[00:00:00] Welcome to Outfox Spike. It's great to finally get a chance to have this conversation. I feel like we've been talking about this for, oh God, I'm afraid to actually say how long I think we've been talking about this. Is it almost a year? Slides by, doesn't it? And thanks for having me on. It's a pleasure. I always love talking to you guys.
Agreed. So, uh, you should tell the story. So how did, how did we get connected? Spike? Let's, let's, let's tell the story of why. You and I are having this conversation here today. Well, I think embarrassingly, you might've seen one of my ads and downloaded my not embarrassingly at all. I think that proves that it was very effective.
How was a conversion for you? Yeah, yeah, yeah. There you go. That's how we got connected through conversion. Yeah. But before that, I'd been using your software for it like a long time, and then I saw the email from you and I saw your. Activity on my Instagram. Saw that you're a photographer as well. So it was a beautiful thing.
It was, I I mean, I didn't know that you were the guy behind Hunter. Yeah. Yeah. It, it was, uh, not something heavily publicized or anything. So like how would you know? Right. You just use the software and it does what you need, but um, [00:01:00] yeah, but what you tell it is so much more polite. 'cause it sounds like stalking, right?
The way you say it, but like, no, it was, uh, it's funny, every once in a while, I feel like for myself, but I'm sure for others. Your personal side of things and your work side inadvertently collide in strange ways. And that's, yeah, that's exactly what happened with you. I saw your ad and it, it said something about like, learn how to learn how to pitch or learn how to get work as a photographer.
I was like, yeah, like, I'm not planning to do that, but I'd like to know what that's all about. Like how, how people, how do people get paid for photography? And then I got into your, your whole thing. I was like, you have a document for those that don't know you have a, you had put together like a how to pitch your work document.
It just perfectly and concisely told the story of, Hey, if you need to introduce yourself to get work, basically, if you need to do cold outreach, here's a great way to do it. Here's a great template for it. Here's what's worked for me. And it didn't speak the same language we speak. It didn't use the same terms, but it was a perfect example that like.
Every one of our customers [00:02:00] needs to see. And that's what made me reach out. I was just like, aside the fact that I need to learn how to be a better photographer, holy cow. Like can I please share this awesome work? And, uh, you did a great job with it and I think it's, uh, it's high time we get this out. So we can share that document because I think, uh, it still holds up really, really well.
Thanks, man. That's how you know that you're doing something not necessarily correct, but maybe that's how you know that you are doing the right thing for yourself. If your work life and your personal life intersect like that, I think that's how you know things are. Things are right, and I didn't, uh, I began to have little conversations with yourself about that, that lead magnet.
I wrote the little pitching document. And your colleague James, when I wrote it, I hadn't figured that it really, it's just information, universal information on cold pitching. I hadn't figured honestly that it transcends my industry. It is, but that's sort of the secret sauce about cold outreach is if you just do the basics well, it can be very effective.
And most people, they get so fixated on all the other stuff they forget. The [00:03:00] basic premise is. Explain yourself what your value is, why you're having, you know, why you're reaching out in the first place, and just how to position yourself. And that's somehow in all the cleverness, people seem to overlook that part, which I thought you nailed perfectly.
And it just, it does away with a lot of the BS and that's, I think, what makes it, I assume, very effective. Yeah, it's effective. Yeah. Well, I mean, cold outreach is effective. Like you say, if you simplify message, you say what you have, why it's important for somebody else, highlight supply and demand a little.
And that's really it. We talk all the time, like people are always saying, what's the cliche? Marketing right person, right message, right time. And I'm like, you're not gonna get time, time. You can't guess. You're never gonna get time. Right? Yeah. And so you have to be almost perfect at the other two things for it to pay off.
But you say cold outreach works. Like that's a known fact I had for two conversations today where people are like, yeah, you know, it just never works for us. Like somehow their business was so unique. That cold outreach just wasn't effective. And I, [00:04:00] they, they coped and were like, oh, but you know, I'm sure there was 'cause of this reason or that reason and that was probably true.
But yeah. I love that you say like it's a foregone conclusion, but for a lot of people it's really not. They don't, they've tried it or they followed somebody's template and it didn't pay off for them. Or maybe their expectations were too high. But I actually think your perspective on that is really healthy.
'cause I feel like a lot of people don't necessarily trust that it works. There's one last piece of that equation though, isn't it? That your naysayers might be missing and it's volume or frequency, whichever you wanna, you have to send enough emails. Yeah. And you have to write them in a way that if you send enough for it to be effective, you haven't alienated the person by the time they get there.
But let's talk a little about, so one of the things that you do really effectively. In your content, but is a great topic for us is like the your ideal customer profile. One of the things that I remember reading as I was thinking about that is how well you formatted the content with an understanding of who the audience was going to be.
Talk about who is your ideal buyer, how you think about engaging that ideal [00:05:00] buyer. It's like, talk about that process of like cultivating the audience that you're gonna reach out to. Well, to give you a little synopsis of who I'm reaching out to. I suppose I have as a journalist, video photo producer, I have two audiences of mine.
One is low ticket, so that's supporting other filmmakers and photographers. That's my low ticket offer. My high ticket offer is producing stories for media outlets, mostly us, and that's relative high ticket. So it's like. What they pay up to five grand or something like that per story with pitching to media outlets.
It's just trying to find an angle on a story that I know that they're interested in at the moment, but give another take on it that's different to what everybody else is doing. So with mainstream media is obviously. Time sensitive. So they're interested in today's politics or environmental stuff or ongoing conflict.
So it's, it's unfolding narratives. Most of the unfolding narratives being covered in a very uniform way. So if you throw a pitch out that's as uniform as [00:06:00] everybody else is, it won't get looked at. So you'd have to find a different angle. That's really it. It's just setting yourself apart from all of the other people who are sending pitches in as well.
Let's go back, right? So I've reached out to you. I said your content was really interesting, spike. Tell me how to start pitching. So I get the, let's say we, we talk to each other. I get the message piece down, how do I know who to contact? Right? Because like media outlets are very big organizations. How do you narrow that down?
That's the tough bit, isn't it? Well, for me, I'd want to try to find anybody with the title photo editor. Creative director, producer, visual people. For me, I'd find outlets that I would like to see my work in. For example, I don't wanna see my work in the sun. That's, that's no use to me. So, so it's a little bit like Dream 100 as well.
You know, I, I would like as a bullseye, national Geographic, and then I'll either. And this is the long way to do it. I'll either start Googling them, start looking on LinkedIn, start trying to guess email addresses [00:07:00] or I'll use, I hear, I hear there's an application that can help with that. Yeah. There might be one out there.
Yeah. Yeah. And it makes it so much faster. So take all those shortcuts. If you can find a way to make that easier for yourself, grab that because it, I mean, if I did it manually, to be honest, I used to do it manually and it would. Take me days and days and days, and my percentage response rate when I pitch is i'll, I'll pitch.
So I pitch to a hundred people and I normally pitch to like 200 at a time. Probably get like 10% response and only one will buy. Two will buy outta a hundred. So it is volume. When you said that, do you artificially limit? Your outreach to 100 or 200 because that's been the most effective, or like how did you decide that 100 or 200 people was the right set of people to try to reach out to at a time?
That's normally the amount of people that I can find that my work will be relevant for. So within there as well, for example. When I've found a photo editor at National Geographic, normally the only information that I can get on them is that [00:08:00] they're a photo editor at National Geographic. But, um, hundreds of photo editors at the National Geographic, all editing slightly different stories.
So one will be fashion, one will be food, one will be environmental. So I will go on LinkedIn or I will go onto National Geographic itself and I'll see the work that they've previously been publishing to make sure that the work that I'm about to send them will align. Otherwise it's useless to them. It's very applicable broadly because like ultimately that's the job all of us are doing.
The thing that's interesting there, sort of buried in your statement is the fact that understand how to target your audience to a specific enough size where you're like, that's as many people as I can find that fit this profile at a time. What that means is you're not doing a spray and pray method where you're like, I'm gonna get a list of 200,000 people and hope that a hundred are interested.
You are saying, I'm gonna find the hundred that I want to talk to and start. From that. Yeah, I am doing mass outreach, but I'm um, a little bit superstitious about it. 'cause the people that you're reaching out to don't like to be on an [00:09:00] email list. So I do like to try to personalize a little bit and I feel like if I have a list that's too long, maybe they can smell it out.
So I'm a bit careful. I think that's the process everybody should be following. We do like every year, although we're increasing the cyclicality of this. A more intensive research deep dive where we look at the data of our customer's performance, and we actually get down to like words being used, word count, timing, frequency, like we look at sort of all the variables that we can help users control, and then we also reach out to recipients, separately, decision makers and, and ask like, what do you think about cold outreach?
How did, how does this impact you, et cetera. Bring those two together in the research. And I think one of the things we found was the sort of knee in the curve of effectiveness was like right around a hundred. So you could tell I, I wish I had the report here. Right. Handy. 'cause I'd, I'd recall the the data point.
Yeah. Like right around a hundred is a break point in effectiveness in campaigns. And that's why I found it so interesting that you'd kind of. Picked up on that number. That's mad. Well, maybe it's not me doing it. Then maybe. Maybe [00:10:00] this is just the way the stars align. You didn't get to this on a guess your first time out.
Right? At some point you went from zero to something to some number greater than zero with your business, and in that experience of going from zero to your first a hundred clients or what have you, you learned some things, and I'm guessing this is probably one of the byproducts of that experience. Yeah.
How does it work for you guys with your company? Are you doing cold outreach campaigns? We do that. Yeah. Not, not mostly, but that's one of the things that we have now in our go-to-market motion is, is doing cold outreach. It would be a tad insane for us to not do it, given what we do. If you're doing B2B work, how many other distribution options do you have?
You know, it used to be that Twitter was kind of good for B2B and then it got overwhelmed with noise and then it was LinkedIn kind of filled the gap only. Now the thing that I hear most consistently about LinkedIn is hard to stand out because of all the noise and. If you're doing B2B, it's like, okay, other than email and cold calls and advertising.
How many choices are there and cold calls [00:11:00] don't work either. If you're not doing cold email. It's kind of a question of like, well, what are you doing? And how effective is that actually, because I'm, I'm impressed more than anything. What other tools would you have used? So I, 'cause I know you, you have a tool that is.
Kind of semi V two B that you market, like talk about how you distribute that platform and get it in front of people. I think you're speaking about my lower ticket one where I'm supporting filmmakers and the short way to describe it is it's a database of grants and opportunities with a paywall that, again, email, email's the driver.
So you would've seen one of my lead magnet. Which drops you onto a email list, which then I can email people and offer it to them that I don't stop at a hundred. That's many more people, but it's a different beast. I think I, it doesn't have to be personalized to the same degree. The offering is uniform always, rather than me trying to find an angle on a story for a newspaper.
Yeah, it's a bit different. More of a traditional. Traditional marketing play instead of something more direct and targeted. Yeah, it makes [00:12:00] sense. Yeah. It is fascinating though to watch numbers on this stuff behind the scenes, isn't it? Because it's like a, I'm sure you know this better than me 'cause you deal with much larger numbers, but you can almost see like human psychology at work.
It's fascinating based on like the time you send and, and how you word things and what you offer. For us, it always translates to, the better you understand your audience, the better you can dial those things in which in our perspective, our interpretation of the research is that the reason smaller lists perform better is because of that right there.
You can dial in the personalization about as far as you need to in order to really make it tight. 'cause either you're doing bespoke emails one-off and you're really deep diving, and if you have a higher value, if you're dealing in like enterprise software or consulting. That probably makes sense. You do want it to be hyper, hyper-personalized, but almost the rest of us, right?
Like everybody else. We need to find a way to reach at least a few people at a time and that, yeah, that number seems to be a sweet spot. You didn't get to a hundred overnight. Let's talk about your first few clients. How did that [00:13:00] experience go? How did, how did you go from, maybe I should get paid to do this, or maybe, maybe I should actually go and find some additional companies or customers to work for?
How did you go from, from zero to one or zero to 10? You find something that works and you do more of it? Isn't it? So the first, the first story I made was 2012, I guess so a little while ago. And my friend gave me 10 contacts on a little Excel spreadsheet. 'cause he'd been working for a while before and they were good contacts as well.
They were New Yorker and he was really generous. And I sold to one of those people and I think it blew my mind 'cause I, I realized that I could maybe make money as a photographer. Then I just did more and more and more of the same thing until I tapped out. The thing that tapped me out was time and energy.
So, 'cause you can't scale one person. Yeah. No, not well. Do you remember the pitch? Do you remember the the, that first pitch that got that first job? Yeah. It was horrible. It was so long, so long. I don't think it was the pitch that did it. I was really lucky. Won a competition. It, they partially wanted [00:14:00] to cover the results of the competition, but it just so happened that my story hadn't been published either, so they took that along as a X drop.
That's fascinating. How long after that gig did you generate enough business where you were like, this is my full-time thing now? Oh, immediately I jumped straight in. Wow. That's a huge risk. Yeah. That's, that's awesome. Yeah. Well, it was the, the timing was quite lucky. I just finished a master's degree in Dallas and um, I got dumped by my girlfriend also in Dallas.
So I thought to myself, all right, well what am I gonna do? I've got, you know, now it is all or nothing. So I went to Asia, I went to Southeast Asia, and I started, and I dived into a. Nasty little conflict over there. And I was the only non-local journalist. Everybody wanted the work. Well, I, I won't say it took off 'cause it never really takes off, but it, but then I was making a living.
Yeah. That's amazing. Most entrepreneurial stories. Don't start that. Lucky I not lucky. 'cause like that's, that, [00:15:00] that undersells what you've done. That's not the right word, but like. So it's a very auspicious beginning. Yeah, no, it was, of course it was a bit, it's always a, it's always what? Half luck and half judgment, I would say, isn't it?
But how did you get started then? How? Because you've grown a company from zero. Let me give you the more scientific perspective on this. So I think in order to do this, what we do in terms of like starting a software company, there's lots of components that, that you need to do, but I think one of them is a certain tolerance for risk.
And I don't know, a sort of naive or like an optimistic, it's optimism to the point of almost naty, but like in order to start something from scratch, no, it's the same concept, right? You have to have a vision. For the world. That includes a thing that either isn't there today or is dramatically different than what's there today and the insane beliefs that you can actually make that happen.
And so. I think starting anything re requires a certain amount of that. But usually in something like a startup, like a tech startup, [00:16:00] so many moving parts, right? Because it's actually, you know, so a friend of mine has been working in the film industry at Hollywood for a little bit, and we were talking about this, about the parallels because when you're building a software company, you have to have a clear enough vision that you can communicate to people that they get excited about it, that they wanna be a part of it, and that they're willing to take some risks.
In being a part of it, right? It's not as simple as, Hey, here's, you know, Hey, you work for Facebook. Don't you want to just make no money and take all the risk and have no prospects until you create them? Nobody goes, yeah, sign me up for that, except idiots like me. So I think there's a certain. Risk tolerance that's necessary, but I found that I probably have a somewhat unique risk tolerance and that it makes me very good at the early stage because I'm able to tolerate things that are ambiguous.
I, I, my ability to deal with ambiguity I, I think, is just greater than some people's, and that makes me well suited to that stage of a venture where everything's ambiguous. Most [00:17:00] people feel like they need a certain amount of data to make business decisions and. Part of the reason businesses slow down once they get going is you start to depend on that data to make decisions, or you build a business with a bunch of people in it, and that's the only real way you can tell what a good idea is from a bad idea sometimes, but in the early days, you don't have that benefit.
You don't have the data. In fact, if often what you're doing is you're staring at something that doesn't make sense on paper and you're saying, I'm gonna go, will this into life, I'm gonna will this into existence and like a film. It's very much like that. It depends on bringing a lot of creative people together because they have to execute the thing you have in your head to make it real.
It doesn't. It's not just real for everybody. You have to make, they have to help you make it real. The difference with software is you can iterate, you can make a mistake and then correct. Whereas with certain endeavors like film or tv, you can't, like you've gotta get it right in that pilot or you probably don't get picked up.
Or if it hits the box office and it fails, you know, that's probably it. [00:18:00] Although I think Marvel has changed that with their obsession with Reshoots. They are, Marvel might be a more iterative, or Disney might be more iterative than film has ever been. But I think other than that, it's usually a sort of one shot.
I really liked bringing people together to be creative and to make a thing exist that didn't exist and I, I just really enjoy that and so I got hooked on it early. It was also more predictable, right? Like the nice thing about software is if you spend a year rushing it and you do an amazing job, those people more often than not, are still paying you the following year.
So you can build on that, whereas. Not every industry gives you that opportunity. It took me a long time, I think, to kind of figure that out, but then once I did it was just a no brainer. I'll just keep doing this probably for forever because I just enjoy the, the activity of building the business this way.
It's really fun for me. Yeah, it's lovely, isn't it? That compounding subscription model is a incredible thing. Yeah, I mean, it works for everybody. It works for, for, for the business and it also works for [00:19:00] the the customers because it's a lower price. And ideally you're signing up for something where the company who builds it is also saying, this is a subscription thing.
We're gonna just keep making this better for the foreseeable future. That. I like that model. I, I like the model of we're all signing up to make this work together. And, uh, you can just stop paying if it's not working for you. And that kind of keeps your feet to the fires personally. That's why I really like this and I like doing, doing what I do, is just scaling creative ideas, I guess.
Have you had, um, scary moments on the journeys because.
You are the guy with no safety net. A hundred percent. Yeah. Yeah. I know. I'm, it's, like I said, it's sort of all a string of terrifying moments and you either have the disposition where you look at that and go, yeah, but I can figure that out. Like, you know, you're either one of those people or it's not right for you.
If you [00:20:00] can't deal with a string of setbacks and ambiguous opportunities, then not a good fit. You know, it just works for me. For you, you are saying, Hey, I'm gonna go out into the world and I'm gonna use my creative vision for things. I'm gonna find these opportunities to tell these stories, and I'm just betting that somebody's gonna pay me for that.
And then, and then you're gonna do it again. Like, that's a, that's such a huge bet on yourself, but be because you're, you become an enterprise of one, right? Yeah. Stupid isn't it? It's my kind of stupid Yeah, yeah. Like it's exactly the kind of lunacy that, that, that I find appealing. Yeah. But like one of the things that comes up when you talk to any entrepreneur in any space that I think is, is interesting, is like, do you spike, consider yourself a salesperson.
Oh yeah, probably if you asked me a year ago, I probably would've said no. I just didn't realize that I was back in 2013, I'd made world press winning story if I hadn't have pitched it. If a tree falls in the woods, yeah. You know what I mean? You [00:21:00] can have the best thing in the world, but if you don't tell people about it, then it's.
Useless. It's an audience of one. And that's you and your mom. Maybe your nan. So Yeah. Yeah. I'm a salesperson. Yeah. I always thought a salesperson was the guy on the phone. Cold, cold calling, or the guy knocking on the wall. But yeah, not in the way that I thought. Not in the conventional way, but Yeah, absolutely.
And yourself. Oh, yeah. But, but I've recognized this at an early, at an early point. In fact, one of the things that I realized was that the, one of the secrets to my early success was the fact that I did have sales conversations all the time. What I realized was what I was learning in those conversations was incredibly valuable to making the rest of the business very successful.
I learned early on that if you as a founder or a CEO or an entrepreneur are not acting as a salesperson, you're missing something. There is a gap in the business that you're not seeing that's gonna cost you at some point. But I remember early in my career, the idea of being a salesperson was like, I was allergic to that idea.
I did not want that to be true. But it's funny, at a [00:22:00] certain point you realize if you're any good at any of this, you're probably selling across the time, right? Yeah. Do you mean that if you're not selling, there's a gap that you're missing because you're not seeing your pitches fail? Yeah. You learn a lot, at least in the software industry, losing a deal, like going through the negotiation process, selling and not winning.
There's critical information there about parts of the market that your solution doesn't well fit. If you're not selling, you are not getting that data, you are not learning about those gaps, and in some cases you might look at it and go like. Yeah, look, hunter is building to make all of this cold outreach business as accessible to everyone as humanly possible.
I want one person founders to pick it up and feel like it's so simple that there's no reason not to do it. So for us, if we go into a big enterprise and are having a conversation with a really complex business, we are gonna learn. There's [00:23:00] all kinds of things we don't do. Well, or we don't do the way they would want it, and for us, the answer most of the time is, and that's okay.
Sometimes you're learning something about the market that reinforces the things that you're already deciding to do, but other times that's where your growth opportunities are. And so at some point you've saturated something or it's time to pivot, and you need to start looking at where the other opportunities are.
And if you don't have that conduit of conversations, you are gonna not know. It's, it's, it's the most ambiguous you can get because it's an unknown unknown, at least if you're having the conversations, it's a known unknown, and then you can figure it out. But I think a lot of people are so afraid to get lumped into the sales function that they avoid it or they're afraid of it, or they think they're not good at it.
And I am saying even in spite of all that, you should probably be doing it. Yeah, no, totally. And as you were talking, I was thinking a lot about fear, and you mentioned that word as well. It's a big deal, isn't it? I think it's something that I had to overcome and many people don't. Or, [00:24:00] or it takes them a while to overcome it.
And it's not necessarily the fear of failure. Well, I, no, it is. There's, there's totally the fear of failure in there for me or was early on, but it's also the fear of getting something wrong publicly. Some sort of fear of shame, some sort of looking silly, stupid. But once I switched over to not really minding about that.
It was a bit of a superpower because like you said, there's so much knowledge in that. I mean, as long as you can calm your own ego enough for it to be okay to get through it, to learn through it, fear is a beast. Fear will will stop a person. Yeah. I think the thing that, I don't know why, but it worked for me that I figured out if you are afraid of selling, it's because you're probably not doing it right?
Because effective selling means you are not doing most of the talking. And so it means that if you're thinking about it, right, all you really are doing is can I ask good questions? Can I just be a curious person and can I think about do I [00:25:00] have enough information through this conversation to solve their problem?
And if you look at it more like that, like it's just a creative problem solving exercise where you're gathering enough information to know if you can help. I think. For me that changed it. Whereas if you're thinking about it as like, oh, I gotta close this deal to make enough money to like hit my number.
So like if you add all the sales stress overhead to it, it's very easy to get distracted from the important part, which is I need to find 30 minutes with this person to shut up and just, yeah. And then you, and then you learn about, and then you learn about people's problems and, and maybe they mentioned something else that you can solve for them in the future, but it is that dark side.
Is that, is that preconception of the sales person as. Convincing somebody to buy something that they don't need, that's unethical. And it's, I don't think it's what most people are doing. No. I think, yeah, there is this perception that, what is it that this, this, the saying, uh, from when I was a kid is like selling ice to Eskimos.
You know, like there's this impression that you've gotta be this guy who can convince anybody to buy anything. And I'm like, first off, that [00:26:00] exists and those people are there and that's fine and that's a hell of a skill, but. Most of the time you're just trying to problem solve with people. You can also look at it like, um, just making an offer.
Can't you? Look, I have this thing that I think is useful. Would you like it? It can't be as simple as that. I think that in a face-to-face sales environment, you would outsell me. I could not sell on the phone or, or in person, I don't think, but email fine. Yeah, I've had to do it. It's, I don't ever wanna do it again.
You know what it is? I all joking aside on, on things like cold calling, for me it's a fundamental thing, right? Like, have you, you've cold called, right? You've picked up the phone and you've never even tried. No, no. Oh, okay. Different era. Uh, this was early in my career when I had to like, learn how to do this and, you know, have managers who like record your calls and then play it back with your whole team and like.
Let's listen to one of Matt's calls, and then they're like, oh, you shouldn't have said this, or, oh, you should do this. So like, if you've never lived a day in the life of like a true rep, it's [00:27:00] grueling. It's it's exposing in ways that are uncomfortable, but you get better. And when you see yourself get better from it, you're like, okay, I can deal with that a little bit more and a little bit more.
And you get to a certain point where you realize like. Probably the secret to success actually is being able to go back and be willing to take constructive feedback and really put it in play. But it's hard, but like cold calling. For me, the break is I'm a busy person. You are a busy person. Our phones serve a purpose for us and we have to prioritize their time, and I can't, I can't operate as a hypocritical person.
It just doesn't work for me. I too much self-loathing and it just doesn't feel right. So if I'm not willing to take a cold call because I'm a busy and if I'm taking your call, it means I accidentally picked up and I had something way more important to do. And if I'm talking to you, then there's an opportunity cost to that that has nothing to do with that person.
It has everything to do with the fact that honestly, if I have enough time to take a cold call, I'm probably not doing my job [00:28:00] right. So there's just a certain amount of respect in that for me, and I can't, if I'm not willing to take those calls, I can't in good conscious make those calls because I think the other person on the other end like me is a decision maker with lots going on and lots to do.
I think it's far more respectful. I think it's far more. I'm just respectful is good enough. It's just respectful to be able to send somebody a message that says, if this is interesting, let's talk about it. And if not, I'm not gonna bother you by calling you 55 times and trying to trick you into catching this.
I'm not trying to trick you into talking to me. I want it to be, I, I, I just want to have a conversation on better terms than that. And so for me it's that, it's a very philosophical thing I realize, but, um, that's what it gets. That's, that's, that's what gets in the way of cold calling for me. I don't. I don't find efficient either.
I feel like there's a R, there's an ROI problem with it too, but, oh yeah. Yeah. One thing that I used to do, which is the other end of the spectrum, the and the utmost of personalization in terms of sales, I would, instead of pitching these editors that we spoke about or the producers, [00:29:00] the story in a email, I'd go to New York first and then I'd say, and I'd email it.
All the editors I knew were in New York and I'd say, I'm in town. You wanna go get coffee? And then we'd go hang out and have coffee and then, but then that relationship was cemented for so long, they recognized that I showed up in person. And, uh, the ROI on that was quite good, except for the flight. How do you think.
Yeah. So one thing that hasn't come up yet in all of this discussion, and I have to ask, and this is not just me teasing, 'cause I know you, you, you, you use Hunter, but a lot of time gets spent in, when people talk about this, like in our industry, there's just a lot of conversation about tech Stack Tech.
Everybody's really wound up about, oh, I can do this and this. I can pull these five pieces of technology together, blah, blah, blah. It is really ornate and I'm not against it. I think it's really cool and kind of creative, but it also is overkill for probably 90% of the market. But you haven't mentioned tech once really.
It's interesting 'cause like is tech stack important to you or are you [00:30:00] looking for the fewest possible technologies? Like how do you think about technology in your workflows? Um, the simplest. Stack possible. If you, if you wanna say, in the documentary work I make, that's just Adobe Premier or, or Photoshop and, and obviously hardware, the cameras.
So that, that, that's easy. In the, in the low ticket stuff, the, the database I offer, it's really simple. It's a mm-hmm. Email scheduler. It's a database. So Airtable, it's Webflow for website front end and that's about it. That's about it. Super lean. I think it only costs me like 600 bucks a month is my bill for all of that stuff.
If you leave me alone in a room, I will overcomplicate it and I will try to implement AI and I, you know what I mean? And I'll try to have it all automated and, you know, I'll use Zapier and all these things to, to try and add functionality, but people don't really want it. I've, I've found the, my audience doesn't really want [00:31:00] overcomplicated stuff, and then honestly, it's too much for me to get my head around.
And then something will break a connection. A, a zap will break and something will mess up. And right now I'm in the process of stripping everything out and making everything as simple as possible. I love, I love technology. It can do amazing things for us, but it can also, I. Suck a lot of time for For me.
Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And your point about sometimes something breaks, like that's the other part that people don't think about a lot is the support, the sort of maintenance of it, and then just the sort of mental distraction that that can create sometimes, which I think is bigger than most people think about.
Yeah. Yeah. 'cause we only have so much time and energy. Yeah. I think once, you know, it boils down quite easy, doesn't it? Once you, you find who you want to reach out to and then you just write 'em an email or, or, or reach out to 'em in the simplest way possible. Anything else is over complication and. For, for me, I don't dunno.
I, I dunno how other people are doing it, but no, I think, look, there are agencies where they focus on this as their proficiency is all they do. [00:32:00] And if they need to scale up really flexible or, you know, deeply articulate tech stacks to be able to automate more of it. Like I get that right, they're doing a high volume job, they need all of that, but I think they're also the ones disproportionately talking to the market.
And so if you are a solo person or a, you know, a small team, you know, if you are, if you're James and you're, you're building a marketing organization, all the, all that you hear is like tech stack, tech stack. Oh, you gotta sign up to this. Oh, I'm using this. It's a game changer. But I think when you're talking about small teams or, or individuals trying to build up their portfolio, it's no, the simpler, the better.
And I think it's a lack of hearing that that's an acceptable answer a lot of the time. Well, for me it's not necessarily, less is more in terms of tech stack. It's over time. I'm finding a few platforms that work incredibly well together. So I'm finding what works for me and before perhaps I'd use like three [00:33:00] things because I didn't know that this other platform existed that would do everything.
So now it's simpler, it's simplifying because I'm finding better platforms, really. Which is, which is what's happening. It takes a little bit of effort off my play. It's supposed to be the promise of technology after all. Right. It's taking things off your plate. Yeah, and we can't live without it anymore.
We do seem dangerously close to that being a true statement. Yeah.
How about you guys? I mean, what's yours look like without giving too much away? We are, despite being digital first and probably almost everybody on the team, being a bit of a tech geek, we've opted for a more simple stack, and so we have. One marketing outreach platform that does sort of all of our customer communications and you know, all of our marketing type stuff.
And then we have one platform for our customer success. But like we've gone the opposite route where we've tried to get the fewest possible tools for each team to do what they need to do effectively and [00:34:00] efficiently. And so our company tech stack is probably lighter weight than most. And then for cold outreach, you know, we're using our end product.
So it's, yeah, it's homegrown in that regard. But. Yeah. Also, when you can use your own product, you see where it, you see what you can do better. Yeah. Yeah. And every once in a while we'll fold people in who are used to using other platforms and have them do a project with us, and then be like, and by the way, part of your job is to tell us what you would've been able to do differently had you had certain features.
So we can evaluate if it makes sense for the rest of our users. And so, yeah, we use that as a, as a kind of a technique to also get information, which, uh. Which works. But I have a different question for you. So have you ever been cold emailed and like responded and like bought from a cold email? Bought from a cold email?
Yeah, I've definitely been cold emailed and the, the best ones are appear people cold emailing me off me work, you know? And of course I'd take those ones. [00:35:00] I don't get cold emailed much. I, I, I honestly can't, I have been thinking about this recently. I, I honestly don't think I have. That's interesting. It's not a very good answer to your question.
No, it's okay. But you should, uh, you should figure out how to sell that secret because for those of us that get hundreds a day, that's, uh, we'd all love to figure out to have a bubble like Spike. I dunno why I do not. Yeah. But that's not to say I wouldn't, I mean, if someone had something that I wanted, I definitely would buy it.
Oh, well, yeah, probably. I have, oh, no. I'll tell you what. It would've been that courses or education from a particular very famous internet businessman. Wait, keep that very vague. Yeah. Alex Hormo. Of course. There you go. Yeah. Yeah. I definitely bought his books from a cold email. I wanted to be so cynical about him because he was just so ubiquitous for a while, and that kind of irks me when, but goodness gracious, like.
I dig [00:36:00] it like he's doing good work. Yeah. Yeah. Holy shit. What a mind. What a mind. Yeah. Yeah. So I, I guess so, but the best cold emails are when people ask me if I'll work for them. That's lovely. That sounds like callous. That's cheating. That's funny. I'll let you know one last thing, I just had another thought about Tech Stack.
What I am loving at the moment about tech is that although I'm simplifying the tech that I am using. I'm not trying to implement AI into my stuff at all. I'm not trying to build my own AI processes and, and drag it into the work that I do, but I'm really enjoying the software platforms that I'm using.
There's just AI functionality popping up, which is making things so much easier. I'm, I'm enjoying that a lot, so, so, although I'm not, I guess actually it, it points back to what we were saying before, doesn't it? On, on subscription services. The platform will iterate while you're using it. And I'm enjoying that.
I'm, I'm enjoying the AI stuff, right? And everybody was so focused on how [00:37:00] AI was gonna disrupt in ways that they, that they couldn't keep up with, that they didn't get a chance to talk as much about, honestly, this is an, a glorious period of new tool sets for a, for software companies. And if you're just thinking about being a hybrid business and you're just thinking like, okay, if it's a set of tools.
Is there anything that that tool can do better that I'm currently doing than what I'm currently using? And if you start folding AI in like that, it's, I first off, it's way more practical, but I think also it really delivers value in clear cut ways. We don't all have to be Chad, GBT, we shouldn't all be rushing to try to mimic Chad GBT, but I think there's certainly lots that you can do to bring that to bear, to make your, have you, I'm curious, have you tried writing your pitches?
Have you tried using, uh, any of the AI tools for that? Did it work? Did you like it better? No, I do not yet. There will be a day. There will be a day. Do you know what it lacks? The, um, the thing that I've found that is most, that makes the, the secret [00:38:00] sauce in the pictures that I write is the personal story.
So like, if I can share a bit about me or like how I overcame this thing, or how this was a problem, or just how I'm, you know, making this work and AI does not have that, it can't do it. Maybe one day it will. But what about you? Are you using it for writing? I mean, it's incumbent upon us to try to figure out the easy low hanging fruit opportunities for improvement for almost everybody I've seen doing cold outreach is in the writing.
There was such a long phase of. Email templates with personalization variables that ended up, how do I say this? It's like they ended up demonstrating technology for technology's sake instead of using the technology to, to solve personalization. What they were saying is like. Here's some data that you can have about Spike.
So when you write, spike an email, open it with, Hey, spike, as owner of your own photography business studio, whatever they, whatever thing they come up with. [00:39:00] It's like your business name insert here. You know, I'm sure you deal with problems like X, Y, and Z all the time. And so what ends up happening is there's all these like sentences and paragraphs where the real purpose is to demonstrate that they somehow know things about you and like.
Most of the time those are dumb. They don't add any value, they don't actually move the conversation forward or solve a problem. And, and so I think what happened was for a long time that was leading the best practices in cold outreach, a AI is so much more effective at that job than email templates were.
And it does a much better not job of not trying to do the wrong things unless you tell it to. And so I think in that regard. It's better. And look, at the end of the day, no one cares if it's ai. The recipient doesn't care. The sender doesn't care. All that matters is is that communicating the message in a way that is gonna make the most sense and be the most relevant to the recipient.
And if it, if AI and AI is fundamentally better at doing that job. So we're incorporating that into our email campaigns. [00:40:00] But to me, it's less about AI writing it and it's more about. Getting the templates and the personalization variables outta there. It's like those are not the right tool for the job anymore.
So it's more from that perspective than anything. It underpins everything, doesn't it? Just the written word. It's so powerful. I agree. I think it, this is my, my thing with cold outreach is if people focus on the basics and just. Got better at writing the message in the first place that would probably pay more dividends than any tech or any playbook that they've read.
It's, it's really, if you focus on those and you get good at those, the conversations that will generate are gonna be the ones you want anyway. But I don't mean to pepper over that. Like that's some clear cut, easy solve problem. I don't think selling ideas is everybody's strength. Yeah, true. And. I think organizing your thoughts like, I like writing for that reason.
I use it as a tool to organize ideas and thoughts, but like, like we talked about earlier is you [00:41:00] can't rally a group of people around an idea that idea's not gonna happen. It's not gonna get done. I think that's a vital skill that's under sold to people I think. You see this in education because so many people in education are just letting Chad, GBT do all the work now and not using it to refine their ability to tell stories with words.
And I think that's just, um, yeah, it's gonna create problems for people at some point. Yeah. And telling stories with, with words boils down to organizing thought. Yeah, it is dangerous if people lean on it too hard. I, I do wonder, I love living in this era we we're in, I love science fiction and we are now in it.
We just haven't realized we have self-driving cars. We have ai. AI is here. My God. Yep. We got, I trying to fly to Mars whether or not he'll get Deb. Olms have finally created the translation layer for language for robotics, right? That was one of the biggest problems robotics suffered from was an interface problem.
If you can't speak to it, you can't put it in people's [00:42:00] homes, and so it's just sort of dead on arrival, right? Because how are you going to tell the object what to do? That's now a solved problem. You're right, the science. We're like in the middle of the beginning of the science fiction tornado. 2030 is gonna be kind of wild, right?
I hope I live long enough to to see like the next 50 years. Agreed. Although you shouldn't be questioning whether you live long enough at your age, you're gonna be just fine. You're gonna see all of it. I'm older than I look, man. Well, do you know what? I'm, uh, I'm playing a safer game now. I'm, I'm not going to dangerous places so much, so it's on my side.
Yeah. I have to admit, after we reached out, one of the things that I did was, uh, I was like, you know what I'll do? I'll just look at the news, figure out where all the action's happening, and I'll just go there. The pictures will just take themselves essentially. And then I was like, oh, wait a minute. I have a high tolerance for risks, but not putting my family's and my companies.
Like, I can't put them at risk. I can put myself at risk to a certain extent, but when it starts to risk other things, so I [00:43:00] very quickly curtailed that behavior of like, yeah, let me, yeah, there's chaos in dc Let me fly to dc. I mean, that's, that makes a lot like, I, yeah, I, I, I decided not to follow that. Oh, man.
Yeah. I'm very grateful for my family for letting me do that stuff. I feel so guilty. My God, the, the shit I put them through, bless them all. They shouldn't have named me Spike. Right. Yeah. I mean, you were s. Had to live up to it. You were gonna be a troublemaker from the time you came out. Right. Did you, um, when on the, on your way up with your building companies, without that safety net, was there a, were your family worried ever?
I mean, probably I, yeah, of course they were. The question is like, did it ever reach a point where they felt they needed to communicate about it? No. I think I've done a good enough job of managing the downside risk. Of doing what I do to make that less of an impact on my family. That's how I chose to manage it.
And that's worked out fairly [00:44:00] well. Yeah, well done. Well that takes skill though, because if you didn't manage the downside well enough, you could have run outta money and you know, that's awful. Yes. No, I mean I did that like I took the payoff from my first success, so bankroll my working for free for almost a year to start the next company.
And subsequently watched that get completely wiped out and then had to completely start all over again 10 years after the sort of first foray into software. So yeah, I know like, but that's part of the game. If you're not willing to invest in the idea, then you're probably not right about it. When the idea is right, you know, and you're like, yeah, okay, it's worth this thought I managed it better, would've been a really amazing situation for me.
So in awe, I think, um, unless you've tried it, you dunno how difficult it is. I am a, a novice in comparison and it's hard as hell. So you've done a amazing job. [00:45:00] I'm a tactile learner, so for me, I just have to do things. I just have to jump in and try it and then fail at it, and then figure out why I failed at it and then correct that next time.
And it's probably a very slow way to learn, but it, it, it works for me and it keeps me busy. It's the only way to learn if you don't fail, you don't know if you haven't pushed it far enough. Yeah, exactly. Who wants to not be successful and know they left, they left energy in the bag. Like, oh, if only I had tried harder, I would've succeeded.
Like, you don't wanna say that. Yeah. You didn't really commit. Yeah. If you were on your deathbed and, and you, and you wondered, oh, I wonder if I could have been a millionaire. You know what I mean? Yeah. Yeah. I definitely No regrets. Thanks so much. Agreed. Listen man, this was fun. I've really enjoyed it. It is great to catch up.
Um, I think there's some great. Things that came out of this discussion that'll help people in how they think about this work and how they think about growing their businesses of any kind. And I [00:46:00] think also if you're, if you live in the software universe or you live in the consulting universe, I think there's a ton of value that fi in finding out that a successful photojournalist has to do all the same stuff.
You've, you've gotta do the outreach and it can be successful when you find the right way to do it for your space. You just kind of gotta grind at it and then keep learning and keep listening and not overcomplicate things. I think there's a lot of really great advice in here, so I'd really appreciate you being willing to share that.
Thanks, man. Yeah, it's those, those fundamentals transcend industry, don't they? And also the thing that came across is if you want it bad enough, you've gotta go get it. 'cause no one's gonna get it for you. Same as cold outreach, they're not gonna ask you to send them an email, you just gotta do it. No, we aren't all Spike.
Where the cold emails we get are people offering us jobs that doesn't, uh, that doesn't exist.
Few and far between, mate, few and far between. Good luck between now [00:47:00] and the end of the year with your, with your filming work. Can't wait to hear more about it and, uh, we'll, we'll, we'll check out critical in the meantime, James and I. And yeah. Any, any parting, parting words of wisdom? Try as hard as you can.
Fair enough. I can disagree with that. Yeah. That's simple, isn't it? Thanks for chatting with me, mate. It's been really nice hanging out with you guys. Appreciate it.
