The Makeshift CMO: Marketing, Growth & Business Podcast For Early Stage Founders & Teams

In this episode, Bruce talks with Brenden K of MasterTalk, who, in his own words was scared shitless when he first started public speaking, but is now an absolute god.

"Despite all the presentations I’ve given over my life, I still remember to this day how scared I was to post my first YouTube video.

I didn’t look like anything in my workshops or presentations, but I went ahead with this project for one reason.

Impact.

A wise friend once told me that I couldn’t possibly coach every human being on Earth with the limited time I had in my life, so I needed to go on video to share my message with the world. I got over my fear, practiced 100’s of times on camera until I was finally able to say that I was “YouTube Ready”.

All’s to say that when you care about others and only want to add value, you’ll be able to overcome any fear/obstacle in the service of others."

That's all that needs to be said about Brenden.

In this episode, Bruce hooks up with Matt Evered, his boy with the Ryerson DMZ. He is a product marketing manager by trade, and has made the unusual transition from Sales into Product Marketing. Matt has an extensive resume as an entrepreneur, a side hustler and of course, listening to a lot of Gary Vee.

This is an episode so epic that it actually births the launch of another podcast, but this time, it did. Check out what Matt Evered of StackAdapt is doing: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mevered/

In this episode, Bruce hooks up with Zeze Peters, a rocket scientist (literally) in the world of marketing. Zeze is the founder of Beam.city, a serial entrepreneur, aerospace engineer & innovator with 20 years of experience in software, robotics & applied A.I. who has led large teams across continents to build million dollar platforms for Fortune 1000 & other fast growing companies.

$3 of $5 spent on ads is wasted due to this complexity, human inability to handle large data-patterns and click fraud. For marketers, there was never a solution to this problem...until now. 

Learn more about Zeze's product at: https://www.beam.city/dna

In this episode, Bruce dives into a mini-SEO and paid search crash course with Ali Abbas, Director of Marketing at Crowdlinker.  Ali works with North America's brightest Tech Start-ups to increase their Search Visibility and Overall Domain Health. He is Founder of Courses by Ali and Creator of a Best-Selling Search Engine Optimization Course.

Learn more about what Ali does at: https://www.linkedin.com/in/a1abbas/

In this episode, Bruce breakdowns the barrier between founder and employee on a sensitive topic: Options. We talk about something that’s fairly outside of the realm of marketing and very founder-focused and why it's SO important to be transparent and HOW to be transparent about options.

In this episode, Bruce interviews one of the most selfless and empathetic entrepreneurs he has even met: Ilya of VanHack, who is on a mission to democratize and help tech companies hire talent faster. He is a founder who is very hands-on with marketing and genuinely feels happy to see his marketing team get conversions and for the VanHack brand to succeed. 

We dive deep into the future of work in Canada for developers. He also gives us a great sneak preview into VanHack's new remote work product which, given these times...could be the next big thing. :) Also, why they may build the next great ATS. 

Not MQLs. Not leads. Not pipeline generated. Bruce has a refreshing convo with Zoe Chung of BioBox Analytics today talking about how her north star is the number of customers she talks to. Putting the customer first is what Zoe is in charge of 100%. There is an incredible amount in this episode, which covers everything from her background in paid search and SEO in nonprofit to finding her why as a marketer for a bio-genomic startup.

Zoe talks about how finding communities for certain products is similar to Pokemon Go, as well as why the recent Netflix drama, Startup has become an inspiration for her.  She also talks about how she works alongside product to ensure that as MD, her messaging and product promotion is on point. 

At BioBox, they are a team of six with three departments: Founders, Marketing, and Product. Learn more about what they do at https://biobox.io/

In this episode, Bruce talks about another large Canadian tech giant's product marketing strategy: Shopify. Today we’re going to talk about Shopify’s origins. Their humble beginnings marketing to super small business owners selling trinkets and their Etsy creations online. Long before their behemoth partnership with Walmart and long before 16-year-olds were making 20K per month on Shopify selling youtube courses, Shopify needed to get a bunch of small business owners on their platform and beat out WooCommerce, BigCommerce, etc. 

This is how they leveraged:

In this episode, Bruce sits down with Alex Jivov, CEO of Hopeful Inc, an ad-tech startup for nonprofits can better attribute their media efforts in relation to dollars generated. Alex talks about a variety of topics including delegation, time efficiency and the future of nonprofits. Also a fun story about how his how team members do improv comedy to spice up their Friday standups.

Learn more about what they do at https://hopefulinc.me/

In this episode of the Makeshift CMO, Bruce sits down with Alexandra Sifton, the owner of Futureproof, specializing in defining marketing direction and repeatable processes for startups and SMBs looking to grow. 

Ali is the definition of "Fractional Marketing Director". She can help define your product, set marketing strategy while organizing and optimize your paid ad campaigns, write website and blog copy and more. 

Along the way, this episode will hopefully teach you a bit about bootstrapped marketing, time management and why no matter what, marketers should presume positive intent. Oh, and also read historical fiction to avoid burnout. 

Learn about what Ali and Futureproof do at meetfutureproof.com