UX Marketing Blake Emal

on the podcast today, I've got Ryan Garrow with us who is going to help us determine our side hustle, talk about goals, figure out that whole stage. So this is going to be really valuable, especially if you're just getting started and looking for some advice before we get too much into it.
Ryan, how are you doing today?


Have him do an awesome Blake. I'm excited to be here.


Ryan just started his own podcast that we'll get to at the end as well. So we're, we're going to learn a lot here. I want to get some quick context on you before we dive into the technical subject matter of side hustling. So if you could just run, walk us through really briefly the story of your career from how you got started to where you got or how you, how you got to where you are now.


Okay. I don't think our podcast is long enough to cover all of it, but we'll touch on some high points. I've, been in the digital marketing space for about a decade, was CEO of a company that got acquired. I'm now working with the company that acquired us. And so my focus is primarily in the eCommerce space.


most of my days advising businesses on how they can grow their e-commerce, what they can do in strategically. well how they can compete better. But I also have five businesses with my wife outside of that. So I do have the side hustle game going where I have a brand selling direct to consumer. I also have a wholesale division on that.


My wife has a retail store that also sells online. I have a wine and beer retailer. I have a marketing company that tests new products into markets. And then we have a, an investment organization for e-commerce technology. So I am literally all over the place.


I have so many questions, but I, I can't dive in just yet cause I have one more contextual question I ask everybody there. So I'm curious what you would say is your professional superpower.


Strategy. Seeing where something can or can't work.


I love it. I can already tell. We're going to get along great. You're so, so simple. Direct, straight forward. It's going to be fantastic. My first question, because I do this every bit as much for me to learn as for the audience to learn so. You've mentioned you've already got several side hustles, especially some e-commerce stuff.


I'm really curious. First off, we can go into how you get the ideas for that, but then I also want to bring up, before I forget, how do you actually get the system in place to like get, somebody to manufacture it if you need that or how, like how do you build those relationships as well? So let's tackle the idea first, then we can get into the more technical side.


for me, the ideas are generally easy. And the problem for me is, is refining. And figuring out which ones are bad and which ones may have potential. so my wife is usually my best filter. She, she shoots down most of my ideas and tells me they're dumb. And so that's my step one. Like, all right, what do you think of this?


Oh, I think it's bad. Okay, let's maybe table that and I'll try to refine that. But I usually, when I'm advising, cause we have 800 employees here, I'm advising on a lot of side hustles internally for people under 30 but what I like to tell people too is if you're going to make a side hustle work, you've got to be passionate about it or have some interest.


Otherwise it's just going to become another job or a grind and you're not going to keep going and pushing when you're not making money. Cause most side hustles in the eCommerce space. You're grinding now and hoping for pay late, or whether you're working to become an influencer or whether you're working to set up an econ business for success and to scale and pay for generations of wealth type thing.


So I think passionate interest is one of the biggest things I would filter an idea through. And then I think secondary below that is. What kind of con connections do you have or what kind of opportunities do you have to...

Welcome to the podcast. Today we have Peter Schroeder who is the head of growth at Onna, and we are going to discuss growth. Maybe it's maybe some other things as well, but first and foremost, let's just get some context on you. It's kind of a weird time that we're living in. So, Peter, how are you holding up with all this Corona virus stuff going on?
Hey Blake, thanks for having me and thanks for checking in. it's a crazy time, in tech. I say to my team and I say to everyone every day, we're very fortunate to still be working, and I think that we get the lighter end of everything that's happening. So yeah, just staying positive, saying grateful every day.


and I think we should, we should all do the same on a daily basis.


yeah, definitely. hats off to everybody out there, all the nurses and doctors and everything. Obviously right now, a weird time we're living in. Yeah. The show must go on and let's. Let's give some people some ammo that they can take right now is a great opportunity for side hustlers and people working online to either start a project or continue building it and having a little bit more time at home to do that.


So let's help them grow a little bit. But, but before we get into the details and getting ahead of myself a little bit of context on your career, if you could just give us a snapshot of your career so far, where you've been, where you're going, and where you are, how you got to where you are now.


Basically.


Yeah, absolutely. So, coming out of college, I very much so had that entrepreneurial spirit where, I was inspired by startups. I was inspired by tech companies. and I started, I tried starting a company that was essentially a messaging unification platform that brought all your text messages, your emails, your social media DMS into one place.


and it really gave me that startup feeling that startup hustle and kind of grounded me on what it takes to get a company off the ground. So did that for about a year. didn't end up getting the traction that I wanted. but I used that time and experience. owning a project and trying to build a company to, make my way into the tech world.


So ever since then been at a couple of tech startups, which has brought me to my current role at Oana where I'm heading up growth. And essentially what we do at Oana is where the central information layer for most tech companies. So if you think about the average tech worker and how many different enterprise applications they use on a daily basis, there's just.


Tons of data getting created, especially at this time as we work from home. All this data that lives in Slack, Microsoft teams are emails, a sauna. It's just data getting created everywhere. So Ono helps you bring all that data together, right? and do a couple of different things. We help people do, like eat discovery compliance.


So that's like GDPR, CCPA, enterprise search, knowledge management. So just really taking control and understanding your data. .


What would you consider to be your professional super power yourself?


Yeah, so am I professional superpower, at least to this point in my career, has been. Building and standing up and moving on to the next, repeatable, growth engine that companies, so just going into new channels, building repeatable processes that's driving leads, driving pipeline, driving repeatable revenue, and just moving on to the next thing.


And I think that's very much. A growth mindset that a lot of growth marketers and people who work in marketing should have is everything needs to be built up to be repeatable and scalable. and then after you work on one thing, and it's very much like a testing. Framework that you should have with everything that you're standing up, but come into it with a hypothesis, test that hypothesis, and also have a definition of done.


So, in most experiments, actually, every experiment you need, like what that definition of done is to be able to...

All right. On the podcast today, I have Stapho Thienpont who is here to talk LinkedIn with us. Somebody that is not only a consultant about this thing, but he's, he actually acts on his own advice. You can go check them out on LinkedIn and we'll get to that later on. First off, Stapho, how are you doing today?
Ah, I'm doing great. I just came off my own show and you know, I'm just enjoying talking so much on the nice thing like this. Nice to be like here in Europe.
Do you like hearing your own voice?
Not really, but I do enjoy talking.


I'm the same way. Hearing my own voice on on microphone. It's kind of weird, but you get over it cause it's


fun to talk to people.


Yeah. 100%. Awesome.


Well, before we get into the details of LinkedIn, I know you're going to give us a ton of advice on how to grow on LinkedIn, but first and foremost, I want some quick context on you so that the audience knows who they're dealing with here. So first and foremost, just curious about the story of your career so far, where you got started and how you ended up where you are now, as briefly as you can.


As briefly as I can. Okay. So I lived in issue to Jim and Stockholm, even though I'm originally from Belgium, which is the other side of Europe. one day I realized, you know what, by beating up my friends all day, I'm not really providing much value to the world. I figured I have a knack for both language and systems.


And then. What I figured out was that, marketing is right on the edge of that. I started a Facebook group, got to start working with my favorite author, all this kind of stuff. and before I knew it, I got started with LinkedIn cause I wanted to learn a new platform. I somehow got into a super secret group of people that were basically the best to ever do it on LinkedIn.


And I just started picking their brains and I started learning all this kind of LinkedIn stuff. I did it for myself, and then I figured, you know what? this is so helpful for myself to generate leads and also generate awareness and build connections and network. I'm going to do this as a service for other people.


And since then we've been turning our people into LinkedIn thought leaders and generating leads for them. some highlights were when the multibillion dollar multimedia Titans started reaching out to our clients purely based on the content, but also getting some of our call bites on sales calls with Microsoft Lyme and the like.


So, yeah, it's been a, that's my journey so far, I guess.


And you're still going, okay. Yeah, the beginning right.


Definitely, definitely. I don't know if I'm going to limit myself to LinkedIn forever, but I'm definitely still growing strong every day. Awesome.


And if I were to ask you what you think your professional super power is, what would you say.


That's a really good, a really good question. I'm actually a really good networker. I would say, even though I don't spend much time, I'm really good at building relationships fast and somehow I don't know what it is, but it's when I talk to people, they walk away with the idea that I really know what I'm talking about with makes, it makes it easy for me to sell, but also to get buy in when I'm working with people, which ultimately lasts me to get good results.


But the networking of personal impact is for sure the key, I would say. Well


that's, that's good because that's what LinkedIn is all about. So let's dive into that and just start talking about how this group of of listeners that are bootstrappers and micro-influencers can actually grow on LinkedIn. My first question really would be, if you are starting out with zero, you're a micro influencer, you are an entrepreneur that's just starting out.


How can you actually get anybody to take your thought leadership seriously?


Well, first and foremost, you gotta have at least some skill and some area, so you've got to be good at something and...

it's just me as usual on a Friday, and the subject today that we're going to be covering is headlines, bios, titles, whatever, across social media. Okay. On LinkedIn, it's your headline on Twitter, Instagram, it's your bio on Facebook. It's your whole profile.
Basically. You don't really have a title on Facebook, so. Let's talk about how to optimize that. Um, I have a couple of tactical tips that you can implement. Ultimately, I think it goes without saying that there is. No perfect formula for everybody, but there's a general universal formula that will usually work and do better than what you at least have.


Tweak it over time. This is the kind of thing you want to AB test, so don't just do something about it right now and then forget about it forever. Constantly be AB testing things. There's no penalty for doing that. It's not going to hurt you in any way. You're just going to learn more and more about what drives clicks on your profile.


And in the case of LinkedIn, which unique because you actually see your headline across the entire platform in the feed and everywhere. So that's really a conversion tool for you across the board. That one's particularly impactful. So here is my number one tip for you that I want you to go and try right now.


This is very easy to do. So whatever you're in right now, whether in LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, go into the search bar and type in conversion copywriter or copywriter search. Any copywriters that are in your network already or that you're following or that are following you, check them out. See what their bio looks like.


Now, keep in mind that these are people that for a living to make money, to support their families. Right copy that converts people to take action and into customers. So I think it goes without saying that the, of all the groups of people that you could probably trust to write a good bio, this is the most likely, I'm not telling you that every copywriter has a great bio.


Okay? You're still gonna come across people on LinkedIn that don't use it enough. And then their title just says copywriter at, you know, Acme org. So. There are going to be people like that, but for the most part, as a whole, more than any other group, these people are going to give you great patterns to follow.


So whether you're on Twitter with, with your bias, so let's use that as an example. Look up. Conversion copywriters look up copywriters for B2B, for B to C, whatever is unique to you. If you're in an eCommerce store, look for B to C conversion copywriters, or if you do SAS technology, look that up. B2B copywriters look at these people and try to compile a list.


Of all the elements that you notice from this search, you're going to start noticing like they're more descriptive. They don't use a lot of fluff. They're straight to the point, but in a way that's really fun to read. So it's not just like I do marketing for businesses, it's, it's not necessarily always clever or.


Punny or anything like that. But it conveys the point in a little bit more of a story and it makes it a little bit more exciting, but there's no fluff. So there's a really good balance. Usually when you, you'll find with, with these people's bios, so write down a huge list and almost like a math equation, like add them all up in terms of their patterns.


Take the average of those patterns and what does that usually look like? So what I've found for LinkedIn, for example, when I do this exercise, aside from the elements of using your personality and things like that, just a general universal formula. If I took the averages of conversion copywriters, headlines, it would usually be, I help.


X group of people accomplish Y task using Z tool or for Z purpose. That's usually the general formula. And you've heard that before, right? You can add onto this a little bit to add a little bar and then you know, you can still state your actual job title. You could still state if you have

Blake: [00:00:00] today on the podcast you have Stef Caldwell, who is going to tackle a bunch of different subjects with us. Today we're going to be discussing things like side hustles and authenticity and customer experience, kind of the, the whole gamut.
[00:00:11] But I'm really excited about this one. But Stef, before we get into it, I do want to give you a chance to give some context about yourself. Basically, if you could just tell us, first and foremost what your career path has been to this point, where you got started and how you got to where you are now.
[00:00:28] Stef: [00:00:28] Happy to do that and thanks for having me on the show. So my career path, if you just looked at it on LinkedIn, might be confusing to somebody who doesn't know kind of where I'm headed. So I started, , my first internship was in recruiting, right? I worked at a staffing firm where I was recruiting people and, and helping place them in jobs.
[00:00:48] In my professional career, I moved from being a business analyst to working in a sales and marketing role, to then working in a product management role and a channel development role to now where I sit, which is in customer success. And so again, , any person would look at that experience and be like, huh, this girl's really, , been all over the place in terms of her variances.
[00:01:08] But the way that I look at it is I'm collecting the experiences necessary to make me the most ultimate general manager or CEO of a business. And I think that, okay, really, really incredible leaders can empathize with their people in any department. And so I really navigated my career path. Bye bye.
[00:01:28] Creating opportunities to have those experiences so that when I do become, you're the leader and I am, , and my side hustle that I can really emphasize and create good experiences across departments.
[00:01:39] Blake: [00:01:39] Oh, that's a, that's a pretty unique. Viewpoint, I guess because most people when they go into a side hustle are basically just looking to make money.
[00:01:47] That's, I mean, that's the facts of the matter, and I love that you're really more like people focus your people customer centric. That's going to bode really well for you down the road, and it's gonna be great for our audience as well, because I think it's a really important message to hear. And before we dive too much more in detail, I do ask everybody, what do you consider to be your professional superpower?
[00:02:13] Stef: [00:02:13] I think adaptability and tenacity. So whatever the baby is, of those two words, that's me.
[00:02:20] Blake: [00:02:20] It's a necessity.
[00:02:21] Stef: [00:02:21] Untapped tenacity. Yes. it's, . I believe and truly like live out every day that everything is figureoutable and having that mentality and then also having the willingness to get up everyday and take one step forward, even if that step is very uncertain, I think is what sets me apart in my professional career as well as in my side hustle.
[00:02:44] Awesome.
[00:02:44] Blake: [00:02:44] Well. I know that you do work full time at narrative science. Correct. So you've, you've already got the full time job. Now you also have the side hustle thing going on. obviously the word side hustle itself is self explanatory. Do you understand that it's something you're doing on the side? You already have a full time job, but it's another thing to actually help people understand how you can do that.
[00:03:06] And so you're in a unique position where you can discuss that a little bit with us. I'm curious right now, what does your day to day look like? I mean that, that may be a bad question because right now we're going through all this coronavirus stuff and everybody's normal is completely out of whack, but normally how are you balancing having a full time job that's, that's demanding where you're trying to learn skills and grow and you're doing a side hustle at the same time.
[00:03:31] Stef: [00:03:31] That's a

Blake: [00:00:00] on the podcast today, I have Brian Bosche who is here to talk all things tick tock. He's the first person to come on here and strictly discuss this with us about tech. So Brian, how are you doing today?
[00:00:10] Brian: [00:00:10] Doing well, Blake, thanks for having me. I am
[00:00:12] Blake: [00:00:12] super excited selfishly because I need to learn more about tick tock.
[00:00:16] My, my fan ship is really, really low and I do not get a lot of views, so I'm excited to learn how I can flip that around and I'm sure that the audience is going to do just the same, but before we get into it, I do want to get a little bit of context on you. Just basically your background. If you could give us a snapshot of your career so far, where you got started and how you got to where you are
[00:00:36] Brian: [00:00:36] now.
[00:00:37] Sure. So right now I'm on the product team at Smartsheet, which is a collaborative work management tool. it's a public company used by tens of thousands of different companies to help them manage their workflows and really managed our work as a team. And my company, my startup actually was acquired by Smartsheet last year.
[00:00:54] So I was previously the CEO and co founder of a company called slope, and we really made it easy for creative teams to manage their work. So we largely focused on content review and approval, so images, videos, photography, design, and that's really where I got to know more about the creative field, where I worked with lots of different marketing creative teams or trying out.
[00:01:15] Any new channel that would come up that we're trying to, you know, deploy their social media strategies at scale. So that's what really got me interested in tech talk when it first launched, is a lot of the customers that I work with and help build products for. I started asking questions about tick talk and how do we do this vertical video and how do we take advantage of this new channel.
[00:01:32]so I've always really been interested in the marketing creative world. I'd even run a video production company previous to, to slope. so yeah, this is a really exciting space for me. And if
[00:01:41] Blake: [00:01:41] I were to ask you what you think professional superpower is, what would you say?
[00:01:45] Brian: [00:01:45] creative workflows. so, you know, for the last eight years, I have.
[00:01:51] Worked really deep with marketing creative teams, helping them manage, you know, anything from, how do you request a project to planning it out to assigning. So going through the entire feedback and review and approval process all the way to getting something published. So, really the expertise on how companies, teams, people should, Build out their creative workflows. Well,
[00:02:13] Blake: [00:02:13] let's, let's dive into it as it pertains to tick tock then. So for anyone that's not using it currently, can you give an idea of what makes it different from what's already out there. Sure.
[00:02:23] Brian: [00:02:23] So tech talk is really powerful for brands and also for individuals or really anyone that's trying it out, because it gives you so much engagement and reach with no following.
[00:02:33] So I'm sure many of you have been on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter for years, and engagement's really tough. You know, I've had a Twitter for the last 10 years at 10,000 followers. I'm lucky to get a few likes, you know, they engagement is pretty low. And then once you actually. A tweet, something, it's gone, you know, within hours.
[00:02:50]so it's really hard to get that engagement and really hard, you know, on Instagram to get hundreds of thousands of likes. If you have 500 followers, we're on, tick-tock, you can literally have your first video published, get to a million views. So it really a, is a powerful channel because it gives you that engagement and reach without having to establish that following and really rewards great content over someone who's...