Growth Hacking: How to Get Your First 10 Customers

Sean Weisbrot: Welcome back to another episode of the We Live to Build podcast. I'm sorry for the recent slowdown of publishing episodes and late releases of the ones that do come out. I've been extremely busy with my company and preparing it for the onboarding of a new product manager, which involves me doing a massive overhaul of our documentation, design, and product planning so they align and fit together in a nicely packaged bow so that when she starts working with us, she won't inherit a mess. And this has been taking me a long time to complete. On top of my normal duties as CEO and host of this podcast. So, I'll do my best to get back to regular releases as soon as possible. And thanks in advance for bearing with me as I love doing the podcast and I've seen from our almost 4000 downloads that you also love what we're doing. So, let's get back to the intro for this episode.

Sean Weisbrot: In the process of creating a company as someone with no marketing experience, I realized it was time for me to bring on a guest, specifically Chris Out, a Dutch growth hacking expert, guest lecturer, keynote speaker, and consultant who helps clients with growth hacking and setting up marketing teams and growing revenues. More specifically, we talked about what is growth hacking. How do you create ideas around experimentation? How do you know if the experiments work or not?

Sean Weisbrot: Why you should reverse engineer your first ten customers' buying process. How does your competition do things? Why should you talk to your competitors' customers? When should you start developing your marketing department? Why founders should do one-on-one business development in the beginning, whether to hire marketing people from the bottom up or top down. What is cohort-based analysis and how to institute governance? Thank you, Chris and I hope you enjoy this episode.

Sean Weisbrot: What is it that you were doing before you got to where you are here and what you're doing now that make you the right person to talk about marketing and things like that?

Chris Out: Definitely. So, I started out with a very boring job as an auditor at KPMG. I hated my job so much that I decided to quit my job after one year, started my first business, did everything wrong. Uh, we spent more than 200 K of our own money, so we lost everything. And then we saw growth hacking coming up in the United States. And we thought, okay, at some point that will come over to Europe as I'm in Amsterdam and what we said, okay, we are going to build the first growth hacking agency over here. We did that quite successfully, and last year I sold my shares in that agency after working for like big corporate start-ups and scale-ups. And now I'm fully focused on helping companies to structure for extreme revenue growth. So that's my big passion. How can you get yourself into extreme revenue growth and also connecting to marketing and sales and these type of things? So, I definitely think that I have some cool things to share with CMOs and everybody who is interested in marketing.

Sean Weisbrot: So, then I guess the first logical step is what is growth hacking.

Chris Out: It's all about like high-tempo experimentation across the entire customer journey. But what I try to make out of it is that you really want to understand what works and what doesn't, so you can double down on the things that work, and you can learn from the things that don't work. So, it's all about running a lot of experiments, testing different channels, different strategies, but all to really understand how do we get customers in, how do we make sure they buy for the first time, but also how do they come back? And at the end, what's the most important thing? Is how are we able to monetize them? And by connecting all those dots, I think that's the best way of describing growth hacking and extreme revenue growth and these type of things.

Sean Weisbrot: How should someone approach growth hacking as a newbie? Let's say as a CEO, maybe they don't have a CMO or a marketing person yet and they want to try experimentation. How do they create ideas for experimentation? And how do they know if the experiments work or not?

Chris Out: I'm a big fan of being functionally lazy, so I first always try to reverse engineer what works. So, what I would do? Go to the last 5 or 10 customers had bought from you and try to reverse engineer. How did they come onto that path? So where did they saw you for the first time? What triggered them to buy? What triggered them? Almost to not to buy and really understand. Like which channels they use, where they got information about you. Because that will give a lot of clues on things that are working, but also things that you're trying to do right now that are not working.

Chris Out: And what I always try to do in the first phase is to double down on the things where you know that they are working, but you have a double down on it. So, in a lot of businesses, you see that there's a certain typology of customers that buy 5 or 10 times more, spend way more with you. They come in very easy, but companies aren't doubling down on them because they just are forgetting it. So I always try to figure out, okay, what's working and how can we double down on the best type of customers that we have in place.

Sean Weisbrot: So, it's interesting you said that I recently published an episode, I think it's 37 with Alice, and so her company focuses on using data in marketing to help companies understand their customers better. And she said that there's four kinds of users, the ones that are doing the most business with you, she said, are the ones that you should be talking to see how you can get more of that to come to your business, she heard on another podcast.

Sean Weisbrot: These guys grew two companies from 0 to 100 million a year, and what he said was your process might be great, but if you talk to the people or if you think about how the people on the other side, especially if they're a buyer, that's like in the middle level of a 2000 person company, right? You need to understand their process because maybe you're not closing those deals, or it takes longer to close those deals because your process creates friction for them, and that they're struggling to figure out how to resolve, but they want to buy from you.

Chris Out: Success leaves clues. So, if you want to sell to somebody in a 2000 people company, like there are other vendors who are successfully selling to them, so how are they tapping into those internal processes and what can you learn from them, which you can also apply to your own business? So, I'm all about first figuring out the patterns about what others are doing that are successful and see how you can replicate that to your own business and do that as your first experiment or one of your first experiments, because that can give you a lot of insights, and it's something that's already tested with other companies. So, chances of success are way higher.

Sean Weisbrot: A lot of people are talking about the future of work right now. Slack is like one of the first companies that created a tool that I'm trying to disrupt. And what I love about where I am and where my company is in the market is that Slack already spent billions of dollars educating the market on why this is necessary. So, I get to come in and go, well, slack isn't very good at what they do. I can do it better. You already know what the value is and this is the extra value I provide. Come be with me instead. And so, I don't have to spend those billions in order to have the ROI.

Chris Out: Yeah. And I think related to that, I'm writing a book right now, uh, structuring for extreme revenue growth with another fancy title behind it. What I say in that book is that it's all about like riding the wave of customer demand. So, what you're saying with Slack is, like, they've already educated the market, the wave is already going somewhere, and it's easier to write that. In comparison to like creating your own wave, because you have to spend millions and millions and even billions to do that, to become a successful company, while others have already created stuff. And if you can leverage that, that's way smarter to do and will increase your success massively.

Sean Weisbrot: So, I want to go back real fast to what you just said about looking at your competitors and how they do it. Obviously, as an outsider to another company, to a competitor, you can only see what they show you, right? If you look at the website, you can see the funnel. Hopefully, you can kind of see the funnel or you can see the beginning of the funnel. Unless you start to pretend that you're actually going to be a customer of theirs and talk to their team like, so is that how you learn from them? Like, just pretend that you're going to be a customer and learn everything you can and be quiet about your intentions, like, how would you do that? Because it's not everything is public.

Chris Out: That's true. Not everything is public. But what you can see is like, as you're saying, like everything that's happening on the outside. So how are they doing their social media posting? How are their funnels like what are the conversations that they're putting out online? I'm not a big fan of like pretending that you want to buy from somebody, like in a 1 to 1 conversation. I think you should definitely download all their whitepapers and see how they follow up and do these types of things.

Chris Out: But it's also important that you go to places where the customers of those companies that you want to get are congregating and figuring out, like, what are they saying? Like, which questions do they post on for uh, or in groups on Slack or different places? Because that's where you get the information. So, it's all about like coming in from different angles that you also get like some kind of gut feeling on what's working and what they're doing, what's successful and what's not successful.

Sean Weisbrot: 8 or 9 months ago I googled “what I hate about Slack”, and there was specifically one website that had 50,000 comments about Slack on it. And so, my CEO and I went through almost all of the comments and we grouped like, okay, how many times did people say this thing and all that? Plus, through the podcast, I've also talked to 100 or more company owners and a lot of them use Slack. So, I was able to ask them, what do you like about it? What don't you like about it? And then, hey, this is my platform and this is what we're doing that solves those problems you're talking about. With Slack, talking to your competitor's customers is a fantastic way to learn about their process.

Chris Out: I think a great book that I recommend to a lot of people is “Start From Zero”, from Dane Maxwell, and he talks about the three rocks of entrepreneurship. And the second rock is you don't get to decide what works. And I think this is a really important one for especially for entrepreneurs and business owners, because what you think is going to work is nine out of 100 times. It's not the thing that's going to work, it's the market that will tell you if something that you're putting out there is resonating yes or no.

Chris Out: So put your ego aside, test what works, and double down on the things, what the market wants and actually what the market is paying for. Because I have a lot of cases where I've helped companies where they were too focused on like, no, but they need to buy this. And I told them, like, nobody wants to buy that, like tweak it a little bit in the way that they want to buy it, use their phraseology, use their vocabulary because that will increase your conversions. So, you don't get to decide what works. Put it out there and let the market tell you what they want and don't want.

Sean Weisbrot: I think that's really difficult. And I struggled with that a little bit myself with Sidekick, with our MVP, where like, I know that we could have launched something that was very basic, but because there are tons of other options on the market that have different solutions or different parts of our solution that are not put together but segregated, if we launched with a minimal amount of features, people are going to be less likely to want to use us.

Sean Weisbrot: And so we almost kind of had to make a bet that by putting all of these things together and kind of getting more of a mature product available for people, it would be easier for them to understand the long-term value, especially because if you say, okay, I'm going to launch this thing, and then here's our two-year roadmap, they're going to be like, oh, well, I'll come back in two years when I can use all the things you said I can use. But the majority of those people may not be willing to wait, you know, for those things to happen.

Chris Out: I'm a big fan of Pre-selling. If you can sell it based on the roadmap, like that's the ultimate validation. But it's also great validation if people tell you, like, you know what? Because you didn't you don't have these three features. I'm not going to buy from you right now, but then you can still close the deal by saying, you know what, if I got these features ready in three months, are you going to put $1,000 in right now where I normally would have to pay 10-K for like a one year or two years or five-year contract?

Chris Out: I always try to get, can I get them to pay based on what I show them, which is not ready yet. Because that's the ultimate validation. And it's really hard and really tough because once you're selling it, you also have to deliver it afterward. But I believe that if you can sell something, then you've got money to pay yourself out of these problems. And that's also relating to investors. What I've seen is like, if you show investors that people are voting with their wallets, that's the ultimate validation and will also increase your valuation massively.

Sean Weisbrot: Yeah. And that's a big problem with Kickstarter. I've seen a lot of companies are like, look at us, we're going to build this awesome thing. If you give us $200,000 and then a lot of them a year goes by, two years go by, they still haven't gotten their product out. And the people are like, yo, I gave you like $1,000. What's the deal? And they're like, uh, we're working on it. Just give us another five months. Five months go by. We're waiting another five months. So, I understand the value in pre-selling. But it's scary.

Chris Out: It's always a tension between what's feasible, and what's realistic. Uh, but also like knowing which type of network you have, which type of people you can connect, and also how you can use their resources. And that's also something that I talk in my book is about, is like, what's the access you have to people, either customers or prospects or like influencers or developers because you can only be very aggressive with Pre-selling if you know that you have the connections to also deliver it, sometimes it can go horribly wrong as you say with Kickstarter.

Sean Weisbrot: For what I'm doing, the early customers that were targeting are small companies where the founder is still making all the financial decisions by themselves. And so, if I have a network of founders that have financial control, it should be fairly easy to make the sell.

Chris Out: Definitely. Like and if the founder is not. Buying, then you definitely not going to sell to the marketing manager or the team manager. And that's the thing. It's all about being able to persuade them that what you have right now is part of a bigger vision. And what I see that also helps a lot when you are setting up companies like this and you're building software is to give the right people also the opportunity to co-create with you.

Chris Out: And I'm a very big believer in like co-creation with the market, with your top customers, because if somebody tells you, like, hey, I want to have this, then you can build it. But at the other end, that's also a challenge, because if out of ten people, three want this, three one that and the other for one to another thing like, then you have to make a decision. You know what, we're going to double down on one of these three areas. And that's where the challenges for a lot of entrepreneurs.

Sean Weisbrot: Canny is a platform that allows you to have public-facing feature requests so a user can go and make a new request. I wish that I could make group calls. Let's say you've got a thousand users and let's say 200 of them. Upvote this thing so you can upvote and downvote a specific feature request. And so, the ones that emerge at the top are the ones that your company should probably focus on, because a large number of users are saying, yeah, I agree, I want that thing too.

Chris Out: Why are people voting with their wallets? So also analyze why people are churning and why they aren't continuing their payments. What are the reason that they are giving? And are you able to persuade them to come back? Like, okay, but what if we would have this feature? Would you then continue the relationship that we have, or would you still be gone? I really believe that there's a huge difference between like clicking on a button where they are uploading things, which is an indication, but the ultimate validation is are they're changing their spending behavior based on that feature? Yes or no?

Sean Weisbrot: Canny's job is just to give you insight into what your people want. Yeah. And whether or not you announce you're going to do it, or if you do it at all, is really a matter of communicating back to the users, like, how badly do you need this thing? Like so if you talk about Net Promoter Score, you're like, okay, like, how much do you like this product as it is right now? Uh, you know, nine I love this product. Well, you know, would you like this product more or less if you could also make group calls? Oh, well, it'd be a ten for me. Okay. Well, would you be willing to spend more to make it possible for this feature to come out? Yeah, I would okay, great. Well, I'll build it.

Chris Out: In the first conversation, I would add the payment link. Okay. So, you want to get okay over here. You can get a one-time discount or something like that because that really challenges people. Like there's a big difference between what people say and what they pay.

Sean Weisbrot: You should always treat all of your customers well, but you should also segment your customers so you know how much they're paying you. You may find that communicating with this specific user, if they're not paying you, it might cost you money to communicate with them, in which case you should try to, I guess, limit the amount of energy your team expends on them because they're probably not going to convert. You don't want to like, kick them out. You also don't want to have a large majority of people that are not paying for your product, because it's a waste of money and it's burning the company's time and energy.

Chris Out: Yeah. And I've related to that. If I look at my own sales pipeline, I think at this moment, around 70% of the value of the pipeline is not on new customers, but it's on existing clients that I have making them, continuing the retainer, upselling bigger projects. That's where the majority of my sales pipeline is right now, and that's where also the majority of the conversions come from. And I know that if I get somebody in and they buy, for example, my growth challenge for €47, and out of that comes a keynote or a workshop, and out of that comes a consulting engagement can easily turn it into a ten, 20, 30 K yearly retainer.

Sean Weisbrot: So, let's switch focus slightly and talk about developing a marketing department for a startup. At what point should the founder of a company think about developing the marketing team?

Chris Out: Depends on a couple of things. So how aggressive are your growth goals? So, do you want to like three x or ten x your business every year, or are you more comfortable with like slow and steady growth? I think that's an important thing. It also depends on the marketing knowledge that a CEO or CMO or like founder already has. So, what I, a strong believer in is that if you're already knowledgeable that you set up the channels, you set up the basic foundations of the mechanisms, and then you hire out certain types of things that you want people to do.

Chris Out: So, I know if I look at my own website right now, like from an analytics perspective, from an SEO perspective, there are a lot of things that can be improved. But I'm not hiring the team right now. I will do that like later this year because then I have more budget and to go all in and then I know I can really leverage it. So, it's really a step-by-step process, by thinking, okay, like what's breaking right now? Or where should I put my money in? That's within a short amount of time I will actually generate a return out of that. And there's always a difference between exploitation and exploitation.

Chris Out: So, by exploitation, I mean like what are things that you're currently doing that you need to do better? And at some point, you need to move from generalists to specialists with that. And of course, you need to always be exploring new channels, new tactics, and new strategies to see if there is something over there that you can use to also grow your business instead of your marketing. And I'm a big fan of like having the specialist doing the expectation and the generalists or the founders or the CMO be responsible for the exploration part.

Sean Weisbrot: Let's attack this again from a different angle. Let's assume someone like me where I understand the psychology of marketing, but I don't understand. And I'm not interested in the nuances of the mathematics of the SEO calculations and the algorithms. Like, that's not who I am. So, let's say you're that kind of a founder or you're maybe a technical founder. Like what? At what point in the development of the company should you be thinking about marketing and hiring that first person? Like, is it before the product is finished? Is it before the product is started? Like where in in the cycle of your company should you be starting?

Chris Out: So, I think if you get it back until the basics like its product development and distribution start at day zero, because as a founder you're developing a product, but you're also creating awareness and you're trying to get those first customers in. So, what you want to do with marketing is you want to make sure that you get more leads in that you can talk to, and then you can actually sell to.

Chris Out: So, I'm a Make believer that when founders start out, they reach out one and one to potential customers to make sure that they, uh, that they can connect with them and learn more about it, while also setting up one channel, which could either be like a blog or email marketing or SEO, uh, the channel that resonates the most with you, or to flip it around the channel that you least hate. But I think if you set that up and if you see that that works, uh, then you should hire a team to do that when there's a business case for you to work on other stuff.

Chris Out: So, it's really depending on the skills of the founder, but also what's the business case? Because if you can get a new client in that's worth ten K, then you have a different hiring decision compared to if you're getting a new client and that's worth like $100. So, these are all the nuances that you need to take into consideration to really make the best decision on when you should hire.

Sean Weisbrot: Who should you be hiring bottom up in a marketing department or top down?

Chris Out: I believe that in a bootstrapped startup, you should be hiring bottom up and looking for really eager young people who have already shown that they got some knowledge, but they're also willing to learn. Well, if you are like more like in a, uh, venture capital or private equity or like you've got the resources, then it's the combination of making sure that you get the people in who know the strategy, but also people who are able to do the execution.

Chris Out: Because at the end, what will drive leads and sales is that we got things live. And the big risk if you hire too soon, really senior people, a lot of them are really good at talking about it, but not they're not good at executing. And I believe that good marketing and sales come out of executions, comes out of campaigns, out of experiments that are run. And that's really the driving force of company growth.

Sean Weisbrot: All right. So, let's go a little bit deeper into growth hacking related to the person who's in charge of marketing. Right. So, what would you expect of them in order to see that they're paying for their salary?

Chris Out: I'm a big fan of cohort-based analysis. Uh, which means that if you look at what was the type of marketing we did six months ago and what were the results out of that, and do we see every month the results becoming better and better and better? So, do we have an indication that things are improving? Because with some marketing tactics, you can get a quick bump and then that's just it. You've hit a local maximum.

Chris Out: So, I'm always curious to see how are people continually able to move the needle to a higher level of generating more revenue, generating more leads, and showing that if something works, that they were able to automate what works so they could actually be focusing on exploring new stuff, new types of experiments, new type of channels. Because if you just stack a lot of these channels at the end, that will result in more leads and more revenue. So really triggering them on that is an important thing.

Sean Weisbrot: How would they grab this data? In order to be able to analyze it.

Chris Out: You need to have a CRM in place. So how many leads you got in, how many prospects, how many clients you have, but also like how are these clients retaining and how you increasing the lifetime value, but also like channel specific. How many leads that you get from Facebook, from LinkedIn, from email? So, I think these are all like from a commentator's perspective. But it's also important that you have the qualitative perspective where you actually see the voice of customers. Why are they choosing you? What is blocking them from almost buying from you and why are they staying? Because and if you combine those qualitative and quantitative pieces and showing that it results in more leads and more prospects, and eventually in more, uh, RR or MRR or depending on the type of business you're in, uh, you need to see an upward trajectory. That's the important one.

Sean Weisbrot: Do these CRMs tell you the details of like, this person's paying you 500 a month, like how do you view the data? Like do you do you have a spreadsheet or is there a specific software outside of the CRM, or is it a plug-in to the CRM? Like, I think-

Chris Out: What you should know as a CEO is what the lifetime value is of a customer. Uh, because if you know that, you can also tell them, you know what, you're allowed to spend this amount of money per customer. So, let's say your average lifetime value is $3,000, and you're willing to spend $1,000 to get a customer in. And the payback period of that first $1,000 is like six months. Well, then you have giving them benchmarks on what they need to work on and what you need to see in your in your dashboard of your CRM or in your Google Sheets.

Chris Out: And there are a lot of plugins and CRM available, I think especially for software as a service, which you can connect to the things that you have built. Like I always try to put it into another context, like, can they show you that it's a money machine, that if you put a dollar in, you get more than $1.01 back? And that's the basis a dashboard or Google Sheets should be able to tell you that. And if you don't understand it or you can't see it and they aren't able to articulate that it's happening, well, I think then you have a big problem.

Sean Weisbrot: What if you have someone who can articulate it, but the data, the spreadsheet, maybe they happen to be changing the numbers around, or maybe they're not inputting the information incorrectly? How can you catch them? How can you prevent any potential problems? Because if they say, oh, the lifetime value is $3,000 and it only costs us 1000 to get that? But what if it actually costs $2,000 and there's $1,000? Like, how do you figure out those potential problems?

Chris Out: I'm a big fan of just randomly deep diving into things, what they're doing, and just asking questions and see if it makes sense. And I think as a CEO, you should be smart enough to be able to ask the questions and to figure out if it makes sense and if they are connecting dots and you have access to your bank account. And if they say that a customer is worth $3,000, uh, but there has never been a customer that spent more than 1500 with you, then you might be seeing that they're bullshitting in terms of basics, they should be able to show you that if they spend a dollar, that you get more in return for that, and it could be the case that you don't earn it back within one week, but they should be able to show you how it's going to evolve over six months or over 12 months or over two years. Uh, and somebody who is good at that will be able to tell you that. And if you don't understand it by basically asking simple questions or then you know that probably that isn't the best person for your company at that stage.

Sean Weisbrot: If you're starting out, you're like, okay, my assumption is that we're going to spend $1,000 and that it'll take six months to get that thousand dollars. But what if after six months? Like you've spent $1,500. What if they make these calculations? And then the numbers are wrong, but it takes you 2 or 3 quarters to figure it out.

Chris Out: They will be wrong, because if they would be right, then they should, uh, buy stocks and, uh, invest in those because then they could actually print money. So, I'm a really big fan of like understanding what it's costing you right now to acquire a customer. Let's say that it takes you three hours to get a new customer by doing one-on-one phone calls, and you value your time at $200 an hour. Then you know that your current cost of acquisition is $600.

Chris Out: And then you go back to them and you say, okay, how can we get an indication that with the campaigns that you're running, that we could get customers for $600 or less, and an indication could be like cost per click on, on Facebook or cost per lead, because if you know that you convert one out of 50 leads, it costs them $5 to get a new lead, then probably, you know that the cost per new customer is going to be $250. That's something you can figure out upfront.

Sean Weisbrot: Yeah, I guess it's hard for me because I have no experience in the marketing field. And most of the last two and a half years, almost three years, I've been focused completely on the product in tech. And so, while I'm getting better in that regard, there's just so much more I have to learn about running a startup that I haven't had the opportunity yet. And so, I would call it cautious optimism in ignorance.

Chris Out: Part of being an entrepreneur is that you need to learn things about topics that aren't of interest to you, and you need to learn the basics out of that. You need to learn the principles, and if you learn them, then it's easier for you and also more profitable to hire people who actually can help you with that. And to be honest, until a business makes 1 million plus, I think the most important things that a founder or CMO or CEO has to do is marketing and sales. Because without marketing and sales, there is no revenue. And there is a saying sales solves all problems because you have money to pay yourself out of problems.

Sean Weisbrot: I've never specifically had a sales job for somebody else, but I have been a consultant in the past, so I've sold my own service, and in that regard, as an advisor or coach or trainer, those kinds of things like you are into right now. So, I know that I understand how to communicate with people and convince them of the value that I'm bringing. So, I'm fairly confident in my business development strategy and my sales strategy in that regard. But yeah, the marketing thing is like a fricking black box for me right now.

Chris Out: If you know that you're good at talking to people, record a video of the things you just said, put that out as a video ad, like spend $100, and see how many people click on it, and do they even resonate with it? That's from a paid marketing perspective. But what you can also do on LinkedIn is look to potential founders or company owners where you're like, okay, that could be an interesting customer for me, and send them that video and see which messages resonate and which don't because that's also marketing.

Sean Weisbrot: I hadn't thought of that, but I had thought of creating videos under the branding of Sidekick, talking about, you know, why are we building this product? Who is the team? Because kind of things that pull back the curtain a little bit. So, for people to see more about who we are, what we're doing, why we're doing it. How we do it. Things like that.

Chris Out: If you know the talking is your strong point, just make sure you record that talking. You send that video to people, but you can also have other people transcribe what you spoke about and create blog posts and emails out of that. Because I know for my business, I make money when I'm talking.

Sean Weisbrot: Well, that's another reason why I'm doing the podcast. I know it's a long-term play. It's a long game. It doesn't pay anything now. It's a tremendous amount of energy, but in the long term, it's creating value that goes beyond the value that Sidekick as a product creates. You know, we can point to a certain podcast if someone's like, oh, well, this is my company and this is the situation I have right now. And, you know, if I can solve this problem, then a sidekick would be useful for me.

Sean Weisbrot: Oh well, we have a podcast episode that Sean made about this topic. Why don't you go listen to it? Maybe there's value in that regard. In a lot of these podcasts, I kind of talk about sidekick a little bit so people can see. Not only am I building something that's helpful for them, but I'm struggling too. And these are the struggles I'm going through as I'm trying to build this company. So, again, it pulls the curtain back and humanizes what we're doing and humanizes myself as well.

Chris Out: Definitely. And I've got a friend who's also running a podcast, and 80% of his business comes from people who have listened to his podcast. Or as you're saying, when they have a question, they refer them to, okay, look at episode 220, uh, when we speak about this with that person, and that works really well because you get undivided attention from that prospect for a couple of minutes, or even for hours and hours and hours, and you can plant those seeds, and that works really well. And that's why I'm also trying to be on a lot of podcasts because it helps me to tell the story.

Chris Out: I can test new stories right now because if a story works that it's cool and I see you smiling, then like, okay, that's a good story. Maybe I should test it next time. And if I see you looking at me like, what an idiot, what is he talking about? And okay, like that's a story I shouldn't be telling myself. And in that sense, you're also sharpening your marketing and sales skills. So, I'm a big believer that doing these types of things is creating leverage. And it's humanizing you. And I think that's also an important part.

Sean Weisbrot: So, what's something I haven't asked you that you wished I would ask about this topic?

Chris Out: I think what could be very interesting to your listeners is that probably at the end of this year, I will release my book, where I'm also going to share a lot of tips, strategies, and tricks on how to build out, like your growth team. But I think the most important message is, is that there is an inherent goldmine of growth in front of you in every business. And I'm going to show over there, like, how can you see it? But also how can you tap into it to make sure that your growth becomes easier, and faster, and it actually turns into more revenue.