The Oldie But Goodie Digital Marketing Strategy

Coach Yu – EP35: 

[00:00:00] 

Hello Dennis. Hello, Jeffrey. 

Welcome everybody. This is the Coach Yu show here on Startup Club. Thanks everyone for joining us. We’ve got a, a very special edition of the Coach Yu show tonight because it’s an AMA.

Ask me anything. Actually it’s an ADA. Ask Dennis anything or a UA, ask Yu anything. Yeah, take take your, but tonight you’re gonna get to ask Dennis, ask Dennis, right Dennis. That’s right. WWJD. What would Jeffrey do? WWJ S what would Jeffrey say? No, no, it’s an ask you anything, not an ask me anything. right with coach you.

Exactly. So who wants to ask a question? All right, well, Kevin’s got his hand up. Let’s bring him up on stage and we’ll get the show going. And just as a reminder, everyone, [00:01:00] this is the coach you show on startup club. We do this show every Thursday evening at 8:00 PM. Eastern time, 5:00 PM. Pacific time here on startup club.

You can go to startup.club, which is the website for startup club to listen to recordings of this show. And many other shows you can sign up for our mailing list and be kept informed of all the cool things happening here in startup club. Kevin, you got your hand up and I accepted you to, to, uh, come on stage, but I don’t see you on stage yet, so I’m not sure what’s happening there.

There is. We go. All right, Kevin. Welcome. What’s your question for dentist? Yeah. I’ve always been a big fan of Dennis Hughes for a very long time. And we’ve even had him on a couple of podcasts. Uh, but I feel like I’d love to hear Dennis’s story of how he got into the digital content space in the first place.

And also, where did he come up with the concept of [00:02:00] the dollar Facebook for a dollar a day and his three by three. That’s a good one. Kevin, Kevin and I have hung out in so many different places in so many different events. This guy is an absolute video pro I went to see him at his new house in prosper, Texas.

And his video studio is what do you put into it? Like a hundred grand and weeks and weeks of effort. Oh yeah. It was insane. Oh yeah, absolutely. And, uh, Kevin it’s, it, it, it was a labor of love and it’s inspired a lot of people to create. The studios of their own. And it’s, it’s been fun to be part of that journey for a lot of people to build out their own home studios as well.

He’s trained a ton of agency owners on how they can get pro on video. So he’s made his transformation from being a guy behind the camera to actually being in front of the camera and coaching other people. So to your question, Kevin. 25 30 years ago, I was building websites and I did [00:03:00] not wanna be on camera.

I was that guy where, when someone would wanna take a photo at dinner, I would try to be out of the photo. I didn’t wanna see my face. I didn’t wanna hear my voice. I didn’t know what to say. I just didn’t wanna be seen. And thus being in analytics, building the analytics at a search engine made a lot of sense to me, cuz I could.

Behind these huge databases. And I could do my optimization and do math and munge files together and build operating systems and track where all the money’s coming from without anybody ever seeing my face, which is a great kind of behind the curtain introvert dream of how we like to live. Some of us that are introverts, but then cell phones came along and social media and there is no way of driving sales for companies without being on video.

and the moment it happened, the, the realization, the turning point was when I was at Facebook’s headquarters in [00:04:00] Menlo park back when they had their well in Redwood or not, um, in, on Cal avenue, in, in Palo Alto, the, the original ones. And I flew out the head of digital for WWE. I flew out the head of Quiznos and marketing.

I flew out a bunch of folks for a private little meeting that I got together. With Facebook to talk about what do we need to do for top brands to be able to succeed? And the answer turned towards the same things we’re talking about now, one minute videos and dollar a day. And it was at that time, I wanna say it was 2007, 2008 that we created the John Cena Facebook page.

You know, John Cena is one of the well known wrestlers, right? You can’t see me. The guy’s a legend. And so we created that. We created the WWE Mexico page. We started running ads for WrestleMania. We were doing e-commerce. So I was doing the kind of stuff that I like to do, which is optimizing keywords [00:05:00] and running campaigns based on data without showing my face.

But then in creating the John Cena Facebook page, some fans reached out and they said, John, I’d really love. If you could just gimme your phone number. I’d just love to chat with you just for a couple minutes. And. I wasn’t thinking. And I thought, sure. So I replied back to that kid’s comment and other people, there was just, you can imagine, right?

When we post this John Cena saying, Hey, this Sunday, we’ve got this pay view and all these, you know, get 200,000 people liking our posts, cuz the page grew from nothing to a ton. At one point we had the largest, I think Facebook told us we had the largest fan. Of any group of brands out there. If you add up all the wrestler pages and the main WWE Facebook page, and I just started just for fun in the evening, I would reply to these people and I thought, well, I’m kind of making these, you know, these parents or big WW fans I’m making their day.

Cuz they’re thinking John Cita replied right. Has actually Dennis U replied [00:06:00] at a certain point. I thought that was disingenuous. I thought well, for me to be able to really help other people, I need to step out of the shadow and I need to be a public figure. If I truly believe in mentorship and education, then I need to show myself.

And so I did, and on social media, I started making one minute videos and it was an extension of just doing the tutoring that I’d, I’d always done privately. And in order to make sure that my stuff was being seen, I ran ads against it. And back then, The minimum budget was a dollar a day and it still is today on Facebook.

When you on a boost to post. So dollar a day in one minute, video are peanut butter and jelly. I recommend this for anybody. Who’s an expert in any kind of area. You’re an author speaker, coach consultant, small business owner, chiropractor, real estate agent. You have some kind of expertise you’re in a service based business.

maybe you’re selling a book or consulting or courses. I believe that dollar a [00:07:00] day. And one minute videos are the key. Even if you suck on video and you’re full of ums and OS, even if you don’t know anything about cameras like Mr. Kevin Lee does, then that’s what makes it more authentic things that don’t look like ads.

And from then it’s just, okay, well, I busted the doors open on this one, so let’s just go all in. Let’s just start making tons of talks. Let’s make these 15 second stories. Let’s get on Instagram tomorrow. I’m flying to Chicago. To be with Perry Marshall. Who’s the granddaddy of Google ads. Number one bestselling book.

And he’s the granddaddy of Facebook ads. Number one bestselling book. And we are about to put out our book on TikTok ads, which we hope will be a number one bestselling book and Perry Marshall and I are gonna spend the whole day making tos, not singing and dancing, but quick little hooks, quick little tips, little.

Oh, Hey, there. Perry Perry here and Dennis here too. And we, we just wanted to tell you how important it was to make a 15 second video, whoops. At a time, go check out our course, right. Things like that. [00:08:00] And that’s how someone who didn’t speak English as their first language, all of a sudden became this unwitting unwilling video person.

And if I can do it and you guys can do it, what do you say, Mr. I love that. And for everybody who’s listening, I want, I want you to point something out and I don’t know if you guys have noticed, but Dennis is a very well spoken storyteller and not once did he say and, um, or ah, and, or nor did he stutter and he did it just so well.

And so I really admired that about you. I love your storytelling skill sets. how does that play into how you go about doing your 15 second videos or coming up with your one minute videos? When maybe somebody brings you up on the fly and says, Hey, can you show me how to make a one minute video? Yeah. You focus on one story.

[00:09:00] One moment in time. The way people screw this thing up is they try to say five different things in one minute, you can’t do. when you’re making a movie. When you have, let’s say you are the operator of the video camera, you can point the camera at one scene at one actor at that one moment in time. And that’s all you can do.

And if you wanna talk about five different things that happened, those are five 15, second stories. You learn how to do this in Toastmaster. That’s how I learned how to speak. I was so scared of speaking. I wouldn’t even answer the. I had this big black phone on my desk at American airlines when I was a director in internet marketing 25 years ago, and the thing would ring, I would just look at it and it would ring and I wouldn’t pick it up cuz I wouldn’t know what to say.

I was scared to death. I’d go to these fancy dinners with celebrities and famous people who had their names on the building. Cuz they made these donations at Southern Methodist university and elsewhere. And I would go to that thing in the middle, the table with all the food. Grab some snacks, step stuff, my [00:10:00] mouth full, like a chip month with nuts.

See nobody that I recognize run into the bathroom, lock myself in there, peek out to see if anyone was there. See, nobody lock myself back in the bathroom. Someone knocks on the door saying, Hey, someone in there. Yeah, I’m still using the bathroom cuz I was so afraid of even talking to somebody. I remember herb Keleher who was the CEO of Southwest airlines, the founder of Southwest airlines.

He asked me some question. And I froze on the spot. I didn’t know what to say. So if I can’t even talk to someone like that, how can I say something snappy and witty? In 15 seconds, I looked at these other people who were the heads of the fraternities and sororities who were heads of businesses. I watched these people speak when they came to campus and I thought, man, these people are so good.

It must be some natural charismatic thing. I could never be like these people. I had the CEO of American airlines as a mentor and I watched him give speech. I watched them fight the unions when there were things like strikes [00:11:00] about not enough pay and the weather and the equipment and things like that.

And I thought I could never be like that, but I found it was just practice. I went through Toastmasters and I learned how to speak in one minute clips. When you go to Toastmaster, it’s a very friendly group. You should join costs, almost nothing. And they have something called table topics in the middle of their structured session.

Which is structured around Robert’s rules of orders and table topics will be okay today. The topic is what’s your favorite vegetable and Jeffrey will then say he’s got one minute. Well, Dennis and greetings, every one fellow toast, masters, my favorite vegetables, corn, because corn can be made into popcorn and it can be turned into all sorts of other things and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

And thank you. And that’s why corn is my favorite. I lean more towards brussel sprouts because they’re not for Brussels and they don’t sprout . But the point is you have to be able to speak extemporaneously [00:12:00] on a particular topic. And I think that the repetitive practice learning how to speak clearly without ums and OS, even if you’re using D script to filter them out later is so key.

Think about if someone were to give you, let’s say you and the audience David or Danny Monson here. Were to give some kind of compelling talk or just respond to somebody in a zoom call a client. Who’s a, who’s got a question and you were full of ums and OS it would not be very compelling. Think about your favorite scene in any movie.

And if you put a bunch of ums and OS in there, you would just lose it. So I’ve trained myself in the last 20 years to never say I’m an awe, unless I’m intentionally doing it.

Mr. Kevin. I love that. Thank you for sharing. Thank you. Thank you, Kevin. Thanks for those questions and Dennis, um, thanks for those, um, answers. [00:13:00] They were very, um, good. Um, I hope I pronounce this correctly. Mood Gar mood, Gar. Welcome to clubhouse. I see your party popper. Do you have a question for Dennis? Um,

question for Dennis and I’ll say, Hey, mood guy, can you dunk what’s ups up? I don’t know. I don’t, I don’t know who to ask now. Just like Rome me over, like you still tell me about the room. Not, no. Do you have a que, I guess you don’t have a question for Dennis? Yes. Yeah. Um, if you’re in. Do you have a question?

No, no, no, no, no worries. If you’re listening and you do have a question for Dennis, raise your hand and we’ll bring you up on stage. Meanwhile, Dennis, I’ll ask you a question. Um, on the one hand, the things you did in the early days with Facebook, the stories you told, uh, they’ve been [00:14:00] easily, um, adjustable to new things that come along like TikTok, TikTok.

Trained yourself on short videos and TikTok is built upon short videos. So that was like a blessing, but are there any new trends that you see, maybe it’s the metaverse and web three or something else that’s gonna create new challenges for marketers that won’t easily be adopt adaptable from things they’ve always been doing.

Sure. Buy the new Tesla that has Twitter integrated, and you can buy that with Bitcoin in the metaverse with digital. No, that’s all fad hopping. I’m very much into things that never change. I’m not interested in some new, random red shiny object. For example, I believe in long term relationships and long slow dinners, I’m gonna have dinner tonight with the person I believe is the most important living scientist on the planet.

Dr. Ly. And this guy, even though he’s a [00:15:00] fantastic scientist and a researcher and a physiologist, he cannot figure out how to use social media. And so when we hang out, it’s in person and he’s not on TikTok. He’s not on Instagram. I think he might be on Facebook, but under some weird name where I see him pop up now and then, and click like on my stuff because I was 25 years.

I was hopping on the latest thing. So when we made the switch from HTML four to HTML five, so we could have dynamic HTML and with CSS, we could have forms and start collecting email addresses and credit cards. That was the cool thing. And there were so many different changes with the internet. I couldn’t keep up with it.

And now I realized that everything that is new is actually old again or old is new again. So when you look at what’s going on on TikTok, it’s just making. 15 second videos, the same stuff that works in an Instagram reel for a Facebook story. Snapchat is the number one chat platform [00:16:00] for teens. Well, how’s that any different than Skype or AOL, instant messenger, all these things are really just the metaverse Ultima, averse, ultimate online and second life.

And these other virtual worlds we’re around 30 years. so maybe I’m just an, I’m an old cur and nothing’s really changed, you know, get off my lawn. But I feel that nothing really has, and most people are so focused on the fad. They miss on the fundamentals of building relationships and telling stories that are based on those relationships.

I think that will never end in five years from now. There’s gonna be a new social network in the same way that TikTok is stealing share from Facebook. And then people are gonna say, oh, my parents are on TikTok. Talk’s where all the old people are. Cuz they’re gonna say that. Cuz TikTok in 2022 is just like Facebook in 2007.

Cuz every generation has to have their cool social network. That’s [00:17:00] theirs,

every everything. Always new again. Yeah. But do you think there are things, uh, you know, what what’s really interesting to me is that it’s not the technology, even though technology changes, the things that really have the impact is when consumer behavior changes, because to your point, Dennis, second life was here a long time ago.

I was Groucho marksman second life, which was a lot of fun. Ugh. The for second life, which was an early version of the metaverse arguably, when they launched, there were a limited number of surnames you could choose from when you created your avatar. So one of the available surnames was marks. So I grabbed the name Groucho marks, and I designed my avatar to look just like Groucho marks.

And I. Existed in second life as Groucho Marx, but that’s another story. The point I was gonna make Dennis is, is consumer behavior changes. A lot of the [00:18:00] technologies we use on our mobile phones today have been around forever. We’re only now at the point where everyone’s doing it, where everyone is comfortable taking out their phone and entering their credit card and buying something.

The capability of doing that was here 20 years. Consumers weren’t ready. They weren’t doing it. So a lot of the changes are not driven by the technology as much as they’re changing changes in consumer adoption of the technology and consumer behavior. What do you think about that? I think that’s true, but if we took an iPhone 13 and transported it back in time, 20 years ago, and everyone had one, I’m pretty sure that very quickly people would use it.

People would use clubhouse, people would use whatever the thing. Because it’d be so easy, the bandwidth would be plentiful. Let’s just assume that it was, and people will naturally monkey see monkey, do whatever they see other people do. That’s what I’ve noticed. I have been in auditoriums of a couple thousand people and have I I’ve [00:19:00] had people do ridiculous sorts of things just because I got everyone in the room to do the same thing.

It happens so easily. People believe that they have some kind of individual. Most people will do whatever everyone else is doing. There’s a study done at BYU with guys, cuz they always do this stuff with these students on whether guys who went to the bathroom would wash their hands or not. And they would plant this accomplice who was there and you know, people would walk in and the, the accomplice would, would sometimes pretend to pee and wash his hands and sometimes just walk right.

and they found that if the guy washed his hands, then if the accomplice washed his hands, then the subject would wash his hands too. Or if there was no one in there, I don’t know how they were able to do that. Maybe someone was hiding on the stalls guys would be way less likely to wash their hands. So people will follow cultural norms.

So you’re right. It is cultural. But I think if we made some kind of [00:20:00] big shift, which is possible in social media, where you get everyone to believe that everyone else is doing it, we could pull off whatever kind of fad we.

That makes sense. Uh, Dennis, I’ve got a question for you from the chat room. It says on which basis you decided to convert yourself from introvert to public figure. Is it the comments on your page or is it the data analysis? Like the videos are performing well and you have to do it to survive in the new digital world.

I’ve never really converted. I believe that you should have. A profile and you should have a public figure page. That is, is your name has your picture and looks just like your profile so that you can post almost the same content, but then you can boost and you have analytics. Facebook just released something a couple weeks ago called a professional page.

Have you seen that? And you’ll see it online. If you go to [00:21:00] facebook.com/dennis U. So it’s a hybrid where it is my profile. So, I don’t think I can run ads against it, but there are some analytics and it shows followers and it does a few things. I think maybe I can schedule posts. I don’t remember exactly, but I believe you should have both.

I don’t believe you should convert. The only time you’re gonna convert is if you decide that personally, you don’t wanna be on Facebook at all, and you just wanna run as a public. so I believe everyone should have three entities and it sounds confusing, but you’re gonna have one for your company, which is your company name as a page.

You’re gonna have your public figure, which is a page, and you’re gonna have your profile, your profiles, you use your account. It’s how you log in. That’s how you tie everything together in business manager. So hopefully that helps you guys. Thank you, Dennis. Um, moody, Gar, I saw, you mentioned in the chat that you have a question.

Do you have a question now for Dennis? Yeah. Yeah, I have one. So, um, Dennis, uh, you said like, uh, like there’ll be like a new app. Like [00:22:00] there’ll be more apps that maybe like in five years I will come up. But do you think any of this one, any of these apps can do more than Facebook? Like it can like I’ll do Facebook because I think Facebook is even from, even right from the start from until now Facebook is.

Most used, like, even though, even if TikTok is communal, but I still think Facebook is most used. Like, do you think any, any apple, any apple beat Facebook? In fact, in five years time, there is a book called the four horseman and it talks about how there are different layers, not the four horsemen of the Bible where all these bad things happen and revelation, but there’s layers.

So the first layer is Google Googled is the library. it indexes the internet. It figures out where things are connects it together. You ask the librarian for some factual thing and it’ll give you the information. And when Google came out, people thought, no, one’s gonna be able to be Google, cuz who’s gonna build a better search engine.[00:23:00] 

Well then social media came around and you have Facebook as the next layer built on top of search. Social media couldn’t have happened unless there was that initial layer. Of the web being connected together with the search engine. Right? So it wasn’t that Facebook was trying to beat Google. And then you have things like Amazon as a layer on top of Facebook.

Why do people buy on Amazon? Because they like the reviews. The reviews are a social layer that is only possible when the search and social layer are already there and commerce is already there. And these other things are already there. Then you have these TikTok things or. Or other things that are, you know, web three or four or whatever you wanna call it that are built upon these other components.

So there are stacking components. It’s not that the next social network or the next two-sided network is going to replace Google or Facebook or Amazon or apple it’s [00:24:00] that they all build these layers one on top of another. And I thought Microsoft was one of these initial layers, 30. Five plus years ago when they had this graphical interface, which they stole from a couple other places.

And some people thought if you guys remember back in the mid nineties, that nobody could replace Microsoft. Cuz they owned all these platforms, Microsoft office and windows and Xbox and whatnot, and people thought back then the bill gates was gonna be a monopolist and no other software companies could ever.

Well, that’s certainly not true. Look at how many other networks and software companies there are. I bet you, in five years from now, the biggest software companies, a good chunk of them will be companies that didn’t even exist today. Look at zoom. Zoom was a nothing. And now all of a sudden it’s a multi-billion dollar company.

Zoom took off cuz [00:25:00] of COVID. There were tons of web conferencing companies. There were tons of these other kinds of tools before. So I don’t believe. Any of these? I, I don’t believe these incumbents are so powerful that nobody can build anything on top of that. Cuz things change so fast. Look at how fast TikTok rose.

It was the seventh most popular app a year ago, and now it has more traffic than Google. It has people visit TikTok more than Google people spend more time on TikTok than they spend on Facebook or YouTube or even Netflix. Isn’t that crazy? But they could lose that just as quickly because some other app could come along, but it’s not because any, anything that’s new that’s coming is not because it’s because building a better Facebook or building a better search engine.

It’s building another layer on top of what’s already there. Does that help? Yes. Yes. Yes. Thank you. Yeah. And that’s why we’re all friends with each other. [00:26:00] When I was at Yahoo. , it was just a couple miles away. I would bike over to Google and I would eat their food. Cuz I thought their food was better. Every one of their cafeterias had a different theme.

They had building 45, which is the main cafeteria, which had kind of a little bit of everything, Italian and Mexican and Western and breakfast and salad bar and all that. But then I think was it building 38? That was just sushi. And then was one that was just barbecue. And one that was just Thai and one that was just vegan and I would go over there and we were all friends with each.

because we were colluding. Maybe it was potentially partially illegal, but a lot of the folks who worked on my team at Yahoo, where he built the analytics, they went over to Google and a lot of the folks at Google, they went over and guess what? They started working on Facebook and the people who were on Facebook’s team went and started doing Instagram.

The head chef at Facebook, mark Zuckerberg stole from Google, the COO at Facebook. Cheryl Sandberg was the head of sales at Google. [00:27:00] It, it is completely incestuous, but not in a bad way. It’s a lot of the same people that have built the foundation of the internet. It’s not a surprise that when you right next door to each other, isn’t that cool right across the street in Portland, all these companies are working closely together.

It’s jazz, right, Dennis, everyone’s kind of riffing on each other and collaborating and, and, and you know, this whole, all the layers you’re talking about, it’s almost like it’s music and it’s jazz and everyone’s collaborating and riffing and building on top of each other’s ideas and playing along together.

Yeah, it’s impromptu, but still tructure. Yeah. Very cool. Very cool. Well, you’re listening to the coach. You show here on startup club. If you’ve got a question for Dennis, raise your hand or post it in the chat group and we’ll be happy to, uh, to, uh, [00:28:00] bring you up. And have you ask someone asked in the chat group, what was the book name that you mentioned earlier?

That’s you mentioned a book. Oh, which book was it? I think I was starting to mention Ray Dalio who wrote the changing world order. and that’s how everything comes around to be the same. If you realize maybe not in our lifetime, we haven’t seen it yet, but you see a lot of repeat patterns, then there’s another book, the four horseman, that’s it?

The four, four horseman. Yeah. One of our, our friends, who’s an NYU stern professor who loves to talk about this sort of thing and how all technology works together. Thinks crowd effect, network effect. Awesome. Well, Dennis, before we, uh, wrap up, um, you know, this is startup club, so I’m assuming that a number of the people who are listening or working for a startup, thinking about, you know, launching their own startup from a digital marketing perspective, if you’re a startup and you’re bringing your product to [00:29:00] market.

You don’t have a big budget, uh, at this point in time, your pre-revenue what’s the most important thing you can and should do to get your marketing going at that early stage. Do a few things that create high leverage, because what happens with the startup is you have no momentum. You have no cash, you have no resources.

You have nothing compared to the big boys. But that also is your advantage, which I know is kind of like a zero to one or guy Kawasaki kind of thing to say, but here’s my twist on it. Everyone that I know that has started a company that became a big company, got an assist from someone else, the folks at YouTube, they didn’t just start this video hosting thing.

And all of a sudden they got bought by Google for 1.7 billion. No, they got shoutouts from other investors that ran. Gambling networks, for example, or porn sites, even not, I’m not saying you should do that, but every [00:30:00] internet venture I’ve seen that has grown, they have gotten help from some other venture, some other influencer creators, someone else who has a network or a big email list.

So use as a startup instead of trying to build from zero, which is a multiply by zero moment, you can take a million and multiply by zero. You still have. who has your audience? How do you build some kind of collaboration with them? It could be as simple as getting them on a five minute zoom and interviewing them, not even to talk about your product, just so that you can build some kind of trust.

Just so you can be seen with some level of authority, which is called implied endorsement when you’re seen in somebody else. So that other people say, oh, this Jeffrey SAS guy. I wonder who he is. I’m gonna click on his red profile and check him out. . And so when you create those kinds of connections with the people that your target audience trusts, that’s what we call a lighthouse.

Who is it? So it’s not just the people that you wanna sell to directly, but who do they [00:31:00] trust? Co-create content with them? Declare you have a podcast boost that episode for a dollar a day. My buddy Philippe Kado is a San Diego massage therapist who specializes in pain. So he is not just any massage, the.

These certain kinds of chronic injuries that relate to posture. He has a whole program. And today he interviewed the top massage therapist who has been publishing for years on these different techniques on how to deal with pain. And now all the other massage therapists will say, wow, Philippe interviewed the top guy.

It was only 34 minutes, but it’s. Because we can chop that zoom into lots and lots of little pieces, put it out there. And then to anyone who wants to hire Philippe and they live in San Diego and they have some chronic injury that they need massage on. They’ll see this guy’s legit. So it doesn’t matter if it’s a service business or a product startup or a SAS, you have to build [00:32:00] credibility.

But the way to bootstrap that, which is getting around the chicken and the egg is who is already credible. And how do you co-create content with them? I’m surprised at how many startups think the answer is Facebook ads, which is great, but that if you have crappy content, no amount of Facebook ads is gonna overcome that.

Or they think the answer is some kind of technology or hiring some consultant or agency. That way they can blame the agency. And that way it’s not on them. You’ve gotta build these relationships as a startup. You are a professional networker and everyone in a startup you’re in sales, whether you admit it or.

That’s my advice for you guys that are startups we’re in startup club here. So I imagine you have a startup, you have something you’re trying to grow, and I’m glad you’re here because you have people like Jeffrey that are able to take a small company and turn it into a big company. Like paul.com, where you CMO.

Yeah. Thank you, Dennis. Great answer. And you’ve talked about many times before in the coach. You show how important relationships are for marketing, for content, [00:33:00] for SEO partnerships, all that stuff. And it really is great advice for a startup. We’ve got one more question from the chat group. Uh, I’ll read for you.

What are the criteria you use to use to move from one platform to another is being new and cool. The only thing that works or does there have to be new value added, which was previously missing new and cool from a platform standpoint or from us deciding what platforms to be on you think? I think what they mean is what’s gonna, what’s gonna make you move from one platform to another, just, are you gonna move just because it’s new and cool, or do you really have to see some new value?

Well, I’m lazy. So I might check out a platform just because I need to know, or the press might interview me and ask me a question, but whatever’s working for me. For example, LinkedIn and TikTok are working for me right now. Why wouldn’t I do more of the thing that’s already working? Certainly you can spend 10%, 20% of your efforts experimenting, [00:34:00] but it would seem risky and foolish to put your time into something that isn’t already proven.

whatever’s working for you do more of that. And until it’s not working. So until Facebook shuts me down until LinkedIn, their ads become too expensive and they remove the job title targeting until TikTok, where the ads become, you know, maybe they, the ads aren’t until cheap anymore. I’m gonna stay with whatever’s working.

Why not? That’s how you’re gonna make the most money. You don’t have to. The, the people that are early in a platform. Are usually the ones that lose the most money because they’re out there blazing the trail for everyone else. Unless you are someone who’s already really well known and people follow you for being a trailblazer.

I highly don’t recommend trying to be a trailblazer. Good advice. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Right. If something’s working, you want to scale it. You don’t wanna leave it. Amen. Can’t tell you how many startups try to do 50 different things. Terribly. They become a cafeteria instead [00:35:00] of a Chick-fil-A.

Yeah. When you want to test a lot of different things is in the early days when you don’t know what works, but as soon as you figure out what works, you want to scale that and let go of the other things. Amen. Yep. Well, this has been a great discussion, Dennis. Uh, really appreciate you opening up and, and being available to answer this wide range of questions.

Hopefully everyone listening has gotten some good, uh, advice and inspiration from Dennis’s words. I know that I have, I always take copious notes even though I’m moderating and helping Dennis out. I always have. My trustee remarkable two tablet pad, ready to take copious notes at every session of the coach.

You show, I hope you do the same, Dennis, any final remarks before we wind up tonight’s show. I just wanna take a moment and thank you, Jeffrey for how awesome you are. And it’s the people that are experts. The people that you would think know so much that they don’t need to be here, that they don’t really have anything to learn.

Those are the guys that take the best notes. So when [00:36:00] you’re around other experts, you’re gonna see the same thing. And so you wanna be like these folks where they’re always open to learning something new. And I do wanna say one final thing. I would like to dedicate this episode of the coach. You show to my friend zeal, Azara.

He passed away just three days ago in a hotel room in Nashville. And this guy ran the growth marketing conference. He was a champion of startups for many years. We traveled all around the. In Europe and Asia, I think we hosted the online marketing conference in 20 different cities in the United States.

That’s when Aaron, Kayla was running the thing, and this was one of the nicest, kindest, sharpest, coolest people on the planet. People will say stuff like that when someone dies, but this guy truly was. And so my heart was broken when I was told last night that maybe he had passed away, but it wasn’t confirmed.

It was finally confirmed. And then a bunch of [00:37:00] people paid their respects. The top people in online marketing were paying their respects to this guy, cuz he was just such an awesome sort of person. But vial Azara came from nothing. He was an Eastern European immigrant. He came to the United States, didn’t speak English, went to San Francisco as a waiter and he was waiting tables, renting a room, trying to learn English, trying to learn digital marketing.

And he got his. and he grew an incredible career and an incredible organization. And the last message I got from him, this is, this is why you always have to be careful about the last message you have from somebody. It was a ten second video, which I posted on my Facebook and it said, Hey, Dennis, I hope you’re doing well.

And it said some other sorts of things. He was wishing me a bunch of great things. I think we just did at webinar or something. And those are the last words that I’ll ever hear from. At least on this side of the planet. So I wanna dedicate that to [00:38:00] Vail. And, you know, for those of you guys that no Vail or you’ve been in contact with him, I hope you check it out and see what an amazing human he was.

Cuz I think we should all strive to be like that. Well, thank you for making that dedication, Dennis, and I’m sorry for your loss. And it’s a good reminder. Every time we lose someone, it’s a reminder, you know, now is the only thing that matters. What comes next is not guaranteed. You never know. Yep. Well, thank you again, Dennis.

Thank you everyone for listening tonight. We hope to see you again at a future episode of the coach U show. And as the last reminder, you can find recordings of this show and other episodes of the coach U show over@startup.club. Um, thanks everyone. And have a great evening. Good evening, everyone.