Yeah. All right. Very cool. Welcome. Welcome. This is a hustle podcast. Welcome. It's Ah, It's a podcast by fun size about global product design on your host, Rick Messer, product designer at fun size. I'm also joined by Danielle Moser, Um, P m project manager. If you will have fun size as well, she's gonna be co hosting with me today. Our sponsor today is ping Board,

a company culture tool that helps you manage your team. Went about it at their website ping board dot com. Today we are discussing something. I am very excited to learn a little bit about it. Marketing. We do a lot of product design here at fun size. We occasionally overlap a little with some marketing departments with some of our clients who need some marketing things here they're related to, You know, the product that we're working on, and we'll do the occasional marketing sign stuff like that. But if we were to, you know, launch into some type of marketing strategy or something like that man, I am not really sure where where it started. I was talking with a Adam ST at Bench a couple of episodes ago and We also sort of got got talking about marketing a little bit. And he was like,

Man, you need to talk to Jordan about that. So we have Jordan an ASCII joining us here today. He is Thievy p of marketing and the co founder of Bench will talk to him about marketing his product. Welcome, Jordan.

Yeah. Thanks for having me. I'm excited. Thio. Tell you what it is we learned over the

past couple years. Yeah, that sounds very valuable. I'm excited to you chat with you about a little bit. Um, so for those who don't know and didn't hear the previous episode where we had Adam from bench on What What is Bench? What does it do?

Yeah, so we're no mine bookie. Think service for small businesses. Anything from freelancers to consultants to Debbie, agencies like yourself from, or design agencies like yourself. And what's unique about us is that we both build our own software, which you get to use when using the service. And we also pair you with one of our own bookkeepers to work in how the side of our offices, uh, watch our base in North America. And so essentially with bench. You get everything you need. Thio, hand your bookkeeping over to someone. Both the softer side of the the profession. You gotta professionals. Well, Andi, it's kind of just a one stop solution to just making sure that problems out of your way.

Very cool. Yeah. And, um, I found out about bench from Anthony. Anthony owns fun size, and they use bench, and that's I heard about it. I don't do anything with the books here, so I don't know about that. But what I would have heard is really cool. And also that just yields approach Thio, you know, pairing. Ah, a real person with with the software that you all could is. That sounds pretty cool and sounds pretty exciting. How does how is it that Jordan you came to co found bench? Can you tell us a little bit of the background behind that?

Yeah. Yeah. So I met my co founder in Who's the CEO in university, and, uh, he drew great parties. I was a deejay, so that was just a natural partnership. Yeah, the game out of the gate. Here's my right now, but yeah. So, you know, we we we kind of know respect for each other. Got to do some, throw some parties together.

And you knew that we wanted to eventually start a company together. Um, and in fact, for a couple of years later, ah, he was in consulting. I was at BlackBerry. We both wanted out of our jobs and so many of the time was right. Thio do something, and he kind of pitched the idea to me. Um, admittedly, not the sexiest idea out of the gate. Bookkeeping service is whether isn't what I foresaw myself getting into, um but like like like yourselves, If I was going to do something more in the mobile space,

Yeah. I mean, what kind of hooked me on the idea was that if you really actually peel back, you know, beyond that kind of crusty facade of bookkeeping, which is there for a good reason. And you actually look at the problem they were trying to solve and who were trying to solve before it was actually really appealing to me. I mean, this is something that we're keeping one of the things that every every entrepreneur has to deal with. It's it's It's the last thing they want to deal with. You know, I've gotten it. You have a lifestyle that you want to live. And I'm sure bookkeeping isn't part of that s o the ability to kind of take that piece and remove it from their experience was really big for us. And then the other thing, too,

is that the way that we could actually solve the problem was really interesting to me. We could actually effectively look at the whole process of bookkeeping and then think through, ah, to use leveraging technology. How can we automate as many of those pieces as possible to make it kind of really efficient and then also deliver? I really unique user experience in the process is well so I mean, that's kind of how it all came together. That was that was the idea. And then, you know, for a couple of years to where we are today and we're out there where the market we're going super fast. It's rewarding to see its the the idea that we had is really resonating. And so now it's just, you know, see how far we can take

it. Very cool. All right. Thanks for kind of giving us that background. I didn't. Only that's pretty good. Good basis for knowing what? How is built on just how you came to You started with your with your friend? Um, yeah, So All right, let's let's talk. Tell me a little bit about, um, parking man. I don't I don't know anything about it. Daniel, do you know anything about marketing?

I mean, not not. Not a whole lot. I guess my

main question is when you know, you said you got this started a couple months ago. At what point? In developing a product, or are you know, being in a project is is the right time to start generating buzz around something this exciting?

Yeah. Yeah, it s o. I mean, marketing, unfortunately, could mean a lot of different things. And so I'll speak about it in context of bench in and start ups and kind of sassy, which is where we kind of really focusing on, um So yeah, so, I mean, for me, uh, the processes of marketing was really about. How do we, uh,

tell us many people? About what? What is that we're doing? Describe it in a way where it authentically captures the value that we think we provide, um, and and provide just a great experience for them to get into the door. I mean, so that's kind of like the most high level way of describing what it is that that I do, um, into your question, Danielle, about you. No one is the right time to do that for us. You know, you need to kind of, like,

start the process off a little bit early. You need to think a little bit. You know, like marketing isn't something you wanna attack on at the very end. It's something that you should be kind of thinking through. Really? From the start is like, how Who am I gonna be offering this product to? How am I gonna distribute it? Thinking those through those questions as you're building your product and testing your product is extremely valuable and something that I feel like a lot of people don't do. You know, they might build something but realize that the distribution of it is going to be too difficult or too awkward and and as a result, they don't tailor their product in a way that really suits the way that you're going to get it out there. But in terms of when we really kind of activated the marketing engine, it was when through the process of building in beta testing, with some with some customers,

we felt that effectively the product was working as well as working a CZ good as it was going to at that level. And it was time to really put this thing to the test in the sense that we needed to actually start scaling a customer base using it and see, See the type of problem that we're going to see, uh, you know, as a real business, not as a, you know, a beta beta business. So that was actually we activated the marketing engine back in July of 2013 and yeah, um, that's that was really kind of our field way. Feel the product is ready. You know, that way. Feel that we've gotten product market fit,

but you know, you can only you can only determine that so much. In a beta environment, you effectively just have to launch and see, see where it takes two. And that's basically when we flip, the switch

is all right. I'm gonna have to have you define what a what activating a marketing engine means. Because to me, he had this, like, robot in my mind that you that I was I was envisioning, like, throwing coal into, like, a steam engine. Take this training to the next level. Yeah, really, I What is that? What does that mean exactly? I mean, just like the strategy. Sort of like starting to roll it out or what?

Yeah. So for me, my my approach to it was I wanted to somehow make a bit of a splash out of the gate and the way that I created that waas I say I stored up a whole bunch of kind of reveals if you were like in our little micro like I want a little micro version and evident, but like a whole bunch of reveals all at once. So that week ahead, you know, say hello, world in a way that was unique and interesting. It wasn't kind of like a slow trickle. We stored up a whole bunch of announcements. So, um, the first thing that we did waas we had actually raised money, but we didn't announce that we raised the money for actually a number of months after the fact. Because we wanted to say that as one of the things that we used. Secondly, we at the time before we we launched at a beta,

we recalled 10 sheets I think Adam probably spoke to you about It was just terrible. Yeah, it wasn't a good name on DSO. He and I decided. Okay, well, you know, in events of we knew that we were gonna launch a TTE some point a couple months down the road. So we wanted to come up with a better brand and better identity. So then we had that kind of idea of in the back of our head, and we kind of kept that behind the scenes until we're ready to do this launch point. Um, the other thing we did was in terms of the actual essay experience. In terms of the website itself, we had, ah,

brand new web design that we had kind of been building out in testing and make sure that was and effectively trying to make it as tight as possible. We launched a little bit earlier, but before that, we got the word out so that we could just make sure it wasn't broken. Um, and so we had a brand new website, a brand new sign up funnel. And then the final thing that we did was stored up all these kind of announcements altogether and then use that to try and leverage on article in the press. And so obviously the targeting folks like TechCrunch and and the next Web and anyone else who would be who was interested in our concept and wanted to kind of couple of this type of story. So that was kind of like my initial, uh, my initial approach on how I'm going to get this out. It may cause much noise as possible out of the gate. The thing is, after that, that's like that. That only works for, like, your first month. And you really got to come up with the plan after that.

Okay. Um, okay. So I I had kind of been been talking with Cameron as well at that bench about this topic because we're discussing marketing And these Cameron, um, a marketing person there as well, or

Yep. Cameron is the content manager.

Okay. Okay. Cool. Yeah, well, he had just kind of thrown out a couple of interesting points about kind of a marketing strategy. And maybe you could talk to some of those points a little bit because again, I'm unfamiliar with him. But, um, number one, the thing they said about, you know, how do you begin thinking about marketing and marketing strategy and all that is, First of all, you have to have a great product because, you know,

obviously you can't push something that people just aren't gonna want, but I mean, that's that's fairly obvious. But I think a lot of people do need to take, like, a moment of, like examination to make sure that they're not just making the product that they want, that they were making a product that you know, is going to be useful to a lot of people. But then the second thing that he said was, you know, after you establish, like, credibility and all that, um, he mentioned something about mentors. Do you find that mentorship is like a really important piece of the marketing puzzle?

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, some of our I'd say quickest successes have come from people just telling us to do X or what? I end it working for us. So I think I can't recommend enough when you have the opportunity to go out and meet people who are in Ah, in a marketing environment that's similar to yours who are much further along, too. Don't just do whatever you can to sit him down, offer to buy them beer, coffee, whatever it takes and just pick your brain on what you should be doing differently. Yeah,

right. And it is not like something like when you find obviously like I would expect, I don't know, Like a good way of finding these people is find people that have done, like the kind of thing that you are trying to do or something similar. But I mean, do people do this like in general? Like, is it like, do people usually do like mentorships for free? Or is it like so, do you think you have to get in with the right people are being like a, um you know, in there in their incubator, Secret club, Super Secret club, Or is it just like a little bit more casual like,

Hey, can you help me out with this? I'm trying to figure this out like I'm new are new to this. Or what do you think about, like, how do you find the right people? And

I think you just do anything and everything you can write. And, um, for us, you know, most of our mentors came through just getting too. No piers in our in our city, which is Vancouver. And through that, you know who is based in Vancouver and who tweak the folks there kind of heard about us. And then through just kind of being in the same kind of community and city, we were able to make some connections there. And as a result, in my case, I got connected with their director of online acquisition. And that was kind of, you know,

I would say, probably the most impactful mentor that we've had. So I mean, I don't think there's any one way to get access to, Really. He's smart, successful people. I think you just have to, you know, be a good person, reach out in a way that isn't too obtrusive. And hopefully you get an intro from someone who can lend credibility to you. But the bottom line is just just do whatever it takes be, be charming. And when you get in the room with them, you know,

make sure you really value their time. And And also, one thing I find is that people do want to help others. You know, the best thing you can do is when they give you advice and you apply that advice, tell them you did that and tell him the result of that. That's exactly what that's the feeling that they are hoping again when when they do

this. That's perfect. I think that answers actually question I was gonna ask next, which is how can you make sure you're not wasting them interest time? Because that is sort of like in the back of my head, like, Oh, man, like I'm bothering this guy like I'm wasting his time. But if you're But you're saying what like just give them sort of like feedback and results. So like the time that they're investing in you, you can show like, Hey, this isn't like going nowhere and actually listening to you and

yeah, I mean, the worst thing you can do is walk in without questions without any pointed questions. It's not necessarily where the entire conversation will go, but you at least need to drive the conversation. It's not their responsibility. I've had. Folks kind of asked me out for coffee, and then and then I really have nothing to ask me if they just kind of like, Yeah, so tell me about Bench and I'm like, Well, you know, that's That's a very open Any question. I don't know what's gonna be helpful to you and

to meet before here. Exactly. Okay. Exact. Okay, that's that's perfect answer to that question, I think, actually, um Okay, So mentors for sure. Another thing that camera mentioned was in this makes a lot of sense to me, but I don't know if I know how to do it for defining the core metrics of your business. I I assume that means, like, Hey, we will be successful if this happens by this time. But, I mean, how are you supposed to find stuff like that? How do you sculpt the core metrics for

your business? Yeah, I mean, so I think this is where there's probably precedence that you can use to help, you know, help identify what you should be tracking and really measuring yourself against, right. Like in the case, we even though we're not a pure sauce business, we resemble one. And so we can basically take all of this. You know, all of the the science if you were that has gone that has been developed out of all the previous last business is out there in an apply to us. And so what? That gave us a set of metrics that we could just basically start tracking ourselves and see how we're doing relative to our industry and see how we're doing relative to our past. Right? And that,

to me, is what's most important about about tracking metrics is it's yes, it's great to have a goal. Um, and it's also really important to have benchmarks. But most importantly, you just need to know that the work you're putting in is actually making improvements.

Oh, so you're talking more about just like you start the business and you're going and you're just sort of keeping track of the way things go like, you know, ah, rate of success. Or, like, you know, like I'm gonna throw out like a web s e o term like a click through rate or something that you're sort of measuring those you know, and reviewing them. Like, how is this, like, take a look at these live reports or whatever every single day? Or is it like something you review, like more like a quarterly basis? Or or it's a milestones.

Yeah, yeah, I mean, it really depends on the kind of where the rule and what they're tracking. So, for example, we have digital ads manager, and he's looking at the stocks that are relevant to his his function almost every hour of the day because he's constantly making adjustments to how we bid on ads and how we, you know, test out different ads and their effectiveness. And there's a lot of money going into that. So he's constant, like he's really just like Like The Matrix mind melded with with these dashboards. Seeing how things were going in and making little optimization is on my end because I'm looking at it more from, ah, global perspective. I'm looking. I'm tracking a couple of things on a daily basis, and then I'm usually diving into the numbers on a weekly basis just to see if things are trending tool. It's our targets and our goals and obviously pointed in the right

direction. Is it a secret sauce? So pardon me if I'm asking a question that you know, that's what I'm wondering. Is there a secret? Is it a secret sauce like what tools you use to track your metrics? Or is that like, more of, like a terrible

answer? Oh, no, that's that's that's That's actually the most like there's no secret sauce with Google, these Google Dogs and Google analytics and the actual dashboards. That or reports that come from the ads tools we use. We really actually, we try to find some amazing piece of software and and spent, you know, it's too much money and too much time on trying to get these different kind of analytic software is working for us. And when it came down to it, they just almost worked against us and wouldn't give us the data we want. So we just kind of have this, uh, kind of a little bit Frankenstein out system. Um, sure, I'm sure I'm going to start getting some cold emails after this podcast system, but I cannot experience like I'm still waiting for that perfect system. In the meantime, we've got something that works for us.

That's great. I think, I think, more and more than when I talk to companies about stuff like this. Not necessarily. Like what? What marketing tools. They used to measure the metrics of their business. But just like what tools work for you to manage a project or, you know, any of these things that a lot of people use. It is usually like if the business is, like, successful, that I'm talking to you like the Your answer usually is some sort of hodgepodge, like we hacked it toe work the way we want it toe work, sort of thing.

So I mean, it's interesting to hear that you're just using stuff like that because, man, I don't know I'm hearing about like all these tech start ups in the Bay Area, there's even a number of them here in Austin that are completely like super like dashboard, you know, to measure your tweets, you're reaching your tweets and like that's a whole product that's just launching and getting acquired for millions and millions of dollars. And so obviously it's like a important thing to businesses to track those metrics through through these, like, really advanced systems. But I am sitting over here not knowing a lot about marketing, but feeling like cheese. This is, like Seems like a little much,

you know? Yeah. I mean, the promise of them. It is awesome, right? Like, yeah, I would love just have all this stuff strung together and spit out exactly the reports I need, but I think the reality is it's kind of like productivity software. You know, it really like your mood For what? What what to do up is gonna change based on what project you're working on. You know how overloaded you are in, like, that's what? Why?

That stuff, you know, just kind of shifts with the wind. Um, and I know then, like our our view of how we wantto measure and analyze our performance is constantly involving. And a lot of these platforms unfortunately, try to propose a formula that they think is the right formula to follow. And that just doesn't work for us. So we rather just stick with the system where we put a little bit of elbow grease in, get it kind of too close to what we're looking for is possible. And then just stick with that eventually, we're gonna scrap it and put something out someplace,

okay? I mean, like I said, I think that just sounds It just feels right, because it's like, maybe it's like the promise. Like, you're saying of these, Like bigger tools like we live in the world now of big data and the Internet of things. There's just so much to quantify and draw from this science. But, um, man, I just don't feel like it's always like this one big answer for for all of us, this one tool that we can just sort of, you know, that's the lure right of the these bigger,

bigger products. I don't know. I didn't mean to go on at, like, a rampage on like, I hate these products or anything. I don't know anything about him. And again, I'm not an expert on marketing, but, um, I am hearing like a pattern of answers to the question. What do you used to do to accomplish this with, you know, um, successful companies And it's usually something like that where it's like we use,

you know, we use what we need to use and way make it do what we wanted to. D'oh! Um, yeah, I like it. I like to hear that. That's cool. Um, yeah. So getting back to the the robot, the engine, um, the engine, the marketing engine. He said something Cameron again Because I had a bit of back and forth with him regarding marketing and trying to write an outline for this episode.

But a lot of the things that he wrote I was like, Man, I'm gonna have to ask Jordan about what that means. You know, he wrote in R and D versus engine. Yeah. No, I'm not really sure what r and D is. I guess I know what an engine is now. Sort of. Can you explain? Like, kind of like, yeah, yeah. Approaches this.

This is This is, uh I think currently, bench specific Bergen. Uh, okay. But But I will say this that I have shared this concept with a couple other folks from, you know, businesses and a way more advanced than us, and they're now adopting it themselves. So hopefully this is valuable for the folks listening. Yes, so I mean, my okay. Just kind of start from the top. My view is that every company, every product, every competitive lands,

landscape, and every time which you're marketing a product is going to be different than someone else and it as a result. There's in my experience. There's no just there's no playbook. You can just copy and paste and say, Oh, this work for this company. Therefore, I'm going to do exactly that. There's gonna be some elements you can incorporate into your mix, but there's gonna be other elements that just aren't gonna work for you. And that was, Ah lesson I had to learn the hard way because unfortunately, the business of marketing and online marketing really lends itself to a snake oil salesman or sales people. Rather yeah, a za result,

your constant being told. Hey, just do these exact things or hire me to do this. And I promise you I will get you. Ah, you know all all the customers you could ever hope for and between.

Yeah, that's the thing about marketing and, like, advertising in general. And I'm a huge fan of the show madman. So I take a lot of things that Don Draper says in that, you know that. But like it's not a science, but they try to make it a science because you cannot force somebody to respond to marketing. And that, for me, is what is terrifying about about marketing. I know, like I have a good idea that they may want this, but I don't know how to guarantee someone. Look, let me market your product and I guarantee I will get these, you know, people in the door. Whatever.

Exactly. And so that's why, for me, marketing is more of a good marketing is more about good methodologies and good processes than it is about coming in with answers on how you're going to do it on DDE. What I mean by that is you effectively just need thio test constantly. You just have to come up with ideas. You gotta throw it against the wall. You can see what sticks. Um, and some of these ideas will be informed by your own your own kind of creativity. Some Well, some of them will be informed by the six snake oil sales people, but eventually, like, you're just gonna find that your hit rate is gonna be It's just not gonna be perfect. And so you just have to keep effectively testing new ideas and seeing what's working for you. So this is this is how I developed kind of these two terms,

um, R and D versus engine and a bench. What I do is every time we want to try something out, I never, ever go into it expecting it to be sick, sex successful. I have a hypothesis that I think this could work, but I expected actually to fail because in most cases it's going to on. That's fine. And so what I What I do is I have almost a separate function in a separate budget dedicated just to testing new ways to reach our market and, um, Dr kind of like customers and into the into the

door. That makes a lot of sense to me because, like, we're kind of doing the same thing a lot of time with, just like testing user experiences and stuff, because, like, yes, they sometimes do fail, in fact, but we are all. But even though they like that, that wasn't the one perfect answer. There's always something you can learn from that where you can go back and iterated on what? What it is you're trying to accomplish or what it is You're trying to, uh, let the user, like, find

in the idea is that you You need to allow for fit. Not there. You need to have

slush in this system. That's cool. Yeah, that that makes a lot of sense. So I guess to that point, you know, how much How much research do you need to do in this R and D versus versus engine sort of system? Uh, like, what do you need to know or what? What basics? Air. Good to know about your user base you're trying to reach.

Yeah. I mean, and I think this it's so it depends on a number of different objectives. So I would say at the start when you get back to your point like, I don't even get started. Well, at that point, yeah, you're not gonna you're not gonna know. You don't have the single engine working for you. And at that point, it almost everything you're doing is R and D, right? You're just you're just testing up is many different ways as possible, Whether it's true as or whether it's through content marketing, Um, and eventually hoping to find one that you can convert into an engine so that at that point I'd say everything is R and D.

Eventually, what will happened? And so this is a good kind of Segway into explaining how I define an engine. Eventually, you're gonna find ah, couple of these different, uh, you know, a couple of different channels, as I like to refer to that actually work for you. And what I mean by working for you is that you know that you can pump in a certain amount of effort or certain amount of money into it, and you're going to get a certain amount of customers in return. In our case like that, you know, we track on the cost, you know,

cost of customer. Whatever it is, it's cack. It's a terrible acronym, but customer acquisition costs. So yeah, you know, I going potty humor jokes here, but but yes Oh, effectively. We have a target amount that we're willing to spend on acquiring a customer. And once we've done once we've tested a channel and we're finding hey Weaken were able to acquire customers at this cost. Then we converted into an engine that the point of the engine is to say OK, well, then how far can I How much? How much effort, How much money can I put into this engine on? Get as many customers as I can before I hit the point of diminishing

marginal work uniform before the point that like Okay, um, I don't know, probably terrible example. But I know famously that win Facebook acquired Instagram The cost per customer, whatever they were paying for, basically was like $7 which was, like, insane for the cost of ah, user or something. But at any rate, like, I guess what you're saying, I'm just trying to under understand so, you know, stop me to find misunderstanding. But what you're saying is that,

like, if you can keep doing like this, this thing with this engine, right? I know that if I advertise here on this podcast or on this radio show that I generally get between this many and this many customers from that. So how many times can you do that before it sort of runs its course And people are like, kind of tired of hearing about it. You know that in the channel or whatever,

exactly everything you do is gonna have a certain ceiling where it loses effectiveness. And then as a result, no matter how much more money or time you put into it, you're not gonna get any more customers. And that's just gonna translate to higher cost to acquire. I get it. I get just so so the point of, aren't we? Yes. The point of R and D. In this case, right is you really have two reasons to pursue our Andy. So one is you. You kind of are at the ceiling for the set of channels that you have turned into engines and you're trying to then add new channels or new engines so that you could just expand effectively your throughput to the market like Okay, I through all these channels that I've been able to, you know, get to the point where they're an engine,

I'm getting 100 customers out of them. But I want 120 customers on a monthly basis. So I need to find another another compliment to what I'm already doing. And the only way I'm gonna find another compliment is by going out again and do my R and D and testing. So that's that's kind of like one objective is to expand kind of again. Your report. People hate I just like my word of the week right now. So everyone kind of rolls her eyes when I say throughput. But that's that's one objective. The second objective is Hey, you know, I have enough customers coming in like I have got more customers and I can even handle, for example, Um, but at the same time, I you know,

I can pursue other objectives, which is like, Okay, well, still, I'd like to make my channels more efficient. I'd like to bring down my cost. Um, and so again, this is where you go back to r and D, and you try to test out channels. But your goal here is to find channels that are effectively cheaper than the ones already in your engine. Your engine mix, right. So then you find one channel. It's like,

Oh, wow. Requiring customers here is half the cost of say, you know, one of my engines. Obviously, I'll convert that into an engine and then bring down the spend against my other channels such that an increase of spent here. So I get it all to the level out I get. It's kind of like be at the most optimal point on the curve in terms of diminishing marginal returns. When I look at my entire kind of set of engines, I don't know why I'm talking like pure dragon right now. You tell me. You just stop.

Yeah, I am following you, in fact. Okay, watch Shark Tank. So I get some of these terms, okay? But I like cack. I think that I think that's cool. Uh, so that second track seems almost like it could be like, Maybe you're always doing that. Are you? Are you Are you always trying to reduce the cost to, you know, get your users? Yeah.

So So exactly like, in our case, because we're, you know, high growth startup. We always want more customers, like we're always trying to expand our group, it t the market. And but, you know, if there's ever a point where we're like, OK, we were kind of going at the rate that we want. Let's just Let's just Let's just save money on our approached acquiring customers. Yeah, we would always do. Andi.

So my my view is that there's always value in doing are indeed the one. The one kind of consideration is RND, especially in the case where you're trying to do it to drive efficiency. Um, basically takes time to pay itself back. Right? So if you like, if you're tight on cash you probably don't want to be doing are indeed because, like, Yes, yes, I might drive, you know, over over by spending, you know, $10,000 in r and D.

I might get a 10% efficiency in terms of, like, reduction in price to acquire a customer. Um, obviously that 10% is going to take time Thio pay back or that that 10% is gonna take time to get to the point where you pay back at $10,000 up front investment. So that's the wrong consideration you need to have, is I Do I have cash laying around thio kind of pursue effectively long term objectives.

Okay, I get that. That's awesome. I get it. It's like it's like when you finally understand algebra for, like, eureka moment. That's awesome. X y

yes, I've got 11 thing to layer on here. I've been meaning to get the word out on this stuff because I think it's pretty cool. Please do. It's got back to the metrics. What I do is I measure my R and D operations. You know, I separately then my engine operation, right? Like I and that allows me to have effectively a part of my marketing organization that's incredibly inefficient, right? You know what they're doing? Tests. Things are constantly failing, but along the way to come they come across one major success. And that success pays back all all the rest of the tests. It's kind of like,

you know, it's it's It's like a hit based industry kind of start ups or movies, or whatever it is in this case, it's just advertising customers. So, um and so that what we do is we have kind of, um, a set of metrics that we published to our board, for example, that says, Hey, this is how we're performing What? We're acquiring customers exclusively through our engines and the numbers look great. I was like, This is awesome, Then.

Then I have a separate set of metrics I say that this is how we're performing. If we factor in R and D plus our engines on dhe suddenly, aren't you being a really inefficient part of our marketing? Spend, uh is now effectively making our overall marketing department look good, but not great. So if you split the two out, you can say, Hey, if you want us to stop growing so fast, we can stop doing R and D. That's no problem. And and if we do, that will grow at the rate that our engines provide and it's extremely efficient. The business looks great, and that's that's that makes for a really effective conversation,

because then we could say, But if you want us to go really, really fast, we need to put more money into R and D. But don't penalize us if we're if we're putting money in there and in the way that we enable that, are we achieving? That outcome is we show them the two numbers separately. So if we were just to show the to the R and D and engines blended together and we're aggressively investing in R and D would kind of make us look like you know, good or mediocre in terms of our performance. But by splitting those two out, they understand. Okay, this is a lever that they're that they're pulling hard on to drive more

grip. I see. So, like, I'm thinking of the R and D versus engine thing, sort of like in, like, engines. They're sort of like casting like a wide net. Like getting all these these sort of channels out there, but not really sure which one's gonna work or come back correctly or anything on R and D is sort of optimizing like those engines like to be a little bit more focused. Is that correct? No, no,

no, no. So engines are effectively channels that you have validates all like these were channels I should do something like concrete. So, like Facebook, video ads are really working well for bench right now. We had to test out, we had to make a video. We had to, like, start advertising on Facebook video, and we had to get to the point where we optimize our eyes to the point where it was really working for us. So that was like an R and D test that turned into that was successful. We convert that to an engine, and then we just tried to drive it as hard

as we can. I see the engines were the results of the R and D.

Can you can

you share an example that's failed or you just

Yeah. Uh, so I mean, yeah, we we, uh, tried to, for example, do, um, good examples, like, sponsored content. So we have block content. We're actually really like we're doing a second version of this test right now is actually working for us. But in the past, what we decided to do was Okay,

Let's let's take posts from our blawg and sponsor traffic to go read those posts. Right? Way figured it would bring people to our website, give us followers for our content as well. As you know, by being on our site and reading our content, they would like us and converted to a customer. Well, the costs to we were able to draw customers from that, but the cost was really expensive. So we had to effectively demon as a failure. Not not to slag him too hard, but we've tried constantly to try to get linked in to work for us as an advertising channel. And just in our experience, at least for us, they're advertising platform is just not mature enough to allow us to tweet the variables and way that works for us. Maybe that has changed. These things change constantly, but as a whole has has just never been something that we've been able

to really activate. That's a great example of, like, a channel that just mean, you know, I mean, it may work for another, you know, another type of company or something, but it's just not working for you. That's that's a good answer. Um, okay, So what I'd like to understand, Like, at this point, maybe,

You know, maybe maybe you could give us a hint like those, um, somebody like me or somebody who you know, no house, like a competency in business or something else unrelated to marketing. And they're ready to go on a product, but they're just not, You know, a marketing budget isn't going to be something that they have to start with s so so can you recommend I don't know, like a good book, a great blawg thio kind of pay attention to Oh, anything for somebody who's just trying to get started within and doesn't have, like, a formal marketing education. Or maybe you're on this the side of like, Dude, you need to hire like marketing. There's no other way to do it.

No, I don't know if there is. I can answer you that. The questions I'd actually I mean, I've read Blog's on and off about marketing. Some of them have been helpful at times. A lot of the times. I don't find them helpful. Um, for me, like the number one thing I can recommend is is finding again mentors people who have done it and just get them to coach you on on different things to try out and then in terms of, like, do you have to hire marketing person it It depends on what, Like what stage of the businesses you're in. If you're at the point where you're like OK, we know that adds work for us, we're not great at them,

But we can pay to acquire a customer through Facebook or Google. Um, but we want to scale this and I don't have a background there. Well, in that case, you want to go find someone who has years of experience working with those platforms and and just being kick ass at that. So that's that's an example where you're getting to the point where you're hiring specialists. I had to start up this like, I don't know. I think that if, if I mean this is kind of how we think about people in general are benches like we're more concerned about people's raw intelligence and, like the raw materials that they have to work with then necessarily their experience. Um And so I feel like if you have a passion for this, you are ready to just do whatever it takes to learn what you need to learn and and basically task. We need to test it to make this work. Um, you can come from any background, you know, it's just it's just gonna take time, but you'll close that time gap if you're if you're got to get the raw intelligence and the drive

to do it, that's cool. All right. Yeah, that's great. I think that just the answer of like, mentorship is probably gonna be a big takeaway, at least for me. Like thinking about this. You know this topic in general. Yeah, but, um cool. Man. I think we kind of got through like this stuff we're hoping to cover. If it's all right, can we?

Is there like, a someplace in particular Jordan that people should go if they want to follow you or something? Usually people give their Twitter handles or, you know, of course, we can have them visit benched. Octo are anything Anything else?

Yeah. No, You condone following at Jordan an ASCII on Twitter and see whatever. I don't really tweet about marketing. Most tweet about music and complain about other people's products, but you haven't yet, but prepare for the onslaught of

questions. Oh, yeah. You're the expert, sir. Do you think you so much for your time? I very much appreciate it. I know we had, like, kind of Hopper out on the schedule a little bit before we finally got this recording date now down. So I appreciate it working with us on that, but I think you again very much. I truly do feel like I learned a bit about march my mind more than I thought I would. Actually, I thought maybe, you know, we brush on something.

Some of it seemed to kind of crack open for me, but but thank you again, Jordan. Everybody who's listening, thank you very much request topics or just responded this episode by tweeting to at fun size on Twitter rate. That's a podcast on iTunes and subscribe. Thank you very much, Jordan. Thanks, guys. Today's episode is brought to you by Ping Board, an employee directory that will supercharge your team. Today's best companies use Ping board to help their growing team continue to feel small. Ping Board Company directory lets your team learn about each other in a way that's fun and engaging and ensures that they'll always have important info about their team wherever they are. With Ping board, you have one place to organize everything about your team,

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