#36: Corey Haines — Mental Models for Effective Marketing

Corey: Dude, I hate reinventing the wheel. I hate starting from scratch andthat's what I'm trying to bring to marketing, right, that's kind of like maybepart of my personal monopoly theme is like, never start from scratch. Peopleare always trying to come up with new marketing ideas. There is no such thingas a new marketing idea. You can only remix old marketing ideas.  

[00:00:30] Josh:Hi, I'm Josh Gonsalves and welcome to Mind Meld. This is where Ihave in-depth conversations with some of the brightest people in the knownuniverse. My aim is spark deep conversations around interesting topics to findthe tools, tactics, strategies, and philosophies that we can all use in ourdaily and creative lives.

[00:00:51]In this episode, I sat down withCorey Haines. Corey is the founder of swipe files, a membership community, andresource hub for cutting edge comprehensive and sometimes crazy marketingideas. He also teaches multiple courses on marketing, including RefactoringGrowth and Mental Models for Marketing.

[00:01:09] Before swipe files, he was thehead of growth at bear metrics, and has consulted for dozens of startups onmarketing and growth. Some of those clients include savvy cow ever case andriverside.fm podcasting platform that I'm actually using right now to recordthis podcast.

[00:01:26] Besides some of the incrediblemarketing strategies that Corey shares in this episode, we also talked quite abit about personal knowledge management, mental models, and entrepreneurship.It's a wide ranging conversation that's already led to so many new insights forboth Corey and myself and I hope that you come out of the other end of thiswith some new resources and ideas yourself.

[00:01:45] And as always, if you want todig deeper on some of the topics or resources that we bring up in the podcast,you can find direct links to everything we mentioned in the show notes for thisepisode. You can find the link to the show notes and description of thispodcast, or go directly to Josh Gonsalves.com/podcast. That's J O S H G O N S AL V E S .com/ P O D C A S T, and you'll get all the show notes and linksrelated to this episode.

[00:02:14] If you haven't yet subscribed tothe podcast, please pick up your phone, pull it out of your pocket and tap thatlittle subscribe button on the podcast app that you're listening to this on.That way you can get notified when I publish new episodes every Monday withamazing new guests each and every week.

[00:02:29] So I hope you enjoy thisconversation and I hope it blows your mind, leads to new ideas and motivatesyou to keep doing whatever it is that you're doing. So let's get right into it.I'm Josh Gonsalves and this is Mind Meld with Cory Haines.

[00:02:41] Corey, thanks so much forjoining me on Mind Meld man. I'm really excited to do this for the second time,after the first one kind of messing up for us.

[00:02:53] Corey:I'm super glad to be out here a second time. It's an honor. I hopethat's, uh, uh, first I'm the first invite back.

[00:02:59]Josh:Exactly, I might even post the episode, like the bad quality versionof it somewhere, but for sure folks listening, we're using riverside.fm. It isa great platform, but for some, yeah, the reason my audio just, it didn'trecord. So it was just completely silent. So I'm really thankful Corey thatyou're coming back so we can record this. Hopefully we recapture that lightningin a bottle that we got last time, but it's a good segue because you're alsousing riverside.fm for your podcast as well. Right. Everything is Marketing.

[00:03:24]Corey:Yeah. And it's been great again, like not perfect and no platform isgoing to be, there's still very early. I've been super happy with them, I'vebeen using them for, uh, for both my podcasts actually Default Alive andEverything is Marketing.

[00:03:35]Josh:I don't think I've listened to default life yet. Can you give me alittle background on that?

[00:03:39]Corey:my friend and I, uh, Chris Spags he runs a SaaS business called JetBoost. So it's like a plugin for Webflow, no code tool. we actually met like afew years ago. Uh, I started like an Indie Hackers, a San Diego meetup, and hehad just moved to San Diego to just kind of like got involved in the IndieHackers movement.

[00:03:55]He was one of the people who cameto the meetup, we became friends. I made a little Slack channel, and then westarted doing like these weekly calls where we just kind of update each otheron what we're working on and like help each other kind of keep accountable andbrainstorm. And then when I left Baremetrics and went full-time on my own orlike, Hey, why don't we like turn this into a podcast? And then like otherpeople can like, listen and kind of get updates on what we're working on. Andthat's what he's been doing for the last, five months now. So.

[00:04:20]Josh:That's awesome, man. I'll have to check it out. So I'll post itagain for anyone listening. I always do these like really, really detailed shownotes. So I'll put links to all your projects in the show notes to people. Ifyou want to check that one out. Your latest one, just dropped, right?Everything is Marketing.

[00:04:33] I left you in awesome review.I'm pretty sure. I was like, Corey is marketing. You're like my go-to person,at least on Twitter for like, learning about marketing stuff. So, yeah, that'sbeen awesome. Tell me a little bit about the podcast and how it's been going sofar.

[00:04:46]Corey:Yeah. So basically the premise of the podcast was I wanted to figureout a way where I could do something different and add value to all the othermarketing podcasts out there. And what I noticed was that while I loved themall, there's already a bunch of podcasts out there that are like these quick,short snippets or features on like a particular story by a marketer. Like, youknow, how, uh, X company added a million dollars in ARR with like this oneweird growth hacking. Like, Oh, like that's interesting, but like who's themarketer. And like what's all the backstory and like how they think thatthrough it was the strategy was the plan.

[00:05:18] So it's basically like a JoeRogan experience meets like a nerd out session in marketing, um, where I get tojust do a deep dive on someone. And, uh, really kind of go into theirbackground, how they think, ask them a whole kind of array and gamut of questions.And that'll be like, you know, the thing for that market. Like, if you want toknow if you want to get inside the mind of how this person thinks here it is.

[00:05:40] Josh:That's awesome. So what have you learned so far? Like, I mean, justfrom people's stories from some of the stuff they've been sharing, what hasbeen like some of the key takeaways from it? Cause you did like 10 episodes,right? To begin with.

[00:05:49] Corey:Yeah. Yeah. And then that's also kind of core to the premise was,um, it's so it's under like the swipe files brands, quote, unquote, and thecore thesis for Swipe Files is you know, to swipe ideas from other industries,other people like to kind of curate this library and repository of things thatyou can draw from for your own marketing.

[00:06:09]so I want to do the same idea orthe same thing for ideas and for, you know, for stories and what people thatwe're doing. And again, a lot of other marketing podcasts will focus on aparticular industry or business type, or even like type of marketing. Likeit'll just be like the e-commerce marketing podcasts.

[00:06:24] And that's great, but, my kindof thing, like, what I want to bring to the table is that I want to encouragemarkers to get out of their echo chamber out of their like sphere of, you know,email marketing or like e-commerce marketing and really, get outside it andreally like widen their perspective. And so I'm bringing on people from allsorts of different backgrounds, skill sets, types of businesses, disciplines,like what they're focused on and that way you can kind of steal the best of allof them and kind of mold it into your own.

[00:06:52] So I launched with 10 because Ifelt like the premise wouldn't really be clear if I just launched with like oneor two or three, because he wouldn't get the wide array of people. Right. So Ihad a B2B SaaS, founder. I had a DTC e-commerce founder. I had a positioningconsultants, uh, a Facebook ads guru, like it just spans the gamut. And thatway I can really deliver on, on that premise.

[00:07:15]Josh:That's so awesome, man. So I'm really excited to check out some ofthe other episodes. I've only listened to the one with Jay Acunzo just causelike, I'm like, we're both like mutual big fans of him and he does some awesomestuff. I think he didn't, he recently just rebrand or relaunch a podcast orsomething recently, too.

[00:07:30] Corey:Yeah, I think he rebranded his, his personal site. Um, but Jay's oneof those people where I was like, man, there are so many good ideas from this.I I've been a huge fan. I've been reading all of his blog posts, listened tohis podcasts. I followed him for a long time. but  in our episode, Talking about some of thethings that I learned I've been taking away is, uh, he's like really big onlike having a really strong podcast premise.

[00:07:50] And like that idea, I justthought, Oh man, you can take that to so many other things. Cause basicallythis whole thing is like, it's not, what content you explore. It's how youexplore that content. So like take a marketing podcast. Right. And it'slocated, this is a podcast about marketing, but like.

[00:08:06] For me for everything ismarketing it's okay, this is a podcast that explores every facet and dimensionof marketing from people from all sorts of different backgrounds and skillsets,not just the one or two kind of focus ones. and that you can take that to ablog, to a newsletter, to like a video show. You could take that to evenoutside of like content.

[00:08:25] And generally you can take thatto your, uh, your value proposition, right? Like it's not what you deliver,it's how you deliver it. And so that was one of the things I was like, man,like, this podcast is helping me. No one else. I'm getting some good ideas fromthis.

[00:08:40] Josh:Honestly, I mean, even just from him, tweeting out a lot of thatstuff too, like if you follow anything, he does his blogs, his podcasts, it allkind of goes around the same thing. And I totally agree with that.

[00:08:50]For this show for Mind Meld, the premisereally is for me to share with people, tools, tactics, and strategies that willhelp them in their personal and creative lives.

[00:08:58] And well, the last episode wedid record, we definitely got into there. We definitely did all those things. SoI'm going to try to bring those back out. I still have some of my notes off tothe side here. Some things that I wanted to bring back up.

[00:09:09]And that's kind of the, one ofthe reasons I love chatting with you last time, and I had you on the podcastbecause you are doing so many things and you've kind of taken this sort of likesolo preneur path lately, which I think is so cool. I mean, I think we're kindof doing roughly the same thing.

[00:09:22] I'm doing a couple no-codeprojects myself on the side of this podcast, and that's one of the reasons Iwant to chat with you because they're so awesome. I mean, seeing what you'vedone with Swipe Files, seeing how you've built, Hey Marketers, all theseprojects that you've built using no code and you've kind of done yourself.

[00:09:35] And then on top of that, doingall this marketing, and then it wasn't until recently that I knew that youactually created all those courses and everything. So there's a lot of jugglingobviously, but you've done them in like succession, which is really cool.

[00:09:46] So the first one that you did,um, well, I think it was while you're at Baremetrics was Hey Marketers. Right.And that was completely a no-code project. So how did you start that thing? Howdid you kind of grow it and what were sort of some of the takeaways from it,from creating that job board?

[00:10:01]Corey:I think since I was 19, I've known that I want it to be like, my endgoal is to be an entrepreneur. I wanted to like go out and do my own thing and startthings. So just like I'm a starter and I like, going out and like. Creatingyour ideas, right? Like realizing the ideas you have in your head. So I'vealways had a mind, like I'm looking for excuses to like learn stuff.

[00:10:18] It was actually, it was likeOctober, November of 2018. I want to say, um, where I like got introduced tothe whole no-code movement started following Ben Tossel he created his firstiteration of a Maker Pad, which was my new co. And I was one of the first likecustomers and members, like played around with her for a while, learn somebasic stuff. That's how I got into Webflow. basically what happened was in, Ithink it was March of 2019. I want to say, I was doing this campaign forBaremetrics where I was reaching out to past customers and asking thembasically, What it would take for them to become a customer again, and justdoing some like basic customer research.

[00:10:54]so send sending the email, thisguy replies, and he's like, Hey, we'd love to hop on a call and I can tell youmy experience, but also like a level what you're doing and follow me onTwitter, uh, would love to learn like how we can find someone like youbasically we're hiring for like a, you know, early stage kind of marketer forour SaaS company. Uh, so what if we swap, I'll spend 15 minutes asking you, youspend the rest of the call asking me and we can call it a day. So I thought.That's perfect. Great. Why not? so ask him my things and then he started askingme, and so, you know, who are you? What do you do? What's your day-to-day looklike?

[00:11:22] And then we got to, how did youfind Baremetrics? That the wallet I follow Josh on Twitter and, you know, kindof plugged into like the bootstrapper SaaS community. So I was following him,you know, a couple of people and he thought, well, okay, if I was hiringsomeone like you, like where, where was he laying? So I was like, well, wework, uh, we work remotely, uh, Remote okay. Like all the remote. And he waslike, Oh, well, ours, isn't a remote job. And then we were kind of likelocated.

[00:11:46] So they were like, ah, I don'tknow where I would post this. And he was like, Well, man, if I have a coupleextra weekends, I would build like a job board just for marketers. Cause likewe're dying to find a place to, you know, to post this and to get in front ofthe right people. And I was like, you know, it's a good idea.

[00:12:01] I was like, you know what, giveme a couple of weeks. I'm going to come back when a build it and you can meetmy first customer and he's like deal done. So I went back to, uh, my new cowhich had by then become maker pad. I remember that there was like a tutorialof how to build a job worth through Webflow.

[00:12:15] Three weekends. I spun it up,went back to him, ask him to posts. Um, he did, he was my first customer. Andthen I went back and kind of like, back-filled a lot of the other jobs and justkinda like scrapes and posted, launched on Product Hunt and kind of the rest ishistory. It's a it's hummed along on its own.

[00:12:32] And actually an update from, thefirst recording that we did was, uh, I actually sold the majority stake of itin November to, a guy who was like, really, he knows what he's doing with jobboards. So I'm still on. I still have about 20%. Yeah, like an advisor role,but uh, he's, he's gonna take it and run with it. so I can share that now.

[00:12:52] Josh:That's awesome. Well, that's great. Congrats, man. That's always agood position to be able to see things kind of go off and flourish on theirown. Right. And be like, yeah, maybe there's someone else running it or it'skind of self running. That's awesome. Congrats man. That's a really, really,big.

[00:13:05] Corey:I mean, it was going on its own and it was fine, but it had kind ofplateaued. And I knew that in order to get us to the next level, I would needto put in a lot of work and a lot of things that are outside of my comfortzone, especially on the tech side of things. And I just knew that I wasn't theright person to like, handle all that.

[00:13:21] Um, so actually I posted onTwitter asked I was kind of a sneaky way, but I just asked, Hey, I'm thinkingabout selling, Hey Marketers, like what would be an appropriate price? And itjust had like hundreds of people will reach out and be like, I'd be interestedin like, you know, trying to negotiate, but, once he reached out, I knew thathe would probably the best candidate and we managed to find a good agreement.

[00:13:40]Josh:And I mean, I think the biggest takeaway is like, you're able to startit up yourself without any code without having to hire developers. Right. Andthat's the power of no code. Yeah. And it's so quick. That's insane. Threeweekends. And it was like a pretty good business.

[00:13:54] So from there, it was that whenyou decided to stop working with Baremetrics and kind of go all in or what wasit until you started Swipe Files?

[00:14:01]Corey:Yeah, it was until I started Swipe Files. So after Hey Marketers, Ithen created a course, mental models for marketing. And that went really,really well. And then I basically turned around and did the same thing again amonth later and create a refactoring growth. like a month later, it turnedaround and started working on swipe files, um, because.

[00:14:17] Again, the through kind ofTwitters serendipity, I was following this guy named Sako, he was creating thisamazing PS4 prototypes through Webflow. I was just like mind blown. And then hedid it to giveaway where he's like, Hey, I'll build someone's prototype forfree. Uh, you know, it's just like, pitch me your idea and then retweet.

[00:14:32] And so I did, and I pitched himon this idea that I had, and I have this big long kind of like file of, uh,business ideas and my Notion doc and, um, It's kinda like went through, it waslike, Oh, I, we could probably do that in Webflow. And so I pitched him on it.He was turned around. I was like, Hey, I'm gonna do, I'm gonna, I'm gonna pickyou and, like seven other people, we're all going to do it together. And I'llbe like, uh, a no-code rumble kind of idea, like a accelerator. so we startedworking on that and it was the first version of swipe files. And that was likein the middle of the pandemic. Literally it was March, 2020. We broke ground onswipe files.

[00:15:03]and. You know, I think at thatpoint it's he would just being in quarantine, I kinda knew like, yeah, I don'treally want to like work full-time anymore. Like I'd rather do consulting. Iwas getting kind of bored. I knew that there was a lot of other things andespecially so I felt was getting really promising because even with like these,weekly tear downs that I was doing, I was getting a good amount of customersand members.

[00:15:21] And I knew that there was somany other things that I could do on top of it that I just had, like the timeand the focus to be able to do with that, it could be something much bigger Soin September, that kind of all culminated in.

[00:15:31] Swipe Files is the main thingthat I'm working on is not the only thing. but that's the thing that I thinkwill help me unlock my time. And it's looking pretty promising.

[00:15:38]Josh:So there's a few things I want to get into that from that. So thefirst one, obviously just, maybe you can explain sort of what swipe files. Asthe community as the product is, um, there's a few terms in there. So peoplemight not actually know what a swipe file is. I think you mentioned it brieflyat the very beginning, you mentioned like tear downs.

[00:15:54] Corey:Yeah, totally. So I'm glad you asked because it is very much likemarketing jargon and a lot of other people don't notice, but it's as a coolconcept. I think it's actually really good for this show because I was actuallywas just talking to someone else earlier and, uh, there were like, you know, soI felt like a thing that's like really specific to marketing and, but I, I toldactually, no, it's actually a swipe file is like a thing that marketers tookfrom something else.

[00:16:17] And, uh, if you get into likethe whole personal knowledge management space, uh, with like building a secondbrain and, zettelkasten and a commonplace book, it's all about basically havinga system to curate ideas, save knowledge and information to reference it later,and then be able to organize it in some good way so that you can go and find itlater.

[00:16:39] And basically you're, you'rebuilding an extension of your brain of, okay, if I want to save this for later,how can I do that in the most efficient way possible? So we see this in allsorts of other industries, like for example, in the like design space, theycall a mood board, right? Where you just like, you create a whole bunch ofthings that you like, and then like you take from that and create other moodboards for other projects or clients or whatever it is.

[00:17:00]you know, even authors, authorskeep a commonplace book. That was like their version of it. Um, now we'reseeing, you know, Tiago Forte really pioneered to building a second brain ideawhere, um, that he has para and you build it all in a tool like Evernote orNotion.

[00:17:13]So a swipe file is basically likethe marketing version of a zettelkasten, have a, some sort of like file or asystem for saving ideas and being able to reference them for later.

[00:17:25] Uh, so you, you swipe it into afile. So any like landing page and you add an email where you're like, Oh,that's a really good one. I'm going to save that for later so I can referenceit. Um, you swipe it into your file, whatever that might be. And again, itcould be a Notion doc could be a Google drive. Um, could just, you could justdrop it into your Apple notes. It doesn't really matter  

[00:17:42] There's a tool I really likecalled My Mind. It's just mymind.com. That's like perfect for this type ofthing. Cause he can literally save anything and everything in the like searchfor it later. but that's in essence what a swipe file is.

[00:17:53] And the reason why I had theidea for swipe files.com was, I was creating the affiliate program forBaremetrics, and I was like, what? That goes on a landing page to promote anaffiliate program for a SaaS company. Like, I don't know. I never seen anyoneelse do this. I mean, I probably have, but I haven't seen their landing page. Idon't know what to put on there.

[00:18:13] So I had to go do a whole bunchof research. I went to, you know, convert kit and to a whole bunch of othersand I just thought, and then I DMD them that, Hey, why did you create this thisway? Or like, what'd you change? Or like, what would you advise for us?

[00:18:25] And I was like, what if therewas a place where, I didn't have to go out and do all this. I could just searchand find you know, affiliate marketing landing page, and then get a tear down oflike what makes it great, basically? Why is this a good example?

[00:18:37]cause there's a whole job sitesout there. There's swipe file.com. There's swipes.co and they kind of justcurate anything and everything, which is hopeful to a certain degree, but it'smore helpful to learn why it was swiped, why it was saved.  

[00:18:50] A tear down is basically like ananalysis of, something right. In this case, a patient ad, the good and bad ofit, essentially you're you're commenting on it.

[00:18:58]So that was the first iteration.That's why fells was basically writing these tear downs on these examples thatI was curating. So you could save it for your own swipe file. and today what'sevolved into is, I call it content, community, and courses to help you mastermarketing. So the content is, tear downs. I also have like a database of like acurated swipe file just for you. If you need like a Kickstarter, just like saveinto your notion doc.

[00:19:21]There's the community. So it's aprivate community built on circle. it's just basically a place for people tofind like minded people, answer questions, network, get to know people havefriends, you know, find your people, uh, and then courses. So I bundled inRefactoring Growth, Mental Models for Marketing, working on some other ones aswell, eventually. so that's what,Swipe Files is today is essentially aglorified membership site.

[00:19:43]Josh:Yeah, totally glorified. Right? Like literally in the best sensepossible, like, instead of just going in and just having like, maybe it's like,I don't know. It used to be just Slack channels now people are going on circle.Right? So circle.so everyone just kind of creating these like multichannel,community, and then having a course with it and then people can kind of learnfrom each other.

[00:20:00] I like how you've added thecontent side of that. And that's really cool. You have like this sort of triadand you just kind of mentioned something before we got into this, which islike, it'll help you unlock your time. So it's like this like leverage, right?You're kind of like building yourself out of it.

[00:20:12] Like you're going to have thecommunity for people to ask questions. You have the courses, so you could teachpeople rather than having to consult them one-on-one and then obviously thetear downs, I'm sure at some point you'll have other people adding to it, orhowever that community grows. That's really interesting.

[00:20:27] I want to hear your thoughtprocess on that on sort of the leverage side of things. Because last time wechatted about this idea of like stair-stepping entrepreneurship. So I want toknow where this kind of fits in that, and I want to hear your whole philosophyis on that.

[00:20:38] Corey:Yeah. So, again, with the end goal in mind being like, I want to bean entrepreneur, I want to be able to work on different businesses and businessideas and just like tinker and, and start things. I think that the biggestthing, like actually I heard the podcast the other day, um, that everyone iseither moving away from something, or they're moving towards something. Or combinationof both. Right. And I feel like the first step to really being an entrepreneurand like, unlocking your creativity and like be able to work on what you wantto, it's just moving over away from and getting away from trading your time formoney.

[00:21:07]So I'm doing a lot of consulting.I happen to do a lot of consulting. I was doing, you know, full-time jobs. Um,but having an asset, like swipe files where it's a membership site and it'srecurring revenue one day, we'll hopefully unlock my time to be able to work onwhatever I want to.

[00:21:21] And then there's no longerrelationship between how much time I put into it and the paycheck that I takehome every day. And it's not in like a sleazy, like passive income sense, butmore in the sense that like I am scaling myself and that way, this thing is notdependent on me and I'm not dependent on, you know, putting in time in order tobe able to, you know, eat and put food on the table for my wife, my dog.

[00:21:43] And, uh, so, so I felt like thefirst thing where I think, you know, this is something that is clearly in, inmy, uh, area of expertise. If you think of like the, um, what's it called?It's, uh, Uh, there's a Japanese web. It's about the intersection Yes.  ikigai. I

[00:22:02] Josh:Yeah, ikigai.

[00:22:03] Corey:It. ikigai. Yeah. Uh, but it's basically the intersection of likewhat you love, what you're good at, what the world needs and what other peopleneed.

[00:22:11] And I spent like swipe fileswith something for me where I, I'm not a programmer. I love SaaS the software,that's kind of the background that I come from, but I can't do that right now.So it wasn't that I can do on my own. That will help me get out of this tradingtime for money. And so I felt just like, you know, the combination of all thesethings, where I felt like, um, that could be the thing, and then I can go anddo other businesses.

[00:22:30] I can do other side projects Ican build on top of it. But that first step being, I can unlock my time, removemyself from being the bottleneck on the amount of money that I make everymonth, basically.

[00:22:40]Josh:Yeah. I mean, that's the key, right? I think that's the way to gofor sure. And I think the other thing you brought up ikigai, or as, I don'tknow, do you follow like David Perrell? Cause you're in the personalknowledge  yeah, of course. I think we'rein that same Twitter sphere of all those awesome people.

[00:22:52]yeah, he talks about, um,building your personal monopoly. Right. So I think you're starting to buildthat right now. Definitely in sort of the B2B SaaS area and B2B SaaS marketingspecifically now mixing that with personal management, it really seems likeswipe files in particular has become sort of that like personal monopoly foryou, which has been so awesome to see. Definitely feels like it's like the baseof something big. So it's really cool to kind of see you do all this stuffearly on.

[00:23:19] And I think it's reallyinteresting too, that you kind of bring that up. Because the idea of knowledgemanagement, plus all of the marketing content out there has been something thatI've been grappling with myself for a while.

[00:23:30] And I'm just like, Holy shit,man. Like there's so much on the internet. And then like me more so on thedesign side, I'm like, okay, like, There's so many websites that drawinspiration from, and then you need specific types of websites, like, uh, likeyou said, like, uh, an affiliate landing page, or what does a sign, a good signup page look like?

[00:23:46] Or what does like a really goodintegrations page? Like whatever it is for SaaS or whatever kind of websiteyou're building, the one thing that's really cool. And you brought up Sako, wewere chatting about this on an episode before where like the internet. Like,no, one's really doing that much innovative stuff, aside from actual productdesign.

[00:24:03] When it comes from the websites,you're, you're basically following, patterns of the web. Like almost everyother SaaS website is going to steal from Stripe, like something from theStripe website. Right. Um, so I find that really interesting that you're takingall of that and then putting it and mixing products with personal knowledgemanagement. And that's kind of where the swipe files come in. So for me, I waslike, Holy shit, there's so much out there. How do I save all this? There's allthese designs websites and they copy.

[00:24:30] So maybe we can kind of get intothat now. So I know you save some stuff or most of your stuff with Roam now.and I think you're mentioning, just notion for a few things. So I'd love tohear how you save all of this stuff when you do come across something nice. Andthen that process of saving it for yourself. But then also when does it go toswipe files and when does it go out to the community?

[00:24:49] Corey:Yeah, I have this process like nail down about just like walkthrough, um, sort of what it looks like today. And. Uh, how I'd like it towork. At least eventually it's fairly streamlined.

[00:25:00] But basically I do all of mythinking and writing and brainstorming in Roam. and there's a few things thatpipe interim, like I use read wise to save quite a few things, especially frommy Kindle, which I do all my book reading through.

[00:25:15] And that allows me to dosomething. I also use a podcast app called air, uh, I think a second, like anair quote. So basically you can take notes within a podcast episode, and notjust like on a high level, but like for specific segments of audio and that wayI can like directly go back and reference that piece of audio. And so thoseboth, uh, go in and feed back into Roam.

[00:25:36]On the swipe file side of things,if I see something that I like, I'll save it in two places, which is my mind.And then I'll save it in Notion. So Notion is where I actually keep like my, myliteral swipe file, uh, my mind as well, but like notions, like the thing thatI, that I referenced, And, uh, and that's what eventually makes it into swipefiles, uh, for our members. And then like, that's how I create the, you know,the database and that's normally what I use for myself. And I'm kind of drawingoff of, uh, as well. And then my mind is like, kind of like a catch all, like Isaved everything through there. Tweet, threads, articles, um, images. Adsemail, like everything is saved in my mind.

[00:26:13] So it's, if it's not in one ofthose other places, it's probably in my mind and it's not, if I need it, one ofthose places, I'll probably find it in my mind. Didn't duplicate it over there.Um, but I think that that's probably the best, like high level overview of howthey all kind of work together.

[00:26:28]Josh:Yeah, that's awesome. And I just reached out to you the other day,asking you for a link to get my mind, and I actually started using it and it'samazing. I think it's such a great tool for designers for marketers, right?Like it's so cool. my favorite aspect of it is that you don't need to go andkind of categorize things, right.

[00:26:46] It just uses AI to categorizeit, which is insane. use AI to like pick out the colors and the image. So youcan literally type in a color green show you all the images that are agreeing,like it's wild. Like it's really, really well done. there's a few things that Ithought were like, kind of changed my mind on things because with Notion andyou brought up Tiago Forte is building a second brain.

[00:27:04] That's very much like, you know,you're categorizing things and things have to fit in sort of a single box. Butwith my mind, it kind of goes all over the place. obviously you can just usethe search, but how do you go about. recalling some of the stuff. Youmentioned, like saving like tweets and tweet threads in there.

[00:27:18]When or how do you go andretrieve some of that stuff, because I find myself like saving a lot of shit,but as a matter of making it useful, right. Um, I would like to hear how youkind of go about that.

[00:27:31] Corey:Yeah. I mean, that's the whole reason why I like in a use Roam andmy mind is like the. The most central places for how I, um, reference and usesomething is because it's very decentralized and because there's links back andforth, um, With Notion, I try to use a notion to like organize my entire life,but I found myself overwhelmed with the amount of structure and hierarchy thatit required to just like, keep it a sane system. Basically.

[00:28:01] With Roam, I can dump everythingin there and like, no matter where it is, as long as there's a backlink, I canlike find it. And it's got a great search. Same thing with my mind, so you canjust type in it's actually one of the reasons why I really liked my mind forpersonal knowledge management is because you can type in just like a keyword,and it'll also find that keyword within an article, a tweet that you saved,like, not just like the title of it, or like what you tagged it, but likeliterally within it, I don't know of anything else that does that, to thatdegree.

[00:28:27] So in that way, I actually have,as far as like making it useful, I think that the search is like the real keythere, because nothing else allows you to search so powerfully. Other than Roamand my mind. Cause then I can type in any keyword, any phrase, anything that Imight like use to kind of like, Oh, I know that I phrased it this way. Or likeI described it this way. Maybe with this tag, they can find it that way ratherthan going through folders and drag, trying to filter, which isn't always afull-proof I'm not even sure where to start.

[00:28:53]I have pretty good recall. I'dlike a terrible memory. Uh, short-term and long-term like, I couldn't tell youliterally what I did this morning, but if I'm writing something and I thinkabout a specific theme, like there's tweets going through my mind of like whatpeople said, and like, I'm pretty good at finding it and referencing it later.

[00:29:11] And so my mind in Roam are thatreally good ways for me to, um, like I know it exists, I just needed to go findit. Um, but most of the time I find myself using that recall to actually makeit useful. But other times I'll just. You know, if I'm kind of like drawing ablank and, um, you know, the cursor is blinking in front of me and I havenothing, then I'll just go through and start exploring.

[00:29:29] I think that's one of themagical things about it too, is like, it's not just like a, a linear kind oflike path to like this one specific information you can kind of like wander andmeander and like, Oh, that's interesting. I forgot to save that. Or like, whatis this about?

[00:29:42] And, one of the other parts ofthis whole equation is, uh, for the intake is a tool called, Mail Brew, andthat's what he used for a lot of like the intake. So it's like a save laterslash central place for all of your RSS feeds. And so that's where I read allof my newsletters, a few blogs.

[00:29:59] Um, I'll save things for laterto read through, you know, my browser, whatever it is. And that's another greatway to then, you know, I'll highlight it to read wise or I'll save it in mymind. Um, and then it's, it's there. Right? Uh, but sometimes if I'm not surealso I'll just go scroll through mail brew and start meandering.

[00:30:15]Josh:I think that's a really good point. I think he was like last week Iwent through David Perell's he did like a workshop on how to write for theinternet. So it's on YouTube now. I'll link it. Have you seen it or have youdone his course or anything?

[00:30:27] Corey:I think I saw an early version. I was actually registered for hiswebinar is like workshop last week and I missed it. Um, but I mean, he's, Imean, I read all of this stuff like religiously. I was just going through oldtweets today.

[00:30:38] Josh:Right? Yeah. Yeah. It's awesome. So I think he basically put all ofthat into this one webinar it's on YouTube. I'll send it to you after, it wasamazing. And he talks about the idea. Like, you shouldn't have to like, thinkabout what you're going to write. It should be all there. Like you should besaving the stuff you mentioned, like highlighting stuff from Kindle and likeclipping stuff. It should be all there.

[00:30:56] And then the process of writingis really just putting things together, like clicking like Lego together.Right. And it's cool because I think, yeah, you do a lot of writing yourself.Especially for the course. I'm sure it's the exact same thing. When you'rebuilding a course, it's all these things that you found from books, from blogposts from everywhere, and you're just kind of bringing it together and thenmaking it easily digest digestible for people to consume and to actuallytransfer that knowledge. Right.

[00:31:18] You're like, here's all thisstuff that I could put together into a neat package and just plop it into yourmind. I think we're all waiting for some sort of neural link where we can justhit download and we get it to our brain, but there's no fun in that, right. Wewant to be able to like go through the process and I think that's awesome.

[00:31:33] And I think what's really,really cool here is that same process for design, right? It's like, getting allthese like design pieces and just plugging it together, especially for thingslike Webflow, you're either going to buy a template, or you're going to getsome sort of UI kit and you're just going to start smashing shit together.

[00:31:50] Right? I think your, uh, yourswipe file site, wasn't that based off of a template. I think I own the sameone and it's amazing, right?

[00:31:57] Corey:Yeah, it's fantastic. I'm super stoked that I managed to snag it.And no one else I know is like really using it. Um, but yeah, like there's no,my whole thing, I I'm really, really, uh, lazy as far as like creating things.I'm, I'm all for. Um, I've always been like a curator and a collector and I'mlike a diligent note taker and I'm always like writing down ideas.

[00:32:21] And I think it was actuallyagain when I was in college and I was, I had these long commutes and I was, uh,I was just any idea that popped in my head. I would just write it down. I gotin the habit  of, you know, I had likethis ginormous, uh, Apple notes folder, just like ideas.

[00:32:33]And you get in the habit of that,and eventually you can make use of it later, but you know, now, like, dude, Ihate reinventing the wheel. I hate starting from scratch and that's what I'mtrying to bring to marketing, right.

[00:32:44] That's kind of like maybe partof my personal monopoly theme is like, never start from scratch. People arealways trying to come up with new marketing ideas. There is no such thing as anew marketing idea. You can only remix old marketing ideas. And in fact, you'llbe, you'll do yourself a favor if you study things people did 50 years ago, ifyou study the, you know, uh, I was one of the people I had them on the podcastis, uh, a woman named Ashley Lovech and she was the marketer for a roboticsmanufacturer.

[00:33:13] And they had so many coolmarketing ideas and things that were like, she was used to coming from like atraditional, like retail space. So she was like, let's like throw on likeevents and like let's do cocktail parties and like let's do giveaways. Andlike, they like took the industry by storm because no one else has thought todo of that for like robotics manufacturing.

[00:33:32] Right. and so if you really getoutside of your echo chamber, stop sitting down with a blank page and startlooking at what other people are doing and trying to remix them for yourself.

[00:33:40] Josh:Yeah, totally. I think there's like, I think people have that likementality. They have to start from scratch. It needs to be an original idea. Ithink like a lot of things, even with products. You just kind of mentioned itthere. Like there's no really new ideas. It's just ideas that have been either,uh, evolved through the years who ideas had been smashed together. And then nowyou're also going to be smashing it together. Everything's a, mix-up,everything's a mashup. Everything is a fucking remix of other stuff that'shappened in the past. Um, and that's how we will get new stuff. Right.

[00:34:08] That's kind of one of thepremises for this podcast, which is like, One week I'll have you on one week,I'll have like someone else from it's totally not even marketing, likeliterally nothing that has nothing to do with anything. Bringing it altogether,and eventually these ideals are start clicking and connecting. We startbringing ideas. You're already doing that in the marketing sphere of, withinmarketing, there's like, I don't know. I don't know how many little nicheswithin marketing, but you know, there's with software and all the differentproducts, and at the end of the day, you're just. Marketing is just sort of,you know, getting the word out there, but you know, I'm not going to butcherit. You're you're the expert on this.

[00:34:41]I definitely want to hear whatyour thoughts are on like what marketing actually is. And, you know, aftergoing through all these different niches and sub categories of marketing, whathave you found to be the essence of marketing? What works no matter what triedand true across industries.

[00:34:58] Corey:Yeah. So if you really look at, I'll give you a couple of differentdefinitions that will help kind of triangulate how to think about marketing andencourage people to really try to start from a blank slate and really thinkfrom first principles, when you think about marketing, because, now, like, justthrough like passive absorption, you start to gather all these, ideas andassumptions and connotations about what a word means. Especially something likemarketing, which is very like broad and kind of ambiguous and can meandifferent things to different people. But to try to start from scratch, thinkfrom first principles.

[00:35:32] And if you literally look at thedefinition of the word, it is markets ING, right? So like, what does it mean tomarket? And like, what is like the, ongoing version of that thing? Right? So tomarket something, or it means to bring it to market, right. It literally means.Oh, yeah, I built this, um, this wooden table and I'm going to bring it to themarket to sell it. I'm going to, I'm going to place it somewhere in front ofwhere people are that way people will know that it exists and that maybe thatthey will want it.

[00:35:58] Right. And in marketing is I'mgoing to come back every week to the farmer's market. And I'm just going to sithere with my wooden table and showcase it. Right. Um, so we literally thinkabout what it means to bring something to market. you know, marketing is tobring something to market.

[00:36:11] But I think a little bit more,um, philosophically the definition I really like is earning trust at scale,because we really get down to it, trust, especially today is like currency.everyone's attention is going, you know, here and there and you have clickbaitand you have, uh, like all sorts, like there's never been more sources ofinformation and things that want your attention. And what happens over time isthat people learn which sources of information in which inputs are a signal andwhich ones are noise.

[00:36:39] Like which ones do I trust?Which ones do I not trust? And, so you want to earn trust. Trust has to beearned. It can't be bought, right. It's, there's a lot of different trustsignals out there about, um, you know, what's your authority, otherendorsements. Um, are you telling the truth or not like basically, how can youtell if something is trustworthy or not, and then how can you do that at scale?

[00:37:00] Right. So I would define salesas, uh, earning trust, one by one or individually. Whereas marketing is earningtrust at scale. It's a, it's one to many, right? you can leverage sort of likethe infinite scale and reach of the internet, for example, um, where there isno limit on how many people can come through the door or will pass in front ofyou and his store.

[00:37:20] It's, you know, your store is,um, it's in the cloud. It's the internet. Like any number of people can come atany given time. So you think about marketing in that way as earning trust atscale, it really changes your perspective, from, here's something that I have,and I want you to have it. So give me something for it, rather than like, letme help you with something.

[00:37:38] And marketing is actually an actof service. Like I'm going to, I'm going to earn your trust and it's all these,uh, exchanges, right? Where anytime when people change hands, anytime acontract is signed at anytime, uh, a link is clicked. There is some sort ofexchange with trust.

[00:37:53] Someone gives you their trustand you have to earn it. You have to give it back in return because. If it'sclickbait, guess what? They're probably going second guess at next time, or ifit's a really crappy product, they're going to return it, ask her for a refund.They're going to, you know, make a big deal about it on Twitter and kind ofslam you online. So everything has to be earned and it's these continuousexchanges. but that, that's how I would think about marketing. And so I try toteach people to.

[00:38:15] Josh:Oh, that's perfect. Yeah. I love that. And again, that just totallybrought up from our last conversation. You obviously bringing this concept upand there's something that was the first time I've heard it, honestly, when youtalked about it and it makes so much sense.

[00:38:25] How can you earn that trust? Youknow, when you're just starting out, when you're a brand new product, you're abrand new service and you don't really have that trust yet. How can you firstgain that trust?

[00:38:35]Corey:Yeah. So I actually got this phrase. I swiped it from Alex Hilmanof, uh, the tiny MBA was, is his book, and actually that's that tweet threadwhere he talks about earning tries to scale, turn into the tiny MBA. And it's alittle ebook, uh, his partner at stacking the bricks and the creator of the 30by 500 course. Awesome guy, really smart guy. Really last one to me.

[00:38:54] And actually the context of itis, um, he has this phrase where he says that, uh, if done correctly, marketingand teaching look basically indistinguishable. so you really think about, okay,so what is teaching? Well, teaching is, um, an exchange of knowledge. It's,here's something that I've learned that I've experienced, um, some patternsthat I've recognized, uh, an outcome that you want. And I'm going to show youhow you can get that same information, that same outcome, et cetera.

[00:39:21]So at the end of the day,marketing, I think is really an act of, teaching. But teaching isn't really theright word there. It's really an act of, of giving. Right. And so you give, andthen you get an return. you don't always, like, it's not always a one-to-onething where like, Oh, I give you this thing and that you give me this thing inreturn,

[00:39:39] Josh:It's more

[00:39:39] Corey:I'm going to keep. Right. That's more transactional, but as arelationship is I'm going to give, give, give, not really expecting anything inreturn, but knowing one day there's a chance that I might earn the right togive something in return to ask for the sale, um, to, to ask for a favor,right? To, to get the share, to get the click, et cetera.

[00:39:56]So, if you really want to thinkabout uh, how do I do marketing? How do I build an audience from scratch? Thefirst question should be, what can I give that would be valuable to someoneelse? And that thing could just be your product, I think could be informationthat that could be something that someone wants to do that's completelyunrelated to your product.

[00:40:15] In fact, I think a lot of thebest marketers are YouTubers because YouTube is figure out what do people orsearching for and like, what could I make a video on that I could teach someoneelse that they can go and do. And I will earn subscribers that way. I earnedclicks. I earned ad revenue that way. Right. So we take that same person. Imean, that's really where we get everything from, um, content marketing, toconferences, with workshops and talks like everyone is learning to getsomething. And if you have something that you can give them, then later you canexchange that again.

[00:40:44] Actually it goes back to this,uh, this idea of trust. Toby Lutke talks about this idea of a trust battery,and he says, think about making deposits and withdrawals from a battery. And ifyou're always making withdraws from a trust battery with someone else, forexample, where you share it , then eventually it's going to be depleted andyou're not going to be able to withdraw anything else. There's no nothing asyou can ask of that person to give you.

[00:41:06] But if you're always makingdeposit, especially if you're making more deposits than withdrawals, thenyou'll always have something to withdraw. One day, I might be a purchase oneday. I might be a favor. One day might be a click, but you're making thosewithdrawals and you have to keep making those deposits.

[00:41:20] And it's especially important tomake the deposits first to give first and to have that give first mentality.And then later you can withdraw or you can, uh, make the ask later.

[00:41:29] In fact, I, I think I mentionedit last time, but, uh, I had this tweet a while back. There was a little bit controversial,but I basically said like my theory is that anyone can replace their income andbasically start a business by giving themselves 18 months or the first sixmonths you do something completely for free, and then you do like a free yearof whatever it is of service of a member site. This is mostly applicable tocontent, but it could really work across any industry if you wanted to.

[00:41:59]And then after that year, ifyou're giving value, because you've already built up the trust, you've given somuch for so long, the money is going to take care of itself. Like you cancharge whatever you want and you can charge any amount of people. Like they'regoing to be there, um, asking or to take their money, right, because you havesomething of value to them.

[00:42:16] And so that's where that givefirst mentality comes from because if you're trying to build an audience byjust taking and by just making asks and just trying to like manipulate peopleand do a lot of sales. It's not going to work because people don't haveanything to reference. They're like, Hey dude, my trust battery is empty. I'msorry. But like, I don't really want to do this with you.

[00:42:34] But I feel like, man, this guylike David Perrel for example, um, he's taught me so much, I've gained so many,I've followed so many interesting people from it. I've learned so much. Hesaved me so much time. Like at the least I can do is buy his $2,000 course.Right. And at that point he's really, really earned it.

[00:42:50] And it's made, it's a no brainerbecause he's given away more than I have given back to him. So to answer yourquestion, I think, uh, if you want to start. Building an audience. You want tostart marketing, just thinking about what you can give and how you can give itfor a good long amount of time before you make any ask in return.

[00:43:07] Josh:Yeah. And I think like the big part there was giving yourself thatrunway, right? Like obviously, this is so serendipitous, cause I was justreading. I think I mentioned this before, actually in our last chat and Idefinitely mentioned on like the last two episodes. I'm not done this book yet,but I've been reading Optionality by Richard Meadows.

[00:43:22] Highly recommend it. And ifyou're into Roam Research, I'm pretty sure he's an investor. And he w he helpedthem out in the early days, still helping them out I believe he mentions Roamin the book and he mentioned zettelkasten all this stuff. So what was reallyinteresting is he talks about optionality in the sense of like an on, offswitch and kind of what we're getting at here, especially when you're startingsomething new, it's like, that's going to be like, sort of like, not yourpassion project is going to be that thing that you want to start yourentrepreneurial venture.

[00:43:50] You should have enough moneysaved up that you don't have to rely on getting money right away from thatthing. In your case that swipe files, building a community, doing YouTubevideos, because if you're like, if your income is tied to that content or theproject or whatever it is you're putting out, then you're like, it's going tosuffer, right? Because you're like, you're, you're wanting something in returnand it's going directly against what you're just saying of like, you know,putting deposits in and giving stuff away for free. You're going to be thinkingabout, I want, I want, or I need, I need that money, but if you have the moneysaved up or, you know, you go in parallel, you're working a full-time job or apart-time job, and that's paying your bills.

[00:44:28] Then, you know, simultaneouslyyou could do these things, uh, which I think is kind of the way to go. There'salways this idea of like juggling more than one thing. And some people arelike, Oh, you have to go all in. again, I think you're a really good contenderof the opposite of being able to do multiple things.

[00:44:42] So maybe just for those people,who are kind of thinking about that, how would you go about juggling multiplethings? And you did that at the beginning, right? You were working on baremetrics and doing a few things. How did you manage it? what have you learned?What are some takeaways? was there something that you would've donedifferently? Something you'd do differently now, to make all these things workand, and reach that next, stepping stone in the stair-steppingentrepreneurship.

[00:45:05]Corey: Yeah. I think that I I'mdefinitely guilty of, I have to be honest of, um, trying to sort of monetizetoo early. Uh, probably because I, you know, not even because I needed themoney, but just because I wanted to make sure that what I was doing was, wasvaluable enough to charge money for, but I probably could have, for example,just on that run a pre-sale and then like taking it, but then like make made itfree after that.

[00:45:28] For example, for. Anything'sI've done for, Hey marketers, that kind of stifled growth was, you know, Iinitially made it completely free and actually I did a, um, I pay what you wantmodel for a long time, which worked really well. But I think that if I had justdone it for free for two years, and then, you know, got a really good amount oftraffic and subscribers, then I could have charged anything I wanted to post ajob.

[00:45:51] So now that's what we're doingis we've made a completely free. And you were still doing paleo a little bit,but like we're manually curating a lot of the jobs and then eventually we'll beable to cash in on that and, you know, charge a pretty penny for each jobposting.

[00:46:03] Same thing with the courses.could have done like a, free thing at first or like a free run and then latercharged for them. Swipe files, I did for free for quite a long time, but Ialways had the option of getting members and I, I did get members, which isgreat.

[00:46:16]But at the same time, I thinkthat if I had to go back, like that's where that tweet came from originally, orwas talking about how you can replace your income and in 18 months, was I wouldreally focus on how can I put myself in a position and to do somethingcompletely for free for 18 months and build up this massive audience and likemake so many deposits on people's trust batteries that eventually once the 18month Mark comes around, I can flip a switch and then I can immediately replacemy income and, and also never have to work, you know, worry about money again,basically.

[00:46:44]Cause there's really, there'sonly two like functions in business and it's the product and it's themarketing. And I think what I've learned is that, it's difficult to really dothem both the same way at the same time.

[00:46:56]When you have an MVP product,that's like really new, you can't start charging a lot of money right away. Youhave to discount it a lot, or you have to create a free plan or you have to runlike an alpha and a beta. Or you have to just like test it out at a steepdiscount, you know, one time just to like, see if it works Same thing on themarketing side of things. Um, if you're, if you're like starting out and you'relike buying all these ads and you're like spinning up these programs, um, likeit's not going to pay off because that's not really what you need.

[00:47:24]The direction I was going withthat was that people always start with the product and then they do themarketing later. But really it's just start with the marketing because that'swhat you're giving away for free, and then you should do the products later ornot do the product, but you should charge for the product a little bit later.

[00:47:38]so specifically for me, I thinkfor swipe files, I would've started this whole process 18 months ago, and thatwould have built up, you know, huge free community free tear-downs free contentfree, you know, whatever the thing is, got people are involved and gave themlike a hundred percent off for a year. But then knowing that, Hey, if thisthing is valuable in a year, I'll be able to reap the benefits of that. And,uh, so I think that that's a good way to also balance it when you're working onthe side, because if you already have a good stream of income, why charge forsomething if you don't actually need the money, um, like save that for later,when you do need it and leverage all the free stuff that you're doing to builda bigger audience, to get more customers later.

[00:48:18] Josh:And again, that's like the compound interest and like investingmindset. Um, I brought this up, I think on another episode,  I talked to, um, Danny Miranda, is apodcaster. We had a great conversation where he went from being sort of like adrop shipper and that drop shipping mentality of like, Hey, I need money rightnow to then, you know, taking a step back.

[00:48:37] He went back to live with hisparents during the pandemic, which I think a lot of people did. Cause there'sjust an uncertain time. They said, Hey, I could just like, you know, bite thebullet, have some humility here and continue living with them, so that way Ican focus on long-term stuff, which was like the podcast.

[00:48:51] He didn't have to worry aboutmonetizing the podcast. He doesn't have to worry about building community. He'sjust putting out free content. And I think that's amazing. And I came back withit and I told him like, Hey, yeah, there's kind of a two mindsets there. Andlike from the investing world, you're either a trader or you're an investor,are you a trader or an investor?

[00:49:08] So it's like, man, I'm going tolike take that. So I'm like, this has been a mental model that I've been nowputting into so many different domains. And I think it works just as well withmarketing. And it works exactly the way you're talking about instead of likeright away, like trying to do one for one transactional relationship, which willhappen later on at scale, right.

[00:49:24] Once you've earned the trust, iteventually becomes very transactional at a certain point, but your product oryour service, or course whatever it is, needs to be transformational, right. Soit needs to have that sort of like compounding growth curve rather than like alinear curve. And I think that's like the perfect analogy, right?

[00:49:41] Because you want to optimize forthe longterm. You don't so much want to just right away be like a day traderday trading people's attention. And I guess, trust in this point and saidyou're investing it. You're making the deposits to the automatic deposits inhopes that in five, 10, 20 years, however long it is. Sometimes it takes thatlong to really get that growth curve.

[00:50:04] So that's been something thatI've been bringing, but now it just brought something up for me that we haven'ttouched on yet, but I really want get into, which is mental models.

[00:50:11] And I'd love for you to kind ofexplain that because you have the course on it, you kind of become like alittle bit of a mental models guru, at least in my eyes. Um, I love to hearlike, you know, I'm sure for people who don't know what mental models are orlike how they package them up, I love to hear your thoughts on it and howyou've applied that to marketing and some of the stuff that you brought intothe course.

[00:50:33] Corey:Yeah. So, um, to give like a really quick definition of mental modelis basically just like a mental shortcut or heuristic or like simple framework,that helps you, uh, explain something more complex kind of going on in theworld, essentially. So we talked about, for example, if you're being aninvestor versus a trader and mental model can be an analogy like that, or itcould be an acronym or it could be anything that basically helps you thinkthrough something without having to directly like reference it on a piece ofpaper, like step-by-step or you have it basically saved in your head and youthink, okay, I'm doing copywriting, here's like a couple of frameworks andmental models that I can use. I'm doing investing, here's a couple offrameworks and mental models that I can use.

[00:51:15]So basically it's just thingsthat help you, um, think through things better and make better decisions,essentially. So again, I've, I've taken, uh, an idea of mental models and haveapplied them to marketing. So that's kind of the Personal Monopoly there.

[00:51:29]The reason why I started withthis whole thing and why I created the course mental models for marketing was Ihad started to save all these like concepts and frameworks that really helpedme think through these are the things I want to save and remember for later,for any other experiment or tactic or channel, I'm gonna experiment with later.Um, and I was talking with friends and I was showing them, you know, like, Oh,like, let me go, like see what this thing says. Or like, I remember this oneway to think about this. And I'm like, Oh, that's cool. Like, can you sharethat with me?

[00:51:55] So I figured out this thingmight be interesting. Uh, for other people, decided to create a course out ofit. But basically, yeah, my whole thing is just, how do you apply like thesegeneral frameworks and mental models to something like marketing has a veryspecific use case.

[00:52:10] So I can go through a couple of,a couple of my favorite ones are, the principles of persuasions. This is RobertCialdini and he has like the six kind of things that get people, uh, Basicallyto earn their trust and to persuade people. There's the stages of awareness,which is even what Eugene Swartz worked on back in the sixties a long time ago.Um, there's the pirate metrics. of them, if you want to.

[00:52:33]Josh:What are some of the favorite ones that you find yourself comingback to most that come top to mind? Um, just in general.

[00:52:40] Corey:Yeah. One of the, one of the big ones is definitely, um, theprinciples of persuasion. And I don't think that there's like these aren't likethe ones. Right there, there's more, there's different versions of thesethere's like sub versions of each one of these, you know, he talks about thingslike, um, reciprocity, consistency, uh, social proof, liking, authority,scarcity, and basically like these are like the core pillars, according to whathe says of what gets people to do what you want them to do. So how do you getpeople to take action? So if you have these ingredients, then you know thatyou're going to have a better chance of persuading someone.

[00:53:15] And actually in my studies, inthe, in, in studying a lot of these principles of persuasion and amounts ofmodels for marketing, actually, I felt like I kind of found like, One of thegranddaddies, uh, mental models of them all, which is a little bit lesserknown. Uh, and again, thinking through first principles, which is anothermental model is a little bit meta, it's called human action model. Is basicallylike what gets people to do something that you want them to do. How do you getpeople to actually act?

[00:53:43] And, um, and there's these threeingredients. So like one, you need someone to be dissatisfied with theircurrent state of being. Wherever they are, whatever they're doing, people haveto be unhappy, which is like a really sobering kind of like interesting fact.

[00:53:56] Um, but people have to beunhappy in order to take action. And speaking of, uh, all these kinds of ideasconnecting, I was listening to a podcast with Nir Eyal today about his newbook, Indistractible, which isn't super new, but it's fairly new. And he wastalking about how, everyone is always trying to, again, talk about like movingaway from something and moving towards something, everyone, like all humanityis always trying to move away from discomfort.

[00:54:20] We're trying to find somethingthat makes us more comfortable. So it makes sense why the first ingredient forthe human action model is that people have to be dissatisfied with our currentstate of being. Because otherwise, why would they do anything they're perfectlycomfortable with where they are and who they are.

[00:54:34] The second ingredient. Is, youhave to sort of like paint a picture, and show them what could be. You have toshow them an outcome, it's transformation, a destination, something that theywant, you have to create desire.

[00:54:46] And then the third ingredient isyou have to show them a path that gets them from their current state to thefuture state of where they want to be. So from point a to point B, and it hasto be like a realistic achievable plan because a lot of, and this is actuallyone of the really key ingredients there is that what's missing from a lot ofmarketing is, a lot of people talk about, you know, Hey, like it doesn't this,or like, here's her pain point, are you experiencing this thing? Look how greatour solution is, but they don't connect the dots between the two and theyespecially don't make it achievable.

[00:55:15] It's like, Oh, you can totallydo this, but it's going to cost you a hundred grand and 12 months of your time.And it may or may not work and you're gonna have to get on calls, and it'slike, who wants to do that? Right. Where it's like, you have to learn how toprogram, like who wants to do that? That's why no code is all a thing. You haveto learn how to do, fill in the blank. Right. And so that. Um, that thirdingredient of a plan that makes it achievable and, uh, is realistic for people,um, as a third thing there. So again, that's another mental model for you isthe human action model.

[00:55:42]I think more practical mentalmodels is actually the stages of awareness. So again, this is something that,uh, Eugene Schwartz kind of, one of the OG American marketers talked about, buthe talked about how, um, there's different milestones mentally that people needto achieve in order to get to the final stage of a sale. And he, he, he framesit. In reference to, uh, levels of awareness or stages awareness.

[00:56:07] So at the very right end of thespectrum, you have most aware and it's basically like people know exactly whatyou sell, uh, what the offer is, why they need it. Like they just basicallywere at the point of pulling the trigger of making a decision of saying yes,signing the contract.

[00:56:22] You take one step back you haveproduct to where, so people know what you do, they're just not sure if you'rethe right solution for them. They have objections, hesitations. Anxieties aboutswitching.

[00:56:33] You take one step further backto the left. You have solution aware. So people know that. You exist, they alsoknow about all of your competitors. They're just not sure which one they shouldexplore and how they compare. and then you take one step back, you also have aproblem aware, which again is people know, I know I have a problem. Um, but theydon't know that there's a solution for it quite yet, or what the rightsolutions are, how to think about it.

[00:56:56] And then the final one that thefifth one, all the way to the left of the spectrum is unaware or completelyunaware. And so, again, this is, these are people who are satisfied with theircurrent. Problems basically like they are, that they're not even sure that theyhave a problem. They're just perfectly fine, you know, signing things on paperand faxing it over, like they're stuck in the old world or stuck in the old wayof doing things.

[00:57:17] And the way that this applies isthat for everything that you do, it should fit into or should fit into purposeof moving someone across that spectrum to becoming more aware. So think about,for example, if you're a completely new product in a new category and peoplearen't really even sure that they have a problem, then you're going to have todo a lot of teaching and education.

[00:57:42] And so telling them, Hey, likethis is a, a brand new thing. And like, look at this like magical widget thatwe have. It's also your problem gonna be like, Do I have that problem? I don'thave that problem. Like, what is this thing? Why should they care about it? Idon't care about it. So you have to do a lot of education, actually likepinpoint, Hey, you do have this pain. Um, this is you. Like, this is somethingthat you should be aware of.

[00:58:03] Whereas if you're in a reallycompetitive market, like CRMs, for example, it's just take like B2B, SaaS.Everyone knows what a CRM is, what it does, what pain points are solved, theyjust need to know how you do it better than everyone else. Right? So in thatcase, everyone in that market usually is very, product aware. So don't worry,waste your time talking about how important a CRM is. Just get straight to thepoint about what's different about you and what the features are and howspecific caters to them, uh, in specific.

[00:58:32] So you can take that across anyone of the stages awareness, the five stages, and think about, uh, which stageis most appropriate to the audience I want to reach. And how does that changethe way that I would market to them, the message that I use, the offer that Imake, the way that I describe it, what's on my landing page or different setsof landing pages, ads, emails, just tailor everything you do to what stage ofawareness you think your audiences in.

[00:58:56] Josh:That's really interesting. And I think bringing that into the CRMspace, you know, I was just playing around with Outseta today, for product I'mworking on, you know, we're building our CRM and there's like the pipeline,right. The sales pipeline. And it's kind of like exactly what you're saying.

[00:59:09] Maybe it's like, You take thatheuristic, you bring the stages of awareness in there, so you know wherethey're at, but how would you even know like what, at what stage they're at,what you just go out and start asking them. Cause it's really, I guess youdon't really know, right? Especially, um, a cohort in general.

[00:59:25]I guess maybe a really goodexample of somebody we've been bringing up is like Notion, right? Like if yougo on their website now is kind of like explaining what the product is, peopledon't know that they have a problem, but, they're kind of like hitting adifferent, a bunch of different problems you can use it for school, you can useit for your CRM, you can use it for note taking, and all these differentthings. So especially when it's something very wide like that, you don't reallyknow where they're at.

[00:59:48] So how would you go aboutfinding out what stage of awareness are at? Cause I guess once you, or do youjust hit every single stage and do like an, I don't know, Facebook ad thattargets like one stage of awareness and then one that does another one. Howwould you go about setting that up?

[01:00:04] Corey:I'm very glad that you asked because the traditional way of thinkingand marketing is let's just test it and let's just experiment. And let's justlike throw spaghetti at the wall and see what sticks and we'll figure it out.We'll probably like blow some budget in a couple of months, but like, we'llfigure it out basically.

[01:00:21] And again, I think that that's avery wasteful, terrible way of doing things where you're just like reinventingthe wheel and starting from scratch as usual, the mind-blowingly simple andeasy tactic is to just ask our customers like quite literally just, get on thephone, uh, get to know them, ask them questions.

[01:00:38] You can be more strategic andintentional about it, but literally. Get on the phone, listen to yourcustomers, uh, jot down notes, get a transcription, and then figure out what doI think that this person is? Cause even you'll find that there are differentsets of customers and people in your audience that are, that have sort of likedifferent stages of awareness that have different levels of sophistication.

[01:01:00] Some of them like notion forsomeone that's very broadly applicable. Um, they have like. A hundred of differentpersonas and segments that they could go after. Each one with a differentoutcome that they're looking for with a different stage of awareness, withdifferent pain points, with different things that they're looking for, likedifferent solutions that have a different frame of reference of what they'recomparing it against.

[01:01:21] Uh, if it's someone like if mymom picked up notion today, she'd be comparing it against a pen and paper.Right. For me, I'm comparing it against like Roam and, uh, like a bunch of allthe other, like really, you know, Bleeding edge type of tools. Right? And so ifyou literally ask our customers, it could be on the phone, it could be over asurvey.

[01:01:39] It could be by just doing likeonline research and kind of like curating and lurking on different communities,looking at people, describe stuff. Um, but if you jot it down, then, then youknow, right. And then you can kind of figure it out and then knowing what thatinformation, you don't have to blow a bunch of budget on the Facebook ad, uh,market into a group of people who already know, you know, what other things areout there and how you know that they're sick of a spreadsheet. Right.

[01:02:04] And you can just say, Hey,instead of using a spreadsheet, use this thing over here, like compare metricsor, uh, you know, whatever it is instead of, um, pen and paper, instead ofTrello use outset, uh, for your, your CRM.

[01:02:16] Um, and then you can do aretargeting ad that says now that you know what outset it is, let me just giveyou the offer. Start a trial today. Right. Uh, you know, that they've, ifthey've gone to the competitor comparison page, if they started the trial, um,right. That, that all influences probably what stage they're going to be in.And then every strategy and tactic then can be thrown through the filter of,which stage am I trying to get people to and how does this help them

[01:02:40] Josh:right there, I think is the key, especially with the retargeting,you want to get them to do like a certain action, whether you need to likere-educate them or something. It's just totally brought up a memory. I had, um,a Shopify performance marketer on here, Brent Sterling, and he does all of theperformance marketing for them. So like all the paid ads stuff. And what he wasdoing was for the retargeting ads, it was all educational stuff.

[01:03:01] So all the targeting ads weren'tlike, Hey, sign up for free trial, whatever. It's Hey, learn how to use thistool. Like there's so much you can do with it. I think even with Webflow, withall notion would be another example.

[01:03:13] When there's so much you can dowith it, it's just educating them. I think Webflow does the best job at this. Haveyou watched the Webflow University videos? Like they're the best and that'smarketing at the same time as educating them as you kind of brought in earlier,it's like, you're learning how to use this tool, but also it's the perfectexample of what that brand's all about. It's, it's comedic, it's reallythoughtful, it's smart. Like you're like, Oh shit. Like I trust them again,bringing that back. I really trust these guys, they're teaching me something.I'm going to learn how to use it. So I think that's an excellent model.

[01:03:47]Corey:Yeah. I mean, even, um, to take that mountain model one stepfurther, you think about, uh, who you're marketing to and the market ingeneral. When you have a strong brand, like what does it actually mean to havea strong brand? I have a lot of brand awareness. What actually means thatthere's a large portion of your market is in that product aware stage ofawareness, right?

[01:04:09] And so people always talk about,Oh, you need to, you need to build a brand, you need to invest in brands andwhat they're getting at is basically you need to get people to know who you areand what you do. But you can't just do that right away. Like you said, in fact,you're probably better off starting from the right end of the spectrum.

[01:04:26] First increasing the amount ofpeople who are in like the product aware stage to becoming fully aware, right.Getting them to be customers and evangelists, and then working up to solutionaware and get them to be proud of to where, and then from problem aware tosolution aware, and then finally from unaware to problem aware.

[01:04:44]And then like that. Whole groupof people who are in each one of those stages awareness grows over time, andthat's what really makes a strong brand is you are the one doing the educating,doing the uncovering the problems, doing the teaching of what solutions are inthe teaching of what, who you are.

[01:05:00]But a brand is basically justyour reputation, right? How many people know you and what did they know you for?If a lot of people in that product to where it stays, especially that's reallywhat it looks like to have a strong brand.

[01:05:11] Josh:Right, that's like Zoom over the last year. Zoom has become a verb,right? That's when you know you're doing something well, like when you'reGoogling something or someone or your Facebook me, or cause let's Zoom, I don'tknow how Skype allowed zoom to overthrow them that quickly, but that was justwild man. Like now people just know Zoom is like video, call us, go on a zoomcall. Even if we're on Google meet or something else. It's, it's a, it's a zoomcall now. So. That's interesting.

[01:05:39] So really another part ofmarketing really is just awareness, right? So it's earning trust and gainingawareness. It kind of seems like if you could do those two things, like it'llkind of like the problems will solve itself. People are obviously complicatingthings, especially, I think you mentioned earlier with the D to C space, likeshit's over complicated and like people have been complicating things. It seemslike just for the sake of it almost.

[01:06:05] Corey:Oh, it's it's so over complicated and like diluted at this point. Ijust feel like, we need kind of like a reset to really understand like what'sgoing on and how to think about marketing, cause it's just gone on like thecompletely opposite end of the spectrum of like, Oh, just like, what are thetactics? And like what works today? And like, what should I do? And like peoplejust like copying and then even know why they're copying it. Right.

[01:06:25] But if you really get back tothe fundamentals, then that's what allows you to do good marketing andeffective marketing, but also do a really creative marketing. Cause if you'rejust, you know, you don't want to, it's, it's one thing to imitate someone elseand to basically just like, copy exactly what they do down to a T and not knowwhy they do it and probably fail miserably, but it's another thing to copy whatthey do and then learn from it and remix it into something for yourself. Andbecause you can take like the most fundamental elements of like, you know, whatmade that thing work and then tailor it for yourself to make it work for you.

[01:06:59]but. Yeah. That's where we getkind of like this people get crazy about marketing tactics. They just want toknow, Oh, what's like the latest channel and what works. And like, what coloris your call to action button? And it's like, dude, none of that matters. Likeyou have to really tailor it to your audience for your product, for yourmarket, for the messages that you want to deliver. And that's what makes good,effective marketing.

[01:07:19] Josh:Oh, totally man. It's full game of monkey see monkey do. Right. Um,it's hilarious. Yeah. Broken telephone. And it's so funny. So I think like thisis a great way to kind of tie things together now, because we were just talkingabout the beginning, we were using some swipe files and you know, not having toreinvent the wheel, but then it's also, you have to know the fundamentals.

[01:07:39] So obviously you kind of do thatwith a tear downs. Cause it's not just like, here's the page. Okay, I'm goingto copy. Like, that was good, but why you talk about it and the tear downs ofwhy it's good, why it's bad. And I would assume people should be doing thatwhen they swipe something. Right.

[01:07:52] Do you do the same thing when itcomes to copywriting? When it comes to tweets, when it comes to highlightingthings on Kindle, do you annotate shit? Do you like, think about what's themeaning behind it? Do you kind of go to the, go back to the fundamentals? Causeyou're, talking about first principles quite a bit. So I'm just wondering ifyou mix that remixing approach with first principles and how can you make thebest of those two ingredients almost?

[01:08:16] Corey:Oh, totally. Yeah. I mean, for every actually I think, I feel likeone of the best practices that I've gone into is not only highlighting what Iread on my Kindle, but adding a note to it as well. And as part of again, thisis something that I've stolen from uh Tiago Forte, but, he has this wholeprocess of what he calls a progressive summarization. So like you bold certainwords and then you highlight and then you summarize, and then you paraphrase.At the end of that, you have like the most basic kind of fundamental essence ofwhat that message was and what it means to you.

[01:08:50] And so, uh, for a lot of ideasthat I have in a lot of the examples that I run through, I'll just write down aquick note about, um, Here's what I liked about it. And like, here's like arelated note to that. Here's like a paraphrase kind of summarized version ofthis. And like, here's how I would apply this to myself. Even, um, today I wasreading an article about how David Perell grows his newsletter lists, and theytalked about how he uses email courses as a way to get people in and to getpeople to engage with his emails right away.

[01:09:20] And so  you know, highlighted it, imported it into,into Roam I know I got the quote, I got everything there. And then I wroteabout, I thought it was, I can literally pull it up right now. Um, but I said,David Pearl does a few email courses, like five day Twitter course, seven daywriting course, 50 days of writing. I could take this to myself and then Iliterally wrote down, you know, a five day Twitter course. I'm like, why wouldhe choose that? Uh, well, actually that leads into one of his courses. I think,how to crush it on Twitter or, or something like that, basically. So that,okay. Interesting. Like I think it works for him probably because the emailcourse is directly related to one of his products leaders.

[01:09:58] So he's doing some teaching,some education, he's kind of like giving a taste of it. One of his other onesis a seven day writing course. And actually I just created this, um, thisworkshop for, uh, the product led summit a few weeks ago and I created aworkshop called the seven habits of highly effective marketers.

[01:10:14] So I thought, Oh, that'sactually a pretty good, like parallel. And, um, You know, equivalent possiblythat I could use for an email course. I never considered it that way because ithad just lived as this webinar or workshop and I could actually remix it andrepurpose it into an email course.

[01:10:31] And then I noticed he had onecalled 50 days of writing. I thought, Oh my gosh, 50 days, like he actually satdown and wrote, you know, 50 emails, one per day, just for this email course.So I was exploring, I was looking through it and then I noted, I thought, Oh,actually, this is a way for him to repurpose a lot of his essays that are inthe archive.

[01:10:49] So he didn't actually go, hedidn't sit down and think I'm going to create the 50 days of writing emailcourse. He thought, how can I. Remix and repurpose all this content that I'vealready created and give it new life and get it in front of new people. I'mgoing to package that all up in a 50 days of writing email course. And youknow, it's not immediately evident that he's just repurposing the content. Ifhe, if he marketed that way as like get 50 days of drips emails from like all mypast writing people would be like, wow, why would I want that?

[01:11:18] But you can repackage itrepurpose it together as the 50 days of writing. And then all of a sudden youhave this amazing way to engage people in your writing. They can look forward tomore. So I thought, okay, I can do the X days of marketing. Once I have thisbacklog and archive of, uh, of marketing tear downs of articles and things thatI've written and done in the past.

[01:11:39] So I ended with that of beinglike, okay. So email courses are interesting where the David Pearl is growinghis newsletter. It works because it gets people in the door and there's aspecific outcome. And the related to something that he sells and that's whythey work, quote unquote, they pay off because they have a positive ROI.

[01:11:57] And how can I then translatethese ideas for myself? And then what was the action items from that? So Ithought, okay, well, one of these I'm not going to do because I don't have likea, uh, Uh, like an equivalent to five days of Twitter. And I'd rather, youknow, sort of just, um, focus on one of the other things, which was sevenhabits of highly effective marketers.

[01:12:16] So that's what I can go andimplement tomorrow, but I'm not going to go create the 50 days of marketinguntil I have already created 50 pieces of content. And now I've come fullcircle right now. I've made this information actionable in some way. so that'sa good example of how I've kind of taken that in and put it all into use.

[01:12:33] Josh:man. That is the perfect example. This is, I'm glad that we came torerecord this now. Cause it was obviously right after you did that. So that'sserendipity, man. I love when these things kind of just work out. That was afantastic, uh, example. So for you, when you go to make it an action item, doyou use like certain tools?

[01:12:48] Do you have a framework for whenit comes to putting down tasks that you need to do? How do you, sort throughtasks, I'm sure you have multiple projects going on. How do you kind of juggleall of that and make sure that you're doing it

[01:13:03] Corey:Yeah. this has been a struggle. I'll tell you, because with so manyprojects up in the air, I have a, an ever-growing to do lists. And I know it'sever-growing because every day I go into Roam and I have all my to-dos, they'rejust listed under the, the tasks, tag. And I noticed that the number getsbigger every time that I get in there.

[01:13:22] But it really is an exercise offiguring out what's important, what's urgent, can it using like the EisenhowerMatrix. And then translating that to my calendar. And this has been the hardpart. It's not a perfect system. I wouldn't say that I'm an expert at this, butit's something I'm diligently trying to get better at, is instead of just likeworking chronologically or like in order through the to do's, I'll insteadschedule that on my calendar as a block of time that where I spend on this oneproject.

[01:13:52] And now I even have recurringtimes on my calendar where I do specific types of tasks. So I have, forexample, Thursdays are like all blocked off for consulting. So all myconsulting to dues and projects, I have a list of those, and then I pick whichones I do on Thursdays and I give them a specific, okay, I think that this blogpost will take me, you know, three hours. Uh, I need to follow up with theseemails. I'll give half an hour to email. Uh, I have this call at this time. Uh,and now my whole day is kind of scheduled out, and I know that I can achievethese things within this day. Right.

[01:14:25] So, same thing with like,Tuesdays. Tuesdays are for myself. It's like my deep work day. And so I have awhole block of time already specked out for this is my writing time. I'm goingto go into Roam I'm gonna look at my, my, like in progress blog posts that arebeing assembled and I'm gonna continue to assemble. I'm going to put pen topaper or basically, uh, fingers to keyboard, and I'm just gonna type, and I'mjust going to get things out of my brain onto something.

[01:14:50] I don't know exactly if it'sgoing to turn into something legible or interesting, but I'm just going tocontinue to work on those types of things. But it's, it's a struggle to be honest, because, really at the end ofthe day, it's hard to know, if what you're doing habitually is actually goingto result on the things that you want.

[01:15:09] And this has been another, itcan like mental model for me is learning to prioritize, outcomes instead ofoutput. So like what can I show, and how to show for it instead of like, whatcan I cross off the to-do lists essentially. like really how productive you arewith your time as a matter of what you make of the time, not what you didwithin that time.

[01:15:28] Right. So like, I can sit downand like work on an email for an hour and be like, dang, I was so productive,like I didn't look at Twitter once. And like, I just cranked through like ahundred emails, but then what would I have to show for at the end of that? Wasthat really that important. Um, could I just like deleted all those emails andsaved myself an hour that I could use to something else.

[01:15:44] Right. And so. The difficultpart is figuring out are all these things that I'm doing right now, like, youknow, this deep work Tuesday, is that going to result in an article this week?Like sometimes it doesn't. Actually a lot of times it does. I'm doing a lot ofassembling right now. But pretty soon, I'm sure that's gonna start paying offand then I'm gonna be able to produce one or two articles a week.

[01:16:05]and now like the time that I'vespent a couple of weeks ago, doing a lot of assembling, I'm going to start tosee the outcome of that. I'm going to have something to show for eventually andall that I'll get in this cadence of it. I don't have it down to an exactscience though. It's difficult juggling a lot of different things.

[01:16:20] Josh:Yeah. And I think it just is difficult in general. We're not reallywired for that. Right? Like we have all these extensions. you know, second andthen third brain, some of the times, to manage this.

[01:16:30] And I actually saw a tweettoday. I was like, actually, by having these knowledge management tools andhaving these things, it actually does stretch us further than we should begoing. And we realized after it's too late, like, Oh my God, like you said,with your list, growing and growing and growing you're like, Holy shit, I wouldnot have been able to even keep up with that amount of stuff if it weren't forthese tools. Even if it was on a piece of paper, you would have startedcrossing it off, crumpled up, like now I don't want to do that. But now,because we have all these tools, unless it's like automated, it's like, Holyshit, man. Like w like it's really being overloaded.

[01:17:05] Just to bring something inperspective, elon Musk is someone who probably does like the most amount oflike high level shit. And I don't know if you listened to the last Joe Roganepisode with them on there, joe Rogan was asking him, he's just like, so what'snext? You know, you guys are doing the semis, you guys are doing the cybertruck, you guys going to do planes and then Elan just like, looks stairs intothe abyss. And he's just like, Yeah. You know, I asked myself, you know, it waslike to my brain and like, should I, should I do an airplane?

[01:17:32] My brain just like, no man, likethis I'm going to explode. Basically he's like, he's like my mind, the stretchto his limits. And then Joe was like, man, I'm glad you have a limit. I'm gladthat there is a human limit. So there really is a human limit even for therichest man, smartest dude out there. Uh, there's there's real limits.

[01:17:48] So that's the great thing aboutthese tools is we can stretch our minds and we can do this, but it comes at acost, so I think like that's where a lot of things are coming.  

[01:17:56] I spoke with Marie Poulin, whodoes the notion mastery course, and she talks about, kind of, where you went,you talked about like the routines and sort of the structures that you build withinthese tools, to know how to actually be productive and be creative or whateverit is that outcome is like, if your outcome is to be more creative, maybe don'twant to be as productive. You just want to be creative. Right. It's likejuggling the two there's so much, man. Like, it's just like, it's getting sortof out of hand until you come up with your own solution that works with you.

[01:18:24] So I don't think it ever is,right. Like, even for me, like, I'll do something like, Hmm. I think that couldbe a little better. And again, it could be a little bit of what people arecalling like mental masturbation now. Right. Where you're like, okay, I canlike rearrange there. So make, make these connections.

[01:18:38] Does it really make a differenceto the end of day? Like, no, I just want to remember to do this if I'm notdoing it right now, if it does, if it takes me more than five minutes to do,then it goes on the to-do list because I want to remember it for later. AndI'll put like a reminder on my iPhone for like, remind me tomorrow becauseotherwise I will forget and something will slip through the cracks.

[01:18:54] So I think it's like, it'salways up. Sorry. That was so weird. I just got a ding, ding, ding in my ear.And that was literally, I got a notification to say, have you done your eveningjournal? So it's funny. Cause this brings me right into what I was about tosay. And somehow my brain knew it was eight. O'clock here at Toronto to do myevening journal. And I was like, when you're doing all these things, you talkedabout recurring tasks, right? And that's like, you're literally programmingyour life. Like you're literally like hey,, here's the thing I'm going to dothis thing. And this is like in programming, you would program an algorithm,like do this thing, like at this time or after the sequence events, do thesethings.

[01:19:28] So, your calendar and your to-dolist becomes sort of like the program language that you use to program yourself in this video game of life. Right? So, um, to get super philosophicalthere, so we're like these, we're not robots, we're humans, but we arecybernetic organisms that we have that we can constantly program ourselves.

[01:19:49] And that's one of the things I'dlike to bring to this podcast because you know, a lot of people are kind ofpassively going through life, they're kind of just doing what other people tellthem to do, they have obligations. There, um, a reflexive, uh, you know,they're not really doing what they want to be doing and you brought it upearlier kind of with that entrepreneurial mindset of like being a self-starterand doing your own thing.

[01:20:10] So you have to be able toprogram your life. So it's interesting to hear some of these strategies thatyou've employed. I'm sure you'll get better over time because you're thinkingabout it all the time. Like I want to do better at X or Y. So yeah, it's been alot there already. That has been, been really, really helpful.

[01:20:24] Corey:Yeah, I think too, like getting away from, um, there's all sorts ofthese like residual ideas and practices that we take from, like outdated orbasically even like irrelevant, industries or businesses, or just like, I guesslike cultural norms even. And one of those, I think productivity things is likemaking the most of your time, because if you're paid by the hour and if you'relike, uh, you know, paper pusher or like an assembler, like literally on afactory line, It's all about making these tiny increments to, how can I betteruse my mind and body to produce more every day.

[01:21:02]But especially when you're anentrepreneur that does not exist anymore at all, like you are the one designingthe system and you are the one delegating to other people. But most of thetime, it's not really that there isn't that same analogy of like, how do I domore every day? How can I get more out of myself. It's how can I do higherleverage things that will pay off later. And what can I do now that will helpme with this next thing I want to do. Like what's the order of operations herethat I really need to think through this.

[01:21:31] Like, especially for me, thereis a, you know, there's a lot of things that aren't technically productive,that later helped me with something that I can feel like is productive. Forexample, there's, like customer research, you know, like when I'm reallysitting down and I'm consulting with a client, It, it kind of sucks, but I haveto spend a lot of time talking to customers, getting to know them, building outlike a profile, reading through transcripts and just so that I can understandthem so that I can do the marketing that is going to work, because what willhappen if I don't do that as I'm going to go do a whole bunch of things that Ithink will be productive, but at the end of the day are going to fall flatbecause I didn't do the hard work in the beginning, that was quote unquoteunproductive. Right.

[01:22:13] Because I can sit down and Ican, I can knock out blog posts, I could start running ads, I could reach out topeople, I can hop on calls. But if it's all for nothing, if I don't have, uh,if I'm not talking to the right people, right. I'm not talking about the rightthings, if I'm not creating a message that really resonates with people.

[01:22:30] In fact, um, For SaavyCal one ofmy consulting clients, one of the first things that we did was I sat down andwe reworked the landing page because I knew that it, it's not going to feel alot. Like at the end of, at the end of this, I'm going to spend, you know, 30, 40hours on this landing page. And at the end of the day, it's just gonna be likedifferent words on a page. Like it's literally the, the number of differentwords is going to be like 50, and then I'm going to, I'm going to say, okay,for my 40 hours of work, I created 50 different words on this page.

[01:23:01] But the end result is that morepeople are going to sign up every day. More people are going to get it becausemore people get it, they're going to refer it to more people. For any marketingthing that we do in the future, we're going to convert more of those peopleinto happy users and customers.

[01:23:16] And I'm not going to see theresults of that productivity today, but I'm going to see it a year from now twoyears from now, three years from now, four years from now, we're going to reapthe benefits of that for a long time. And so it all goes back to the, you know,the delayed gratification of just like, how can you be an investor instead of aday trader, And, uh, for everything that you're doing and like, just thinking,how can w what am I doing today is going to pay off a month from now two monthsfrom now two years from now, instead of at the end of the day, where you feellike, okay, this is what I get from my that's, why I had to show, and this iswhat's gonna, I can, I can feel reasonable charging for.

[01:23:50]Josh:Totally. I think that's a great way to think about it. And thatactually brings me just to one of the last questions, I actually didn't ask youthis last time, but this is perfect way to bring it up. You mentioned just kindof changing a few words on the landing page.

[01:24:02] So what actually does make goodcopywriting. Like if you're getting that granular and you're really thinkingabout every single word with so much weight to it, how do you go about figuringout correct copywriting in whatever. I'm sure it's different, obviously inevery situation, but what is something that you look for when you're workingwith clients, when you're building out landing pages. What are some of thesecopywriting things you always come back to?

[01:24:23]Corey:I'll reference a lot of things that we've already talked about andit'll probably make it a little bit more clear and tangible. But the firstthing absolutely is to pick a stage of awareness that you want to sort of letyour landing page, uh, appeal to those types of people. So when I sat down withsavvy, Cal, for example, it's a Calendly, alternative and competitor, and,there's all sorts of other Calendly alternatives and competitors as well.

[01:24:48]most people. shouldn't say most,most people, but there are a lot of people with the type of people that we wantto resource for people like in tech. Tech savvy people who know about somethinglike Calendly or even using Calendly in particular. So again, for the landingpage, I'm not going to be describing why someone should use a scheduling linkand like what the benefits are, because I'm just going to be rehashing oldinformation. I'm going to lose their attention.

[01:25:12] So specifically for Savvy Cal, Ifigured, okay. A lot of these people are solution aware. I need to make themproduct aware of Savvy Cal. They already know the pains and the problems of,you know, Calendly. Um, they know the pains, the problems of not using some ofthat Calendly.

[01:25:29] So I'm just going to reallyfocus in on how savvy Cal is unique. And then maybe later we can work our waysort of backwards or to the left, and we can go more problem aware or unawareto do more kind of educating. But for early stage, you have to pick kind of onein particular that you really want to cater towards.

[01:25:47] And then that really dictates alot of the other things that you do, right? So above the fold, quote unquote,so anything you can see directly on the, on the screen when you first hit it,uh, you want to catch someone with the headline, some sort of paragraph andillustration and a call to action.

[01:26:02] And so, within a lot of thecustomer research that I did, which is really the cornerstone of a lot ofmarketing and how you should start with any sort of thing that you do, whetherit's this, does any new landing page or running an ad or creating a whole kindof marketing plan. The strategy is to sit down with customers and, um, We're we'rekind of moving out on a salary table. And so I didn't actually talk to a lot ofcustomers, but thankfully there were a lot of people talking about Calendlyonline.

[01:26:27] And since that was the maincompetitor that we were trying to frame against, uh, there was lots of tweaksfor me to go through, uh, testimonials and reviews on places like G2 and, uh,and Capterra where I could, I could see what people liked and didn't like aboutit. And, in particular with, uh, with the unique kind of attributes of whatDerek had built was Savvy Cal, we figured that we could really hone in on acouple of key differentiators. I'm also, by the way, like this is not newstuff.

[01:26:55] This is all stuff that, uh,April Dunford teaches and her book Obviously Awesome. Her, her whole kind ofplaybook is, I figured out the competitors and alternatives and then figure outthe, uh, unique kind of attributes, figure out the value that those attributesunlock, who cares about those things, and then like what's an overall kind ofcategory descriptor helps people kind of think about it, um, and put it into,into reference.

[01:27:18]So you start with, with customerresearch, and what I found was that there were a lot of people talking aboutthis one particular kind of pain, where they just felt like, uh, Calendly,well, it's like this weird power dynamic where like, it felt weird sendingtheir scheduling. So we wanted to appeal directly to people who knew aboutscheduling links, wanting to use a scheduling link, but just felt like thescheduling like they had today, it was a little bit weird.

[01:27:42] So can they're solution aware,they're also problem aware they know the problems, but they didn't know aboutsomething that could specifically fix that one particular problem like savvyCal could. And so literally the homepage reads today is probably, if you lookat it is, uh, sending your schedule and like, shouldn't feel weird.

[01:27:58] And that was the exact wordsthat someone used, in a tweet. And so, one of the copywriting kind of likehacks and secrets, this is, this is, it doesn't matter if you're like a juniorcopywriter, like one of the best, all the best copywriters literally use theexact words that customers and users have said in the past. Because what betterway to source that information to swipe it than to use the exact words, thecustomer, like, you know, that it's going to resonate because a whole bunch of,

[01:28:25] in fact, the one that I used wasthis viral tweet about Calendly. So I was like, I know that a lot of people aregonna resonate with this message because this guy has already done the hardwork of choosing this specific language. And then people have reacted to it.They've retweeted. It they've commented like, Oh, why is it like that? Why doesit feel weird to send my scheduling link? And then, uh, the uniquedifferentiator was, Hey, we have like this overlay feature where instead oflike flipping back and forth between different your calendar and your Calendly,uh, we'll just show your calendar on top of the calendar of the person thatyou're booking with. And then I'll make it really, really easy.

[01:28:57] And there's a bunch of otherthings that you can personalize and, um, you can like pre-fill, so that's onlylike one click to schedule and things like that, but basically it removes thepower dynamic. It makes it not feel weird to send in your scheduling link. Um,and then that was a call to action was, Hey, it's free, you know, to getstarted in minutes.

[01:29:13] And there's finally, our kind oftackling is finally a scheduling link to both the recipient and the sender willlove, because the gripe with Calendly is that the person sending the link isreally the only one who's benefiting from Calendly, essentially.

[01:29:25]To recap, how do you build a goodlanding page for the copywriting techniques? Figure out the stage of awareness.Do you want to target. Do a whole bunch of customer research, figure out theexact words that people are using kind of copy and paste, like it's notcopywriting, it's copy pasting essentially onto the landing page. You can dosomething like rewording rephrasing and, um, you know, kind of massagingfinessing of the actual, uh, where it's on language.

[01:29:49]But then really focus in on,  how do you deliver on the value propositionthat will get people to go from whatever stage they're at and now to the nextstage, so the need to, in order to sign up for the product or to learn more orto request a demo, and that case for us, it was creating a free account, whichis a very easy task.

[01:30:06] Uh, so we could say, Hey, aren'tyou sick of this thing up here, here's how we're different. Sign up today. Andthen the rest of the page just goes into more detail about that.

[01:30:18] Josh:That's awesome. Yeah, that's again, fantastic example, and it'sfunny, cause we were talking earlier about potentially doing a plug for thatproduct on these podcasts. Don't need to do that now because he did a fantasticjob. I think you just, by explaining that you, you sold it already, um, I'vebeen wanting to check that out for a while, so it seems really cool.

[01:30:35] There's kind of two things therethat sort of like sparked my mind. The first one is sort of like from youworking with them, do you think about, I mean your payment, obviously we now asa, consultant, I don't know how you charge, but do you ever think about sort oflike an equity model of like, hey, like if you're going to move the needle thatmuch as a marketer, like, have you ever thought about doing like an equity kindof share in some of these early stage startups this way, instead of being aninvestor, you're investing your time and your resources and knowledge, right.

[01:31:05] Corey:Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, I would love that and that's still on thetable, it's still kind of like a, an open discussion, but I think that thatshould be encouraged for, for really anyone. Um, I, I don't know like whoexactly, you know, that, that my appeal to, but I'm at the point in my careerand life where I'm not really looking, to, you know, if like the next paycheck,I don't have a lot of money, but the thing that I want is ownership, notanother paycheck. And if you optimize for equity and for ownership, that again,that removes you from the equation of how much money you can make, because it'ssomething else entirely. It's another team of people, it's a product, it's aservice, it's something, you know, people are not buying you and your time,they're buying this thing that you have created, or the system that you'vecreated or this service that you have created.

[01:31:51]And especially for marketers, alot of marketers are just happy trading their time for money. And, uh, they're,they're getting jipped because they're a big part of that equation of bringingtheir product to market effectively. so absolutely, I mean, that's right wheremy, my head is and that's always on the table.

[01:32:05] Josh:Okay. That's cool. Yeah. I mean, cause it makes a lot of sense. Ithink when it comes to, for someone building your product, you know, you eithercan go to, I don't know, uh, Upwork and hire someone overseas to build it foryou. You could try it yourself with no code. Or you can find a partner to doit.

[01:32:20] So I think the same thing iswith marketing, right. You just said earlier on it's like, there's two sides ofthe coin for, especially for SaaS It's like your product and marketing. It'sthose, if you can nail those two things, like you're pretty much good, likejust do those two things. Um, which is what I love about software.

[01:32:36]Was that one of the things thatkind of drew you to like B2B SaaS it's like almost the simplicity and thescalability of it. What was the thing that kind of keeps you in that sphererather than going to like D to C marketing or something else.

[01:32:48]Corey:Yeah. I mean, that's a hundred percent what it is when I, when Ifirst got that first internship and kind of broke into the tech and I learnedreally what SaaS was. like, I think my only exposure to SaaS at this point waslike, Spotify and like, Oh, it's like a subscription model where, you know,like you, you buy into it and then he reaped the benefits, you know, over time.But I had no idea that there was all these ginormous, you know, B2B, SaaScompanies, like there's all sorts of other, there's a SaaS for everythingbasically.

[01:33:19]And, it really does appealbecause I think especially now for me, and like what I want to do in my careerearly on, I kind of always wanted to do, uh, Business and be an entrepreneur.And I sort of like flailed around, like I did. Um, and I thought, Oh, it can belike a web designer and I could, you know, scale up like an agency that likebuilds websites for people. Then I, I still think that that's a great business,but personally it's not for me because I didn't want to be in like the peoplemanagement business. I wanted to be in like the product management kind ofbusiness.

[01:33:48] Um, and then, uh, I kinda got alittle bit more into like info-marketing and I didn't create anything, but Ialways knew like, Oh, online courses are like a great thing, because itliterally costs $0 to make this thing and you can charge however much it'sworth, right? Whatever value it delivers to And sell multiple times. Exactly.

[01:34:09]And then, so when I wasintroduced to software, it was like, Hey, people get access to this softwarethat provides value. And then you get recurring revenue forever and it's nottied to any sort of like thing that you're delivering, we have this fixed costslike, wow, that's, that's a really great business.

[01:34:25] And it also makes for greatmarketing too, because, You don't really have to worry about the softwarescaling necessarily, or like having inventory. Like that is one of the thingsthat really drew me away from e-commerce and even drop shipping was cause Ialways knew that the product would be an issue either with margin or withhaving enough inventory.

[01:34:43] Um, and so for software wasreally appealing because I knew that that part would be kind of taken care of.And especially if people were using it, if it was valuable, there's no reasonthat they would stop using it. And in fact it probably get more valuable overtime. And that seems like a great deal. So it's a win-win right.

[01:34:59] Josh:Yeah, absolutely. Man. I th I totally agree. I think the softwarespace is like probably the most exciting right now. I wonder when we're goingto reach that point where it's like over saturated and there's just like, Iguess, with the no code, bring that into discussion where everybody and anybodycan kind of make it. Right now, it's still pretty specialized. It's not theeasiest thing to do. It's still a hard thing to do, but just like we talkedabout with swipe files, a lot of the SaaS is the same thing as some sort ofdashboard with whatever, especially in the B2B space.

[01:35:27]We talked about outset earlier,there's like tools that can help you build that sort of infrastructure, so it'sgetting a lot easier. I'm just wondering when we're going to hit that plateau.Hopefully not anytime soon, cause there's still a lot of problems to be solved.Right. That's kind of it is. Just solving problems digitally.

[01:35:42] Corey:I don't really think we're going to reach that point. I think, um, Ithink actually somewhere I'm working this workshop right now, but, uh, I thinkmore and more the product is not going to be the hard part of the equation.Like there's, if you look at even what's happened within like physical productsin the last 20 years has been like amazing progress with the ability to spin up new products, to manufacturer, todrop ship, to like completely automate, delegate, commoditize, basicallyanything that you can imagine, someone can make it. If you have enough cash toproduce it.

[01:36:15] And then what became thedifferentiator in e-commerce was marketing. It was, it came, became all aboutbrands, it became all about how, how well can you run Facebook ads, became howwell can you retain your customers and get repeat purchases. How well can youessentially establish a moat in distribution. And I still think that they'rethe big kind of, um, uh, crux for software is the product because it's still, Imean, it takes a lot of work and capital and specialized knowledge to producegood, useful, you know, software.

[01:36:46] But eventually, like we'reseeing with no-code, that's not going to be the issue and more and moremarketing has actually become the crux of it. And it's going to the same thingthat happened with DTC, where it became all about brand and, and marketingbecame very, very competitive, that same thing is going to happen with softwarewhere we're already seeing it with the commoditization of, you know, there's a,there's a bazillion CRMs and there's like a bazillion invoicing softwares and likethat's going to happen across basically every industry. And then it's become,you know, who do I trust? Who has, who does the best marketing, who has thedistribution modes, um, who can effectively hold their attention, uh, who can,who has the lowest churn, right. And it can like protect their customer base.

[01:37:28] I think we've talked about alittle bit before too, but, more and more too, it's gonna become more importantto have owned platforms owned lines of communication with your audience, becausewhat happens is that people are essentially renting these platforms on Twitter,on YouTube, on TikTok, on Clubhouse. Like whatever the hot thing is at themoment. But it's ephemeral. It just, it disappears. Like what happens when, forexample, like five years ago, Facebook just completely killed the organic reachfor pages to reach their audience and they had to go find another thing. Right.And then you're just like constantly hopping over within the next thing.

[01:38:03] And then what happens when, uh,none of those things are a really great way to build an audience organicallyand to reach people, well, then you have to actually go borrow other people'saudience. Now that I think that's one of the big things right now will continueto be one of the big strategies,

[01:38:16] but these are also no matterwhat it is, whether you're, you know, YouTube has figured this out a long timeago, again, I think that they're the best marketers. That did collaborations,they brought other people's audiences. Um, podcasters do this. You like meright now. You jumped on someone's podcast and you borrow their audience andthere's all sorts of opportunities for borrowing someone's audience, whetheryou're listed on the platform, uh, you, you sponsor.

[01:38:37] I mean, I think mostly a lot ofadvertising is borrowing someone's audience, but they should all be pointingback to building your own platforms. Here, growing that audience there. Andthat really is, it comes down to a few core things. It's your email list, is somesort of a private community. It's a text message list, it's a podcast, and it'syour website. And whatever's on there, whether it's blogs, videos, other typesof content.

[01:39:04] And the goal should always be toget more people there. That way you have an established line of communication.No one can say, Oh, Hey, like we just killed the organic reach. Sorry, but likeyou can ever reach this again.

[01:39:14] Or they say, you know, we don'twant to collaborate anymore. Um, you know, you're getting too big and, or coststoo much personally like Facebook, for example. Or LinkedIn rates just kind ofget priced out of it. It becomes too expensive, but if you have an establishedowns landing communication with your audience, then nothing stopping you fromreaching those people. And as long as everything's pointing back to that.

[01:39:35] You see this with Clubhouse alot right now where, it's like the hot new toy, but the conversations come andgo, right. And if that's all you're doing in class one day, but you can becomesless effective, which inevitably will, it's kind of the law of diminishingreturns.

[01:39:51] Then what are you going to dowith that? If you didn't loop people into your own platforms, like. Yourpodcast and your newsletter and some sort of community where you have that lineof communication. So anyways, I think that's going to be, um, really the cruxof, uh, the future of SaaS and the continue of the future of D to see.

[01:40:10] Any other industry or place thatyou're in is how well can you borrow other people's audience to get them toyour rented audience, to get them to your own audience and, uh, and, and keeppeople's attention there.

[01:40:25] Josh:Yeah, absolutely. And I was, I think I brought this up before, butyou basically summarize the book Traffic Secrets by Russell Brunson. Right. Um,and I think that's exactly it. Right. Which reminds me, I still have not set upa newsletter for this podcast or like my personal site. So by the time thiscomes out, I will.

[01:40:43] So anyone listening, go to thewebsite, listen to the podcast on the website, joshgonsalves.com/podcast. Subscribe. I will have this up because Coreyjust reminded me to do that.

[01:40:54] And same thing with Corey. Um,this might be a good time to plug. Where can people go to find you more? Wherecan they go on your website and kind of get looped in on your stuff?

[01:41:02] Corey:Yeah. So she wanted to go to my rented platforms, um, mainly onTwitter at Cory Haynes, co uh, my own platforms, if you will, coreyhaines.co ismy personal site where you can have links to like all the things that I work onand like a couple other things that might be interesting. Swipe files.com thatswipe files, plural.com. And I recently got the.com actually, I think maybe evenbetween the first recording and this one. and since you are going to manage toset up your newsletter, I'm going to have the Seven Habits of Highly EffectiveMarketers email course lives. By the time it goes live and this one'spublished.

[01:41:36] Um, so, uh, I'll send you thelink. You can find it in the show notes, but, uh, that'll be live if you wantto go through that and, uh, and dig into more marketing stuff.

[01:41:44] Josh:That's perfect. Thanks so much, Corey. so last two questions thenfor you before we get going. number one, being, what do you see as sort of thebiggest opportunities in marketing right now? And you kind of mentioned a fewthat will be tried and true forever. What do you see that are some bigopportunities that people can capitalize on now?

[01:42:02] And then after that, where doyou go to kind of learn more  aboutmarketing? Where do you go first the source of info. For anyone listening, goto swipe files.com and you'll find all of the stuff that Corey finds, but I'minterested after to hear kind of where you get that stuff.

[01:42:19]Corey:I mentioned two really interesting opportunities on marketing rightnow. One is, I think that the idea of borrowing someone else's audiencebecause, sort of a false starter, a chicken and egg problem where like, if therented platforms like Twitter, You know, Facebook, YouTube, whatever, they'regetting more and more competitive, then that's really the only tool you have tobuild your own audience, then where else do you go? Will you have to go tosomeone else's audience and people are not doing this well. Like this is a wideopen opportunity to really be intentional about collaborating with people.

[01:42:48] And again, having that givefirst mentality and not thinking like, Hey, how can I like get on theirpodcasts? But like, how can, what can I say that would be valuable for hisaudience that will help him? And how can I help him share his podcast to growhis audience? Um, And let it be kind of a win-win, but there's all sorts ofopportunities between hopping on a podcast between speaking at a conferencebetween running a giveaway and incentivizing people to share, uh, you know, youknew your new book or whatever it is, sponsoring newsletters, writing, guest posts.

[01:43:17] Like these are all things thatare  really good opportunities for anyonein any capacity, that's not being taken advantage of, if you can present areally relevant, personalized offer. And again, that's not what people are doing.

[01:43:28]Does it mean to take the time todo that and really figure out how you can borrow someone's audience, that's areally great strategy and he's the way to do that is to again, do some customerresearch and just ask them, Hey, who do you pay attention to? What are yousubscribed to? Uh, what do you listen to, where do you hang out online? Who arethe people that you learn from, and that you like, you kind of asked me thatearlier with like people like David Parral, for example, is one, one of thosebig inspirations for me.

[01:43:50]And then will start to just makea list, a big list of like, all right, these are all the things and people thathave the attention to my audience, how can I then go and figure out a way tocollaborate with them and borrow their audience? Quote, unquote.

[01:44:02] The other one a little bit morespecific and tactical is, um, newsletter referral programs. And I'm actuallygoing to plug one of the sponsors for my new podcast, everything is marketingcalled Spark Loop. I've been using for myself, but it's an amazing tool. Andagain, one of those things where you kind of think like, Oh, why was this not athing before? But I figured I've mentioned it for you as well as you thinkabout your newsletter, but was basically creating a referral program directly withinyour newsletter and your emails.

[01:44:28] And so you incentivizenewsletter readers to share with other potential newletter readers, andsubscribe, and then you can se you know, really cool reward programs. And it'sbasically like a, uh, a morning brew referral program for anyone and everyonebasically, it's just like plug and play works really well with a lot of the bigemail service providers.

[01:44:45]They have a case that in thereit's like this one guy really is and leveraged the referrals to grow to like50,000 subscribers in five months or something like that. It's crazy. Um, andagain, one of those things where like, once it becomes mainstream might not beas effective, but, uh, I think a staple for everyone nonetheless, and somethingyou can definitely take advantage of now.

[01:45:05] Josh:That's awesome. But do you think free things are going to workforever and funny you brought this up because I stumbled across that tactic.Um, earlier on for my apparel company, Longboi, and we grew like exponentiallyin like, I think three weeks by doing this by just giving away one of our ownproducts. There's like a new jacket. We, we did like a champion partnerships.We had like a champion logo, long boy logo, and we gave it out for free. Andit's exactly what you described. It's like you have people sign up. Um, andthen once they've signed up, they can get extra points, so they have more,draws or more tickets in the draw, and then you can tell them like, Hey, gotweet this out and you'll get like 10 more points. Go share this on Facebook at10 more points. So we use something else called like a viral, Oh, this isdifferent than.

[01:45:50] Corey:Yeah, this is different. So basically that that'd be like a, like aone-time campaign or this is like an ongoing incentive for anyone to share atany time. So instead of it being like a giveaway where it's, you know, you, uh,you share, and then you get like extra entries, for example, it's for everyonethat you share, um, and, and you reach certain milestones, like you unlock thatreward automatically.

[01:46:14]So, for example, like, uh, Iknow, uh, for a sniffles, what worked really well was, um, if someone justpreferred to other subscribers to the newsletter in particular, and they gotthose people to subscribe, which you know, that at all, does tracking for you,then they'll get a free shout out within the newsletter.

[01:46:30] And just with that one incentivereward by itself. Uh, ongoing I've had, I think in additional like four or 500extra subscribers, just from that one, kind of like initial word. And then Ihave another one where, uh, if they get, if there were for five subscribers,then they, they got, um, I think 50% off their first year's membership.

[01:46:52]from that, there has been likekind of the power law at like 10. I think 10 people have unlocked that andthey've collectively brought in like another 1000 subscribers. Uh, like there'sone lady, literally she posted on like a Facebook group and brought in like, Ahundred subscribers on one day, basically.

[01:47:09] But the magic is that with everyemail that you send, you have a reminder that says, Hey, share this newsletterto unlock these rewards, here's your next milestone that you can unlock. Andthat just works on autopilots. Kind of set and forget. And so I haven't sent mynewsletter in a while, but people continue to share it and people, more peoplesubscribe, and I know that when I start sending again, I have these new rewardsnow it's a little bit more like I have a, I think a three, a five, 10 50, and ahundred milestones. And the war has get better across the board. And, uh, andthat just continues to work exponentially over time. And so like a one-timecampaign.

[01:47:44] Josh:Okay. That's awesome. So this is, yeah, this totally just expandedmy horizon here with referral programs. I think referral marketing is oh,incredible. Again. I saw the, I saw the power of it just from doing thisgiveaway, which it was a fixed time. There's only like two weeks and, you know,people are getting more entries and that blew up exponentially very quicklyover that time. So it'd be really cool to see that over the longterm. So thisgave me some more ideas. I'm sure anyone listening and just kind of, I'm sureit's just, they've got their minds just kind of sparked to be like, Oh, I'mgonna try this. So what was the tool again?

[01:48:15] Corey:Yeah, it's called spark loop and you can

[01:48:17] find it @ sparkloop.app.

[01:48:19] Josh:Cool. Okay. That's awesome. So I'll put the link in the descriptiontoo and show notes. Uh, that's fantastic.

[01:48:24] So last question for you, man.You are obviously ungodly when it comes to marketing, you know, all this crazyshit. Where do you get it all, man? Where do you, where do you go to learn more?

[01:48:35]Corey:Oh man. Um, a lot of different places. Uh, I think that, for mepersonally, I think that again, it's probably shows and like my whole kind ofmethod and what I've been doing, but I've really expanded to outside of thelike marketing echo chamber. So I don't actually listen to a lot of, um, likemarketing podcasts and subscribe to a lot of marketing newsletters and readmarketing blogs anymore.

[01:48:58] I'm more like taking ideas fromother industries and other disciplines and backgrounds, and mostly justwatching interesting people. I can, I think one of the things that I've learnedis that, like, there are a lot of people, this is why I started the podcast.Everything's Marketing, because there's so many people who are amazing marketerswho do not have marketing in their job title at all.

[01:49:18] Um, there, YouTube is theirpodcasters, they're investors, they're entrepreneurs, um, they're, uh, they'recustomer success people, um, their, their engineers, even their, their devpeople. Um, but they're amazing marketers. And so I try to just steal the bestideas from them. You know, someone like David Parell, I think, as I was justlooking today, I was studying the way that he uses email courses.

[01:49:40] Uh, for you tubers, I think thatthere's a lot to learn about like, uh, Thumbnails and titles and like the waythat they kind of loop it, people on within the first 10 seconds, like Mr.Beasttalking about, um, how to create a great YouTube video is like a masterclassright into marketing is just like unlocked that all for free.

[01:49:58] So a lot of the people that I'mstudying are kind of like a mix of like, mainstream influencers and like niceinfluencers and just like people at the top of their top of their field who aredoing cool stuff and, uh, and putting out a lot of content. so I can have awhole bunch, but it's, that's like the whole kind of category of who I payattention to.

[01:50:20] Josh:That's cool. And then do you take all those, the best ideas, save itinto Roam, save it into my mind to reference later.

[01:50:26] Corey:Yeah. And then eventually I'll, start writing about a Mark and, um,I've been doing a lot of curating, a lot of assembling and pretty soon it'sgoing to turn into, uh, outcomes and, uh, things that I can actually havesomething to show for.

[01:50:38] Josh:That's really cool. Well, I mean, you kind of did that with thepodcast already, so it'll be cool to see you kind of switch mediums going intothe blog. Maybe you'll be referencing stuff from the podcast, trans mediastyle. I don't know if I told you about this or I brought it back up. Um, thewhole idea of transmedia is, you know, you can, tell the same story or sell thesame thing or talk about the same thing in multiple ways. You know, you startedas a YouTube video, it could be a podcast, put it in the blog and it's allinterconnected. So I think, you know, just like Roam style, it's, you know,playing with different mediums and connecting it all into different ways.

[01:51:10] So I'm excited to start seeingthat a lot more from a lot more people as well.

[01:51:14] Corey:Yeah, and in fact that the reason why I haven't done a lot of thenewsletter writing, uh, and, um, people should subscribe to the newsletter,cause it's about to like the content production is gonna start going up, but Ineeded to figure out this first kind of piece of input, which was actually thepodcasts, because what I'm finding is this, again, this virtuous, uh, Flywheelwhere I'm interviewing people for the podcast, which ended up itself is a greatway, kinda like a marketing tool, get attention, borrow their audience whenthey share.

[01:51:41] But also the things that I'mlearning from them, I can apply it to myself, but also I can teach people andkind of extracts what works for them and use that for other content and mycourses, uh, for maybe a future book that I work on, for the newsletter for,for blog posts for, for tweets, for example, I'm going to want to write aboutit pretty soon, maybe by the time this comes out, but I'll just leave it withus,

[01:52:04] One last kind of like example isI was talking with Alex Hillman for the podcast, goes into the podcast episodeand I asked him what's in his swipe file. And like, what's like a notablemarketing example that he likes. And it was so surprising. Cause he said thathe was actually studying Twitch streamers, and you're just like fascinated withstreamers. And he was talking about how this one guy, I forget his name now.Uh, but I have it in the episode and you can go find it.

[01:52:30]he he's a streamer. He was tryingto figure out how to reach more people. And like he was very entrepreneurialand wanted to kind of like get into more people that he actually wanted to, hewas like appealing to a lot of other streamers. And one of the big issues ofstreaming is that you can't use copyrighted music. Right.

[01:52:45] And so people are like, youknow, they're playing like these really lame kind of like, Background noise.Yeah, just like in music. so what he did was he went and paid basically like aband, like a musician, a, an artist or producer to produce a whole playlist ofcopyright free music.

[01:53:03] And it's basically likeengineers marketing. Cause then he promoted it as like this big thing whereit's, here's like his playlist, the other Twitch streamers will, will play.And, what's playing. Like you can see what's playing for each one of thestreamers it's by him. Breslin that there's always like a tie back to him.

[01:53:19] Right. I think from that, like,he's just like blown up and like, it's just an amazing, like long-term thing.That's like, Wow. I w like, that's such a great example of, of marketing andlike really creative engineering as marketing example, that one you would neverwould have thought of, but also can start to think about, okay, how can I dothis for my industry and for a while I want to do.

[01:53:40] Um, and so there's all sorts ofideas and tensions that you can go down, but, um, that now will be one of thethings that I can talk about as, like, here's a really creative market idea youprobably wouldn't have never heard about, but that I I'm going to teach you,

[01:53:52] Josh:that is awesome, man. I'm so excited. I wanna go listen to that fullepisode now. Cause that's that's so cool. Um, came in, I think I asked you thislast time, but I like to end off every episode with this. And what is somethingthat you're super excited about coming up? Some of you were working onsomething coming up.

[01:54:11]Corey:Yeah, I'm, I'm really, really stoked about the swipe filescommunity, to be honest. Just to continue to invest in it and, uh, interactwith people there and grow relationships there. It's been a surprisingly funand like meaningful endeavor, because I think it's one thing that helps them onone-on-one and like, you know, if you're like, uh, just like getting a coffeeor like consulting or just, you know, giving advice to someone, it's alsoanother thing to help people kind of at scale, like one to many and to teach,you know, like a classroom setting or through a course or through a blog.

[01:54:43] But it's another thing entirelyto like facilitate and help people help other people, if that makes sense. Andso the community is such a really cool place. I just like fallen in love with thewhole idea of the community of people helping each other, and like every day Ilog in and there's questions and comments and replies to people like answeringand just like brainstorming together. And it's really, really fun. So I'mexcited to like keep investing into that, see where it goes and  keep seeing more and more people in thecommunity.

[01:55:07] Josh:Well, that's awesome, man. Um, it's really cool to see you invest somuch into the education of the stuff. Um, you know, it's obviously you go throughlots of courses yourself and you're really into learning, um, something Ihadn't really been into until like, uh, recent years. And one thing that, thatbrought up with the community is just like,

[01:55:28] I remember I had one of the bestphilosophy professors in the university. And he kind of like, I don't know ifhe was like off his meds or something, he's a philosophy professor, right. He'sjust like, yeah, university is pretty much a bullshit. Um, what university is,is what you learn from all the other students around you. So I think that's theperfect example right there with your community. Yeah, this is amazing. Corey,thanks so much for second round.

[01:55:55] I'm excited to do a third round.Maybe I'll find the backup audio of the last one, people want to listen to itas like a bonus episode or something. We cover a lot of the same stuff. Um, butanyone listening, go check out. Swipe files, go on Corey's website. Hit him upon Twitter. I'll post all of your links in the description of this podcast.

[01:56:15] Corey, I really appreciate youbestowing me with your wisdom and thank you so much for coming back on MindMeld.

[01:56:21]Corey:Absolutely. Thanks for having me. It's ton of fun and I appreciateit.

[01:56:25]

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