John Jantsch (00:01): This episode of the duct tape marketing podcast is brought to you by business made simple hosted by Donald Miller and brought to you by the HubSpot podcast network business made simple, takes the mystery out of growing your business. A long time, listeners will know that Donald Miller’s been on this show at least a couple times. There’s a recent episode. I wanna point out how to make money with your current products, man, such an important lesson about leveraging what you’ve already done to get more from it. Listen to business made simple wherever you get your podcasts.

John Jantsch (00:47): Hello and welcome to another episode of the duct tape marketing podcast. This is John Jan. My guest today is Richie Norton. He’s an award-winning author and serial entrepreneur, an executive coach to CEOs he’s featured in Forbes, Bloomberg business week, Inc entrepreneur and Huffington post Pacific business news recognized Richie as one of the top 40 under 40 best and brightest young businessmen in Hawaii. We’re gonna talk about a new book by Richie called anti time management, reclaim your time and revolutionize your results with the power of time tipping. So Richie, welcome to the show.

Richie Norton (01:25): Thanks so much. I’m excited to be here. This is gonna be so much fun.

John Jantsch (01:29): So I do have to warn people that the book starts with a missile attack. Yes. So may maybe you can briefly tell that story and then tell me why that made it into the book.

Richie Norton (01:39): Well, some people may know of this, but if you don’t. Yeah,

John Jantsch (01:43): I recall. I recall

Richie Norton (01:45): It. Yeah, it has a good ending, you know, like spoiler alert, but I actually was in, I live in Hawaii. I was on a business trip in, in Tennessee. And while I was there, I get this text message saying ballistic missile attack in Hawaii. And it followed up with this is not a test. And so therefore it was not a test. This was happening. This is from our government, you know, telling us this and I’m freaking out. It’s easy. It’s easy to tell a story now, like when was happening, I mean, this was, it was real. It was real. I mean, there were people in Hawaii that reportedly were jumping into manhole, you know, so they could like take cover, like it was real. So I call, I have, you know, my, my three boys are at home. My, my wife’s home, I’m calling each one of ’em, nobody answers.

Richie Norton (02:33): And you know, the lines get crossed, you know, when there’s a disaster happening. Anyways, my one of my sons calls back and I think he was 13 at the time. And it was crazy. He said his goodbyes, you know, he is, I love you dad. And he was just weeping. And I re I remember when that happened, I just started thinking like, oh my gosh, my whole world is about to get destroyed. My family, my home, everything I’ve known the whole Hawaiian island chain, uh, like who knows what’s gonna happen here. And it was an interesting experience in addition to what was happening at the time, because I’ve had a number of, of tragedies and I’ll list them without getting too emotional here. But I had a brother-in-law pass away at 21 and his sleep. I had a son pass away as a baby. Uh, he caught pertussis, also known as whooping cough.

Richie Norton (03:23): My wife had a stroke and lost her memory. We’ve had three foster kids that we thought we were gonna adopt come and go. After two years, taking care of them, which was so hard. And I had my, I had a son get hit by a car and he crossing the street and he shouldn’t be here, but he is. But so in this moment, while there’s this missile attack, I had the strangest feeling. In addition to all the emotions, I thought, at least we didn’t live without, you know, at least we didn’t live with regret. We lived without regret. We did all the things we thought we could do. We tried our hardest, we did our best. We’ve experienced tragedy after tragedy and we’ve gotten back up and it was just this weird, surreal moment. And of course, then later we get this text saying that it was a mistake, you know, and life goes back to normal. So here we are

John Jantsch (04:13): Pretty, pretty crazy. So how does that doesn’t really anchor the book, but uses the launching off point. How does that story kinda launch what you’re trying to say in anti time management?

Richie Norton (04:24): You know, at times people will, I’m kind of stuttering cause there’s so many different ideas in my head right now. but when people start thinking about their lives, one of the first things they do is they work towards managing their time better. And the moment they do that, they, whether they realize it or not, cuz fish are the last to realize that there’s this thing called water, right? They don’t even know what’s going on. We don’t even realize that there’s this thing that’s been actually controlling our entire lives until we start looking at it. And we don’t realize that time management was actually designed specifically not to give us freedom, but to control every aspect of our lives at work and eventually into our homes. It’s not about controlling time. It’s about who owns your time, who controls your time and time management was specifically designed that someone else would.

Richie Norton (05:13): So this is important because as soon as we start realizing, oh my gosh, time is limited. Life is short. I know it’s cliche. We immediately create a priority and we instinctively put that priority last on a timeline. It wasn’t an instinct. It was taught to us in kindergarten to do that. Here’s how you set goals. And so I, I truly believe that, you know, goals from experience are tasks, goals, outside experience are growth, and there is a way to work from the goal instead of endlessly toward it. And when you have these experiences in life, you start realizing what really matters. And is there a way to make our work, support it as opposed to working toward it and never having it happen?

John Jantsch (05:57): Yeah. There’s a lot to unpack from what you just said there, but I want to get to give you a chance to say like in two minutes then what is anti time management?

Richie Norton (06:06): Anti time management is like a value centered approach. So stop timing your values and start valuing your time. Right? People will like bake a cake without sugar and expect it to be sweet. I know you can put other things in it, make it sweet. I get it. But just go with the analogy for a second. That’s like trying to live a life saying you have values in one day, you’ll live them and expect it to be a life lived on value. It’s not possible. But when you bake in freedom of time and autonomy and the things you want, even inside of an entrepreneurial business from the start, it actually expands. It creates it. So all these entrepreneurs, I’m gonna start a business to get my time and freedom back only to lose their time and freedom to the business, why they created that world for themselves. They didn’t know any other way. They learned it from corporate.

John Jantsch (06:52): So your solution of course, to, to getting a hold of this is something you call time tipping. Mm-hmm . So because that’s in the title as well. Let’s juxtapose that with anti time management.

Richie Norton (07:04): So anti time management, like the idea of time management, they control you anti time management. You get to control what you’re doing. Time tipping is kind of this framework that kind of goes along with this methodology. So the concept here I’ll make it super specific. If you are a college kid or whatever you are, you’re an entrepreneur, you’re an executive. The first thing you do when you wanna change your life in a lot of ways is you decide how you’re gonna get paid. But it, the instant you decide that you’re gonna move to the city to get paid. You made the decision to have a city life you did. And you decided that everything you do revolves around that world. So someone will get paid in a way they don’t like living. And they’ll do that for a really long time, maybe forever. Whereas someone who wants to live by a lake in Montana could go to Montana, live by a lake and make the same money or more and live the lifestyle they wanted from the start.

Richie Norton (07:59): So in time tipping, we reverse it. What’s the goal of the goal. What’s the job of the goal. What’s the reason I’m getting paid. And we go, we move beyond that. So we start with purpose, create projects around that purpose. And eventually we create a model that allows us to get paid that way. That doesn’t mean we get paid last. We can still get paid first. I’m a huge fan of getting paid first. And just saying, all of a sudden your work is in alignment with autonomy, with availability, with ability with actual productivity, as opposed to lying to ourselves and pretending that it one day will.

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John Jantsch (09:13): So for years, you know, one of, one of the mantras always was, you know, to have this balance work, life balance. And obviously most entrepreneurs know that’s a fallacy, but you take it on pretty head on. I mean, why is balance really the wrong goal? Even,

Richie Norton (09:27): You know, it’s like the word has got, or the term work life balance has gotten messed up with the meaning. Yeah. So, so they’ll say like, I want balance say, no, you don’t wanna sleep for eight hours and play for eight hours on work for eight hours. Maybe one day, you know, like not every day. What you want is these, the essence of that is that you want the availability ability and autonomy to do what you wanna do when you wanna do it balance itself. It’s a weird word because balance itself in physics means motionless. It doesn’t move. Nobody wants a life that is motionless. It doesn’t move. You actually wanna unbalance or imbalance your life in the direction you want it to go. So you’re able to create things and set things in motion, not just do it all yourself. So I, you know, I even work life flexibility is a better term, but even that term misses the point because work life flexibility has become a perk at corporations at the moment. It’s a perk. Get a corporation is not a benefit to the worker anymore. It’s used as another way to control you. So I’m a fan of this concept of time tipping. Cause we need a new language to talk about the things we actually want because it’s not there.

John Jantsch (10:38): So this is slowly changing this sort of industrial age, you know, management, you know, era is changing. I mean my parents and my wife’s parents could never really understand what I do right, right. Because it didn’t fit into what they understood is a job. And you know, increasingly of course I was doing it 30 years ago, increasingly that, you know, my kids are like, no, that’s how I’m, you know, that’s like, that’s normal, right? That’s normal. I’m gonna have freedom. That’s right. I can work from home. I can do anything I want, you know? And so it is changing, but there still are a lot of people that are just very ingrained in that idea of if I’m not busy, if I’m not filling by my day, if I’m not sitting at a desk from nine to five, then I’m not working. I mean, how do we get outta that?

Richie Norton (11:23): It’s true. And I, I think what’s amazing is this is one of the first times I think in history, cuz a lot of the, I, you know, I work with corporations. I work with executives. I work with entrepreneurs. I work with the everyday person. But when you talk about it from like retaining talent, you know, you know, point of view, things start changing because you realize that someone is only in a job for on average in America, 4.6 years, that means you’re turning over at least every five years, more or less. And when that happens, you have a new opportunity. Look, you as an entrepreneur, you can change projects or careers every day. Right? Right. Yeah. But if you’re in one place one time and everybody’s changing every five years and you realize that leaving a job and getting a new one will get you a higher pay raise than staying for the three or 4%.

Richie Norton (12:05): They’re gonna give you every year. Right. Changes the dynamics. So what happens is this is the first generation. I mean generation now, I don’t just mean what age group in generation. Now everyone who’s living. This is the first time that everyone realizes they actually have everyone in quotes. Right. Everyone realizes they have a choice in the matter. Yeah. Yeah. Whether they do something or not is different, but the switching costs are so low to do something new. Whereas in the nineties, even in the two thousands, it was pretty hard. And before that almost impossible today. So they go, wow, it’s so hard to keep these kids on the, on here that work, is it? Or do they just want, do they just know they can do something else and make more money for in, in less time and they’re actually more productive and you wish you could do that too. And you’re jealous. Like what are we talking about here? but what’s cool is our parents, grandparents, they set us up for this. This is the success that they were working towards. So those who don’t wanna take advantage of it, I think it’s an awareness thing. And then those who want take it advantage of it, the opportunities now it’s, it’s never been more readily available.

John Jantsch (13:07): So one of the things that I think trips, a lot of people up is especially, well, people that are bought into what you’re preaching is that there are a lot of things that want to take your time. yes. So, so how do you get better at protecting? You know, you could set up like, here’s my flex, here’s my lifestyle I’m gonna live. And then everybody just like starts piling on.

Richie Norton (13:26): Now that that’s a great question. And it’s, what’s funny about that is like, it’s the same thing with money. When someone realizes you have money that people are like, Hey, I need some money too. Can I have some money? Right. So I like to believe in this concept that I call time flow there’s cash flow and there’s time flow. And you’re right. The people who are the most productive are rewarded with more work. So instead of getting things done, you know, from nine to five and they can get it done in between, you know, nine and 12 or whatever, they don’t get to go home early, early, they just get more work. So then we, everyone starts saying, nevermind, let’s all be average. Let’s all just do the same thing. Let’s spread out day, the exact time, you know . And so here we are.

Richie Norton (14:05): But for people who are trying to like figure out what to do at their time, I straight up, I have to help many people free up their time. They do it on their own, just sharing their principles. And a lot of times they go right back to doing more work. So there’s no judgment of how you fill your time. You’re gonna do it however you want. But there is a way to make one small move that allows one. It makes lots of decisions that you would’ve made disappear. And on the other hand, it creates a number of different opportunities and possibilities. But to answer, it’s like more of a bigger picture question, Aristotle called it a final cause. So like an acorn becomes an Oak tree. So a lot of times we’re planting things that aren’t acorns, but we expect them to become Oak trees.

Richie Norton (14:46): So the moment you realize that, then you can go back and make your work aligned with what you wanna do. Like someone says, I’m not making money. And I say, when’s the last time you asked someone to pay you? Oh no, I’ve been working so hard. Well, if work to you means you’re gonna get paid. Don’t you think you should ask someone to pay you cuz you haven’t worked a day in your life. If you’re defining work as getting paid, now you don’t have to define work as getting paid. But if you do, you should be asking people to pay you that’s aligned work. So when it comes to like how you make your decisions, Aristotle called a final cause. And the idea was an acorn becomes an Oak tree. So academics will use an example of like a table and they’ll say so I need wood.

Richie Norton (15:22): And I need to be able to have a design of how to make it. And I need someone to put it together and voila it’s done well. What’s the goal of the table. If it was to have like an heirloom for your family forever. Cool. If it’s because you have some nice people coming over, some business people, some family, and you wanna have a nice dinner. You there’s Uber eats, man. You can go down the street and go get a taco anywhere. You, you know that there’s a food truck of every flavor everywhere. So when you realize it’s not the dinner, it’s not the table, it’s not the wood. It’s the experience. Well then you can change what you’re doing. The idea is stop focusing on means and focus on ends. Covey didn’t say begin with means in mind, he said begin with the end in mind. And so I think we’ve made goals, habits and strengths. We’ve turned those into means, sorry, we’ve turned. Those means into ends into themselves. So then we lose all of our time and things that don’t lead us anywhere. Even though we think they are, instead of just saying, you know what, if I just did the thing, all this stuff would go away. I’d have more time.

John Jantsch (16:24): Well and how much stuff do we do in the name of being busy? That doesn’t really go anywhere, right? Yeah. So one of the, you have the book broken up into sections. One of the sections is ultimately some practices, you know, for implementing your methodology. So I jotted down a couple that I’d love to hear you explain a little more project stacking for the first

Richie Norton (16:43): One. Oh man, that’s such a good one. it’s such a good one. The concept is how it’s not multitasking. It would be super single tasking. Where one thing you do impacts all of your other companies, whether you like the guy or not. Elon Musk is a master at this thing. You know, his one company will affect all of the others. So you know, space X and you got the solar thing and you got Tesla, they’re using similar technology. They’re using similar resources. One thing impacts the other, you got this boring companies. Now these cars can go underneath. So that’s the idea is you might say, I wanna do all these different things and I’m not saying it to do ’em all at the same time. Maybe you will. Maybe you won’t. But if you can look at your projects and instead of putting them linearly, turn ’em over and stack ’em, it’s almost like this alignment allows you to say, Hey, I wanna make this decision. And this decision makes these different things in my life happen. I can give you more examples, but is that a good, is that, yeah,

John Jantsch (17:44): That’s a great example. And I’ll actually take it. If some people are thinking, oh Teslas, blah, blah, blah. You know, but I mean you write a hundred blog posts over a hundred days. You turn that into a hundred pieces of audio content that turns into a book. I mean that, you know, that’s another way of kind of looking at it on a real simple term, isn’t it?

Richie Norton (18:00): Oh absolutely. You know, every time we share an example, just leave, have a super example. It becomes like, whoa, like, so for me, yeah, I was an entrepreneur. I still am. People ask me questions. So I wrote a book about it. This is an alignment. The book. I mean the other book I’m referring to is the power of starting something stupid. That book turned into coaching consulting, online courses. All these things can happen with the same client that turned into me creating a product based business, where we make over a hundred different products at any given time for entrepreneurs all over the world. And now I’m making yoga pants and I’m making tiny houses in the same breath. And then I’ll be like, wait, what are you talking about? Like, yeah, it’s one decision. And it all came because of the book, the mindset. And now I have an editing company for people and people go like, what are you doing? How you do so many things. So I don’t, my job is to get people their time back. And if there’s a way I can do that in a way that also gives me my time back. Why wouldn’t I?

John Jantsch (18:51): Yeah. And it leads to another practice expert sourcing.

Richie Norton (18:55): This is, so this one’s so important. Expert sourcing is so important because what most people do, you know this, we all do it. We all do it like, oh, I need to delegate or I need to outsource or I need to hire an employee. So what they do is they go and find someone that’s as cheap as possible. But with that choice, it is not about money. They could be the same price. Just depends on what’s going on. But they intentionally go into it saying, I’m gonna teach this person how to do what I do. And they intentionally from the start have set up themselves instead of having zero jobs, they now have at least two or three jobs.

John Jantsch (19:30): that’s why it’s so hard to do. Right. That’s why people don’t

Richie Norton (19:33): It. It’s like I’m gonna hire this person. I’m gonna teach them how to do it. They’re gonna do it wrong. And then I’m gonna do it myself. . But in, in inherently in the word expert, I’m inferring, they know how to do it better than you. Right. There is zero training in expert sourcing. Sure. There’s little things about, I like this. I like it done by then. And here’s how, you know, we work, but this person should be able to teach you how it’s done. And in that sense, everything changes.

John Jantsch (20:03): Yeah. Yeah. That’s awesome way to look at it. Let’s wrap up today talking about something you’ve hinted at, but I want you to hit this dead on because I think it’s in a lot of ways. I think it’s the essence of the book change, how you get paid,

Richie Norton (20:15): How you get paid dramatically impacts your life in every way. And I don’t mean how much you get paid. I get that. You need to make a certain amount and I get the more the merrier you and I both know millionaires. Maybe even some billionaires that have no time and they hate their lives. They’ll say they’ll even say money is easy. Time is hard. How you get paid, decides how you live your life. So if I am making a ton of money, but I’ve decided I have to work in a swivel chair, I will stay in that swivel chair spinning around all day long. When I told myself I wanted to work from my cell phone, this is before Facebook. This was before Facebook, when phones folded it was a decision cuz I knew that would force me to have to think, wow, I can’t be in an office.

Richie Norton (21:05): How am I gonna get this done? I can’t necessarily have people all around. How am I gonna get this done? So it allows you to be creative, these positive constraints. We’ve ended up just being on the road for six months at a time with our kids, screaming in the back of the car, doing whatever we want. Not that we had all the money in the world, we’re making money on the road while we’re good, just like we would anywhere else. So the idea is when you can create an environment that allows you to live the way you want, then you can also get paid to support that environment. And it’s a very different way of thinking, but it works like magic.

John Jantsch (21:37): Well, and it’s kinda like the end in mind of thinking too, that you just mentioned too, is if you start there , you know, then all the decisions you make, you know, should support that. And just, as you said, in some cases, they force you to make certain decisions. Don’t

Richie Norton (21:51): They, they do. It’s a forcing function. And so that’s why with small moves, you can reclaim your time. You can be as productive as you already are. I’m not saying get rid of things that you, that are good that you like. I’m just saying, don’t lie to yourself when it’s not working, let’s just work on something that’s in alignment. And here’s how to do it in a way that creates time for you and your family and for others.

John Jantsch (22:13): And, and I guess we could spend a whole nother show talking about how you actually figure out what alignment means, but there you go. That’s for another day, right? the Richie. Thanks so much for stopping by the duct marketing podcast. You wanna tell people where they can connect with you. Obviously the book will be available wherever you buy books.

Richie Norton (22:28): Yeah. Go to Richie norton.com. And if you go to Richie norton.com/time, I have a 90 day action plan that helps walk you through this. So you can find your alignment and make these things happen now, you know, and it’s really powerful. So, but honestly, John, I’m just so grateful to be on your show. Thank you so much. This has been so, so good to me

John Jantsch (22:45): Now. You, you bet great book again. I appreciate it. And hopefully we’ll run into you one of these days out there on the road.

Richie Norton (22:51): Definitely. I’ll see

John Jantsch (22:53): Ya. Hey, and one final thing before you go, you know how I talk about marketing strategy strategy before tactics? Well, sometimes it can be hard to understand where you stand in that what needs to be done with regard to creating a marketing strategy. So we create a free tool for you. It’s called the marketing strategy assessment. You can find it @ marketingassessment dot co .com .co check out our free marketing assessment and learn where you are with your strategy today. That’s just marketingassessment.co I’d. Love to chat with you about the results that you get.

John Jantsch (00:00): This episode of the duct tape marketing podcast is brought to you by business made simple hosted by Donald Miller and brought to you by the HubSpot podcast network business made simple, takes the mystery out of growing your business. A long time, listeners will know that Donald Miller’s been on this show at least a couple times. There’s a recent episode. I wanna point out how to make money with your current products, man, such an important lesson about leveraging what you’ve already done to get more from it. Listen to business made simple wherever you get your podcasts.

John Jantsch (00:46): Hello, and welcome to another episode of the duct tape marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch and my guest today is Mike Blumenthal. He’s the co-founder and analyst at near media, where he researches and reports on reputation reviews and local search. Today. He also provides local consulting to a range of businesses, big and small across the SMB and SAS marketplaces. He’s assisting a company called air.com and an online professional photographic marketplace to pivot to the local marketing space and helping them bring the power of photography to every business location in the us and Canada. So the reason I talk about air.com cam I’m sorry, is that we are gonna talk about visual search images in search. So Mike, welcome really back to the show. It’s been a couple times for you at least.

Mike Blumenthal (01:37): Thank you very much for having me. It’s always a pleasure to speak with you both personally and professionally.

John Jantsch (01:43): Oh, thanks so much. So let’s talk, I mean, I’ll give you the really big question that you could probably talk the rest of the show for, but you know, our, you know, what’s the growing importance of images in search, you know, what are all the factors that are leading us to talk about this thing?

Mike Blumenthal (01:59): So Google just today announced that 40% of their audience, younger audiences don’t even come to Google search anymore because they prefer the visual nature of TikTok. So talk, so Google has gotten this for a very long time, but search has become about entities more than keywords. And in that Google is streaming visuals of entities everywhere in the search results. These days, both in older search results and newer search results and images, both drive search results and convert users. So they play an ever increasing role, not just in the non search world of social, but particularly in the search world of Google. Google is emphasizing images more and more. I did a analysis of the pixels of a mobile screen on a small business focused to keep a search and 35% of the surgeries. Well, 36% were image pixels versus 2017 when there was 0% of the search results were images on mobile. So they’ve moved very rapidly and very heavily into a visual stream of information as opposed to text.

John Jantsch (03:15): Now, I think for a long time, if I searched for something that was clearly a product, I was getting visuals in there. But I mean, are you suggesting that this is really, even for things that are, you know, not quite as clearly defined as products.

Mike Blumenthal (03:29): Yes. So if you break up say a mobile search result adds at the top, let’s say LSA, add local service ads. Right, right, right. Google has started putting images of lawyers in there, obviously, excuse me, in product searches, you see products, but in the pack, you’ll see carousel associated with each business in the organic result, Google will show up to five images in the mobile result for a loca for organic page. And then they have a whole range of new search units that are strictly visually based order food searched by photo. And it doesn’t need to be in a visual industry, could be in pest control, could be in plumbing. Yeah. Obviously in purchase driven industries like jewelry, it’s obvious, but it’s showing up everywhere in all of those elements, ads, local pack, organic results, new search units, and virtually every one of those has become image Laden.

John Jantsch (04:30): So going back to the ancient ages of the internet, you know, people would sometimes even turn images off because of bandwidth issues and things. And so we, we all got very into producing, you know, alt attribute, you know, describing what the picture actually was. And that that was a, a help. Certainly it was a help to visually impaired, but it was also a certainly a help to Google to maybe know what that picture is about. What can search engines know about images now? I mean, how is, how has that changed?

Mike Blumenthal (04:55): So it’s the most exciting part of search these days is Google’s incredible understanding, driven by AI and machine learning of everything in the image. They understand the objects in the image. They understand the entities in the images. They understand the color patterns. They understand whether they’re suggestive or unsafe in a yeah. Yeah. Social sense. They even understand clothing styles, not only do they understand color and color patterns, they can read and understand the logos. They can read text and convert the text image to a text understanding. So they literally understand all aspects of an image, whether you have an T tag or whether you don’t. And this is to me, the most amazing thing, because they’re using that extensively to match images, to search your intent in the search results. So they will actually show you images based that the search results will change based on your query, the images will reflect closer to your query than

John Jantsch (06:01): So one of the knocks I’ve heard on this a little bit, of course, you know, business owners like to complain because they think Google’s there to serve them. is that, you know, if I search for a product, it will also say, uh, here’s some things like that that you could buy, or if you like that, you’re certainly telling us your style is this. And so here’s some competitors products that you can buy again. You know, what do you say to the business owner that says, I don’t like that because they’re showing my competitors, I’ve done a great job, you know, of optimizing and showing up and search, and now Google’s going out and showing my competitors

Mike Blumenthal (06:35): Well, Google is as Google does. Right? And they’re big. And you’re little the reality is that more people see you on Google search than see you almost any place else in the world. And the other reality is that more people convert to your business from Google search directly from Google search than from your website or any place else in a number of studies that I’ve done, joy Hawkins has done is Sterling sky, anywhere from 75 to 85% of local conversions are happening right on Google. Other words, people are clicking the call, right. Click to right driving directions right then and there, and not coming to your website. So you can either accept that reality or ignore that reality. Obviously ignoring 75% of your conversions. We’re not talking about visibility or talking about conversions. It is a mistake. And if they’re gonna give you the conversions, particularly if they’re gonna give ’em to you for free, I think you need to maximize it to do that to you need to understand that this is where you’re going to be seen the most. Yeah. And not only do you have to optimize your listing, you have to optimize every image and everything you do there. So that when you are compared to these other places, you look both, you look visually better and reputationally better so that people choose you.

John Jantsch (07:55): Would you say, so let’s say a typical blog post. Would you say that the visual element of that blog post is now sending a signal? That’s going to be a ranking signal to search engines, even if it’s just vaguely about what the post is about, or are you saying that we should be picking a, uh, images that we can optimize in that would clearly like enhance, you know, the search component, you know, rather than just the visual component.

Mike Blumenthal (08:23): So the latter, it’s not clear in organic that images are ranking factors, but Google understands the content of images and it will increase your clickthroughs. If Google includes an image in your organic results. So you get direct benefit from it. In the local, we have hard concrete evidence of conversion increases anywhere from 15 to 90% upticks in conversions. And there’s some research out of patient pop, where they saw a 15% increase by switching both their Google local and their website from stock images to professional images, they actually saw about a 15% improvement in appointments at the participating practices. So big numbers of improvement, and it comes from sort of everything. It’s not just the blog post, it’s the blog post plus the website plus local, I think. Yeah. So I don’t think you can focus on any one of those, but if you’re going to, if your search result has images and your competitors doesn’t have images, then you’re gonna get more clicks regardless.

John Jantsch (09:34): Yeah. And I think that’s a great point because I think we get so obsessed with, you know, ranking , but that, that, you know, if there were five, five competitors on page one, and just, as you said, maybe I’m in the three position, but I have an image that’s very attractive. You know, I’m gonna, not only am I going to get more clickthroughs, I’m probably going to improve my, my search results. Aren’t

Mike Blumenthal (09:56): I time and you’re gonna improve your conversions, which

John Jantsch (09:58): Yeah. Which is ultimately what

Mike Blumenthal (09:59): We’re after what it’s all about. Right. I mean, interesting research out of Airbnb 2017, where they deconstructed photographs and under understand the elements of them and then analyzed when they followed these sort of rules of photography with professional photographer, photographs that followed the rule of thirds and good lighting and balanced imagery, they saw rental units increase sales on average by $2,800 annually. We we’re talking big bottom line numbers from having better images, nothing else changed. The images changed and dollar values of the listing went up.

John Jantsch (10:39): Yeah. I actually saw, at some point they were actually offering photographers, you know, local photographers to go out and shoot your place for, because they knew how much value that had cuz people were doing a really, you know, you’d see some really bad photos. And so yeah. Makes a ton of sense.

John Jantsch (10:53): And now let’s hear from a sponsor, you know, everybody’s online today, but here’s the question. Are they finding your website? You can grab the online spotlight and your customer’s attention with SEMrush from content and SEO to ads and social media. SEMrush is your one stop shop for online marketing build, manage and measure campaigns across all channels faster and easier. Are you ready to take your business to the next level, to get seen, get SEMRush, visit SEMrush.com that’s S E M rush.com/go.

John Jantsch (11:31): And you could try it for seven days for free. Is there a relationship between image search or visual search and voice and text?

Mike Blumenthal (11:39): Well, the underlying technology of all of them are entities, real world things that Google is building graphs around people, places, item that Google is understanding more about them and the relationships between them. So at the highest level, they understand your brand and then they understand what your business does and they understand the products. Those are all entities and all searches becoming entities search, as opposed to it used to be keyword driven now. Yeah, it’s sort of conceptually driven by the knowledge graph. And this is true. Whether it’s text search or visual search or audio search, all the underlying technology in all of them is the knowledge graph with the interlinking between the various elements. So they’re all function largely the same, but Google just delivers ’em in a different format.

John Jantsch (12:36): This is a really big question that you maybe can zero in on because you could go all over. You know, what’s the role of AI in all of this.

Mike Blumenthal (12:43): So it’s critical. Google has, I don’t, if you go, if you remember back to Google, plus let me give you some history here. Sure. Google introduced Google photos as part of Google plus, and it was a very groundbreaking product that when Google plus was going down, Google photos was spun off into its own thing. And I think it was 2050 when it first came out, I was using it. And it was clear at the time that they were understanding everything in the images with no labeling. Yeah. And they understood location and all these other things about it. Now, since that time they’ve gotten 4 trillion images uploaded. They get 28 billion a week uploaded. They have scraped almost every image on the internet. They’ve gotten businesses to upload every image products about the place. So Google has trillions and trillions of images to which they’ve used to train large, these large assets to train their understanding.

Mike Blumenthal (13:42): And they, they have created one of the best understandings of images. Now AI still has its limits and certainly AI can be stupid sometimes in a non-human way and make mistakes. So in that sense, it’s really important that when you take a photograph these days, that it appeals to a human, but that it is also understandable by the AI in the machine. You’ve gotta test it. You’ve gotta know that the picture of the dentist, Google, not only does the consumer think it looks good about the dentist, but that Google as a machine understands it as well.

John Jantsch (14:21): So, so that leads me to the point. You know, we we’ve, a lot of people have been using AI to now test what’s the best subject line now that I should send. Right. So are you suggesting that somebody could take three pictures that they are thinking about using for something and use a tool that would say this is actually the best picture from a Google understanding or from a optimization standpoint?

Mike Blumenthal (14:43): Yes, I am saying that the tool you wanna use is Google’s cloud vision AI. It was used to be free now, put it behind a paywall, but the company you mentioned at the beginning, they’ve actually just recently switched their website to air cam.ai. Although the other one redirects has re has recreated Google’s tool on their website. So if you go there, air camm.ai forward size, Google dash vision, I think, but you’ll find it on the main page. Click on that, drop the image three images in and see what Google understands image ads Z. And if it’s a great tiebreaker, because if Google understands one better than the other, in fact, this happened in a real shoot. We were in a dentist office and we took a couple pictures of the dentist with their actually had their secretary in the chair. But, and one Google thought was about medical equipment because of the hand with the medical glove was in front of the, just sort of low in the image and Google mistook that as the intent of the image, whereas the one where the hand was hidden, Google saw it as a dental image, even though to human, both looked equally good.

John Jantsch (15:51): And the data from, yes. Okay. So the data from that exercise or that search would, how else would you use that? Would you put that as the alt tag? Would you use that somehow else?

Mike Blumenthal (16:02): It, I mean, alt tags are value still valuable, but the reason has returned to their original reason, which is to help people who have foresight understand the content of an image. Correct? Yeah. Google, I think gave up on all tags long ago, they realized that most businesses aren’t going to use them. I was trying to understand what, why Google was including images in the mobile search results. So I picked 50 search results that had images went and looked at the images on the website. And literally only one of them had an all tag and Google had still grabbed all these images and put it into the search results. Now I think the Alag helped Google confirm. I don’t, but they’re not using it as a primary thing. And more importantly, it helps your user understand image, right? So I think all tags are still important. Just not to inform Google,

John Jantsch (16:52): Tell me where augmented reality is with images. So I don’t know how long ago, 10 years ago, do you remember Yelp came out with that Parascope thing? I think it was called, right. And you could point your phone, the app down a street and it would augment what you were looking at. Where is that in this conversation or does it even have a place anymore?

Mike Blumenthal (17:13): Well, it does have a, well, it doesn’t have a place today from small business marketing for the most part. Now there is an aspect of visual search. Visual search has a very specific meaning. What we’ve been talking about up to this type time is visual search. In other words, search results, search results that are massively filled with images, but where people still input and text visual search as a technical term, refer to somebody, dropping an image into the search and searching on the image that’s visual search. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So Google lens has now implemented a combined search where you can take a picture of an object, add a text Modi, and then it will return results to so that’s visual search. Now the role of AI AR in this has been very slow to developed because the tools to see the AR have been slow to develop the most sophisticated tools right now are from Niantic and apple.

Mike Blumenthal (18:17): Those are the two leaders and apple has been very slow and methodical in building underlying technology into the phones and, but has been much slower at releasing a device that focuses on it. But you’re starting to see it come up in very like Amazon uses it to allow you to position furniture in your room. Oh, right, right. Those types of things where you’re seeing objects placed over real world. Yeah. And Apple’s announcement around iOS, sixteen’s gonna dramatically accelerate that. So right now it’s not quite ready for a small business to worry about it from a marketing point of view. Um, but I think there, there will be use cases. Now video, on the other hand, short video, particularly 30 seconds and shorter Google is under parsing. Those the same way they parse images, understanding all the elements in the video, the break points, the topics, what people are talking about. They’re transcribing them in real time. I think video is probably on the cusp of breakthrough has broken through in TikTok, but I think it will break through on Google very shortly. I think 30, 32nd and shorter videos have a huge role in small business marketing. And I think it’s eminently doable with the technology that’s available. And I think Google will reward it much the same way. It’s rewarding images with increased conversions, increased visibility, more phone calls,

John Jantsch (19:50): And those videos need to be on YouTube or in natively embedded on your site is fine.

Mike Blumenthal (19:57): I, you know, I don’t know where you’re gonna get the best conversion, but I would do your site. Let’s Google my business. Plus YouTube. I would do ’em all three places. And I probably would do ’em. I’d do ’em on YouTube. Use the YouTube to embed it on your site and then upload it to Google my business as well. And I think I would give you the maximum

John Jantsch (20:18): Just to Google my business, or I guess we need to say Google business profile. We

Mike Blumenthal (20:22): Do need to

John Jantsch (20:23): Say business Google

Mike Blumenthal (20:24): Business profile,

John Jantsch (20:25): Which Google business pro I had actually somebody asked me if I could help optimize their Google places page. So I was like, wow, great. That really hasn’t been updated for a while. Has it? So, so you’re saying though that to put those videos in posts on, on your Google business

Mike Blumenthal (20:38): Profile, into posts and into your photo area, both

John Jantsch (20:42): Oh into the photo

Mike Blumenthal (20:43): And Google will parse them. I was listening to a Google webinar for product experts. I’m, what’s called the Google product expert where I volunteered that was business with Google. And they really liked what they called selfies were pictures of the products in your business, on the shelf where Google and the consumer could get a really solid idea of what the place looked like and the range of products you were offering. So I think selfies are, if they’ve created a term for it. Yeah. They’re clearly focused on it. And I think it’s the kind of photograph you want.

John Jantsch (21:17): Yeah. Interesting. So in a lot of ways, one of the biggest takeaways for the local business or for the small business is just, you know, do a better job with your images that you’re using. And now there’s some tools that can tell you if you are doing a good job with

Mike Blumenthal (21:32): Well, right. I think you need to think about it semantically. In other words, you need to think about the range of services you offer or the range of products you offer. And you want multiple high quality images in each of those categories that you can drip to Google over time that Google understands as those categories. Yeah. So think about your product and services broadly, categorize them, take multiple images in each check those images against Google’s AI. And then we have found that dripping them into GMB into Google business profile, Google B P G B P, dripping them a couple a month is gonna give you the maximum increase in G B P visibility. For whatever reason, we don’t know quite how Google doing this, but it dramatically increases conversions if you do it that way.

John Jantsch (22:32): Awesome. Well, Mike, it is always great to catch up with you. You are always on the cutting edge of the stuff and testing it out and, you know, seeing real world results. So I love getting your insight on things. You wanna tell people where they might connect with you if they so desire.

Mike Blumenthal (22:48): Sure. So my primary place of writing right now is near media.cl. If you subscribe there, which is you just hit the subscribe button or near media Dosio slash subscribe, we will actually give you a ebook on imagery in Google local to that will summarize all of these things for you, put ’em in a more concrete form and help develop a plan for you. So, and on Twitter and Blumenthal, and to have opening Mentha, and I have open email. These, I always have open email, feel free to email me Mblumenthal@nearmedia.co. I answer every email. That’s

John Jantsch (23:24): Awesome. And I can attest to, at least you answer mine.

Mike Blumenthal (23:27): Well, I didn’t answer the last two you sent me, but that’s cuz I was already setting up my gear.

John Jantsch (23:32): Awesome. Well, my great catching up with you and hopefully we’ll run into you one of these days, soon out there on the road.

Mike Blumenthal (23:37): All right. Sounds good. Thank you very much for having me. I really appreciate it.

John Jantsch (23:42): Hey, and one final thing before you go, you know how I talk about marketing strategy strategy before tactics? Well, sometimes it can be hard to understand where you stand in that what needs to be done with regard to creating a marketing strategy. So we created a free tool for you. It’s called the marketing strategy assessment. You can find it @ marketingassessment dot co not .com .co check out our free marketing assessment and learn where you are with your strategy today. That’s just marketingassessment.co I’d. Love to chat with you about the results that you get.

John Jantsch (00:00): This episode of the duct tape marketing podcast is brought to you by business made simple hosted by Donald Miller and brought to you by the HubSpot podcast network business made simple, takes the mystery out of growing your business. A long time, listeners will know that Donald Miller’s been on this show at least a couple times. There’s a recent episode. I wanna point out how to make money with your current products, man, such an important lesson about leveraging what you’ve already done to get more from it. Listen to business made simple wherever you get your podcasts.

John Jantsch (00:45): Hello and welcome to another episode of the duct tape marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Melissa Kwan. She is the co-founder and CEO of E webinar. She’s also spent 12 years in startups and built three successful companies without venture capital backing her previous startup a real estate tech company was acquired in 2019 as a revenue driven founder, specializing in sales and business development. She has learned how to build companies with very few resources, something a lot of folks listening can appreciate by automating what she could outsourcing whenever possible and inspiring talented people to join her team with shared focus and enthusiasm. So Melissa, welcome to the show.

Melissa Kwan (01:29): Thanks John, for having me.

John Jantsch (01:31): So I feel like I gave a little taste of it there, but I feel like we should just have you kind of say here’s been my entrepreneur journey. We’re gonna talk about your most current undertaking, but where have you been to get you to here?

Melissa Kwan (01:45): yeah. Great question. So I spent over 12 years in, in startups. UL runs my third company. My first two was in real estate tech. The last job that I quit was at SAP and then previous to that was in real estate. So I kind of just like put the two and two together and created software for real estate. First company was a product company towards agency and then the second company was a SAS product. It was like an open house sign in software. So having done so many live webinars, demos, onboarding trainings for a consistent five years, sometimes five back to back for my previous company, I had just dreamt of a product, a magical product that would do my job for me. Yeah. While I go and have fun. And that became E webinar after that company was sold in 2019.

John Jantsch (02:32): So, so let’s, I guess let’s ask the, you know, what is E webinar? Just give us the like really quick, you know, view of that so we can kind of break it down then a little from there.

Melissa Kwan (02:41): Yeah. So E webinar, the concept is simple. We save people from doing repetitive, boring webinars over and over again. So you can imagine sales, demos, pitches, onboarding, training, product updates, customer interviews, you know, things like that. Right? So you might be running them on zoom right now, or you might not be doing them because you don’t have a person to run them. We turn any video into an interactive webinar that you could set on a recurring schedule or join on demand. So people can consume that content whenever they want.

John Jantsch (03:09): Yeah. So webinars have certainly been around for, you know, ages, internet ages, I guess, you know, 15, 20 years peop marketers have been using them, certainly live, but recently eight, 10 years ago, it seems like this platform of going and signing up and sort of watching a live , but it’s recorded. You know, that, that technology, there are half a dozen, at least you probably know ’em all, you know, people that are doing that. What’s when people say, oh, how is this different than blah, blah, blah.

Melissa Kwan (03:40): Yeah. I mean, so first of all, we don’t do any live webinars. Yeah. Right. We don’t, there is no live audio. There’s no live video. Like enough people are solving this. Yeah. Like down to like Facebook live Instagram live, like everyone in the world is trying to solve this and it really solving it and doing a great job. So what we wanted to solve was the next phase of that. How do you scale a live webinar or a presentation that, you know, works for you? Yeah. Like if you’re doing, you know, a lead gen kinda customer interview type webinar, once a quarter, how, what kind of impact would that have on your business if you made that available every single day. So that’s really, that’s the space that we’re focusing on. And if you, if anyone that’s listening to this right now thinks to themselves, Hey, I’ve seen those before.

Melissa Kwan (04:25): Right. But it’s a little bit scammy. You’re right. And that’s why we exist. I was also in my previous life looking for something that would do this particular thing and everything I found was almost like designed to deceive consumers, to trick them into buying something or create false scarcity, which isn’t what sales and marketing is about. It’s not what branding is about. Right? It’s about delivering a beautiful professional, authentic experience that reflects your brand, but also an experience that allows your customer, your prospect, your attendee, to connect with you. It’s not a video on YouTube. A webinar is where you can go and engage and ask questions and get a response back. So what E webinar does differently is we made the investment to build an asynchronous chat system. Just like your Intercom, your Zend desk, any chat bubble that pops up on a website. When people ask you questions through chat, you can, if you’re there hop into respond live, but if you’re not there, it’s totally fine. Cuz when you respond later, they still get your response on email. And I would say no other automated webinar company had actually made that investment to build up that system.

John Jantsch (05:33): Yeah. I mean, there, there’s certainly a place for on demand because you know, you and I are talking it’s 10 o’clock at night for you when you’re talking. It’s uh, dunno what time it is here. Two o’clock for me. I mean, so the, there is a, you know, there is a need in the customer journey to allow people to get the information they want when they want it. So I think the case for having those makes a lot of sense, but the point that you also made is that so many of ’em are trying to fake their live and that there’s pre-canned chat and it says there’s 27 people on right now. and I think everybody realizes that’s all just a scam, but I think we put up with it because it’s like, well, everybody does it. So how did you take on that idea? Or did you just make a decision in the very beginning? We’re not going to be, you know, spammy or scammy like that.

Melissa Kwan (06:22): The thing is John, like the last thing I would want is to build a business that facilitates a behavior. Yeah. That’s the bottom line. Yeah. So very early on, we looked at all these players and we thought, okay, like there’s a reason why they have that because people ask for it, the customers ask for it. Yeah. But what I care about and what gives my business longevity is if your customer likes you, not, if you like me. Right. So in a sense, we’re building for the, a attendee, like that’s the first experience we’re building for. And it’s almost like kind of what Steve jobs does, right? He’s like, well, you can’t have this. It has to look like this. Even if you ask for this is the better experience you have to update your OS. And I think like when you’re specing a business or a product like this, you have to make those decisions to think what is the audience you wanna attract?

Melissa Kwan (07:09): Because the market’s big enough. Yeah. So we wanted to deliver a product with integrity first, which means we had to constantly not put in features and not build features that create that kind of fake scarcity. Right. So we have no simulated chat, no fake sales notifications, no fake counter. Everything is real. You can put in sales notification, but it’s based on your conversion pixel, there is a counter, but you could choose live or accumulative, but it’s real. Like everything’s real. And our chat is one on one between the attendee and the moderator, like none of that fake stuff. Right. So we just made a decision early on to say like, this is just not a business that like, we wanna track those kind of people. And we said like, we came to terms with the fact that it would take us longer to get off the ground. Cause we couldn’t, we wouldn’t be able to win people that already on the other platforms, but that’s okay. Yeah.

John Jantsch (07:59): Well I, let me push back there a little bit because I was on the other platform and I saw this as a, uh, you know, I was on those platforms because I wanted on demand and I just put up with the other stuff. Right? Yeah. But what I want to have with my customers is a long term relationship. Not a short time, I sold you something, uh, relationship. And I think that’s maybe why people put up with those is because they do work in a certain way, but not for the long term. And I think that what you’ve built is for somebody, in my opinion, is for somebody who views their relationship with their customers as a long term relationship, as opposed to I sold you something.

Melissa Kwan (08:38): Well, I would say because we delivered the product in this way. Yeah. Like it is, we mimicked our branding and how we want people to feel to MailChimp. Yeah. Yeah. Right. We wanna be fun. We wanna be a startup, but we wanna be established. Yeah. Right. We want to feel like this is a company they can trust. And that goes down to, you know, the product and integrity. Right. And the features that you have. So I would say like before this year, maybe last year, cuz we, the product’s been line for two years, you would not see companies like Zillow on automated webinars yeah. Or fresh works or catalyst. Right. Like none of those like real established companies would be on there. The people that have been leveraging, those are like a lot of solo entrepreneurs, a of coaches, a lot of like internet cash marketers, but like real companies have never automated what their webinars for this reason. Like they might have a gated landing page or they might have a video with CR YouTube, but that’s not a webinar experience.

John Jantsch (09:36): Yeah. And now let’s hear from a sponsor, you know, everybody’s online today, but here’s the question. Are they finding your website? You can grab the online spotlight and your customer’s attention with some rush from content and SEO to ads and social media SEMrush is your one stop shop for online marketing build, manage and measure campaigns across all channels faster and easier. Are you ready to take your business to the next level, to get seen, get SEMrush, visit SEMrush.com that’s SEM rush.com/go. And you could try it for seven days for free.

John Jantsch (10:17): I, I tell you that one of the features that, that I really love is because one of the things we really want is somebody not just sitting there mindlessly watching, or maybe like having your webinar in a different, you know, different screen while they’re working. And they’re just listening to it is the amount of engagement.

John Jantsch (10:32): One of the things that’s very built in is you have a lot of built in features and templates for getting people engaged, for finding out who they are for creating, you know, a reason for them to say more about the who they are and what they want and what they’re trying to accomplish. And I think that maybe some of the other platforms have that, but I think you’ve really cracked that part. And to me, not only getting rid of the stuff we’ve been calling kind of scammy, I think that to me is probably your best feature.

Melissa Kwan (11:00): Yeah. So we call them interactions, right? Yeah. Um, and I was, when I was coming out with this product, I was also thinking like, okay, let’s face it. Webinars are boring. Yeah. Right. It depends on like how fun it is and how engaging it is. A lot of times if depends on the speaker. Sure. And let’s face it like topic obviously. Yeah. And not, everyone’s a great speaker. And then during live webinar, there’s lots of interruptions. People ask questions, there’s housekeeping. Maybe your connection is bad. Like none of that happens on an automated webinar cause it’s based on a video. But I was thinking like, what is it that you could deliver then put out there that can get your, a attendee to stay till the end so they can take that action. Yeah. If they don’t stay till the end, even if you deliver your CTA, they’re never gonna see it.

Melissa Kwan (11:42): So we, we have these thing called interactions, which are like programmable polls, questions, resources, sales, alerts, you know, things that allow the, a attendee to participate right. In the experience with you. So it’s not like I come in and you’re talking at me for 45 minutes and I’m playing on my phone and you’re losing me to Instagram. Like when you ask me a question, something pops up and I’m actually able to engage with it. Maybe I can see the results and things like that. But on the host side, we actually gather all that data and we deliver it to you in a beautiful, actionable and understandable report. So you can actually see like where are people hitting a thumbs up? Because within any webinar you can hit a thumbs up. It’s more of a consumer experience. Where are people dropping off? Are they answering this question?

Melissa Kwan (12:26): So you can imagine in the past six months I’ve ran my demo. I don’t do live demos. It’s all in new webinar. Of course. All right. I ran it 1500 times. And my first question is, how did you hear about us? Yeah. And about 60 PE like 60% of people will answer that question. So from a marketing perspective, that is such valuable information. Yeah. And the more I run it, the better data I’m getting to, whether it’s helping my business or helping me make a better presentation. Next time, all of that is, is very useful.

John Jantsch (12:55): And I can say, this is not exactly scientific, but we have run this same webinar for many years. And you know, we’re always tweaking a little bit. I will say that our completion rate has significantly increased since moving to ewe R now I will give one caveat because of all the interaction we’ve actually changed how we’re presenting this information BA you know, because we’re, we feel like we have all these engagement tools now. that? Yeah. So, so it’s changed a little bit about how we’ve presented the information, but I can tell you that, you know, 35 ish percent higher rate of completion than using another platform.

Melissa Kwan (13:35): I mean, we have a customer that took the exact same video. Yeah. And put it into E webinar and their engagement and completion rate went up by 50%. Like they did nothing at all. So that’s why, like, we, we encourage people to just give it a try. I think that one of the biggest pushback we have is like, well, if it’s a video, then why don’t I just use YouTube? Yeah. Yeah. And it’s just the mindset of it, isn’t it? Yeah. Like, yeah, you get a registration page, you choose it time. There’s reminders, there’s follow ups. And then it starts at a certain time. Or you can watch it on demand. Like, I, I know earlier you said like there’s a place for, on demand for webinars particularly, but like, it’s so interesting how in our everyday lives, like as consumers we expect on demand video content.

Melissa Kwan (14:18): Yeah. Like when was the last time you didn’t watch something on apple TV or Netflix or Amazon, like I expect to go there and press play and watch it at my own time. However, for some reason, for B2B content, you have to come to my show right next Tuesday at 11, my time zone. So there’s a bit of a disconnect, right. So I think it’s not only like there’s a place for on demand and B2B content. I think it’s already here. And the people that understand that will be able to use that as a differentiator in their business.

John Jantsch (14:50): Yeah. That’s such a great point. I think again, it’s one of those things where we just get used to it. It’s like, well, that’s the way we get to, you know, consume this content. But a lot of behaviors, especially buying behaviors and things really do get influenced by the way that we behave every day in life. And just your example of the streaming, you know, programming, I mean like TV guide, what’s that right? I mean, I just go and I, yeah. You know, I watch the program when I feel like watching it. And I think that kind of behavior or habit that gets developed really should be something that we’re looking at and saying, that’s how everybody wants to shop now. Or that’s how everybody wants to get their content. Now.

Melissa Kwan (15:28): I mean, another great example is like texting, like who calls now? Like maybe your family member, you’re like, Hey, I’m outside or I’m downstairs. Or, you know, if you’re in your car, like maybe you’ll call on a headphone. And we have some people that are looking at E webinar. Maybe they’re moving from zoom, cuz they’re like just absolutely exhausted from running these live webinars and they just have to scale. But one of the questions they have for us is, well, if you don’t, if I can’t answer people right away or using my voice, are they gonna be mad at me? Like, does that mean worse? Does that mean worse customer service? Because I’m used to doing this live thing and I’m used to making people feel, feel special by calling out their name or answering the question. But my response is always just give it a try because I think your customers, like you’d be surprised at how your customers would prefer tech space and how much more manageable all that Q and a is. If it is text space

John Jantsch (16:28): To, to totally agree. And just going back to E webinar, another thing that I think people will enjoy, you talked about trying to make it fun. I think the interface itself is actually, um, easier to set up and easier to, to operate, uh, and get a webinar going than a lot of the other platforms as well. So you’ve think you’ve conquered a number of the things that competitors aren’t doing. I do wanna talk a little bit about just the business of building this as well. You know, from a text import first, I should have asked you in the beginning, are you an engineer or programmer yourself or

Melissa Kwan (16:57): No, I wish I, I wish, yeah. I wish I was an engineer cuz otherwise it would be feature complete by now. so nothing would be ever wrong with it.

John Jantsch (17:06): So, so what’s been the hardest part from a tech sample.

Melissa Kwan (17:10): Oh my gosh. Like I, it is a constant battle every day, but what is the hardest? I would say the one thing, I mean, of course the first thing is just scaling. Cuz as you build a business as like, you know, people start having a thousand people in a webinar. Yeah, yeah. Or you have two of those and now there’s 2000 people and everyone’s sending a chat. Right. And then, but you can’t test for that scenario until you get there. right. So the first six months was like acquiring these customers, but then what do you do? Yeah. What do you do when everyone has it on Wednesday or everyone has it on Tuesday. Right? So we’ve kind of solved that. But believe it or not, one of the most difficult things to solve is just the flexibility, like offering complete flexibility and scheduling and also the ability to track all of those things in a report, right?

Melissa Kwan (18:04): Like all the chat and all the interactivity, like we’ve worked that kind of stuff out. But right now, give, give you an example. People are asking for the ability to pause. So say I’m running a workshop. I wanna say, okay, I’m gonna let you pause for five minutes. You can finish this worksheet and then you can press play or it’s gonna start on its own. I still don’t understand this, but apparently it messes with the timeline of the video and then it messes with all the analytics. Yeah. so it’s just little things like that, that like me and you may never think about that. We’re very happy that they’re engineers for.

John Jantsch (18:36): So, so I was gonna ask you what your most requested feature is. New feature is, and that maybe you just revealed it.

Melissa Kwan (18:44): We have an ongoing wishlist of features, but definitely what you’re gonna see next is a full facelift of our attendee experience. So what we have right now is I think it’s two, three times better than what’s out there. But what you’re about to see is something that will be 10 times, 20 times better than what’s out there because we wanna really deliver an experience that’s less businessy, like less zoom and way more consumers. So what we’re taking inspiration from is not the webinar solutions that are out there. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We’re taking inspiration from like Twitch or gaming companies or you know, apple TV, like those kind of things and see like how people actually wanna consume interactive video because this is what it is, right. Call it in a webinar automation software, but it is interactive video. So how do people wanna engage and consume that content and feel like, you know, they learn something and that and feel delighted. Right. I think delighted is the word.

John Jantsch (19:47): So are you one of those people that I could say, you know, what’s the vision for this company three years from now? Or are you really still trying to, you know, wrestle with the momentum of the moment?

Melissa Kwan (19:58): The only thing I care about right now is getting to profitability. so as a business owner, you probably understand that. Yeah, absolutely. So I would love to not be, you know, burning money, but I just want, I wanna see maybe not even the three years, like, like next year, I really wanna see people’s mind shift away from like Mo moving away from doing repetitive live webinars and just understanding that there’s a better way. Yeah. Cause all it takes is a flip, right. Cause right now this is what, you know, you’ve been doing it for 10 years. Webinars is have actually been around for 20 years. Yeah. But there is a new way of doing things that is not just better for you. Right. Freeing up your time. So you can, you know, spend more with your friends and family, but it’s actually better for your customer. Yeah. To have access to that information when they can consume it. Like the average attendance rate for all of our customers is 65%. Yeah. And that is outrageous. Yeah.

John Jantsch (21:00): Well, and I think I love about it and I think people need to, you know, customer journey, we can design the most perfect customer journey. People are gonna go through ’em the way that they’re gonna go through them. And I think that’s what, you know, a lot of times, if they can go through three or four stages of the customer journey one night, because that’s what they were really , you know, amped up about. I think that, I think we, as marketers have to realize that we just have to offer that flexibility.

Melissa Kwan (21:24): Um, yeah. I mean, I’ll leave you with one stat that I love from trust radius. 87% of buyers prefer to do their own research sure. Through their buying journey. Yeah. And 57% already make a purchase without talking to a salesperson. Yeah. Yeah. So you can actually make transparency and access to content your differentiator. If your competitor is gating everything, making people book a call, not making their webinars on demand and making it just difficult for people to get the information they need to make a decision, then they’re gonna go somewhere else.

John Jantsch (22:02): Absolutely. Melissa advi tell us where people can find out more about the product and connect with you.

Melissa Kwan (22:11): Yeah. If you wanna connect with me, LinkedIn is best. So my name is Melissa K w a N. And check out E webinar. If you’re curious how it works, there is, uh, an on-demand demo of course, delivered through E webinar in a very meta way. And it’s exactly as it sounds, ewe.com.

John Jantsch (22:25): Awesome. Well, Melissa, it was great. You know, I’m a fan. I, you know, love the product itself and answered something we were looking for. So we were happy to find it. And hopefully we’ll appreciate you stopping by the, take some time on the duct tape marketing podcast. And hopefully we’ll run into you out there on the road one of these days.

Melissa Kwan (22:42): Thanks so much, John.

John Jantsch (22:43): Hey, and one final thing before you go, you know how I talk about marketing strategy strategy before tactics? Well, sometimes it can be hard to understand where you stand in that what needs to be done with regard to creating a marketing strategy. So we created a free tool for you. It’s called the marketing strategy assessment. You can find it @ marketingassessmentdotco.co check out our free marketing assessment and learn where you are with your strategy today. That’s just marketing assessment.co I’d love to chat with you about the results that you get.