume builder? Probably very few. 

“Now there’s even dedicated SaaS services to unsubscribe you from SaaS products,” Justin explained. “It's getting so weird. I think we're running into a climate where recurring revenue is crucial to businesses, but it can't be it. You need to find other ways to bring in cash; it can't just be purely recurring . . . doing it on subscription revenue alone isn’t going to be enough going forward. ”

Key Takeaways

Thank you so much Justin for sharing your stories and knowledge with us today. Here are some of my key takeaways from this episode:

1. SaaS has become an important tectonic shift.
2. SaaS programs are designed to help solve a problem.
3. We don’t have to pay massive, upfront costs to build the software all from scratch.
4. SaaS is a great way to provide recurring revenue. 
5. The SaaS market is becoming saturated.
6. We shouldn’t only rely on recurring revenue and should have diversified revenue streams.
7. To maintain subscription revenue we need to provide constant and unique value.

Connect with Justin

If you enjoyed this interview and want to learn more about Justin or connect with him, you can find him on LinkedIn, email him at [email protected], or visit his company website at https://scalable.com. You can also watch, listen, or read episode two of Justin’s interview for more stories and secrets. 

Want to be a Better Digital Monetizer?

Did you like today’s episode? Then please follow these channels to receive free digital monetization content:

1. Get a free Monetization Assessment of your business
2. Subscribe to the free Monetization eMagazine.
3. Subscribe to the Monetization Nation YouTube channel.
4. Subscribe to the Monetization Nation podcast on Apple Podcast, Google Podcasts, Spotify, or Stitcher. 
5. Follow Monetization Nation on Instagram and Twitter.

Share Your Story 

Have you developed or marketed a SaaS product? Please join our private Monetization Nation Facebook group and share your insights with other digital monetizers.

Read at: https://monetizationnation.com/blog/97-why-businesses-are-shifting-towards-software-as-a-service/ 

Welcome back to another episode of Monetization Nation with Louis Grenier. In the last episode, we talked about finding success through great business processes. In this second episode, Louis shares four essential elements of customer-focused marketing. 

1. Obsess Over Our Market

Obsessing over our audience is essential in marketing. “You first need to have a minimum viable market that you can obsess over,” Louis said. 

A minimum viable audience is the smallest possible market we can serve while still sustaining our growing business (Source: Guerric). Marketing is all about finding a specific niche group we can provide value to. 

In order to be successful, we need to meet our market's needs. To do this, we should think about everything from their perspective. What problems can we help solve and how? What goals can we help them achieve and how? The best value we can offer is answers to these two questions. We should go out of our way to build a relationship with them and provide this value. 

1. Ask Customers the Right Questions

Once we have a viable market, we need to start asking the right questions. Louis gave some examples of good questions to ask our customers:

• What channels are you hanging out on?
•  What type of people influence you? 
• What was the reason you picked us over the competition? 
• What, if anything, has stopped you from learning from us? 
• Tell me about the very first time you ever thought about using a product like ours. What was the journey?
• What are your pet peeves about our industry?

“Once you can paint that picture from existing customers, it gets quite easier to pick the people that you seek to serve and understand where they hang out and the type of channels you need to work on,” Louis explained. 

The easiest way to figure out what we need to improve on is by asking questions to our existing customers. We can also take it a step further and ask questions to people who have bought products similar to ours. Louis suggests focusing on open-ended questions and questions about the past rather than the future. 

Above all else, our questions need to focus on the customer’s journey—the journey that led them to us. Why did they start thinking about us? That's what matters. Once we know this, we can stop guessing and come up with a strategy based on life, not “boardroom bullshit” as Louis put it. 

The process of understanding the buyer’s journey needs to be more than “data-driven.” “The problem with [being] data-driven is that it could become an obsession, where you always need more data. And that's a problem I see a lot of,” Louis explained. “You will never have perfect data. As a result, you need to have a threshold, a standard of decision, where once you have enough, once you've talked to five customers, you don't need to interview five more . . . My problem with data-driven is it could be endless.”

Another problem with being data-driven is sometimes getting the wrong data. It also can take the focus away from the people. Data isn’t always about the people. We need to look at the right data to make sure it's obsessing over our market with the goal of helping them. 

We can use Google Analytics every day, but that’s not necessarily going to help us understand our customers. A lot of data can be misunderstood. I’m not saying all data is bad and useless, in fact, it can be very helpful. What I am trying to say is, go beyond the data. Ask direct questions to your customers and get direct answers back. 

Another tip Louis gave is to not outsource the data analyst. Don’t hire someone to go over the data for you. Read through the responses yourself. At the end of the day, designing the question is the most important, and we can only do this if we know a little bit about our customers. 

Talk to the right people and ask the right questions. Don’t use analytics as a crutch. 

1. Use Storytelling to Drive Success 

We can use storytelling to drive success. 

“Humans are learning and processing information better when it's about a story because that's what we're used to,” Louis said. “We tell each other stories so we remember stuff.”

When we hear a story, our brain creates visuals, audio, and emotions, helping us to remember it better (Source: Brandignity). 

In our businesses, we can tell stories to leave a strong impact on our customers and help them remember us. 

“Weaving learning into a story makes learning more interesting, activates the brain’s positive emotional state, and hooks the information into a strong memory template. The memory then becomes more durable as the learning follows the narrative pattern through sequences connected to a theme, time flow, or actions directed toward solving a problem or reaching a known goal.” (Source: Edutopia) 

Most stories follow a very similar structure. There is a character with a problem who meets a guide to help them beat it. In our stories, our main character, our hero, is our customers and we are the guide. It is our job to help them solve their problem. 

Being able to express the problem that they're facing can help differentiate our product. We need to find the problem and be able to effectively communicate a solution that resonates with our audience. We can do this by telling a story. 

Storytelling won’t solve all their problems, but it will help. And remember, we need to solve their problems, not ours.

1. Give More Than We Take

When I asked Louis what his number one best monetization strategy is, he said it is to stop thinking about monetization and think about how we can help our people the best way possible. How can we be the best service possible? We shouldn’t focus on the money; We should focus on serving people, and then the money will come naturally.

“Marketing is about generosity. You can't expect to take before giving,” Louis said. “Generosity is the name of the game here. Switch your mindset from trying to take from people, [to] giving [to] people . . . The more you give, the more you're going to get.”

Once again, it goes back to obsessing over our market and providing them with value. We can offer free value through things such as eBooks, blog posts, videos, and more. Only after we establish our credibility and value with free service, can we ask for anything in return. 

Key Takeaways

Thank you so much Louis for sharing your stories and knowledge with us today. Here are some of my key takeaways from this episode:

1. Obsess over our minimum viable market. 
2. Determine our customer’s problem and provide the solution.
3. Ask customers the right questions to understand their needs. 
4. Our questions should focus on the customer’s journey—the journey that led them to us. Once we know this, we can stop guessing and come up with a strategy based on life.
5. Tell stories to drive success. 
6. In our stories, our customers should be the main character. We should be the mentor that helps solve the main character’s problem. 
7. Stories help us remember things better and help us feel a stronger connection.
8. We need to give more than we take. We need to focus on serving our customers, not the money. 

Connect with Louis

If you enjoyed this interview and want to learn more about Louis or connect with him, you can find him on his website, everyonehatesmarketers.com. 

Want to be a Better Digital Monetizer?

Did you like today’s episode? Then please follow these channels to receive free digital monetization content:

1. Get a free Monetization Assessment of your business
2. Subscribe to the free Monetization eMagazine.
3. Subscribe to the Monetization Nation YouTube channel.
4. Subscribe to the Monetization Nation podcast on Apple Podcast, Google Podcasts, Spotify, or Stitcher. 
5. Follow Monetization Nation on Instagram and Twitter.

Share Your Story 

How has obsessing over your customers help your business? Please join our private Monetization Nation Facebook group and share your insights with other digital monetizers.

Read at: https://monetizationnation.com/blog/96-4-essential-elements-of-customer-focused-marketing/ 

Today I am joined by Louis Grenier, founder of the popular contrarian marketing podcast, Everyone Hates Marketers. His show has reached more than 1 million downloads with no ads in less than four years. He has 10 years of experience in marketing and has worked with businesses like Dropbox and Hotjar. 

Today, we will learn how to drive success with great business processes. 

Louis’ Story 

Louis studied mechanical engineering until he realized it wasn't quite for him, and he eventually moved to Ireland for an internship and found a job in marketing. A few years later, he had saved up enough money to launch his first agency. He learned quickly just how difficult that can be. The four people that worked with him got burnt out and quit after two years to join another business. 

Louis continued to work on his startup for three years and eventually started Everyone Hates Marketers on the side. He published an episode every week which became a huge success, and he has now been podcasting for four years and has published 175 episodes. “It wasn't part of the grand plan or grand design,” he said. “It was just a feeling that I could do this, that it could be quite fun.” 

The Process

“I believe that the process trumps everything else, meaning what matters is not the number of downloads—that's just a vanity thing,” Louis said. “Yes, it's a bit for my ego and a bit for status so that you find me credible, but what matters the most is [producing content each week] because, without that, I wouldn't have gotten the feedback I got from early listeners.”

Louis’s early listeners told him what they liked and didn’t like on his podcast. He could then take their feedback and apply it, adjusting his podcast to fit the needs of his listeners. While the critics might have made him feel uncomfortable or irritated at first, it ultimately helped him grow. 

He compared the process to the making of a pearl. A pearl begins to form when a small piece of sand or other irritant gets stuck in an oyster. The oyster begins to cover the sand in a protective coat, nacre (a mineral substance), and layer upon layer, a pearl is formed (Source: Live Science). This process can take up to four years (Source: American Pearl). 

“The process is more important than anything. Because by shipping and putting that grain of sand out, it's not perfect, but it's going to turn into apparel because that's what makes you grow. You need to ship,” Louis said. 

He explained the number one thing we need to do is to ship, meaning we must constantly create and send out our services, products, or our content. Being prolific is more important than being perfect. We just have to get our content out there. That's number one. This requires us to be patient. Success doesn't happen overnight, just as a pearl can’t be created overnight. It takes time. It has taken Louis four years to get to the point where he is today, but the process was worth it. 

“The key is if you don't show up, if you don't ship something, if you don't stop caring about what people will think before it’s live, you can't really grow it. Nothing is real until the people you seek to serve see it,” Louis explained. 

Getting Feedback

We have to learn from our audience. We're not going to be perfect the first time we go out there, so we've got to learn lessons from them. It's not just about our audience seeing our content, it's about them giving that feedback and then taking their feedback and iterating and pivoting based upon that. 

After Louis’ podcast became successful, he launched an eight-week program. He described it as a “high-intensity program for risk-takers who want to really stand out.” He starts by running an early access cohort to get feedback and then applies that feedback to the second cohort he runs. Because he learned the value of feedback early on, he has been able to use it to his advantage and his second cohort sold out. 

The goal of the program is to provide people with a roadmap to launching or relaunching a product and making it radically different. The biggest takeaway people get from his program is clarity. After completing his program, they aren’t worried about missing out on opportunities. They feel confident in making decisions for themselves for the rest of their entrepreneurship journey. 

“All I've been doing is just learning from my own mistakes, reading a lot of books, interviewing a lot of smart people in my podcast, and making sense of it,” Louis said. “And so in that sense, creativity is connectivity.”

A great way to learn is to look at examples of people who have succeeded in what we want to do, and then apply some of their principles. We take portions of inspiration from the different people around us and use it towards our own success. 

Louis’s greatest home run has been his podcast. For the first time in his life, he followed his gut and didn’t second guess himself. He went all in. He didn’t let the critics pull him down, but used their feedback to improve. 

Understanding a Key Fundamental of Business

One of Louis’ other keys to success has been to focus on business fundamentals. 

“I'm going to tell you that even though there are shifts happening, and I could pick a few, [putting] the audience first is absolutely one, radical transparency is another one . . . But what matters the most, above all else, is your ability to navigate those shifts without being scared,” Louis said. “Once you understand the fundamentals, you can basically do anything you want. You can really see anything coming and evolve if you want to and change things around because you have this foundation.”

Change through Tectonic Shifts

The fundamentals of business are things that will never change. One key fundamental Louis emphasizes is people. “People are never going to change,” he explained. “We are creators that have been created through 4 billion years of evolution. Our brain is the result of all of that. 20 years of smartphones or 10 years of smartphones is not going to change our DNA and the way our brain is done.” 

The most important thing is understanding the fundamentals: taking care of the people. The second most important thing is understanding how to identify and leverage shifts as they happen and as they're appropriate to us. There will always be new changes, and the ability to identify and leverage them as appropriate without changing our core fundamentals is important.

“Once you obsess over a specific group of people, you have a market,” he said. We need to identify our audience, our people, our tribe, and obsess over them. And then if we can leverage shifts to better serve them, great. If not, don’t worry about it. It all comes back to that core of obsessing over our people.”

We don’t have to jump on every single trend or tectonic shift that occurs. That would be impossible and overwhelming. We only need to change when the tectonic shifts affect our people—our fundamentals. 

Key Takeaways

Thank you so much Louis for sharing your stories and knowledge with us today. Here are some of my key takeaways from this episode:

1. The process trumps everything else. 
2. It is more important to get our content out there and ship it instead of waiting for perfect content.
3. Being prolific is more important than being perfect.
4. We have to learn from our audience and accept and implement their feedback. 
5. There is creativity in connectivity.
6. The most important thing is understanding the fundamentals: taking care of the people. 
7. We don’t have to jump on every single trend or tectonic shift that occurs. We only need to change when the tectonic shifts affect our people—our fundamentals. 

Connect with Louis

If you enjoyed this interview and want to learn more about Louis or connect with him, you can find him on his website, everyonehatesmarketers.com. You can also watch, listen, or read episode two for more monetization strategies Louis shared in his interview. 

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