Hey, this is Stelly, Ft.

And this

is heating shot. And in today's episode, we're gonna talk about teaching.

You like talking about more than your sales

and market. We just want a bullshit and chat about business and life. Hopefully, while we're doing that, provide along value to be best for

people trying to get shit done

way. Don't want to give you feedback.

That's bullshit. You want you

to do your best and the importance of it and why we like to teach and how you can grow your business by teaching just zeroing in a little bit on the importance of teaching. Since it's come, it is a big part of our lives. Is that right?

Yeah, absolutely. I think both of us spend a lot of time doing it, depending on how obviously you define it.

So let's go personal. And then we go general. Right? So why do you do it? But when did you start doing it? Like, tell me a little bit about kind of Have you always been teaching others? Is there? Was there some moment where you're very consciously thought? I need to start, You know, teaching Mawr teaching is a useful skill of something can create value with what's kind of your history. Why do you think you've been doing it? And why is it such a big part of your life

today? Yeah, it's a super phony topic. I ah, just for me just because of ah, whole bunch of reasons. One being I was Ah, uh, in sort of the new coming I have with my business partner. We were trying to define, like, what do we do? And I was writing the slide and at the top of the side, it said, Advise, invest and teach. It was actually advisers,

investors and teachers. That's what we are. And And it was because of this idea that, like, you know, ah, we don't want to be considered consultants. We don't want to be considered service providers in any way, although we might be charging people for things that look like that. But our approach to it is always about teaching, and that would be the most accurate way to think about us. Ah, in a lot of these scenarios, just because if you know whether it's because people think we might have expertise or we think we might have expertise in something, although we can debate that and say it's overrated or underrated, depending on the mood,

I think either of you are you are in. Ah, but the so that words not good expert isn't good expertise I wouldn't use. So then it's just about like when you're sharing something and trying to help someone else become better. Grow. What? What have you I think you're teaching because a teacher you know the construct in the concept we have, at least in society Today, the teacher is teaching you things and helping you get better and improve and grow and learn things. So when you expand that out and say OK, teaching is about helping other people learn things to me. I started it a very long time ago. Maybe every business I've run, whether it's in college or software businesses, it's always been about teaching, whether it's teaching people about a market pink in my consulting company or teaching people about ah,

their websites and what their visitors air doing with crazy egg or teaching people about Data Analytics with Kiss Metrics or even with the new company, Quick sprout teaching people about how to increase their traffic. Um, and so teachings. Just been a big component of how I would say my businesses have accomplished getting an audience, but also how Live Personally and my co founder, Neil, have personally approached how we want to do marketing.

Yeah, such a funny and powerful topic. I'll start kind of my side of things in my history of teaching with a quote. Since I really like quotes, which is teach everything you know, it's a way to achieve immortality. Just was by some Dala Lama. I don't think the current one, but some past Alabama, I think that's a really beautiful quote for me. Teaching is something just incredibly human, just something like in this, I think is human that and I'm sure there's some, like scientific research on this, unlike how sharing knowledge is a big part of how kind of we developed as humans and we developed and into groups of humans and societies and all that and the way of living. But I feel like sharing what we know is a big part of what makes us human. And there's something there's a lot of benefits to that right.

There's some interesting, some intrinsic benefits and some extrinsic benefits or some some when you teaching is just another way of deep depth and named your own knowledge around a certain topic. So you know, when you teach, you really learn to think about that skill, that information in a deeper level, you It's another form factor, so deep deepens the information, just consuming. It is one way, but when you kind of spread it out again, just helps you retain that knowledge for a long appear of time. It is a way for you to create value in the world, you know, bite by spreading and sharing knowledge. You know you're creating value,

and it's a way to build relationships and to accomplish many, many other things. I'm sure there's, like, tons and tons of benefits to teaching that I even I've never considered. I know that I've always very intuitively followed the path that when it whenever I had learned something that I thought was great or cool, exciting. Whenever got passionate about some kind of new information or skill, I know that I bought as far as I can remember. When I was younger, I always would look to share that knowledge with others and to to show others how to do it as well. It was kind of part of me expressing my passion. Excitement around this was to share it with others and and show others have always. I've always been teaching my knowledge and sharing my knowledge with others, and I've always found that it was something that came easy and intuitively, and it's something that's kind of very much part of who I am and just like you described,

it's from a business perspective and I think I've always done this as well. I certainly have run certain businesses where did where teaching was not part of the marketing strategy of the business strategy and these businesses. Most of them didn't do as well as the ones where teaching was a big part of the way that marketing was done. And we talked about this. I think in prior episodes with clothes I O. We very consciously looked at all the waste, all the strategies that were available for us to grow and compete in a very crowded market space and came to the conclusion that you know we can out Edward ties our competitors. We can out you know s e o them. But we can out teach them. We know more about sales than anybody else. And we know how to share that knowledge 100 storyteller to create content in a way that's gonna be valuable and compelling. And that's gonna be the thing we're gonna focus on that has made been a major driver off our growth. So and I think that this phrase of out teaching your competitors actually comes from 37 signals Now, Base camp, that we're the first company that I remember that actually used these words of saying you should out teach your competitors.

Yeah, I think many of us definitely watch them sort of do that. We were definitely doing it before them, although I like the way that they describe it just because we took a very marketing approach to it from our consulting company. And yeah, I like, I like what they're saying. I'm not sure if they're living up to that anymore, but I really do like how they built a brand

with that attitude. So let's talk about people you know. Teaching can be important for so many different ways Now, what if we wanna play Devil's Advocate and say for many people, it seems dangerous. Too stupid to t tried. Why would I share the valuable skills or knowledge that I have with others? Doesn't that help others to compete with me? Doesn't that waste a lot of time but rather than me writing, Ah, our company, writing a post teaching everybody, our customers and our competitors customers. How to do something better would be just rather keep that knowledge internally and do this thing in in secret and just invest in ourselves vs sharing so freely. What is your sense when you meet? What is your approach to people when when they come at the table with this attitude, when they try to build a business with a high degree of secrecy and trying to not share much knowledge as possible about this but two shares a little knowledge because they feel like that knowledge is valuable to them, and if they share it, deludes it.

I think there's a lot of different ways to teach and Alaa and depending on your business, or might be different topics that you could teach on. So if you're if you don't want to share how you do things which, you know, you and I could cry, argue whether that's right or wrong. I do know that 37 signals shared a lot about how they do things all the way to sharing their sort of now, you know, infamous framework. Ah, for programming. Ruby on rails. Um, and many of us had, you know, took advantage of that, obviously,

and a lot of the stuff we've written it has been in rails, not all of it. Then it was when there was no better option. Build a Web app so we would use rails. And so they share that. And that has nothing to do with base camp except that base pamphlet built on rails. And you could probably say that that's the thing that they actually, they've taught a lot. But that's the thing they taught us the most. About is how to build a Web APS early on, and that's humongous. That's huge. And the benefit that God has been tremendous. Then you can go look at a company like intercom Ah, and talk about like how they teach people how to build better products. What does that have to do with the Communications told for your business,

right? Like, uh, sure. But that brings a lot of affinity toe to them and basically implies that they're experts and creating products say their product must be awesome, right? All right, so that's like the impression it builds and the brand it builds when they share it like that. And a lot of times, all this stuff just comes from founders, right? And then you have, I think, a slightly different take on it, which would be a help spot. I would say that Dar Mash and even Brian Halligan,

the CEO, and two co founders Brian being CEO dramatically CTO. But they're both the co founders, and they teach a lot about marketing They personally might teach every now and then about business or sask. But the primary thing that you hear from them is all about teaching people about marketing. They actually coined inbound marketing that's completely related to their stopper because, you know, for all intents and purposes, for a long time they had inbound marketing software and they coined that whole term, popularized it by teaching teaching people what it was, teaching people what it isn't teaching people how to do it, and that was very focused on not how they do things, although they do do inbound marketing but more focused on how other people should be doing things based on a based on basically an approach to marketing. That they believe is the right approach that they also follow, which I think is different because that is extremely related to their software in their business. While you could argue that intercom is it and 37 signals definitely not in terms of directly related to why people would buy your crunk.

Yeah, and and so I think there's a lot of different ways to approach it. And if somebody came to me with that question, I'd give him the same spiel I just gave, which is there's a lot of different ways to do it. All you have to believe in is the fact that by teaching your business will be added advantage over your competitors and then you can figure out what is it that we want to teach about.

So let's talk about that and then maybe go through all the different things that that abuse a business can teach to your customers in order to create value or two out teacher competitors, right? So you already touching a bunch of cool, different ways of thinking about it, you know? Intercom teaching about product development, 37 signals Teaching people to do Web ABS help start teaching people broadly how to do ah, content marketing. Um, we can We can continue on that because there's many other things that companies can teach others and the benefits of it. But let's talk about the core reason why first. So I think, when the two of us talk talked about how we personally just always have been doing it and enjoying it, and how we've been using teaching as a strategy to grow businesses. But why does teaching work so well as a growth strategy or as a marketing strategy? What it's core is teaching us how to do things? Why is that something that will help you grow your business or can be something helped you grow your business?

I think teaching builds brand and creates word amount allows you to start having ah, conversation or, you know, relationship with customers are potential customers before they become potential customers or even customers. And today, with the you know with the reach that a lot of the platforms have today, that you can utilize whether it's Facebook, Twitter or even just search from Google. As you know, using a blogger, Um, it's on you to figure out how to reach the audience and teaching in, ah, very classic, um, and and sort of timeless way to do that. And and so I would say that like the the why behind it is simply because it's it's one of the easiest ways to do marketing

today. Yeah, beautiful. I think you it's a way for you to build an audience and an audience is much more worth than just pure traffic, right? If I if I pay some advertising and some people click on it and as a result, come to my page for quick second, they have to make a decision if they wanna convert or not. If they find the value proposition compelling or not in that second in that moment and then they're gone, and I would have to spend marketing money again to find them at another time, hopefully to get them to click again. That's very costly. It takes a lot of time to purchased somebody's attention multiple times until hopefully at some point, the right timing is there. When you teach your able to build an audience or if you want to call them students, you would you're doing is you're shame something so valuable with people. Hopefully something that sobs core problems that your customer base has that these people A they feel a certain if you know,

affiliation in a certain gratitude towards you for doing that, Um, and they feel compelled to return and see what else you can share with them. What else you can teach them, what else you can, what else they can learn from you. And that's a very powerful relationship that mean, as you said, builds, Brand built something that's so invaluable if you wanna have customers, which is trust. But if I already trust you and your company, I think you guys are amazing. I think I've learned a shit ton from you, and I love you know, the way you communicate.

I love the way that you guys right block coast, and I'm like, kind of emotionally bought into it the moment that I need to purchase the type of software product that you're offering. You know, we never gonna have a trust issue. Don't have to buy my trust. You don't have to show. I don't have to see who else is a customer. If you've been featured on some kind of a press site, I trust you already because I have a relationship with you, right? And then I might buy from you your product today I might by tomorrow. If you do it right, that might keep coming back to purchase many different products in many different companies of yours in your case, for certain, Um,

because I have such a strong relationship with you or with with what your company has been teaching me. All right, So let's let's talk about the different things that a business or subtle can teach to customers or two prospects to grow the business. Right. So And let's start with the three examples you have and see how many more we can come up with. So the 1st 1 you brought up was 37 signals teaching how to build weapons. Now this there's something important to this. Although it has nothing to do with base camp is a product which was a Project Management tool teaching yoke, offering people teaching people how to build weapons and offering the their framework open. Sourcing their framework was important in the sense of useful in the sense that their core customer base, ideal customer was helped were people that were freelancers, developers, Web agencies. Those were the main customers they wanted to sell. Their project might have been software to. So these were all also the people that needed that a waste to build Web apps.

So they gave something incredibly powerful to an audience that they also wanted to sell a product right. And that's I think it's an important principle. If 37 signals a base camp base camp was a project management tool for doctors. Open sourcing Ruby on rails might have had a very negativism impact on their business and business growth because doctors are not interested in, you know, open source frameworks. Web apps. So they might have had a huge following in the Web in the developer community, but that wouldn't have translated into massive growth of business for their project management tool for doctors. Right? Um, so they talk. People have to do something that want to do that also customers or there could be put into customers of their product with intercom. Interesting thing is that teaching people how to build better products, that is not necessarily. There's some crossover that I'm sure they have many,

many SAS Company says customers that many product companies, this customer. So there's some crossover. Okay, some of their customers are interested in how to build better products and read this. But I would venture to say that the bigger benefit, or are equally if not a bigger benefit of them teaching people how to build a great product is that they're tracked great top tier talent for their product in for the engineering team, right? Would you agree?

Yeah, wholeheartedly.

And for them, they they strategically decided we're gonna build. We're gonna be this amazing product company. We're gonna build these incredibly beautiful and elegant products. Hands are competitive. Advantage is going to be have the best product team ever hands. We should write more about our philosophy. We should be thought leaders from product because people that are at the top off their game will be attracted. Wanna work for a company like ours which will give us the ability to build things that hopefully lots of people want to buy on products that are gonna be really compelling. So they're they're teaching, helps them attract the type of talent internally that helps them do what they need to do. Hop Spot teaches company. How do marketing give them the software to do that type of marketing? So it's very kind of closely related. I teach you Step one and then you need Step two, right? I teach you how to do email marketing.

Now that you know how to write a good, compelling email, you need a tool to do that. And I offer you that to write and close eyes doing and in a very similar way, what we teach people, how to we sell. And then we offer them the software that allows them to do that more effectively. And more successfully, there is companies like Buffer, you know, we've talked about this before with the whole topic of transparency. Ah, big part. Not all but a big part of buffers. Marketing has been teaching people about transparency, and they have been using transparency as a marketing tool of like sharing their revenue numbers,

sharing their salary numbers, sharing how they make decisions internally, like being very, very transparent about how they run their business and what their business looks like, because that's information that is usually not available. It is incredibly attractive for many, many people around the world to get access to that information. It helps them obviously hire people that really want toe work. For a company that stands out is very transparent. But that transparency, they don't have a transparency software, so it doesn't really necessarily help there. What do you think is the main benefit for coming late buffer with the transparency play that they have So just culturally, the main benefit that the building, this amazing internal culture that they wanna have off transparency Or are they? You know, what are the core benefits of teaching others about your numbers and how you do Everything

is a business. Yeah, they're they're an interesting case, the study in this, because I think they've gone to an extreme of sharing and teaching about how they operate as a business. And I think more importantly, you're the way they have done. It is, actually I would say it is def, definitely about the culture and and, um, belief of what their internal beliefs are, and they're even willing to change them on, do change them and talk about that. They're willing to wear their mistakes. It's very impressive to see a company be that open and transparent and literally being it. And I know a lot about that company for being involved with them in many ways,

and it's true. It's like what you see is what you get. If you read about some problem they have, they're not sugar coating anything. They're not hiding anything and they're wearing it and putting it out there. I think that vulnerability attracts people to that brain and and and it makes you feel a certain way about them, which eventually makes you feel like they, like you can trust them. And so I think they've built a lot of trust with their customers, their prospects there reading their leaders, who are our readers who are reading this material and so you know, one of the biggest benefits of that is that a lot of people want to work there. A lot of people want to work there and and that's a huge benefit when you start sharing, you know, ah, things about your culture.

I think secondary to that. It's like I said, they have a lot of trust in the market. Compared Toa, you know, probably any other brand in that social media started tool space night and probably almost any other brand and

fast today for sure, Absolutely. And that's such a big important component that I think I'm gonna play a bigger and bigger role down the line is teaching the way you teach in the way you market it effects what kind of customers you can get and kind of what, what kind of you know, audience, you build that hopefully, eventually a big portion of that can turn into a revenue stream for your business, but equally as important, if not more important. So if you think really long term is your marketing and the way you teach and the way you share information with the world as a company effects who you can attract as employees. But who wants to come and work for your company and work with your company, and that in a world where you know, building weapons is not as difficult as it used to be and where a lot of the information how to build things and how to design really great things. And we had an episode just two episodes ago about, you know, the competitiveness of the product development environment today just because the bar, instead of keep on being raised in terms of what a great product looks like in that kind of ah,

hypercompetitive world being able to attract the greatest people in being able to build a really cohesive strong culture is gonna become a bigger and bigger part of what makes certain companies succeed Long term business, others struggle and teaching the world how you run your business, teaching the world how you manage your team teaching the world. How do you deal with failure? All that is gonna teach people if what kind of, ah company you want to work for us? Well, and if that's something that they be interested in, a lot of the people that that this year joined the company a big part of why they joined us, they heard from us, you know, in conferences, they read our content. Either they've known about us for a while before they decided to apply or if they saw job Post, they went to a block that went to you know, they did a little bit of research and everything they found.

There was a lot of things there that told them Give them a really strong picture. Of what kind of a company? Well, what kind of a team we are And that made them, you know, no one leaning that this would be a team in a company they want to work for. That makes a big

difference. Yeah, I mean, it's Ah, it's almost eye opening when you think about these company, that air sharing, teaching and kind of the benefits they get. So this is actually I'd say this is a very interesting and important discussion. I hope people get something out of this. So is it is it tip time?

It is definitely tipped

up. All right. I guess I'm going first, huh? Okay. So just like any great teacher, you can't really teach. But what? You know, if you know nothing, or if you believe you know nothing. So you have tow, find a way to understand what it is that you actually can teach people and then go teach them, and you might be putting a lot of weight on this word teaching. But what? What I've seen is even very young companies who are just entering in a market just start teaching people about what they're learning cause you're learning constantly. You're learning about your customer.

You're learning about what products build your learning about what didn't work, what did were just start sharing that. And that's just the same as, like, 37 signals teaching about you know, how to use ruby on rails or putting out ruby on rails or intercom talking about product. They might be really great at it. They might have a lot of expertise, but you can also just teach people by sharing what you're learning, because then they'll still they'll learn things by what you learned. So don't don't put so much weight on expertise or knowledge and put much more weight on on sharing what you're learning. If you're struggling with figuring out what you can teach.

Yeah, I love that. I'm gonna piggyback on this because I do think this is a really important point. I think whatever you so maybe another word. Another word. Instead of teaching is just sharing right. Teaching might create this this impression that you need to have a quote unquote expertise. You need to have really deep knowledge. You need to have some certification. Somebody needs to have giving you the permission that you are now you know, knowledgeable enough in this area that you allow to go and tell people about this stuff, but sharing something we all can do and sharing. I think if you think about sharing the things you know and that the experiences you're going through and if you think about doing so authentically but not trying not trying to be a teacher, not trying to be so an expert, not pretending you know something if you don't, I think a lot of times when people teach, they feel this pressure that they have to pretend they know more than they do.

If the pretended of information about things they don't And if they get questions, they don't have answers before they feel the pressure to pretend they do. I don't think you need any of that. And he even brought this up a second ago. I think there's many examples now off cos that start and all they do is very authentically sharing the things they're learning, right? And just going. We thought we do a Google ad campaign. We knew nothing about it. We're going to spend $5000 in next five weeks, and then we're gonna do five block post where we share the things we learned and how we failed on what kind of results we gotta, how much traffic we got or even people just sharing things like, Hey, you know, we got on the first page on product hunt or hacker news or, you know,

TechCrunch's wrote about us. So we got on the CNN block. He is the unexpected things we learn. Well, should we only got seven clicks, right? They share these numbers that teach others about what to expect from these marketing efforts of these. These results and in that way that they're, you know, again building Brandon, getting all the benefits that we discussed prior without having to be an m. You know, Google AdWords expert, a PR expert, or somebody that had a 1,000,000 you know, launches on product on.

You don't have to get to the pinnacle of something to be able to share and teach what you know. So just if to double down on what he said If you're wondering, what could I teach? Just ask yourself what is who are you and what I do struggling with or trying to learn and just share that. And if you are a part time you know somebody that is, you know, a stay home, dad or Mom and you're trying to launch this at part time and your struggle is that you're living in, you know, some obscure place in the world and you you never have. You never seem to have the time to get started right about that. Teach that there's a ton of people around the world that can associate with it. And if you are, you know, in this insulin value race 10 million and you trying to hire hundreds of people, write about that experience,

but just teach authentically about and think about who you are and what you're learning and going through, and to share that information with others. It's going to teach them a lot, and it's gonna attract the right type of people and come across to the right type of way versus trying to be an expert or trying to pretend you know things you don't Or wait until you get to some point before you're allowed to share information. Don't waste any time to start teaching every day. What? You're learning yourself of it. That's it from us. Well, here.