Chris Smith - Co-Founder of Curaytor | The Conversion Code

Today, my guest is Chris Smith. He is the co-founder of Curator, an ink 500 fastest growing company, and he was named the top four best marketers under 40, according to the American Marketing Association. His book, The Conversion Code, is taught in colleges like John Hopkins University, and he's been a guest lecturer at NYU. Chris used the blueprint in his book to quickly grow his company to eight figures in annual recurring revenue without raising any venture capital. His work has been featured in Adweek, Forbes, Fortune, and many other publications. Welcome to Success Story. I'm your host, Scott Clary. The Success Story podcast is part of the HubSpot podcast network. For everyone listening, I just have to ask you a question. Do you want to know what separates the contenders from the pretenders, the A-list from the C-list? World champions from the world, not champions. It's pretty simple. The fourth quarter. In sports, more importantly, for a lot of the people listening here in business, finishing strong is key. Now, HubSpots, New Sales Hub is the software that you need for your sales and your sales team to win Q4. You could be a solo printer, you could own and run a larger business, regardless if you're selling anything to anyone, which I think a lot of the people who are listening to this are, you need to check out Sales Hub. So there is a new prospecting workspace, there's revamped deal management tools, there's smart sequencing, Sales Hub is loaded with everything you need to turn leads into prospects and then convert those prospects into customers. With Sales Hub, you have the right information at the right time to build better relationships, which means closing deals has never been easier. So this Q4 give yourself and your team the tools to win big with HubSpots Sales Hub. Learn more at HubSpot.com slash sales. I don't think life's that simple to sum it up into one thing. I think that's incredibly idealistic to think that there's a moment that it happened, but I'll give you one that comes to mind as you ask the question, which is I was in the 11th grade. I was on the varsity basketball team, half my teammates went to become professional athletes, it was a 5A state school in Florida, were really good and we lost in the semi's and most of the same team returning, preseason number one and I had to make a tough choice to either continue to be the 12th man and knock it in and be a part of this great journey but not contribute to it other than practice and things of that nature or I could get a job. That was a big decision that I had to make going into 12th grade and as I'm sure you remember my kids are in high school now so it's like that's a big decision to not be on the basketball team or to be on the basketball team and I chose to quit I went and worked at Foot Locker and I was selling shoes and I was learning corporate America for probably two years before I would have had I continued to be naive enough to think that I had a future in basketball. So choosing to work instead of being on the team was a tough choice they went on to win the state championship and I was in the crowd so it finished the way I thought it would so that hurt but most of those players would be pumped to trade lives with me now so it's so interesting how the most important thing then almost feels insignificant today but it's all connected that's why it's hard for me to pick that one point. Very fair very fair it's funny it's funny how life works out now my question to you is you are building a personal brand around conversion why do you feel like you can own the word conversion and why is this something that you're focusing on now out of all the business lessons you've learned over your entire career and we'll speak about some of those. Why is conversion so important? Sure well I think the experience that for me stuck and ultimately became the stuff that I used when I did start my own company was something that I just thought of this but it's like 9998 so my first boss was a billionaire my second boss was a billionaire my third company was a billion dollar publicly traded company and the first startup I went to work for was acquired for 108 million so like BBBM you know what I mean? So when you see that level of success up front and it's funny I was just working on my email newsletter this morning and billion dollar companies make data driven decisions at scale always 24-7 and it drives everything that they do and what they invest in and they obsess about it they build their own systems and technology to manage it when I was at quick and loans we didn't use sales force we used Lola no one else uses Lola except quick and loans lead origination loan allocation the data center at these companies and then once you have that sort of conversion layer which they they had that's what I started with so I'm really good at it start on the phone work my way up so once I saw the conversion layer works no matter what the product or no matter what the lead source the other thing that these companies do is they invest in their brand and they invest in lead they buy leads because when you get the bottom piece right you want to buy as many leads as you can because there's a positive ROI so I think a lot of companies are today Scott you know they're building it out they're building out the funnel and they're trying to figure out the best ways to get people into it you know and it's just kind of like I think you should build your funnel from the bottom up and that's probably what makes me different and why I think I can own the word conversion because I think it would be actually insane to do marketing and advertising and branding that led people to a leaky bucket to an inefficient conversion process follow up process speed to lead how many times are we calling what do we say when we call what's the close rate what's the conversion rate what's the contract out to book back rate we call it book back got a book back book out book back there's a culture around that at these billion dollar companies and there's not a million dollar companies that that would be probably the biggest difference and so for my own stuff I wanted to scale as big as it can be and so unfortunately I have to do a bunch of wiring under the hood to try to get there it's hard it is hard dot loop you know we got to a hundred million when when Zillow bought us I was the chief evangelist for dot loop I wrote a book with their co-founder or with their founder Austin Allison it's called people work it's great it's about putting people first using digital means you know how do you put people first in a digital first world and so dot loop unlike rocket mortgage which is that's what it's called today quick and loans was called when I was there dot loop was still at that stage of a company where there were a lot of chinks in the armor there was a lot of kinks in the rope and they needed a big strong parent company to scoop them up and take them across the finish line to become what they could become at scale they did and so they sold for 108 million but I know and I think Spencer from Zillow who was a part of the acquisition in Austin you know who was the founder I think that Austin knows he was on the path to a billion but he probably didn't realize it isn't just momentum to get you there from being worth a hundred to being worth a billion it's kind of unrealistic to 10x as quickly as some people think you can but I think what happened for Austin quite frankly is once he knew he could build a billion dollar company he checked the box in his mind and then he knew dot loop wasn't the one that was the right one to do it for in his second company after that yeah it's called Picasso and it is the fastest unicorn ever I didn't know that I know Picasso I didn't I didn't know that though it's the fastest valuation to a billion dollars yeah in the history of Silicon Valley Spencer Rascals the co-founder he's founded hot water he founded Zillow these guys are legends and so Picasso is going to get it right this Picasso is is being operated properly on day one because Austin learned more than he earned he made a ton of money but it was he was learning so much and then he got to report to Spencer for two years and see the belly of the Zillow beast Zillow has scale right Zillow's worth billions so yeah the Zillow's and quickens and those types of companies man they are data driven and they are built from the ground okay so a lot of corporate experience all makes sense now I heard something that is interesting to me that's a great entrepreneurial lesson you mentioned some businesses are not the right kind of businesses and we'd argue like if you can build a business to a hundred million dollars that's a great business but it wasn't the one to go to a billion but let's let's shelve that for now I have a different question when you're starting something new what is the right business so if you're an entrepreneur and you're getting into it for the first time how do you decide where to spend your time for the person starting it it's the business that accomplishes their goals at the time you know Austin's goal is to run a billion dollar company so he started Picasso accomplished that goal that was a realist a goal just to sort of have this hybrid between realism and surrealism you know it's like yeah I know I could build a million dollar company and even now it's funny you mentioned Austin because I'm sort of a similar point with Curator my own company because you know we basically sprinted to a certain size we're private so the numbers are not out there the way venture capital back are but we're private we're profitable we got cash we do a million a month in MRR like we're a great business but the way that it is built today it does not lead to a billion because commission zinc and tiger leads in boomtown we've seen the comps for what we've built and the comps are at about 350 to 50 maybe 500 million that is the highest then we looked and we said okay well who are these brokerages that no one's heard of that everyone makes fun of that kind of suck and they're kind of new and they're not even really doing things that well how are they're like six of them worth a billion and there's not one SaaS platform worth a billion so I'm swimming in the wrong stream so but I can't become a brokerage because all of my clients are with all the brokerages you know I'm Switzerland it's important to me by the way so it's hard and so to pick the thing up off the tracks and go build the business of tomorrow while you're working on the business of today it's a harder than it sounds and the key is just having great people around you we were never able to look too far into the future when we were caught up in the weeds okay so now let's sort of walk through the entrepreneurial journey and when you started when you started a curator when Austin started Picasso there's playbooks you deploy there's playbooks for your product market fit first 50 customers first 100 customers from zero to one million from one million to 10 million from 10 million to 100 million so walk me through the playbook for getting a company off the ground I want everybody to get the best advice possible I've built a company like that I have great opinions on it but there's a guy named Jason Limken he is the I believe the smartest person when it comes to growing a SaaS business from zero to 10 million in ARR because reason I say that is as I'm on this journey with Jimmy and as I'm working with Austin and going through all these ups and downs I'm I feel like he's speaking directly to me and he's never met me he's talking about my problems he's talking about my issues he's he's basically like reading my diary on Twitter I'm like dude how do you have my PNL what are you doing and he showed me that he knew me and so I then really latched on to him because he could get me where I need where I knew I could get next Samson yeah but what I love about him too is he's like I ain't the one that gets you from 10 to 100 and the person that gets you from 10 to 100 is probably not the one that gets you from 100 to a billion so don't get romantic about the who or the how and so for Jimmy and I we are not driven by financial gain which ironically allows us to play this sort of Simon Sinek infinite game and so as opposed to some of the other founders I've seen sort of sell move on you know leverage to to level up we've we've chosen to pivot we're like Ross on friends we're pivot and pivot pivot because we know that we are talented enough we know that our team is good enough we know that our ideas are smart enough that we can be bigger and better way bigger than we are today when we see companies that are bigger than us and founders that aren't as good as us we don't stop we just keep going you know but that's how we're driven I can promise you 98% of the people that started Curator were assaulted already and they'd probably be like building an island somewhere you know like but that's not how we think of success we love the work I heard a story let me tell you a quick sports story yeah go ahead there's been one flagrant foul in the history of the NBA all-star game and it was Dwayne Wade accidentally fouling Kobe Bryant across the face he broke his nose or broke his cheekbone blood was gushing out and you know it's the all-star games you guys are half of these guys are friends well two nights later the heat play the lakers and so Dwayne's a little nervous because he never really got to tell properly that he was sorry and Kobe comes out and he's got this mask on you know the sort of mamba mask and Dwayne goes up to him you know before the tip off as as the games about the start he said hey man I'm so freaking sorry you know you know it's an accident but I felt like I just needed to say it again and he said Kobe looked that I'm dead in the eye and he said I like it he likes it he liked the twist that he had to play injured because because that's different and it's unique and it's experience now that he can go through that other people haven't that he can learn from that he can go show his highlight films just like LeBron were in the mask on the heat we've got some Kobe mask games people that reach the ultimate scale they're fascinated by solving problems so if you're building your situation where you're problem free tough to get all the way to the top because you have to be willing to tackle problems people won't or that they aren't and so for Kobe he's just like this is cool tie my hand behind my back you know I'll close my eyes on a free throw right that's a new challenge because the regular game is easy now and so I'm trying to level up from there leveling up from where Kobe was was shit like playing with a broken face you know now you made an interesting point you said when you're building out curator a lot of people would have sold it before now there's a lot of people that would have built it to sell so when you're building a company and you want to build something that has some longevity and lifetime and legacy to it it seems like that's what you're doing right now and you want to test out different things there's a lot of pressure from external stakeholders because a lot of entrepreneurs they bring in VCs venture capitalists investors and there's a timeline is a ticking clock before they have to have an exit event so you want to build something long-term does an investor have that same shared opinion and I guess the question would be for a founder if they want to take that pressure off they want to build something that could be more of a lifestyle have some longevity to it should they work with venture capital investor outside money that's going to put all of that pressure expedite everything no you know I wore this sort of anti silicon valley anti venture capital hat for a while similar to the guys from base camp where it's like hey there's another way you don't have to do it this crazy way that silicon valley does it like be proud of you know being profitable as an example like things like that and sample stuff I actually as I've gotten a little bit older I just it's kind of back to that example we just gave there's a lot of ways to do things and I don't know how to do it the silicon valley way and that actually now bothers me Scott I'm now basically saying the thing I made fun of for 10 years that's actually the thing that I need to understand better if I'm going to continue to be the best marketing sales professor in the world because it's incredibly difficult to keep up with this stuff I got to push alert yesterday Google optimize going away in 2023 I'm like dude that's in my book I can't unprint my book but I know that going in so anyway I hope that makes sense I wanted to follow one point about who to onboard though you know how who do you onboard who do you off board is a really interesting question too because there's these people that like push you up the mountaintop and they they follow you like a disciple they really do it when you have a great culture and you have a great mission and you have you know founders that are passionate like it's sort of a good cult right it's awesome there's words there's colors like they're like it's it's a real thing it's amazing it's hard to replicate but that startup phase has to change to continue to scale so all of a sudden you've got these people that pushed you up to this huge mountain that you're grateful to have ever seen the top of and you're starting to realize that they're the wrong people to help you go up the next mountain and so that change management is tricky you know because you've got all these people that got you there but you know they won't get you here but you're not going to just lay off all your best people it's it's hard and so to me you need to have some sort of unemotional line in the sand where we are going to be you know founder led service led passionate when we hit these numbers we are going to then go find experts like this to help us do this if that was clearly defined on day one people would know which exit ramp they wanted to take but who knows what's going to happen with a company we could have gone bankrupt several times so like they don't even like they're buckling up but they don't know for how long how do you make that decision though how do you make that decision on the right people on the right people you hire in fire on your culture yes not it's really not even overly designed you know it's more about are you willing to hire someone and fire someone based on what I'm about to sort of rattle off as who we are as a company because we're talking about trying to get to this huge scale but to get to that scale it's also very hard to get to that first milestone of call it 10 million because that also involves all these departments and people that you're no longer involved with even to get to there so this this is you know part of what people should do is once you have your culture code dialed in and once you know what it is it should be on the shirts it should be on the walls it should be on the booklets it should be the window with the decal over it like you have to say it out loud a lot and you have to prop it out when it happens and you have to call people out when they're not embodying it to me these are the ways that you scale with quality so number one it starts with us you know like we always look at ourselves as the problem before anyone else and that starts with the founders we take full accountability for the mistakes and unless we can sort of give ourselves an alibi we don't it starts with us and whether that's a client service issue or we used our own products for the first like eight years to do marketing we're not even real estate agents and we're using our own products to do marketing because it starts with us if it breaks we want to feel the pain be the expert that's another one like if you're not committed to learning and becoming an expert you're not going to work here and and so we literally we only really hire sponges because it's hard to be an expert in all the different things that we do as far as digital marketing real estate conversations matter this is the the philosophy that says let's quit email and the actual talking matters you'd be amazed how often that principle that culture code in real life you get an email from an angry client and knowing that conversations matter you pick up the phone and call them you don't email them back debate it then do it you can talk amongst yourselves in an effort to get something done not an effort to see who's smarter right solutions focused culture stay positive it doesn't say be positive it says stay positive we attract positive people it's hard to stay positive man it's hard for us to stay positive so it's more about like not even are you positive it's can you stay that way when it gets really freaking hard and then the last one is just go the extra mile to everybody knows what that means so that that is our secret sauce and I can tell you that we've had at this point you know when you're 10 or 11 you do have turnover even if you have a even if you have an amazing run you know somebody well I love to hear your opinion on this like I think somebody's staying at a company nowadays for I shouldn't even say this I think somebody's staying at a company right now for three years as a blessing to the company I think it is I think it's rare now I think it's very rare now dude if I get three good years out of somebody in the peak years of their life when they're excited to be working there and they're all in and they're drinking the blade like I am going to be pumped for them when they leave I'll be mad right when they leave yeah but I'll be pumped for them deep down we've actually explored creating well people can look up lattice you ever heard of lattice no never what is that it's like HR software and it's one of the industry standards like sales force for H okay okay and what lattice did is they noticed that like hey we've got all this data and we kind of see when people are kind of leaving and we see the reasons are leaving and more and more with side hustles and and Gary V culture there's people leaving that are wanting to start a business and there's no option for them to work with us to accomplish that goal why not so they're actually starting like an accelerator that if you want to be an entrepreneur we will invest and you're doing so but you have to be there for three years or more so I love that I absolutely love that that's amazing so now you set you set the expectation three years and we're going to actually you know we know what the culture is you know the side hustles exist regardless of whether or not we like them you're going to do shit on the weekends we can't you know as much we can try and police we're not going to be able to police it so why not set up an accelerator now it's a business opportunity so now there's a contractual obligation for three years business opportunity investment opportunity yes spinning up companies solving problems that you know are probably very relevant to them a little bit of a reason to be better to work with for those three years because we you know we don't have to invest in you we might I love that clearly three years in I think we both know pretty much know who you'd invest in or not yeah it's like the ultimate due diligence in the startup right yeah you're gonna you're gonna hang out with that person for three years and work with them three years before we decided to invest in her yeah you know we watched her for 40 hours a week and we read that's awesome and and I'm curious though because like you're right all these things about building building companies the right people at the right time they have to get into the cult but the culture is a huge piece of it and it's an it's an overused word without context because too often it is just words on a wall or on a website and nobody buys into it so how do you get somebody to actually buy into that that's such a good question it it is you either start on day one or you maybe should never create one I know this is going to be really strange but as soon as you feel like you need to work on your culture it's too late as soon as you feel like you need a culture it's too late there should be zero work in creating a culture on purpose but again as you start to get bigger there's you know 47 people that work for you I can't spend time with all of them every day and let them sort of through us Moses pick up on who we are so that's always been incredibly difficult for me um I think culture is a buzzword too I really do and even the people that are really smart that work for us in HR that they understand that creating a culture is incredibly difficult compared to earning a culture you you should make sure you're earning it how do you do it you execute you you create a great environment to work in you do great work you're passionate like you don't need to have a three word sentence for it to create a culture but hub spa sales force if you want a model the deck of corns you know the deck of corn is these deck of course I think a deck of corn is a hundred million dollar a hundred billion is a deck of corn deck of corn okay is that deck of ten I think deck is ten okay I think that's a billion or more deck of corn it's it's a good size company is what it is it's Zilla 1.44 billion you know there is a level above a billion right and Silicon Valley is exploded there you know trillion dollar companies now so um deck of corn became a term and whatever hundred is sent to sent a corn I'm just looking I just I just I just google that it's so it's deck of corn is 10 to 99 billion dollars and and I don't know this is a made up term they just called it mega corn over a hundred billion dollar this is awesome but yeah that those are you know that would be my advice would be don't create a culture for as long as humanly possible don't need to don't make it a thing don't make it a sticker you know and then you're gonna know when you need to actually maybe put it on a most good yeah real obvious let's talk about let's talk about conversion mm-hmm because that's what you focus on so you have a million and one startup lessons but you you I don't know specialized specialized in conversion you focus on conversion you you have a code for conversion I am the up up down down left right left right of the version so how do you optimize conversion what's the code for conversion yeah let's describe what that is let's describe what let's describe what you mean by conversion because people are thinking about is it ads people landing pages what is it is it sales reps on calls what is convert it's like a million different conversion points and they're all sort of it's sort of properly to use the term in several different places that are incredibly different so your conversion rate of leads might be like point one four and that's like killing it but your conversion rate of a landing page might be 80 percent in failing mm-hmm so the way I define conversion because I do think it's important to sort of say what is conversion it's the venn diagram where marketing sales and technology overlap it's sort of the intersection of those three things in fact the book section one marketing section two the sort of tools to go from marketing to sales section three sales so it's that line that exists and creates new opportunities and challenges due to the internet basically is how it creates so it's I teach lead conversion using digital marketing and digital ads and social media right and because of that the the funnels that I build and the content that I put out is very very different than what was capturing the lead in 2007 you know on the internet when people were reading Yahoo finance and clicked on a quick and loan debt it has changed a lot so I define it as that overlap and the goals to get that right and so instead of it being two different departments or calling it something weird like chief revenue officer you know I feel like my calling is to be everybody's chief conversion officer because no one has one and it really is almost like a therapist that's real tactical because when I work with a room full of 25 sales people it's very different than the next day when there's like seven marketing people totally different agenda totally different energy the room is set up different right and so I'm basically trying to say I need to talk to both of you and they need you both to quit complaining and thinking the tools are the answer because I just want to take a second and thank the sponsor of today's episode HubSpot now as you all know the success story podcast is part of the HubSpot podcast network there are incredible podcasts in this network one of my favorites that you have to check out if you don't know this podcast you're kind of sleeping on it the gold digger podcast hosted by Jenna Kutcher this podcast has been around for a minute Jenna is an OG in the podcast game the gold digger podcast helps you discover your dream career with productivity tips social strategies business hacks inspirational stories interviews and so much more please go check out the gold digger podcast hosted by Jenna Kutcher wherever you get your podcasts because if you're talking about these billion dollar corporations where you're saying they have the playbook they have the code quote unquote for conversion because they figured it out a lot of this is like the sales and marketing alignment and I'm surprised that this is still such an issue because you're right in 2023 now I would have thought by now that the CRO role was meant to the chief revenue officer was meant to bridge that gap it was yeah it wasn't it wasn't it wasn't the conversion wasn't in the title but the goal of that role was to say marketing and sales and all things revenue all right so figure out how to get revenue how to get money into the bank how to get the next wire without spending too much money and that was the goal but you're saying that there's still a massive disconnect between these two groups even though the businesses do understand that man it used to be VP sales or SVP sales in CMO and even with that somewhat merging there's still a disconnect across businesses in the SMB mid market yeah you just maybe think they won't even let a salesperson in the C-suite they changed the name they didn't you right make you sales officer no it's so weird it doesn't make sense to me why is that I don't know why that is because sales has a connotation with being low brow and but at the same time it's such a band-aid right it's like yeah we're gonna give someone a job and their only job is to make money and it's like I think the problem with that concept and I'm sure for lots of companies it works great because they probably have a little bit more of a linear org chart with those three roles versus maybe a triangle shape which if the chief revenue officer is basically two people's boss then they you have to respect both departments greatly because they they are what makes the company exist and so I think this like the strategy officer and the information officer and you know they need to be on this line and the chief revenue officer just needs to line his ass up with everybody else he ain't better than anyone she ain't better than anyone so that to me is broken where it's like CEO and then COO CFO right and then and so I just I just don't like the way that people disrespect marketing and sales and CMOs they traditionally and historically have not been trained to think about conversion my I'm working with my sister-in-law she said yeah I went to school I did actually take some marketing classes what'd you learn it was just all philosophy you know just consumer behavior you know the psychology of marketing messages like you're not learning really tactical things in school to do digital marketing that has a goal of converting leads so you have all these people that have been trained to create fun brand centric campaigns and then the internet and social media and analytics was born and now everyone can prove that most of them are terrible it's her job I agree a hundred percent I mean I actually just think I posted about this the other day that you know like chat GPT and how it just passed the Wharton MBA exam I'm like well and that's an issue for me when chat GPT stopped training on data that was basically dated in 2021 and that's where it's getting all this data so if I can pass an MBA exam from one of the most esteemed educational institutions in the world one of one of them then that's that to me means that the MBA is really not setting you up for success because what has happened since 2021 in terms of how we work how we market how we sell how we manage how we have gone remote how do you hire somebody remotely how do you convert people to have no more budget or budgets been reduced because of recession or COVID or all these different things the words you'll need to give it will always change but yeah so I think that so now what is a modern marketer well you're not getting that from school obviously because if I if I took things that I knew in 2021 I wouldn't be effective in 2023 it changes that fast so how do you what are the what are the laws that sort of always apply the laws that always apply are relevance and attention and it's just you know if you have people's attention you get a chance to try to be relevant from time to time it is still the fun marketing branding content stuff you know but it's it's those are the jabs and and then the right hook it needs to be super relevant so I just think of it as I'll just oversimplify it you know I get 29 days a month to do really cool stuff and to be creative and to put great work out into the world and then on one day I'm gonna go see how it did and the way that I'm gonna see how it did is I'm gonna look at it much more so through the lens of I earned this day to spam you it you know I spent 29 days providing a hundred percent value and everything I sent you and and so today I'm gonna ask you to help me you know and people are okay with that it's so funny because I have an email newsletter that kills it and it doesn't get a very good click-through rate because the whole point of it is to help people just sort of get a synopsis of several things you know in marketing and sales they could click if they want there's some interesting multimedia if they do but I have a 0 percent click-through rate goal meaning I want to make sure people can read the whole thing and never click and sometimes I get a little nervous because I'm like man I'm you know I've got a course coming up or I've got a you know I've got a webinar where at the end I'm gonna be you know selling something and and my goal is to make money and you know they never click anything and it's like calm down the point of that email is not to get clicks send one that the point is to get clicks and I could show you another email right above that one that is sort of what I'm explaining that right hook and it has like 89 percent open rate and 70 percent click-through rate so what's the lesson when you spend all month they're all week or all day whittling down to the sort of best stuff it's crazy how impactful it can be yeah and I think that the lesson the lesson here is yeah you spent that you you got the permission to do it you got the permission by giving so much value over the period of time but and and and larger businesses know this when I mean the good ones do how many times do you like cringe when you get a sales email from somebody every single week right asking to buy to buy to buy to buy to buy and you've never gotten anything valuable from them yeah just even if this is just for your own sake like I don't know yeah you could probably read that but like yeah if you look at those stats on the on you know people that are buying and engaging with the stuff that they buy that's not bad that's not bad that's not bad if you look at the normal the top one here is more of a normal newsletter that I send every week yeah huh so I heard Jason freed one time say something that really stuck with me and he said the more times you send people away the more reasons you give them to come back and he meant he meant it in like a really good way like he didn't mean it in like a grant cardone keep pissing people off and it doesn't matter because they'll keep going into your funnel anyway kind of way it was more like it was more in regards to content and being willing to share amazing things that you find that you don't create and I think that is probably one of my secret sources the Chris list I don't actually create any of the content in it it's truly the best stuff I find from all over the web and and I just you know I have an opinion about what I found and I have advice on what to do with what I found that's my whole newsletter and so finding greatness is really important because as you search for it you start taking kind of little notes of things you can do that are great too and that's kind of how my flow is so if you were to look at my checklist of stuff that's going to take a little longer like I'm working on an April fools day joke right now I don't know when this will come out but you know how you know how far in advance that is I'm already like planting seeds do you think that do you think the small businesses screw it up still and they focus on selling selling selling all the time versus providing value building rapport is that something you still see yes I think the bigger problem is for the folks that you don't have to convince anymore to try to provide value are not providing value they think they are explain that well you go to the conference and somebody says content video social you know be an expert be helpful be useful and they're like okay cool and then they go to create content and it's just average a mediocre and uninteresting and not compelling and you know it's hard to be an on air talent the internet's busier than ever like I think I'm really good at this stuff man I really do and I'm a micro influencer I'm a nano influencer at best now I have a strong tribe in a specific niche around a topic that's very financially fruitful so I'm good I'm okay with that I'm golden I got better business opportunities than people that probably have 10 million followers you know they're out there doing brand deals I'm out here getting equity in starting companies so like there's lots of ways to do it um I don't even know where I was having with that but well no it was it was well actually more from just putting out garbage into the world yeah and in the in the guys of content and then you actually then turned it into a good good conversation on is is audience worth anything if you can't convert them and and you're just building an audience of on sort of that average content yeah I think that people should almost it's almost like take a step back and I had an email workshop last week and it was really gratifying because the part of the workshop that I thought was going to be the least interesting ended up being the most interesting because again I'm very tactical but I know that most people hat that were attending had a bad email newsletter so I'm like okay we need to start and figure out what is your chris list what are you uniquely positioned to send to people that you have a right to commentary about that you know and what I found is that people still lean towards kind of making it themselves not finding it from other places but it started clicking and they're like oh people love Zillow we could definitely have like the the Zillow house of the week I'm like okay now we're getting there you know it's like and people do things every weekend and they're always looking for things to do every weekend and especially if they have kids and they're looking for free things it's like okay cool there's two letters we're down with the two letters we got Zillow we got things to do this weekend for free and with kids next see what I'm saying it's not that hard but that's the step they're skipping and that's the step that matters the most because when I was teaching this class it's like impact of images what time should you send HTML verse plain text I get it I love that stuff I spend all day neck deep in it but you're applying tactics to a strategy that doesn't exist and then you wonder why you're scrambling and can't figure out if anything's working I'm just thinking when when somebody wants to build like a really strong brand online um but they you know you're talking about house of the week with Zillow and you're talking about things to do with your kids on the weekend that are free let's talk about in a serious business context okay so what would that look like for somebody trying to build out a business brand for themselves or for a business yeah well that that is the exact thing for a realtor which is a business so to be clear those are not theories those are exactly what a local realtor should send it as a part of their real newsletter it might sound weird for a lawyer to hear that but a lawyer should it send that a lawyer might send the most interesting case in Orlando right now see what I'm saying it's yeah it's just sort of the the industry will like for mine stats right people there's always stats about marketing and sales inspiration there's always awesome examples of great marketing research tons of white papers and ebooks to download reports every year and then how to lots of that content that was the one that I really didn't know what would be it became my favorite which is sort of it really should just be TBD it is the most interesting and fascinating thing I read I'm not quite as concerned if it's tactical it's more thought provoking and then I would also ask then if that's the case with the sound strategy it makes a lot of sense in providing way more value than day one you're going to be able to provide to your audience that doesn't ever remove you as a thought leader that doesn't ever make you less than that's what you're saying you put all this free stuff out into the world you show the the cumulative knowledge you've built up over the week or the month and you've seen the results or people will still come back to you so this is what I'm getting to now is the bar to become a creator and a brand online is even lower because now the future of being a creator could be aggregating the most interesting shit that you found all week and that's what it sounds like you're doing and that's what it sounds like you I think you have like 40,000 some people on your list you know or maybe more now yes and but here's the thing because a lot of times it's like so then why should people buy anything for me Scott if it's all this great free information every single week I'm putting it out on social I'm putting it in my emails like why bother paying and that to me is you say where is conversion and that's conversion right there right why pay Chris we got tons of stuff out there for free so that's my funnel right it's working again it's there and it's like I don't need to upgrade I'm good well the line in the sand for me that made the most sense which was sort of like where where would I feel like it became fair to pay if I was the person paying you know like I don't even think about it as me I'm like okay I'm on the other side of the screen and I'm getting this stuff and and it's $49 or $75 a month or whatever it is $5.97 you hear all these crazy prices with funding numbers whatever that is I just I cannot sleep at night if I send something increase something that's less valuable than that and what I try to do is I try to earn the annual ROI monthly so I do a live workshop every month it's three hours and people can attend it for 49 bucks it's cheap they come in they attend it they see if they like it or not if they keep you know get the replay for a week whatever but a lot of them upgrade to the monthly membership which is more 24.7 access you get to go to every workshop every single month so the line in the sand for me was when I'm teaching long form in depth content I'm not gonna do that for free anymore now that sounds easy to say but what does that mean it means I don't have a podcast and it means I don't have a YouTube show and it means if I'm gonna have one I'm gonna have to come up with something cool and different that's not long form practical marketing and sales tactics because then I make it fair to say why pay if you're paying for a workshop every month I got another free webinar every month it's my lead magnet teaching damn near the same thing right it's unfair to ask people to pay so I just looked at it like if it's long form and if it's in depth and if it's highly practical and then the quality is better and it's there's so many cool things that I've done with it around like cheat sheets and I love it I have fun with it but yeah um that for me felt really fair I wanted a lot of people to be able to afford it I wanted to feel really good and hold my head up high when I charged for it I wanted every time that and this is something a lot of people should do like live engagement with your creator is people's favorite thing it's the reason they join and stay can add all the pre-recorded on-demand modules in the world if you're live monthly workshops or webinars or live streams are not amazing people will turn and how do you make them amazing you do the work I mean I'll show you like I don't know what that means for a lot of people but for me I'm I'm I'm mapping it out for the solo printer here who wants to do this right you just do the work man I just wake up every day and work and write stuff down and you know there's such a great story about JP Morgan if you heard that story about JP Morgan and the homeless guy that came up to him no I don't know this story tell me the story what is it so JP Morgan is walking through New York and a homeless guy comes up and he says hey if I can tell you the secret to success you have to give me a million dollars yeah I'm maybe wrong in the amount of money and he said okay let's do it you know and he said key to success is to write things down that you need to do and then do them and he gave him the money because that is it now putting the right things to work on on the list you know probably challenging for a lot of people and and sort of some of it's non negligible right there's there's sort of stuff you have to do but I'm not an intellectual man I'm from a small place called Polk County I failed out a freaking college I failed out of business school I didn't get the little easy to get scholarship in high school I had a 2.9 I'm not even smart my books at Johns Hopkins as a required read I taught it in why you and it's because I just write down things to do and do them but the real answer is creative original ideas are the only thing that matter anymore that is my true feeling about what people should think about as they think about what to create that the the the content arbitrage volume game is over and people don't know it yet and and the the volume is going to have to come way down for most people and the quality is going to have to go way up for most people for the algorithms to even know they exist and I can tell you that one video that pops one I did a Twitter thread and it has 300,000 views my average we have 3,000 views so 10x 100x right but it but it was it was a 100x more clever idea so everyone's trying to figure out what time to post and what to post and how to post and should it be a picture oh reals they do good like I'm telling you man spending a little bit more time in the lab than other people do on coming up with unique and creative ideas is where it's at and and and where you'll come up with those is by establishing some of these inputs that are bringing you these other amazing people's unique and creative ideas I love it dude so actually it's so crazy so you're talking about you arbitrage content for top of funnel you learn from it yourself it's a low effort high value top of funnel product and then all of a sudden you flip the script in the second now you have the gate of content and it is exceptionally high value where you focus all your time energy and effort so you focus your effort on the thing people pay for so they don't churn you don't focus as much energy on the top of funnel because like you said it can't be a volume game you keep it's virtually impossible for any normal human being to have that much creative original thought you're going to outpace someone else at the specialist in their field every single day every single week so you focus on where you're going to put that energy and attention and effort which is the paying customers and that's really this is like this is like the solo printer turning into somebody who teaches for a living and coaches and and advises for a living this is now the new playbook because i think that what people screw up is they try and do the volume on top of funnel to attract people with like sub you know subpar content and then they have gate of content but then there it's not it's okay but it's not great it's kind of like you know a shittier version of something that's already something else it's already out there and that's the final it's a leaky bucket and people pay to get pissed off the product shit they churn and so on and so forth and they just have this like ongoing kind of shitty content and and and knowledge business and that's and we're talking we talked about side hustles that's what everybody wants to do not everybody has a has a technical skill they want to they don't all want to be graphic designers or web developers or they sometimes they want to teach over things they've learned and i think that's the differentiator being what you do and what i've seen a lot of people try and do in teaching for picking up on it i'll leave you with the steve jobs quote it's about quality and in my first book Austin Allison the guy we talked about one of the core principles was quality creates quantity and for each chapter i was tasked to go find the best quote that that embodied that you know printable and the one for that always stuck with me it was from steve jobs and he said quality is always better than quantity one home run is worth way more than two doubles i never forgot that people hitting doubles man single they button yeah they need triples right what happens when you hit a triple i don't even know if you watch baseball i don't hardly ever watch it but when you hit a triple it's people are going nuts yeah we hit on run people are going nuts and what analytics has figured out in baseball is what i'm suggesting in marketing swing for the fences or don't swing it like but don't do the strikeout part a million times that's what people have figured out they got that one down strikeout a lot work on the freaking grand slam um i i will wrap it up in a second but there's one more thing that i want to go into what's the secret in converting because you drew the line in the sand from from the audience the top of funnel into what's what's gated so how do you apply your experience what's the strategy to convert them what's the what's the game plan to bring those people over the line well as you ask that what i think about is it's actually the same formula that got them in the door so if you if someone comes in through a funnel that's 99% just cool fun awesome creative clever stuff and then maybe let's say they hop on the webinar where you're you know actually talking about what you sell and you just throw these like you're just different it's not it's not on brand as we say right like yeah and so what i try to do when it's when it's showtime you know and when it's time to make some money to keep paying for all these stupid ideas that i have what i do is exactly what i did to get them there 99.1 98.2 i i defer and lean towards content marketing for 95% of the pitch so if i if i do a if i do a one hour live stream i want as many people as humanly possible to attend i would rather have the biggest audience possible than the people that are way way way at the bottom that might buy because what i'm what i'm convinced of is that those people show up anyway right because they already think about why they're going to come to the webinar i don't have to worry about them so when you when you get on the webinar i'm going to do what i call the science of sales i'm going to get you more excited than the cost of what i sell while i have your attention and then i'm going to ask you to buy and so what i do is probably a little bit different is i don't rush into it at all you know sometimes i'll be 35 or 40 minutes in and it'll feel like the right thing to do to tell people how to move forward because they're sold and i'm just at that point i'm benefiting and i'll so i'll just cut to the chase but in most cases i would say if it's not minute 50 i'm teaching i understand one of my best mentors is named Steve Pasanelli he taught me how to present publicly he's really sharp see him over a company called bomb bomb i know it yeah yeah you heard of it yeah yeah he used to have this really good segue he would he would actually say hey because we do these seminars and classes for CRMs at a hotel or an office and it was this same thing teach most of the class and so he would always get to the end and he would say hey really quick show of hands how many of you guys think i helped your business today you know and they'd always raise their hand because he's a great teacher and then he would say all right now it's time to help my business just like such an easy segue in the world of that being the way that you sell you know would you guys mind if i spent nine minutes now and talked about what i do sell you know i you don't have to say i've earned the right but you need to know that and you did and they'll know it or or you didn't so what i need to improve on because i'm not perfect by any means what i need to add to my arsenal is actually the direct sale fastball down the middle come see what the conversion club is all about is it right for you should you join yeah if you join they'll be a coupon i'm too cum by y'all sometimes but it works for you and that's your style i said in my newsletter day i said i think that's where the puck's going and i'll be over there yeah i think there's some there's some wisdom and elegance in that too i mean you can learn other tactics but if you have the funnel down and it works for you i mean you already put a lot of thought into this i don't necessarily think you have to maybe you would convert slightly more but maybe it turns off the audience and there's always a net positive and there's always a negative positive to every action you take against an audience especially if they know you in a certain way so you can optimize other ways too but i mean yeah and and i think that it's it's a better problem to have than the alternative problem like figuring out how to monetize an audience that loves you properly is a way better problem to have than what can i have to build that tribe because that is probably a long slow grind yeah in those cases but nowadays with the algorithms and with the kind of sea of sameness where you know nothing stands out unless it's really really good people pop off pretty quick man in my industry glinda baker you know 900 can tiktok overnight just telling war stories about selling real estate for 30 years in itlana brad mccallum this guy up in calgary started a youtube channel made these amazing videos about luxury houses up there became the number one luxury agent in under two years so charlie demilio is is real you know you can be cobby i think that's his name cobby lane yeah you know those people they came out of nowhere but they were really funny or they were really cute or they were really good dancers yeah or really funny like i he keep going so different so fun yeah that good yeah but if you are it's almost like whatever that old analogy of taking the road less traveled it's almost like candy land where you get that you get that ladder almost go the very top you happen to strike the right court or roll the right number i love that all right um before we wrap up most important thing is where can people connect with you they want to uh get your new book they want to connect with you but i need the stuff that you offer to social website all of that listed out this i feel this is very ironic that i also did a bad job selling my book today we're at the very end i don't know that i mentioned the book it is called the conversion code yeah you can go to the conversion code.com my social media handles that i use the most that i love or twitter and insta i g chris underscore smth same on twitter chris underscore smth when i started my journey scott i couldn't afford the vowel well that's funny um well uh okay last thing to wrap this up before i close out and by the way we'll link everything in the show notes um so that all the links for the book and for all of your social and your website it's all linked uh in the show notes below but i ask everybody this so you've had an incredible career um you've built companies uh you've been part of exit events acquisitions you've built your own startup successfully you've built a personal brand so after all of this is said and done um you look back and and what does success mean to you so yeah um i think success to me is really just about reaching my full potential and enjoying trying to that's it because it's so hard i believe for me and i am grandiose and i think i can accomplish things that are unaccomplishable but yeah i i said a big goal and i go out to accomplish it and for me it's just sort of like i try to be equally discontent and grateful that to me that's success if you're discontent because you know you have better work in you but you're grateful because you're already living a life that 99% of the world would dream of i think that's a good spot to be and and i've noticed with the most successful people they have a chip on their shoulder and they shouldn't you know and so i have a chip on my shoulder and i shouldn't and it's because it isn't that actually think that i can beat them i can i'm better than it's just that i know that i'm not where i personally can get and so if i you know i in the other the grateful part is because i don't want to have that journey and then because the checkbox will keep moving right so it's like oh i want to make a movie and i make a movie and i want to win a Oscar and i want to Oscar i want to win two like so i'm well aware that that prize can move from what we think it may be today so that's what i think for me the answer that came to mind as you ask that was just more sort of like am i continuing to push myself bolstop and am i having fun i love that to me is success and i think that is way way harder than it sounds