SEO Podcast The Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing

Unlocking Growth: How to Raise $250M for Tech and SaaS Companies with Hamlet Azarian Ep. 616

• bestseopodcast.com • Episode 616

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Join us for a conversation with Hamlet Azarian from Azarian Growth Agency as we explore the key differences between growth and traditional agencies. Hamlet explains how managing the customer lifecycle, from acquisition to retention, maximizes customer lifetime value. Learn how programs like the National Science Foundation optimize acquisition costs and attract investors.

Hamlet shares his experience scaling businesses, including a successful M&A exit. Success stories like CBDFX’s rise through SEO and Disco’s transformation of Survey Junkie into a unicorn highlight the power of strategic experimentation.

We also discuss scaling startups from $1 million to $10 million, investor criteria, and the future of AI-driven personalization. Tune in for actionable advice.

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Guest Contact Information: 

Hamlet Azarian

LinkedIn:  https://www.linkedin.com/in/hamletazarian/

Twitter:   https://x.com/hamletazarian

Azarian Growth Agency

LinkedIn:   https://www.linkedin.com/school/azarian-growth-agency/

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The Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing podcast is a podcast hosted by Internet marketing expert Matthew Bertram. The show provides insights and advice on digital marketing, SEO, and online business. 

Topics covered include keyword research, content optimization, link building, local SEO, and more. The show also features interviews with industry leaders and experts who share their experiences and tips. 

Additionally, Matt shares his own experiences and strategies, as well as his own successes and failures, to help listeners learn from his experiences and apply the same principles to their businesses. The show is designed to help entrepreneurs and business owners become successful online and get the most out of their digital marketing efforts.

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Speaker 1:

Howdy. Welcome back to another fun-filled episode of the Unknown Secrets of Networking. I am your host, Matt Bertram. I have a special episode here today. I have a special guest, Hamlet Azarian, with Azarian Growth Agency. He also has quite a big ecosystem of other things that he does, and really one of the key topics that people have been asking me about is growth agency versus traditional agency and what the difference is, and so I brought Hamlet on to kind of explain that, share his story and talk about some things that you might be able to do to incorporate some of these strategies into what you're doing and clients that you have, as well as if you might be one of these clients. Azarian might be a great connection for you. All right, Hamlet, let me know. Tell me what is the difference? How would you define growth agency versus traditional agency? Let's start there.

Speaker 2:

Well, first of all, matthew, thanks for having me on. It's a pleasure to be here, really excited about being on the show. So, yeah, let me explain what the big difference between a traditional agency and a growth agency, the way we describe it. So, in most digital marketing areas, traditional agencies are really concerned about the funnel. This, typically, what I mean by that is they're trying to acquire the customers for you, they're trying to get them to your landing page, they're trying to convert them, and that's really the main focus. They don't go above and beyond that.

Speaker 2:

And what a growth agency does, which is a little bit different, is a growth agency is looking at the full funnel, and what I mean by the full funnel is not only getting the customers to show up, not only getting them to buy, but getting them to buy again and then continuously tell their friends and build sort of this full ecosystem.

Speaker 2:

That what you start doing is you start measuring what the lifetime value of a customer is, and your overarching goal of a growth agency is you want to increase the lifetime value as much as you can on, at the same time bringing the customer acquisition costs as low as you can, so you can have an LTV over over CAC, which is what investors try to shine upon and they get excited about when they see incredible numbers, typically in the 6, 7, 8%, the 8x range. So if you're make the math easy, if you do $1,000 a year in revenue and you're able to divide that by eight, and let's say you bring it in for $125, $150 for the customer acquisition cost, investors get excited and they're ready to invest into your business.

Speaker 1:

So it's really about, well, full funnel management, right, or full brand management. You're looking at the lifetime value of the customer, you're looking at the repeat business cycle, but really I think the key difference is helping tell the story to different stakeholders on the value of the digital marketing you're providing beyond just bottom line revenue growth, of getting this lead in the door for this very snapshot of this month or this quarter or something like that. You're looking at more of the longer term and you're trying to incorporate these strategies into that. I think even like that's part of it.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, for sure, that's definitely part of it. The other difference, which I didn't get into, is you're embedded into the product itself. So there are times where marketing actually can change the outcome of what the product is, because what you're trying to do is you're getting to this notion of product to market fit, and what does that really really mean? Right, and what that really means is you as a marketer because your front lines, you're able to really test and iterate different value propositions and sometimes you're able to actually test things that the product team is thinking about building and they're not built yet yet to be able to prioritize what should actually be executed in the product roadmap. And what this sometimes leads to is a completely brand new product that people weren't envisioning before, because the market wants this, wants A versus B, and so on and so forth.

Speaker 1:

So, like quantitative research, maybe you're doing some surveys, you're doing some studies, like I think you know, throwing stuff out there on Twitter or social media to see how people are responding to it. I mean, can you expand upon that a little bit? Yeah, of course.

Speaker 2:

So what you're doing is a bunch of several things, right? So I can give you one example. I'll give you a non-paid version of an example and I'll give you a paid version of an example. So, on a non-paid version, we had a client and they had just recently gotten a seed investment. A seed investment is a small round that typically is designed for you to be able to build the product itself. And the founder came to us and he was telling us hey, I'm about to build this product, but I'm not sure if the market really wants it. And it was a small amount, it was like 350, $400,000 that he got in. He was a technical founder, he led a large engineering group at one of the big tech companies and he had the chops and the know-how on how to build this right, but he wasn't sure if he should invest his time into building this and if this would turn into a scalable business.

Speaker 2:

So what we did is we, with his support, got enrolled in a national program called the National Science Foundation NSF, and the reason we did that is we wanted to have a way of, as we reached out to this potential customers, to say that we were part of a program. And this was. We were doing customer discovery and we were going to, we were going to be interviewing them. What we really were doing was not just customer discovery, we were also trying to see what the market really wanted to do. We began a cold outreach strategy. We looked at LinkedIn. We found his ideal customer profile, which were engineering managers as well as CTOs at Fortune 100 and Fortune 500. So if you've ever tried to reach out to an engineering manager at a Fortune 1 or Fortune 5, it's incredibly hard to get them even interested to talk to you or even want to have a conversation with you. So because we were part of this program and it was affiliated with the University of Southern California, we were able to use that angle right. We had a USC email, we were part of this program. We looked at their LinkedIn profile and we said, hey, we really see that you've done incredibly well in your career. We just need about 15, 20 minutes of your time. We're working on this project and we want to see if there's even a market interest in it. That little program that I'm talking to you about. We only emailed about 150, 200 people, which resulted in about 100 phone calls. In those 100 phone calls, we quickly learned that there was a potential need, but it wasn't going to be a venture scale business. What it was really going to be was venture scale business. What it was really going to be was a lifestyle business, because everybody's engineering stack was so different that was going to be incredibly hard to build something that was venture scale.

Speaker 2:

Once we learned this, we were in this, you know, conundrum. What do we do? Do we move forward? We not move forward. You know, he had to go through a lot of soul searching and he came back and he went back to the investors and he said you know, guys, I don't think this is going to work out. This is not what I want to build. I want to build a $10 million a year business where it's a lifestyle business. What I really want to build is the next unicorn. I want to build a billion dollar business. So he went back and he actually gave the money back to the investors, which later on they ended up giving it all back to him, which led to his new venture that ended up becoming a venture-scaled business as well. So that's on a non-paid strategy, right On a paid strategy.

Speaker 2:

We had a similar problem, so this company was called Camino Financial.

Speaker 2:

We have case studies on it on our website and I'll probably talk about it a little bit here. We were running, we were targeting B2B businesses. These were Latina-owned, first-generation businesses that had come into the US and what we had started doing is running Facebook ads. But we were a broker, and what that means in fintech is we didn't really have a product yet and we weren't sure what our product needed to be. So we started testing different value propositions and different product offerings to see what would be interesting for our potential customers, and that allowed us to figure out what we call the microloan, which was an entry-level loan for businesses to be able to build out their credit score and their credit history. This testing and iteration process allowed us to eventually lend up to $150 million loans in first-generation businesses and family-owned businesses that have moved into the US. So this is two examples how the growth aspect of it led to the eventual either shutting down of the business, or also the path of growth that led to $150 million loan originations for the company.

Speaker 1:

Awesome. That's a great case study, hamlet, and I'm excited we just jumped right into this. Let's back up a little bit and you can credentialize a little bit your background. You've raised $250 million for different kind of startups. Why don't you share with the audience your origin story and how you got into this?

Speaker 2:

Yeah for sure. So initially, when the birth of the agency, let's say right. So what ended up happening is I was working for different startups as an advisor and I would come in and I would, you know, build out their strategies. And then eventually, one of the advisors that I met was Sean and Kenny Salas with Camino Financial, which I just kind of just shared the eventual results, and they asked me hey, can you do more than just advising? Can you actually execute? I said yeah, sure, but you know I like advising, but I can do it two or three days a week. That's all I can do. So I started working with them and I was having a ton of fun. We're growing the business. When I joined them we were only five people, six people. We eventually ended up growing the business to well over 150 employees, had offices in LA, mexico City as well as Columbia, and eventually had an M&A exit which allowed us to kind of have a full cycle from beginning to end.

Speaker 2:

But while I was working with them, I also met another company called CBDFX. They were a CPG brand and they wanted help and guidance on their SEO strategy. So CBD, as most of you guys know, is an incredibly competitive space, a huge search volume. You can't really run ads at that time, but you have to really dig in and build out an SEO strategy, which I provided guidance for them. Similar things started helping build out their teams of execution and now they are the second largest privately held brand of CBD in their category. So they're sold in the US. In Europe they're sold online and offline, they have a wholesale business and so on and so forth. Also at the same time, I started working for another company called Disco and I was leading their overall go-to-market strategy for their consumer-facing branch, which was Survey Junkie. This business ended up scaling. They were spending about $150,000 in ads. We scaled it to 1.5 million. They became a unicorn as well.

Speaker 2:

When I did all these things, different VCs started taking notice and they said, hey, how the heck are you doing this all at the same time across three different businesses? And I was like you know what? It's really not hard. I'm just finding really good people. I'm running a bunch of experiments and tests and through those experiments we're learning. And then they're like, yeah, but you're doing it all at the same time in three different companies, how's that happening? I'm like, well, I'm just testing the right things and they're like what does that mean? I'm like well, I'm just not. I'm not doing the basic test, right. I'm not doing the. Let me test the color of green versus red or the shade of red. I'm like, who cares about that? What is that going to give you 5% or 10%? I'm like testing the whole damn business. I'm testing the value proposition of the business, what really really matters, digging inside to the data and seeing where there's a special focal point that generates more, less churn, the customer stays with you longer, or whatever it might be. And I just come up with a bunch of ideas with the team and we just start running tons of experiments and we see if it works. And they're not like oh, we love that. Can you do that for more businesses? Like, no, I'm good, I'm good Because I knew what it took, right. I'm like I'm maxed out. I could only do this for three at a time. If one of them drops off or something happens, I will kind of help you out.

Speaker 2:

This went on for a while.

Speaker 2:

Two years passed, three years passed, and then eventually I started saying, okay, if the investors are asking me to start an agency, I probably should listen to them and begin an agency.

Speaker 2:

I was like I got to do it differently and what I wanted to do is I wanted to take one of the issues I was having with each one of these businesses was I might come up with a strategy, I might come up with the idea, but I still needed people right, I still needed talent, I still needed resources to be able to execute.

Speaker 2:

So I thought about okay, what if I already had the team? What if we were no longer an agency like a traditional agency, where we had specialists that were only working on multiple clients or multiple projects? What if we flipped it on its head and said what if we build dedicated teams that work on maximum one or two accounts, depending on the scope of work, and they go really deep in each one of those accounts? So it's almost like you're hiring a whole team and you're hiring it at the same rate you would have paid for a director. And what if this team has the selective learnings of all the experiments that are running across all of the accounts and is quickly able to identify tactics across different strategies that are working and implemented and, you know, obviously make it more unique for a specific customer? So that's what we've been so that's a very ingrowth agency.

Speaker 1:

And in addition to that yeah, no, there's two things I wanted to kind of add to what you're saying. I think that one of the big things that I've heard from clients that they've seen with a lot of traditional agencies out there is kind of this waterfall mentality as far as like delivery of work as well as like there's so many different people on the account or it's kind of the game of telephone. Some of the people doing the work are not engaged with the account as much or even met the account, and so it takes a long time to get stuff done. You're playing the game of telephone and then it's not like like there's easy things that if you were working on the account or the account manager would know that when it gets to the delivery person they don't have the benefit of all that kind of information. So structuring it from like an integrated team standpoint, where maybe there's somebody that's busy, that doesn't know what they want to do, and then they have a dedicated team to them, they can help with that execution, I think it's a great strategy and a structure that's really nice.

Speaker 1:

Also, I recently had interviewed Billy Jean is marketing. I don't know if you know who he is, but one of the things he said that really resonated with me. That really echoed in what you were saying was well, if you're looking for a 10X difference in what you're offering versus something else and you're trying to do little word changes or color changes, you're not going to get those big changes either way, and so, essentially, you need to change the overall offer. Or even another guy that I was interviewing, you got to change the whole name of the company. If you're maxing out two to three years because it's already found its place in the market, right, or or people don't know about it, that might be the issue.

Speaker 1:

But if you want outsized gains, you got to make outsized changes. Right, you got to. You got to really, um, really go over the top with what you're doing, and then you'll see those stark differences in in the type of engagement, and I mean even some of the things that you said with cold email outreach. As far as wow, we, we reached out to 150 people and we had 150 responses. That's pretty incredible. That really goes into the right kind of targeting and demographics and everything that you're, you're, you're trying to do is is is pretty amazing.

Speaker 2:

So thank you, man Appreciate it.

Speaker 1:

So you know, let's talk about maybe, okay, there's a founder that's trying to seek investment or there's maybe an agency that's working with the company that has a great product, but they just don't spend the money. Roas is fantastic, you need to dump. I would just dump this up till we hit a plateau and what we're spending and they're like we can't handle that. Either we can't scale or we don't have the money to do that. But it's like you're putting in 25 cents and you're getting a dollar 50 back, like keep spending. And so curious what your advice might be or what you've seen as far as like mistakes, when people are going okay, I think I need investment, but they don't know about how to get it.

Speaker 2:

So I think some of the challenges that people have is so I'll give you an example of a bootstrap business that we've been working with, where we started at zero and they're now doing 1.5 million and then they're on the way to do $2 million.

Speaker 2:

So the company's called Ordersco. When we initially met them, they didn't even have a website. They had an incredible product. Like, literally, I was just. It was one of those moments where I'm like how the hell did you build this product? They're like yeah, I know We've been just like tinkering away. We've been talking to customers, we've been really digging into what the pain point is and incredible engineers right, really smart, really talented, but come marketing, no idea. So it's like we don't really, we really don't want outside capital. We want to try to do this on our own. We want to see how big we can get it. We want to build a traditional business All right, cool.

Speaker 2:

So one of the first things we did right away for them was try to figure out all right, where are we going to find their customers? Where do they exist? And they're really going after restaurants, and what they had built was a platform, an all-in-one platform that allows any small restaurant to be able to get third-party delivery apps to you know, you can use uber, eats, postmate, grubhub, whatever it might be. And if you didn't know at the time when they had built this that you had to, if you went into a restaurant you might see all these different screens and all these tablets up. It's because you need to buy each one of those tablets, or you need to get each one of the tablets to start what the orders were. So they had figured out a way to consolidate all of that into one tablet, or no tablet at all, so they could start bringing orders in. But they wanted to now get their message out right. So they came to us and they're like, hey, what do we do? We're like, all right, first you build a website. You need to clearly explain what you're trying to do for the customer. You need to put together both an online SEO strategy as well as a paid strategy. But they're like, no, we don't have money. We're like, all right, you have something, what do you got? We're like, okay, we can afford to do $5,000 to see if it's going to work or it's not going to work. I'm like, all right, with a budget like that, let's start with Facebook. We really don't have much choices. If you go after Google, we're not going to be able to learn enough because we're not going to get enough clicks, but with Facebook, we could actually see if the value proposition is going to work.

Speaker 2:

We started testing different concepts. We started testing different pricing, we started testing different target audience and, fast forward to today, we scaled them up to a point where we have investors coming to them now wanting to invest into the business, and the reason that's happening is that their LTVs are phenomenal. So their lifetime value of a customer is incredible. At the price that they're charging, they're cheaper than everybody else in the market. In addition to that, their CAC is really reasonable. They're able to sustain and get most of the money back within three to four months. So in most in traditionally in this sector it takes eight months, nine months, 10 months on your customer acquisition costs before you're able to get the money back. So they're able to do it in, you know, a half to a third of the time, and because of this they've been able to grow quickly. They got to a point where we plateaued right.

Speaker 2:

So this story got to a stage where we were at all right. We're at one and a half. How do we get to 10 million? Man? We need more money. And so we started going out to the marketplace, showing all the incredible success we've had, and what we started getting were offers from investors, which were nice, but it felt like it was a different time, right if these offers in 2024 felt like they're a third or a fourth lower than what their peers were getting in 2022, because obviously they were looking at what the other competitors got, what type of evaluation they got and where they were at their stage, and they're like, man, do we really now need the capital? Like we're growing on our own.

Speaker 2:

So we got into this whole debate for a while. We tried we still tried pushing through it, and we're like, man, there's this whole new segment of customers that we need to tap into. So we're like, okay, we need to change a new offer for them. And which is what we experimented with? And my god, like the cap just dropped even more. We're like all right, we figured out a new offer. So we figured out like an annual plan that brings the CAC even further down, but it now got our payback period to one month. So in theory, we actually don't need any more investment capital, because now we're able to get the customers and pay for it right away and kind of be able to scale the business up.

Speaker 1:

Wow, that's impressive. So if you were to zoom out and just say what are some of the key factors to successful fundraising, how would you summarize it?

Speaker 2:

So I would say is they investors want to understand, depending on what stage you're at, right. So if you're early stage and you have no, you have no revenue coming in. They're really looking at you as the founder and your capabilities of building whatever this initial set of product is. And can you actually go get 10, 20, 30, 40 people to pay you that you don't know right. So these are completely isolated people and do they believe in your ability to be able to do that? And normally they'll invest somewhere between 300 to about $500,000 for that and get about 10% of the company. Okay. So if you're able to do that without it, I highly recommend it. So meaning, if you're able to build the products, if you have enough financial resources to be able to sustain, however, you have to be able to get to an MVP or a minimum product. It's not worth giving up the 10% for the $300,000.

Speaker 1:

Because you're going to hate yourself.

Speaker 2:

Later on You're going to be like oh my God, Right. So the next phase is usually you have to get to about a million dollars a year and that's typically $80,000 a month in revenue or sales. This is where they're looking for a predictable, scalable go-to-market. We call it a growth engine, or one channel that you can put more money into. That's going to show a really positive LTV over CAC ratio. The business itself, operationally, can handle more.

Speaker 2:

So you've figured out the sales mechanism. You've figured out the fulfillment mechanism. You've demonstrated that not only can you build the product, but you're now talking to your customers and you're trying to figure out what the next thing is that you should be building and you have customers that are already ready to pay you for whatever that next thing is. Sometimes you've already begun building that and you have pre-orders on it, or you have customers that are on beta the next thing and you're starting to get early traction on it. Then the next phase is typically around 10 million. So you now you got to go from 1 million a year right to 10 million a year. So it's a substantial leap up. And what this really means is can you actually build a scalable team that can handle all of this, including multiple growth engines that can handle all of this, including new revenue channels and including new customer segments.

Speaker 1:

Okay, so in like 2024 and the market you know we're in an interesting place right now, I think, in the market. I mean, what do you think that investors are looking for? And also, how do you like startups build strong relationships with with their investors or potential investors?

Speaker 2:

The, the. What they're looking for hasn't changed right. So what they're looking for is an incredible team, a great product, the ability to execute some basic fundamentals that are showcased in already, how the business is already doing. All of those have remained the same. They've just become much more selective. They've just become much more selective, so they want to make sure they're putting the right bets into the right companies where in the past they might have been a little more lenient. They're like well, you know, the founder is not as experienced and the team is a little weak, but I can help find that additional person.

Speaker 2:

So what they're hoping now is that your core team is in place already. You've been able to recruit who you're going to be executing with, you're demonstrating your technical know-how, you have figured out your marketing components of it, or understand how all the unique economics work, and you are on the path of growth. It doesn't have to be 20% month over month or 30% month over month right, it just has to show reasonable growth and you understand the financial. So you're not burning cash unnecessarily, you haven't hired way too many people unnecessarily and you're treating it more like a real bootstrap business. If you actually do that, the ironic thing happens is more capital wants to come to you, more investors want to come to you and work with you and all of those different things.

Speaker 1:

It's true across the board. It's true in recruitment Like. It's true Like if you don't need something, people want you. If you do need something, there's a reason and people look at you as a red herring. Potentially One of the things that I think is really interesting and I want to get your take on it is you know, initially you start out maybe you're you're you're you're doing some, some surveys and you're trying to find product market fit and you're doing some marketing and to get your initial customers time to add the sales component right, add that sales team to it. And then how are you viewing the partnership between sales and marketing? That's something I really believe in. Is sales and marketing at bigger organizations really need to work together? And a lot of times they don't. And that's where the advent of like the CRO has come in to to try to bring them together.

Speaker 2:

So I think, on day one, you're trying to sell even if you don't have a product built. You're trying to get pre-orders or you're trying to get some version of a commitment. Hey, if, if this product was built today and whatever, how much are you like? You, you're really getting close to it. You're trying to get a number out of them and then, on top of that not only once you get the number you're like all right, are you willing to put 10% of that into a deposit right now? And I will give you 30% discount, cheaper than whatever number they throw out, right? So what you're trying to really see is is there a real commitment on that number? Or they are, are not, they're just kind of just being nice, and that happened before the product is even built. So I think that's a really critical element of this, because then you're able to see and you can actually showcase this now to other people right, you can go to investors and you're like not only did we do customer discovery, I actually sold the product already. Here's our some deposits. This is the average price that people are willing to pay for it, and I have commitments, I have deposits. I now need to go build it, right. So that's that part.

Speaker 2:

The second part, I think what you brought on is sales and marketing. It's more than that, so it's not just sales and marketing. I think it's really sales, marketing, product engineering, it's the whole organization operations, right. So I think it's really really critical now and it's going to become even more in the near future. I don't think organizations are going to be as large.

Speaker 2:

I think we're all in the phase of superpowers, right. Like where AI has gone in this very short period in the last four or five, six years. It is really allowing us to be much more productive. It's giving us exponential skills and unlocks that we can have and, let alone where it's headed, it's making most of us become much more generalist and specialist select T-shaped marketers in the marketing world, and that applies also in sales and that also applies in engineering, right. We have an understanding of the breadth of knowledge that we need to do and we're going to be really, really good at certain things, and the team sizes might not necessarily be as big, so I do foresee companies and organizations being much leaner and being able to do much more and much quicker and much faster.

Speaker 1:

To highlight a little bit of what you were saying the T-shaped is the breadth and then the depth for people listening and so really, people are becoming experts and also having a wide range of knowledge. And then you apply AI on large leverage models and some of the automations and personalizations to that. You can take someone that could do X amount in whatever period of time. Their productivity goes through the roof and so you really don't need as many people. You know kind of going back to the question, and we can go to AI next, as far as like where the future trends are coming. But let's say, you know you're okay, you're a founder and you're the CEO, your job is to sell, right, and usually the CEO's job is to sell. But say, you start to grow and you have a clip and you start hiring people and you know you, you have a website now and you have, um, some advertising going and and you're, you're getting your name out there, right, and you're finding your place in the marketplace and you're saying, okay, now, now I need boots on the ground and in addition to myself, right, or or my executive team, and and there was this book called the E-Myth that we had everybody read, where it's kind of cool.

Speaker 1:

You build the organization and literally you're wearing like 50 hats and then, like, you take the hats off as you build the organization but say you need some salespeople, right, and you need some people to go knock on doors and give presentations and do pitches.

Speaker 1:

And you need some people to go knock on doors and give presentations and do pitches, and you need some account-based selling. What size organization should you be? Or when should you start thinking about that? Because, as a founder or owner or whatever, your time is going to start getting pulled in a lot of different directions and you need to duplicate yourself in that sales function. And with advertising, look, you can scale pretty quick, right, and you can reach the right kind of people and get your message out there. And maybe you have order takers. If you're doing e-commerce like in inbound, but like if you need true B2B salespeople especially we talked a lot about SaaS companies and technology companies there's a premium on those people in the marketplace. Oh yeah, when do you decide to opt to bring people like that on and build a sales team?

Speaker 2:

I think that depends on the segment you're going after, right? So if you're going after, like, there's B2B segments, like the restaurant tech that I was telling you, you're dealing with SMBs and you can build a sales team much earlier in there, because it's not the same level of sales skills needed. You're not trying to sell to five people in an organization or to a committee. You're really you're meeting with the owner, you're meeting with the small business operator. It's it's typically, you know the decision feels like a b2c and you can start, because of that, systemizing the process much earlier on. Now, that applied to camino, that applied to orders. But now, if I go the other way and I look at something like Disco, which was much more B2B and we were selling to much larger organizations, the same thing also applies there. Team are part of the process in itself. What I mean by that is you know you're going to trade shows, you're going to conferences, you might be hosting different webinars, you might be actually hosting dinners or regional events that you're inviting the potential clients that you want to sell, plus the clients that you've already sold, and that does involve boots underground, right. So it really depends on the type of business you're building Both, I believe, needed early on.

Speaker 2:

Sales is a critical part of it. Like, as I said, even like the product was built, you're trying to sell it right. So. So I think, as a founder, what you're trying to do is you're trying to figure out what is my sales process as soon as possible as you can at the same time is how does marketing and sales play together before I get my lead, when I get my lead, and sometimes on a larger ticket, b2b sales, the window is much longer. Right, we have some clients that are six months it takes. So there's a lot of marketing that goes from that moment that that first phone call occurred till the six months before they make a decision, all the way from case studies, all the way from answering any rebuttals that come and showcasing different work, that we've done anything new, that that arises in the midst of the sales process, and so on and so forth.

Speaker 1:

So I hope that answers your question.

Speaker 1:

No, it does. I. I think that a lot of founders think that if they're technically driven right or they're engineers or I see a lot of this We've seen a lot of people that have been in the industry for 30 years, they're engineers they come out of it. They say I have this idea, like I have, I want to start a second career, I want to start this company, and they're they're very, very good at whatever it is they did. There's a need in the marketplace, but then they discover I don't have this huge sales apparatus and all these logos behind me to help open doors.

Speaker 1:

How do I tell that story? And they just think that if they build it, people will come, and then that's when the whole marketing conversation starts to happen and they have to build all that out. I want to transition into and you broached the topic of AI. Let's expound upon that of kind of where you see the future going. I mean, I know, when I listen to podcasts about AI and people at OpenAI or people even at Google, like Eric Schmidt just did a talk and like he can't even see out six months right Of like what's going to happen.

Speaker 2:

So fast, right, like what's coming out and how quickly it's coming.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, and so so I mean just tell me kind of your take on it and like what you're seeing and and you know what predictions you might have. I think a lot of people are start. I mean you know what predictions you might have. I think a lot of people are start. I mean I think when uh, apple rolls out which I think it is rolling out in October um the they they postponed it they're putting uh chat GBT on the Apple phone and so then people will really be using it and Google's looking at from a search standpoint and there's now like complexityai and there's, I mean, ai is creeping into everything. It's creeping into education, it's creeping into, like learning, even the creativity components. You look at what's going on Elon Musk in the cars. I mean it's, it's everywhere right and it's coming at us really, really fast and I think it's going to dramatically change our world. And so I just want to hear kind of what you're seeing.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, of course. So a little bit about us and AI. We give incredible talks during New York tech Week, san Francisco Tech Week and LA Tech Week. One of the talks that we did was how I taught my six-year-old son about different large language models and I used different children games in explaining that to him and how generative adversarial network models work, or variable autoencoders how do they work? So?

Speaker 2:

I totally nerded out and really explained it basically to them. So, in regards to our agency itself, it's core of what we do. I think in June 2020, if you know your open AI timeline that's when 3.5 came out right. So right away we were on it. We were trying to figure out how do we utilize it. We dealt with the early stage hallucinations. We dealt with this is too general problems. How do we make it much more specific? So, where I think we are at the stage of right now, it's still super early.

Speaker 2:

Not everyone really fully understands it, at least the mass population of it, but the people who are using it, they see it as an incredible tool that is allowing them to move much faster, much quicker, much more easier in finding information and being able to quickly figure out personalized strategies or plans, and that's how we end up using it. For us, where has it helped in? It's helped in marketing workflows, it's helped in marketing strategy building. It's helped us in design. It's helped us in content creation. It's helped us in coding, so there isn't a team in our organization that has not benefited from it. So every single aspect of our team has flourished. There's so many tools we've gone through, by the way, last year at this time there was 350 startups that had got an investment for AI. This year at this time there's 1,500. So there's been an exponential growth in just the amount of companies that are trying to build around this right.

Speaker 1:

Well, my team keeps bringing like different tools, like, hey, let's incorporate, like, let's use this, let's do that, and they're all doing something like a little bit differently, like there's got to be a washout at some point, but we're we're looking at different, different kind of things for everything that you can think of, right, um, I actually I I wrote I uh, when SE ranking was launching their, uh, their podcast, I was like the first interview and it was right around that timeframe that chat GBG came out and we were just talking about like what, um, what, how to use it like, what to do, like people, and it's just like talk to it, right, and?

Speaker 1:

And I wrote a blog after that and I said, okay, we're in this information age, like attention age, I think that we're going to move into like a intimacy age like, where you know everything is so personalized. And I mean, if you talk to a AI like and they train it to be like a therapist or to be an educator or whatever, you can give it all kinds of parameters and you just talk to it like a human and it's going to give you feedback and and it's going to give you better, better feedback most likely than you would get talking to a, you know a credentialed human. You know what.

Speaker 2:

I mean, I mean there's now on the citation.

Speaker 1:

What were you saying?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, yeah, let me give you an incredible story around that. So my, my, my wife knows, and she hates, how busy I get and I always forget the most important things, right, like the birthday card or the Valentine card. And man about this lot, and she, she figured this out. It took her a while to figure it. Man about this lot, and she figured this out. It took her a while to figure it out.

Speaker 2:

But this last February same thing happened. Is I forgot to write that nice card that she always likes? She just likes simple things, she just likes thoughtful cards. I was like, oh shit, what am I going to do? It's Valentine's again.

Speaker 2:

I haven't had time to think about this and I was just nerding out on fine-tuning and being, and this is when gpt transformers that come out. I'm like what if I just start loading up all the previous cards I've written to her? What if I load up some of the pictures of our kids, some of the trips we've done this past year, and just ask it to write a nice little personalized letter to her? It did. I was like, damn, this is much better and it met my style, my writing the same exact ways that I enunciate and punctuate on my letters Like this is so good. It took me a whopping 15 minutes and I sent it to her and she started bawling. She's like wow, this was so good. She's like I know you didn't have time, so how did you actually do this so good? She's like I know you didn't have time, so how did you actually do this? I'm like she's like did you use GPT again? I'm like, yeah, I use GPT. She's like I don't care, it was so, so good, I'll take it.

Speaker 1:

So I got a very similar story, did something very similar to that, and you know my wife's big on posts on, like public displays of affection, right, so like posting it on Facebook, and so that's what I did. I took a bunch of images, I wrote something nice, I posted it first year, like she was just like enthralled, right, like this is amazing. I had so many brownie points. And then year two came around and I think I had sent her an article about, like how different industries are going to get affected by AI, like maybe the week before, and she put two and two together and she was like this was not, you was it, and I was like it was me, because I had to do the prompting and like all this guy and she was like no, so your wife was like good with it.

Speaker 1:

Like my wife was like no, you didn't put in the effort. I said I did put in the effort. I said I did put in the effort I put in a lot of effort.

Speaker 2:

What are you?

Speaker 1:

yeah, I was like, and I was like how do you not like this? And she's like so. So I think that there's this human element that that's going to be uh, part of uh, the the zeitgeist for for a long time as far as like how, how it affects human culture, but it's going to seep into everything.

Speaker 2:

Imagine about education, right, like so we have a couple of our team members who are getting their masters now, and then I'm like man and remember in our, in our organization, it's all I am Right. So so they have every tool. We don't even know how many tools we have. It's like insane amount of tools that we have. They have access. So. So I've've been, and we encourage in every one of our workflows to share the prompt how did you do it? And we have, like uh, brown lunch series where we're sharing each other different techniques and strategies. Did you know I could do this? They're like oh, wow, I didn't know I could do that either. So, so that's continuously happening, right. So I look at her. I'm like are you actually reading books? Now? She's like well, I'm trying to, but it's really, really right. So I look at her. I'm like are you actually reading books? Now she's like well, I'm trying to, but it's really really hard right.

Speaker 2:

Like I can just ask it and they could summarize it for me and they can tell me what's going on. So the whole education system, I think, is going to be like mad. It's going to be completely different.

Speaker 1:

It's going to be what we grew up with.

Speaker 1:

It's not going to exist, right. So well, I I remember that in school I was like they're like, how to do long form math or whatever right? And I go, I'm going to use a calculator. And then they're like, no, you have to learn how to do. And I said, but I'm always going to have a calculator. And I was like, if I'm always going to have a calculator, and this is supposed to help me with whatever job that I have why can't I use a calculator? You know well, you need to learn how to do it.

Speaker 1:

I think that that same argument is just going to be multiplied by a ton. Ok, so we're going off on tangents. I love it. I've been thinking about turning this podcast into like a longer form podcast where, like, really get to know people and start to break down things and but but we don't have that yet. Freelancers or agencies or even founders that maybe want to transition, to be more kind of growth-based, that are offering digital marketing services, or even just kind of final words for founders that are looking to make decisions with this rapid growth environment. I think it's going to be really wild with what's going on with AI and then what is really the best way to get in contact with you, some of the stuff you're doing. I know you've done a ton of webinars on AI and some of them look really, really fascinating, so I'd encourage people to go check that out. But yeah, what is some advice for people if they want to move more towards growth agencies, or what should they be looking for? And then founders like any kind of parting tips?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I think the biggest really is it's moving from campaign based or output driven initiatives to really staying focused on what matters and what really drives results and what really drives growth, and switching your mindset to constant learning or a growth mindset. So you're always in this notion of like, how do I fail 95% of the time? And that's what you have to constantly be thinking about. So you have to be wrong 95% of the time. And how am I right that 5%? And obviously, with that 5% you're going to go really big on right. Like once you figure it out, you're going to scale it up, go as fast as you can, run as quickly as you can and really grow it to the next stage. But you have to constantly think that way and the reason I'm bringing this up right and this will answer how do you get a hold of us is we have a whole ecosystem and there's multiple ways you can get a hold of us. You can monthly join us in our Growth Lab webinar series where we unveil literally what we do. There's no black box in marketing anymore. I could literally show you what I learned today and by tomorrow it's already outdated. That's the world I think, we live in, I think, and that's what we try to do. And the last one, one recent one we talked about SEO and how to future-proof your SEO strategy and we dug into all the Google patents related to AI overviews and kind of showed how that actually works and how do you participate in that and how do you rank in that all of that. Another way you can get a hold of us is we have an academy, so this academy is structured to help if you want to transition into growth marketing. In our last cohort we had over 400 students applied. It costs you absolutely nothing. We provide 100% scholarships for this. You often have to select it. We can't take everybody in. We had 30 students that got the full scholarships and had over 40 startups that applied and six of those startups got full scholarships, where we build dedicated teams with the startups to help them through customer discovery. So this way you're able to kind of learn and grow and do all the things that we preach and you get our hands on right. You learn from us as you're doing it.

Speaker 2:

Another way is we have a podcast as well. We interview different founders who have made it in their journey and what they learned along the way, as well as VCs and what they're looking for in founders and what do they want to invest in, and so on and so forth. So, if you're a startup, amazing. If you're a challenger brand we didn't even talk about that. These are brands that are position four or position five in their respective category, you know. And they're stuck and they're plateaued and they're looking for someone to work with. Feel free to reach out to us at Azarian Growth Agency. And we're stuck and they're plateaued and they're looking for someone to work with. Feel free to reach out to us at Azarian Growth Agency and we're more than welcome to take a look, see if we can help you guys as well, too.

Speaker 1:

Awesome. Well, hamlet, this has been great. I've enjoyed it. I think it's been enlightening for a lot of people, so really appreciate having you on.

Speaker 2:

Thank you. Thanks for having me. It was a lot of fun. It was fun jamming with you, and I'm sure we could have gone on to many different topics as well.

Speaker 1:

Sounds good. Until the next time, everybody bye-bye for now, bye-bye, bye-bye.

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Matt Bertram

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