speaker-1: All we did was post.
speaker-0: Content.
speaker-1: You can use one channel and one offer to get to a million dollars a year. We went from about five, six hundred dollars per meeting book down to eighty to a hundred twenty dollars per meeting book. So we went from two million to twelve million in any recurring revenue that year. They'll pay in one call. That's how we know the price is too cheap. You know, if I had to restart from scratch, honestly I'd start a service business. I wouldn't build anything.
speaker-2: What's up everybody?
speaker-1: You are back here today with Jared Matt and FaZe on the Polymaths Pod, the show where founders and builders break down exactly how they built what they built, their tactics, their strategies, their secret sauce, and how they made money in a way that's honest, practical, and tactical that you can apply to whatever you're building. Today we got FaZe Imran, he's 24, he's been selling since he was nine. He's built and sold six companies, three venture-backed and three bootstrapped. Starting with a digital agency he sold before he turned eighteen.
speaker-2: last company intent post started as a
speaker-1: LinkedIn post and built its whole point on LinkedIn and was acquired by mailing this year and CEO of Dripseed and today is the first
speaker-2: First time he's talking about it on a podcast. So thank you so much, man. Thanks for coming on the show.
speaker-0: Excited to be here. Thanks guys.
speaker-2: I definitely, definitely appreciate you hopping on. And yeah, I I guess the first question is just can you tell us about who you are and about what you're building that drip seat?
speaker-1: Yeah, yeah. my name is Faiz Amran. My background's in media marketing. I built and sold a couple
speaker-0: market companies in the space as as met mentioned. And with Dripseed, essentially making it easy for B2B founders to push out content on LinkedIn, Twitter, AEO, GEO, right blogs. And and the big idea came from what we did at Intent Post. So Intent Post a company that simple to send physical mail, like actual physical mail that stood out. And
speaker-1: And what's ironic is the way we built our pipeline was entirely it was just post
speaker-0: with LinkedIn. And building in public and it led to like a hundred twenty thousand closed in six weeks, eight hundred forty thousand dollars in pipeline in six weeks and all we did
speaker-1: was post
speaker-0: content. Anyways
speaker-1: happy to dive into that more, but yeah, that's that's what we're doing. We're helping
speaker-0: founders show up everywhere and and get content out the door.
speaker-2: So what about the content that you've posted across LinkedIn historically do you feel like has made it work and made it successful? Because like you just said, it was a big part of your growth at Intent Post and now you're literally helping people create that kind of content themselves. So what makes LinkedIn content work?
speaker-1: Yeah, I mean that's a great question. I mean, right now, twenty twenty six, a lot of people are just
speaker-0: Using AI to write their posts and AI
speaker-1: There's nothing wrong with just using it to
speaker-0: to like maybe
speaker-1: clean up your post or format your post but people are just push pushing out
speaker-0: like recycled content, like AI slop, right?
speaker-1: social spee feeds, they see it. People see it. More importantly, if you're trying to rank it notices. Like what a lot of people will write me a post about or I want to write a post about the and what they get back recycled either it's trained on it, it searches the web or
speaker-0: people see and they skip past it and then on AI search as well. What do is is be like right about this topic, this trending headline. Back is recycled content. That's all AI can give you is recycled content. It's been web for
speaker-1: other things. It pulls in the same information that if I were to prompt
speaker-0: prompt it the same way and Jared would prompt the same way, it's gonna be relatively or about the same insights,
speaker-1: It's nothing there's no net new
speaker-0: right?
speaker-1: and when you go out and you write a post
speaker-0: by hand for example with your experiences you know talking about a call
speaker-1: You're sharing a funny story that happened in your company or something or a customer success or even a failure. It's net new it's something that you experience your day to day activity, it can't experience it,
speaker-0: Content experienced, you know, because you were doing
speaker-1: can't talk about that. And then as a result, when you do post it, whether it's a social post, humans recognize it, and also AI notices it at all because it's right.
speaker-0: It as it's a blog or recognize it as well. It's new content, net new content, right?
speaker-1: It's something that's a personal experience, it can label it as trustworthy if it's somewhat factual.
speaker-0: Well, and
speaker-1: More the most important thing in my opinion and kind of sharing authority instead of just recycling what AI gets.
speaker-0: is being unique and and and you know through learned experiences gives you and and kind of pushing out what people call AI
speaker-2: Okay. I actually have a question that's kind of coming back to the LinkedIn 'cause for for example, I've always been able to blow up on Instagram, Twitter, YouTube. What would you say is a constant like feedback loop with LinkedIn and also with LinkedIn, do you see if you use like a s like a posting scheduler like buffer or medical, I think it's called, do you see those hurt the content in terms of like the engagement or the growth?
speaker-1: I I th I don't think the tools and the scheduling of the post
speaker-0: itself hurts the content. I think it's the things that people do to try to automate everything, right?
speaker-1: When people try to automate the scheduling, they're usually automating other
speaker-0: other pieces of it and and then the post doesn't perform and they're like, see it's the scheduling tool.
speaker-1: I I think the difference between like posting on TikTok, Insta and
speaker-0: And
speaker-1: posting on LinkedIn is LinkedIn the the audience that's actively looking
speaker-0: Scrolling LinkedIn is look for ways they can improve their business, improve their job, their workflows. What we look
speaker-1: So what they
speaker-0: for is
speaker-1: hey, this is what I tried and here they look for numbers, right? They want to know what this new strategy or this new thing you're sharing did for your business. Writing like a very just generic post, that's yeah, if you're
speaker-0: Yeah.
speaker-1: writing generic posts and it's just like, hey, this is a good tip.
speaker-0: Or hey hey.
speaker-1: Here's a cool way to do blank and and you do that on on LinkedIn, it won't perform as well as hey, we did this and we increased pipeline by ten or here's how we added an extra hundred thousand dollars, or here's how we closed an extra
speaker-0: ten percent or this month to our pipeline. Hundred K in deals and
speaker-1: And then you walk through real experiences.
speaker-0: learned experiences, you'll crush on LinkedIn with that.
speaker-1: but when it comes to Instagram and TikTok, I mean the same format works, just in a different, you know, scenario. Like if you talk about real world experiences, if you talk about something that's like you negative hooks, for example, on on TikTok or Instagram where like, hey, I I did this and I got kicked out of school, or this is you know, I said this to my girl and and now I got you know, now I'm single. or you do anything like that that that's extreme and it's a negative hook, it'll crush TikTok and
speaker-0: on and you know, Instagram and and YouTube
speaker-1: YouTube shorts but with actually YouTube shorts and LinkedIn are really similar where people look for ac And and that does usually a lot better.
speaker-2: Not to say I doubt anything about your value proposition, I promise, but I'm curious like how what your argument is against like what's the difference between just taking transcripts of every call that I have and throwing it back into AI and y
speaker-1: Yeah, that that's
speaker-0: That's great question.
speaker-1: well, you know, the way I look at it is when I was doing the post myself, right? When we were building a Tet Post pipeline, that's that's when I realized that this is such a difficult thing to do. It's not just about taking the transcripts and and throwing them into, you know, AI reformat them. There's a lot of other steps that go. One, as a brand, if you're posting with
speaker-0: and being like f go into it as a founder or you have your team posting.
speaker-1: you, you want to make sure you're not saying anything that hurts your brand. You have things that you want to say.
speaker-0: Say things that you want to share, things that n of course things you don't want to share.
speaker-1: And then on top of that, you not only want to just publish content, you want to see that content. So can you just take your transcripts and and throw them into Chat GPT or something and organize them a little better? Sure. I think you'll get better posts than just simply post about certain topics. But it still doesn't solve the rest of it.
speaker-0: like asking an idea to write no topic, right?
speaker-1: Like when someone comments and and they are ICP, you want to make sure you engage with them. You want to also, as you guys probably know, on LinkedIn, if you're trying to crush it LinkedIn, it's not just about
speaker-0: Posting.
speaker-1: You also need to comment and you need to engage with other people. There's a
speaker-0: post.
speaker-1: essentially it's like a second job. And and a lot of companies that that we work with that are doing over two million dollars a year growing quick they don't have time like you
speaker-0: Growing aggressively, growing quickly, time for the s second job of
speaker-1: know, thinking of hey, what's trending and and matching that up with my transcripts and you know, polishing the post, writing it over and over and and editing it and tweaking it sounds right and and it gives off the right posting
speaker-0: Until
speaker-1: it once it's posted, you know, replying to every comment and
speaker-0: And responding to and
speaker-1: every D and making sure everybody that is a good fit for what you sell, making sure that you actually in your pipeline. It it it's literally a full time job. So what we're doing is essentially taking a lot of the like
speaker-0: workload off of a
speaker-1: a junior marketer
speaker-0: or like a a growth higher.
speaker-2: It's super interesting. Like I said, LinkedIn is probably the only platform that I haven't been able to tap into. But when you scroll on LinkedIn, what would you say gives a post away in terms of like it's AI slop or it's generic or like what's a post that you often see people try to post online? It's like, okay, this isn't gonna this isn't gonna work out.
speaker-1: It's a couple things. I mean, sometimes it's the formatting, sometimes it's it's too
speaker-0: Just
speaker-1: I g it's hard to describe. I feel like everybody has seen AI. Like and
speaker-0: I slide you see it and you're just like, All right.
speaker-1: you just sc skim right past it. But it it's not i there's no learned experiences, no sh human experiences. I the the hooks are usually like really like safe. AI doesn't give you anything that's even if you ask it to be punchy, it's not gonna give you anything as punchy as also the image a lot of the times will give it away. and then what LinkedIn is actually doing now is they're testing out this for you versus network feed, so you won't even make it to the
speaker-0: for you feed if if it's not like content that that's actually teaching something or it's original in some way or form.
speaker-2: What were you doing? What do you feel like made you successful during that period of time?
speaker-1: Yeah, I mean so in Tent Post we did so usually just generally, my belief i when it comes to marketing for an early stage company, I think you should take and just milk. A lot
speaker-0: One channel that channel.
speaker-1: of people like will try to, you know, run paid ads and then do content. So like email.
speaker-0: And then also do cold and
speaker-1: They try all of these channels and and they all do meh. You can use one channel and one offer to get to a million dollars a year.
speaker-0: And and if you can't, I mean something wrong with the product and and and use that channel and and and really aggressively work
speaker-1: channel so for the channel that we picked for us at Intent Post was building in public, posting public. So we were posting on LinkedIn X and we were sharing our internal experiments with testing mail. We were sharing our customers' experiments, the
speaker-0: Panst.
speaker-1: results, the negative stuff, the positive stuff. We were just building you know public. We showed everybody everything that was happening.
speaker-0: In public happening.
speaker-1: And people really resonated with the bad days. And then of course when we had some really cool case study and we started sending things that showed up to you know see Doors of big CEOs, or we started signing up unicorns. People started trusting us. They saw the the results of our success, but they also got to see the Yeah, no, I I've seen stuff like that as well. I think it's an I think that's the way to
speaker-0: They do it.
speaker-1: So with Intent Post, it was me and my co-founder, and then we had an account manager, and then we had so that it was a very small team. It started
speaker-0: An assistant on the team it was just me, my co founder.
speaker-1: so I'd be doing most of the posting. My co-founder also posted occasionally, but I was posting and it was literally like a full time job. So it it took me a couple hours a day, but it was worth it. What what took the most so it took me maybe like an hour to Polish a post, get a good picture, and like write everything out. What took a lot of time was responding to all comments and the DMs. And some posts that didn't even get a lot of engagement got a
speaker-0: Of DMs and people asking questions. So
speaker-1: It was my essentially full time job.
speaker-0: my co founder posted here and there, and then that was about it. After the team is like active on these
speaker-1: It but what teams like Evictor and other teams that are just the whole on LinkedIn, I've even heard some of
speaker-0: teams are offering incentives to do that, which I think is is really smart. They're just show up all the time.
speaker-1: They show allows you to trust them, see what's going on, and and you trust them as an authority in space, even when you're not ready to buy. And I think that's what's really different about like building in public or or posting You're sending a cold email, you build a list, right? You have a message and you're hoping it's the right time f for that person. It's for just
speaker-0: First you're hoping it's the right person. Like is it
speaker-1: the person that you should target. Then you're hoping it's the right time. Is it if it's too late, they've already bought if it's too early, they don't even know they have so you want the right time. And then finally you you're hoping like your offer is what they even
speaker-0: want.
speaker-1: so it's there's all these levels. You're doing a lot of game. But you're doing like content or
speaker-0: Guessing. When you're and
speaker-1: or anything like in in that realm, you're allowing people to come to you when they're ready, but in the meantime you're building trust. You're
speaker-0: Prost.
speaker-1: showing them, you know, why they might need your your product or your solution. You're building trust with them. So they do trust you when they know they need this. and and and you're you're just building this whole before you're even and you're not selling anything. So they come to you and make it a lot.
speaker-0: makes it a lot easier to sell when they do come to you 'cause they know they want it, they know they want to buy it from you and they they they you know, have been kinda like st like as they see your post, they check to see how other people react and it
speaker-1: already stalking you, right? I got the comments here and there. It just builds so much trust. I think that's that's the future of selling. It's not just spamming. It's more of building trust or search and and being recommended product by
speaker-0: of self. It's saying spray and pray emails. It's and and letting the person come to you when they're ready. On Chat GPT or Gemini. Your stuff you're the AI engine because you're the most active and you're the one posting the most insights and and building the most trust online about that topic.
speaker-2: I've heard you say that you test consumer ideas on TikTok and be ideas on LinkedIn before building anything. So I'm really curious like what are some examples of ways you've ran those tests and closed customers before like spending time building something?
speaker-1: Yeah, so intent post was a really cool case study and then I have a a case study for consumers. So with intent post, all we did in the beginning was put up a post
speaker-0: was I and I said
speaker-1: because to give some background, I was looking at fraction. So fraction place
speaker-0: I was working at the time. So i we essentially fractional talent, fractional CMOs, fractional CTOs, we allowed moonlight jobs they could
speaker-1: We had people to move and so we got them their like second job while
speaker-0: keep their first job.
speaker-1: and at fraction i it's essentially so we got
speaker-0: Really, really tricky.
speaker-1: to stand out, so we tried
speaker-0: whole bunch of things, right? We would send cold emails. You should drive a ton of business for us a couple of years back popular.
speaker-1: As AI got more every recruiter was using the same signal that we were using, right?
speaker-0: Right? There's like a job change or like a certain funding round or a certain revenue range crossed
speaker-1: And they were all sending the same email.
speaker-0: with the same pitch at the same time. So
speaker-1: It became really hard for us to compete. So we started doing things that were
speaker-0: Crafty, right?
speaker-1: we would go to our clients' offices, we'd go to conferences more often, show up to build and then in doing that, I had this wild hey, what if we sent physical
speaker-0: idea male
speaker-1: like what if we sent a piece of mail or a gift with that person's face on it or something just that
speaker-0: Wild, right?
speaker-1: would stand out? I think that would crush it. And so we started testing that internally a little bit. And then what I learned was it was so many steps, right? First I had to figure out what to send, like
speaker-0: Like, am I gonna say
speaker-1: Send a note card? Am gonna send a gift? What gift do I send? If it's a note card, what do I put on that note card to make it stand out and it actually means then where do I send to their house or office? Then, okay, let's just say I figured those pieces out through, you know, just manual efforts and and stalking people online. And then it's like, okay, I'm gonna send it. Once I ship it out, how do I make sure it arrives? Right? If you send a gift, you can have a tracking code, sure. But if you send a piece of mail
speaker-0: Sure. It's harder to track that, especially if it's like a no card. A
speaker-1: Once it does arrive, we had to send
speaker-0: follow up
speaker-1: email or a text, but it you're so many
speaker-0: You don't really know when
speaker-1: just like siloed out different pieces of this and we had to do it annually. So I put out a post on LinkedIn and I was like, Hey, does anybody know of a tool that can do this, this, this you know, it's email now. I think physical mail was the great way to stand
speaker-0: This and that because I think it it's really hard to stand out with cold deal would be a really great way to stand out.
speaker-1: and I got a couple comments and and some energy. People were like, Hey that's a cool idea, that's a idea, hey I would
speaker-0: Would pay for
speaker-1: And I was like, cool. So I built a website that, you know, put together the whole idea, shared the problem, and then had my version of the solution attached to a meeting. And
speaker-0: And I had to put the book a link.
speaker-1: I started posting I posted that on LinkedIn. And then I kept posting like as I was these little steps. Eventually, like a couple people started booking meetings. And then when they booked a meeting, I I would just ask them, Hey, what's up? Like, okay, well, like is this is this a problem for you? Like, do you think this solution would work for you? And as soon as somebody was like, Yeah, I'd send them a stripe link. And that was the ultimate test, right? If someone's willing to pay. So on B2B, it was sharing the problem through what an idea might be, getting some buy-in and and having other people agree, hey,
speaker-0: Read that.
speaker-1: I also have this problem. Hey, I think this and then I the most important is paying something
speaker-0: Dank some.
speaker-1: for it. And then we built the product. We built all the product after somebody paid. Because once somebody pays us, we can still execute that work and really understand what it is to spending hundreds of thousands of dollars and years or months of time trying to build a product and then going out and pitching it. Instead, we just put out our thoughts. had somebody buy it and built exactly what they needed. For a consumer, it's a little it's it's about the same, but it's it's fast based. and in you have to test it.
speaker-0: Extra pay with payment.
speaker-1: 'cause consumers will like say, Yeah, yeah, I'll buy that. Yeah, that's a great idea. yeah, invest in that. So with consumer, I just put out TikTok around the niche and see if the TikTok gets so I'll put out a TikTok so I I did this
speaker-0: app on I I I built an iOS app.
speaker-1: real quick, use Claude code. It was just for fun experiment. And to test it, I started posting to see what would engage. And the the the hooks were essentially the problem or here's how to get past this. Here's how to work with this. Here's how to, you know, do blank. And I tried three niches. Two of them flopped. One of them got a video that made got like eight thousand or ten thousand views. So we tried it again a couple couple times and eventually we had one video get a hundred eighty thousand views. So that was enough signal for me to go through the the hassle of publishing the app
speaker-0: The app store, it's really brutal right now for iOS apps. The wait list is very approved.
speaker-1: long to get your Apple account. And then once we did all that, then all we started doing was
speaker-0: was attaching
speaker-1: a picture of the app
speaker-0: in the slideshows and dropping a a link in the comments.
speaker-1: And we got our first couple free trial sign ups. So that that was enough signal. It's a little harder to do with iOS apps and such, but on consumer it's the same thing, right? Put out a post, talk about the problem. If people resonate with that problem, find the easiest or the fastest way to get them to say.
speaker-0: Find the pay.
speaker-1: But what I've also seen some people do is is put out these posts and then send people to a landing page that has like a like a stripe free trial, like a free trial.
speaker-0: Or a revenue cat for
speaker-2: Okay. Yeah, I definitely do know about let's say the slideshow on TikTok. That's a good example 'cause a lot of people don't understand that slideshow with TikTok, you could definitely have Claude or Chat GPT make you a certain set of slideshows and try to see if that could get some type of audience to your app or your platform. My question coming up is who kinda inspired you not maybe not inspired you, but where did you get the idea to start building a public on LinkedIn? 'Cause You never really see that as much. You usually see Instagram, TikTok and YouTube like did you see a podcast from somebody or did do just like a light bulb popped up in your head one day, you was like, Okay, everyone's going this way, let me go this way.
speaker-1: I mean, I usually like to do the opposite of what people are LinkedIn.
speaker-0: What
speaker-1: So a little backstory like on on this project I've
speaker-0: And I think it'll it'll help explain, you know, how how I got to Dripse.
speaker-1: So I I it you know, I had a Kickstarter project, it did all right, and and that led me to getting into the marketing world. And it was my first, I guess call it real company. It was called it was a marketing agency and we did web development. we eventually built that company up and and the top Atlanta. We got
speaker-0: And we did influencer campaigns. And we're one of the marketing companies in Atlanta. Got to work with some big fortune five companies.
speaker-1: and and a whole bunch of smaller companies. But a core way we got leads was just scanning LinkedIn and seeing who was asking for recommendations on site.
speaker-0: And for a website, like
speaker-1: Like a web developer, a website agency, people would just ask. And usually we were competing with a whole bunch of offshore companies in and we were the only US company asking back in like So
speaker-0: In the comments actually commenting. This is twenty seventeen.
speaker-1: that was my entry into you know, B D B. Also, another thing I did to get leads when we were an agency and nobody knew me, you know, we we hadn't built is I tried to grab lunch with multiple every single week. Like It's I'm I refuse to eat lunch alone. So I would just DM everybody that looked like they had a cool background or profile
speaker-0: And I'd be like, Hey
speaker-1: Yeah for for lunch this week hey I'd love to connect advice and in doing so I built a a network of hundreds of people that I have met in person that then actually led on to be like great referral partners and some of them I still work with today. So that was my like experience with LinkedIn. I'm like, hey there's a whole bunch real professionals on here and there's a whole bunch of people asking for you know business advice
speaker-0: Or
speaker-1: Tips or like recommendations. So that's how I started with the agency world. Then I jumped into SAS and I you know I then I launched a media company, Business Blurb. We did a lot of posting on Instagram, TikTok, Twitter. We got actually a billion three and Forbes called us one of the fastest growing media companies.
speaker-0: And piece of twenty twenty
speaker-1: So we didn't do much on LinkedIn there. We did a lot of like other platforms. Then I launched Backspace and I got to see and learn how important tech, Twitter, and you know LinkedIn is for radio.
speaker-0: Yeah.
speaker-1: A lot of venture capitalists are hanging out on there. A lot of people in the tech space are hanging out there, you know, posting announcements for their new funding round. They're posting about where they need help. They're they're posting, you know, cool, exciting updates so people can essentially buy their products. Some of them are just shilling their product. And and after that, as I was in SAS from, you know, backspace to then doing PureBase, Fraction, and then like all the rest of the companies, most of my experiences are in B2B. So LinkedIn is so important. Twitter is is also very important, but consumer i is where a lot of people feel comfortable just posting 'cause the engagement right? Like you post something, a couple people will like it. On LinkedIn, you might get like one or two likes, but you get a hundred impressions. But those hundred impressions are people sitting there at their job 'cause they're allowed to sit on if
speaker-0: Scrolling. LinkedIn and scroll, right?
speaker-1: you're on TikTok and you're at work, y you might get frowned upon. But if you're on LinkedIn it's like no no no prospect No, I'm doing I'm doing there's something to it. So I I feel like nine to five Monday through Friday, for for if if you're selling to people that are in SaaS software tech, they're allowed and sometimes they're even encouraged to be on LinkedIn. So it makes it a lot easier if if you're in B to B. if you're in B to C don't even I would like I I would just stick to
speaker-0: Batteneye TikTok, you know, YouTube Shorts, Instagram, Facebook Reels.
speaker-2: Mm. Actually before this call, Jera actually asked you about during fraction which ads really picked up and that you were selling these 30 to 50k a year placements to businesses doing two million or more and that meta beat LinkedIn ads and you scored every lead one to ten and then updated the score after the first meeting and sent Meta the good and bad signals. I I I would love to like hear about that process for like nailing meta ads B2B.
speaker-1: Yeah, yeah. So I'll break it down. So I I joined Fraction as a CMO. Fraction was growing really quickly at the time. there were about two million dollars.
speaker-0: any occurring revenue.
speaker-1: And the way they got there was a lot of cold email. And in and I I like what we sold, like I said, was fractional CMOs, fractional CTOs, fractional hires. so it was traditional recruiting with a spin on it and cold email crushed it. AI came out,
speaker-0: Came out.
speaker-1: everybody's competing, sending emails at the same time with the same signal, and it made it really hard for
speaker-0: When
speaker-1: When something happened and we would find it as a signal, our like prospect got like ten of the
speaker-0: emails from ten other companies.
speaker-1: so we wanted to stand out. So we tried a variety of things. we tried LinkedIn ads and it did all right. Like we I mean, our cost per meeting was like five, six hundred dollars a meeting, which is insane. You know, each customer is worth thirty. So it's not of course our close rate
speaker-0: Sounds insane, but thirty forty thousand dollars year for us. Not that bad and all those other things.
speaker-1: varied. What we did was realize that The people that are on LinkedIn. Now, the reason people a lot of people use LinkedIn ads is for that
speaker-0: The toggles you get on LinkedIn ads.
speaker-1: on LinkedIn ads, you can target this type of role, CEO or or CTO, for example. You can also target the stage or like the estimated revenue of that company. So doing above a million dollars here. You can target the the location, maybe the
speaker-0: So you can target anybody doing above a million dollars a year. Make sure they're in the
speaker-1: United States. You can also target like you can target all these very specific like company and and and and business settings. On meta, you can't really do that. You can't go, I want to target CEOs in the United States whose companies are doing over a million dollars a year in software. Can't really do that. But what you can do is you can target with creative. So what we did is we shot very specific
speaker-0: We shot.
speaker-1: ads that would only make sense to that ICP. So some of them were just straight up like, hey, if your business is doing over $2 million a year and you're struggling to find talent, or your talent costs are killing you. It was so, so specific. that if it wasn't you, you'd kind of just swipe, you'd keep scrolling because
speaker-0: Yeah.
speaker-1: it's irrelevant, or you'd watch it for a little bit and then not interact with it. So we made very specific ads and we targeted with
speaker-0: specific the creative
speaker-1: and so that was step one. And also the copy that you put underneath the ad is so important, it helps guess who to show it to So our copy was also very specific.
speaker-0: Meta kind of at first specific on that ad.
speaker-1: So we launched those, and then what we learned was I mean, the obvious reason a lot of people don't run paid ads, especially on meta for high ticket.
speaker-0: Beat cycles
speaker-1: Because the sales
speaker-0: are so long.
speaker-1: it's not like running an ad for like some random consumer project like product like a fidget spinner or or some physical product. Because that type of product, you run an ad, somebody clicks the ad, they buy, it goes through your Shopify, and then you send a signal back saying this person bought and this is how much they bought for. And that happens within a couple or or immediately and and so Meta's able to be like, Cool, like we ran this ad, this person paid this much. Hey, here's the return on ad spend. Let's optimize and and and you can get these signals and you can iterate and move a lot faster. When it comes to something like sometimes it takes a couple
speaker-0: We were selling a fract weeks, sometimes it takes a couple of months.
speaker-1: weeks. So between running an ad, and and imagine if we're spending like a thousand dollars a day, right? I think at times we're spending a lot more, but let's just say we're spending a thousand dollars a day. Every day that goes on where you don't know if this ad perform
speaker-0: Form.
speaker-1: or didn't perform, you're you're you're just down the drain, right? money going down the drain. So what we did to to kind of train and and also it's not training the algorithm on like who to show it to it's just keep showing to different sets of people at a conversion. So what we did is we started running these ads and we set the conversion goal, custom conversion goal using conversion API. And we started scoring each so what would happen is somebody would see the ad, they'd click the form, they'd fill out the form, we had a whole bunch of questions. Sometimes we write page, sometimes we did lead form, but we added a lot of friction, right? We asked like about their website, we asked like their role, we asked like what their ranges were, we asked who they're trying to hire, and and and a whole bunch of questions. I think it was like eight.
speaker-0: Questions?
speaker-1: And some of the questions just straight up filtered you out, right? If you answered the wrong way, we'd be like, hey, we don't think it's a good fit for you. You can view our website
speaker-0: Like i if you if you disagree.
speaker-1: and they could go to the website and then fill out the form that way and we'd still track them. But if you filled it out and we thought you were somewhat of an ideal client, then you'd make it to the end of the form, be able to submit that form, and then we'd say That straight to an end-to-end workflow that would look at your website. It actually would see if the website even loaded. It would look at your email and see if you had a, you know, like a business email. It would do all these steps and it would score that person between one through ten. If you scored between eight and a ten, we took that and we sent a signal back to Meta saying, great lead, like it was profitable, like find us more people like this. If it was between six and eight, it didn't send any signal. It was like meh, we don't we don't know. And if it was below a six, it would send a negative signal saying, like, don't send us more people like on this.
speaker-0: We lost money on
speaker-1: So we did that originally and then you know, we had the system blow up on us, like some people like would it be like rare exceptions and and and and we couldn't, you know, pinpoint it. So what we started doing was scoring it, then having our sales team call the person, book the meeting, or manually update that s that score after they did the first meeting. And that was our like secret sauce, right? So that allowed us to scale and send signals back to meta fast enough so we can cycle creative and see what creative was working. We went from about five, six hundred dollars per meeting book down to eighty to a hundred twenty dollars per meeting book on the
speaker-0: Depending on
speaker-1: offer. So that that's a big, big difference. And then of course we went from two million to twelve million.
speaker-0: in any recurring revenue that year.
speaker-1: We also did a couple other things like the CEO and the team started also
speaker-0: Posting on LinkedIn, we started sending, you know, wild things like showing up to conferences.
speaker-1: And we started doing a lot of person. So it was a combined effort for sure. But if you want to do meta ads for B2B, you need to make sure you're able to send a signal back fast enough to allow Meta or any of these, you know, paid algorithm paid platforms to really learn what's good, what's bad. You can't rely on like the the long sales process and then try to update it. Cause even if you did that, let's say like a month and a half or two two months later, you do update it and send the signal back. It's gonna find people like that person. But everybody else like that person has now made a buying decision and moved moved on and they're not even IC. So that's what's that
speaker-0: It's the interesting thing, you know, with be in pay dad.
speaker-2: I definitely like how you about the scoring system and also how you mentioned the conferences. I feel like a lot of young founders, a lot of young people don't even know how valuable conferences and how much deal flow goes through them. I would my question is now on your new company, Gripsy. I see that it's like an AI tool, but also you get a strategist with with the monthly payment plan. Why not just make it a another AI content tool? Like what does the human catch that the AI misses?
speaker-1: That's a great question. I wanna jump back to the conferences for a second though. Cause I I I s so much like agree with that and I and I love the idea of of doing like things in real life. I feel like a lot of founders are trying to do trying to automate every skill
speaker-0: Everything, trying to kill everything.
speaker-1: and just trying to take the easy way out, right? Like some founders for them it's like pay pads or some of them it's like sending a whole bunch of emails and it seems like you're doing a whole bunch of important work, but the reality is you're just trying to like automate the hell out of everything
speaker-0: Everything.
speaker-1: and you don't even know what the offer is. Like especially like under two, three million dollars a year. You don't know what people want to buy. You don't know how people are how ac how they actually feel about your product. You don't know you you don't know anything. Like you need to go out and talk to real people, not like just sit behind, you know, a desk and try to automate like a million emails to be sent out. You need to talk to real people, you need to get on calls, you need to get people to pay you for your product. And I think conferences and in person events are coming back
speaker-0: Very much as
speaker-1: AI makes it a lot easier to do these
speaker-0: You know, spray and pray type blast on cooling hunt.
speaker-1: And then so when it comes to dripseed, why did we not just make it an AI tool? And why did we make like why did we add a real person to it? Why did we kind of make it a service? Great question as well. A lot of it comes down to our ideal customer is doing over $2 million a year. And and there's a reason for that. The the reason that's our ideal customer. When when you're in the marketing space, you get judged on performance. That that's the reality, right? Like whether you sell it on performance or you charge by performance, people are gonna either hire or fire you based on how you perform. Usually you get three months in the marketing space. So if that's the case, and you know, we we people judge us on outcomes. We want to make sure that people we take on as clients, we can produce a good outcome for them. Anybody under two million dollars a year, I mean, really anybody under a million years, you don't know and we don't know if your product is the reason you're not growing, like sucks.
speaker-0: Maybe your product is
speaker-1: Maybe nobody wants the product. Maybe you were able to sell it to your network and then all right. Or maybe you don't even know if you let's say you're doing like a hundred K, 200K a you haven't
speaker-0: Yeah.
speaker-1: even figured out like like what the best product to sell is, what the bet right messaging is, who your ICP is. There's all these questions for you to figure out and you're gonna hire us. Give us three months to try to figure it out when you haven't figured it out. And maybe we figure it out and and you keep working,
speaker-0: But most
speaker-1: likely you probably won't figure it out, especially with our one system. And then we're gonna get fired. You're gonna blame you're gonna like write off LinkedIn content forever. You're gonna be like, it doesn't work. But when it comes to founders that are doing two, three million dollars a year or above two million dollars year, they usually have figured out like a channel that does work for them, obviously, that got them to two million dollars a year. Figure out the general offering, like the messaging, like who the what ICP it works with. And they have something to give us and we can take that and and run with it. Also, for what we do, we like to, you know, push out net new content. So to push out net new content, insights. So we need to like be in your call recordings, in your, you know, to read your Gmail. Not us literally reading it. Of course, our our AI systems read it. similar to how any of like all these new CRMs work, right? They they kind of scan your email, your Slack, your call recordings, and they extract insights. We do the same. And if you if your company is not making a couple million a year, you're probably not doing enough sales calls. You probably don't have enough team members. You don't have enough insights for us to extract. So all of that said, why we chose to make it a service, our ideal customer is growing so fast. They're focused on sales, they're focused on product, they're focused on marketing. Content itself is another job. I have seen all these tools that are like $30, $50, $500 a month, but at the end of the day, still still
speaker-0: Someone
speaker-1: has to run it. So it's either the CEO or you know some decision maker. or the team member or it's getting thrown all on like the growth marketing or the CMO's plate and it's still taking bandwidth. The goal for us is to eliminate the work it takes to push out content and allow you to just do your job. We extract the golden nuggets, you know, and we push out winning posts for you with as little work as possible, right? It's like if you were to hire a cleaner, but then you have to clean the house once first and then they'll just do a second pass. Like you you don't want to do that. And that's what a lot of these tools are doing. They're like, yeah, here's a tool like, you know Put some information in and then like read what the output is. Okay, then edit it again, then edit it again, then post it yourself, then manage the comments. Like it's still like it makes like one piece easier, but it doesn't handle all of it the way we handle it. And also for our larger customers, the
speaker-0: Where's the
speaker-1: AEO, GEO, like the blog post and and helping them rank on AI search, all of these extra things is either extra ban we would have to make to then manage the the tool if we did it that way. So by the way we do it, it's completely done for you. You talk to us in Slack. You spend maybe five, ten minutes a day at most versus you know
speaker-0: a couple hours a day.
speaker-2: To be honest, I think you could definitely even I I see your cheapest options thirty five hundred a month. I think you could probably charge way more, like maybe six thousand dollars a month. 'cause especially with you adding human layer to that. I there's people in the agency space named Daniel Eilas, he does like content marketing for personal branding. He charges six K a month for just short firm content that's put that's distributed on Facebook, Instagram, and et cetera. But I definitely think especially with your Your tool is essentially scraping the Slack email calls, everything and the strategists are gonna help them with the content. I I I think that's worth way more than what you I agree.
speaker-1: No, no I I so that's our early pricing. The same way we built intent posts and all other products, we want to sell it. We want people to use it. And right now we're we're testing it, we're having people use it, we're getting case studies. So we're we're gonna
speaker-0: Starting low, right?
speaker-1: keep upping the price until essentially people refuse to pay. So
speaker-0: Okay.
speaker-1: right now it's like we get on a call, they'll pay in one call. That's how we know the price is too cheap. So as as the product matures, as we build more, as we test more, have more case studies, the
speaker-0: Price will go up for sure.
speaker-2: Hmm. I'm curious what your take is on like today's state of email marketing. Like I have a I have a client who wants to run an email marketing campaign, he's very dead set on about it and he sells.
speaker-1: But
speaker-2: I don't know how effective that's gonna be. So I'm just like curious what you think the state of email marketing is today.
speaker-1: Well, I mean loans and finance is a tricky category, right? You have stats, spam filters. But as much as I hate on cold email on LinkedIn a and other podcasts and and you know, like I hate on it because I don't like I I think the way people use it now i i is it it's too easy to just like spread prey, right? Like just to harass people. I mean, I I think cold email works. I think, you know, like building in public content works, I think LinkedIn DMing works. All of these things work. That's why people have built in business.
speaker-0: Right. It's working
speaker-1: For somebody at some point. I think anything when it comes to marketing, all that matters is can you reach the right person at the right time with the right offer? And that's all that matters. So whether you reach the right person through email, if they're wanting to buy, it's the right time, they're actually just shopping for a tool and you reach them with the undeniable offer, they will buy it. Right. If you reach them through a paid ad and it's the right time, they'll buy it. If it's a billboard that they see while they're driving down the street, but it's the right time, like like you know, there's personal injury, like lawyers and stuff. If you just got into an accident and you see a cool lawyer, you're like, I'm gonna call the guy, whether like it it so it's it's less about what channel you're using. It's more about can you find the right people at the right time and offer them the right thing. So I I I think any one of these things can work, but I think a lot of people get distracted by so many different channels and you know, kind of like doing a little bit of cold email and like also doing a little bit this, instead of just all in on cold email, test like twenty different offers, test ten different, you know, types of people, test the timing, test a dozen different signals. And if sit there and you you decide, hey, we're gonna make cold email work and you set up instantly, right? Or you set up another smart lead or another tool and you just cycle through dozen different signals, dozen different types of people, a dozen different offers, you will something that generally works.
speaker-0: Find something generally.
speaker-1: So it's usually not the channel. It's usually the offer or the timing or anything else. It's it's not my usually when people tell me this channel doesn't work for them, I'm like, okay, maybe there's another channel we can try that makes it easier to get the right timing and the right person and offer, but
speaker-0: It's it's usually
speaker-1: That's why, by the way, I I like to work with companies doing over two million dollars.
speaker-0: Yeah.
speaker-1: They have figured some of these things out. You're not guessing.
speaker-0: As much.
speaker-2: Mm. Okay. And I want to go back to Gypsy, 'cause I'm very interested on that side of things. Yeah. Let's say example, there's a sales call happening on Tuesday. What exactly does Gypsy find? What does the final record and what finally gets posted?
speaker-1: Yeah, so I mean the the coolest case study is is my own LinkedIn. My my LinkedIn is all drip seedcott. and and I don't know when this is gonna get published. Maybe there'll be more content, but the what happens is let's say, for example, this this c call we had, everything that we talked about and we mentioned, it gets scanned for what's trending, it gets scanned for who my ICP is and and and what might appeal to them. And it takes that and not just that call recording, but also what's going on
speaker-0: Slack.
speaker-1: also what's going on in my emails and like it it just takes everything and then it pitches you a couple. Slack.
speaker-0: In your
speaker-1: It'll be, hey, here are three like cool ideas. They're trending. Like you you seem to know a lot about it. pick one. And you'll pick one and then you send a couple minute-long voice message of you essentially just scrambling and just spitting out your thoughts. It doesn't have to be polished. You don't have to just literally for like a couple about that topic. And then you send. And then from there, our team will take that and then process all of that into a polished post. And we'll send you a couple variations of it. You tell us which one you like. Each version is already proofed by a person and it looks good. It's not like we're asking you to go edit it over and over. And then once that's done, you can attach your own image. You can use one of the images we recommended. And all all you do is you hit approve and and and it gets posted. and as as soon as it gets posted, we're analyzing everybody that visits your profile on LinkedIn, everybody that engages in a comment, everybody that DMs you, and anybody that's a good fit gets automatically literally
speaker-0: So it's
speaker-1: like a couple minutes of you just talking about what you know. And that turns into published content and then that turns into people in your CR so our goal is to make it as little work as possible, but to publish like the best content that's net like that that's not recycled garbage and that gets you picked up and and makes
speaker-0: And and too trustworthy and
speaker-2: And what do you see Dripsey, let's say, in the next like six months? Is there like a certain feature that
speaker-1: I mean I so I I think over time the play for drip seed is like for example, if you go to like AI and you say do a good job or or write a good post, it's hard to define what a good post is,
speaker-0: Posting.
speaker-1: right? Even if if you were to feed AI like a dozen examples or even a thousand examples of of what a good post is, it doesn't actually know the engagement. It doesn't actually know how it's performing and and what's actually converting into leads. People don't care or at least people shouldn't care about just views, people should care about what that turns into. because views There's things that get like millions of views and then result in no customers. And there's things that get less views but result in a lot of customers. So we over time will know what good is when it comes to content, like what content actually c like
speaker-0: Content action verts looks like.
speaker-1: and and have the only model that's trained on that. So that that's that's I think what we become over time. Maybe not in six months, but in a little longer than that. But that's that's the goal.
speaker-2: Dope. I think that's cool because like for every customer that you have, and I think especially because of the human in the loop part, you can like fine tune and get better at and better at making content that like works for them because it's more and more in their voice. And like yeah, that's dope. That's I mean that's awesome. I guess unless Jarrett has any questions as we start to wrap this up, w if you haven't mentioned anything that you want to talk about, the floor is yours, but also like how what yeah, what's your departing message and how can people like reach out and collaborate with
speaker-1: Yeah. I'm I'm always happy to help. People can reach me through any platform. My handle is at Famron, F A I Z I R A N. And if you have any questions, hit me up. I I I try to respond to every comment and and every DM myself. So yeah, it was it was a pleasure being on.
speaker-0: Yeah guys.
speaker-2: For sure. Okay. My only question is what would you do if you had to restart? You know.
speaker-1: If I restart from scratch, honestly, I'd start a service business. I wouldn't build anything. I would have this offer. And usually like within your your day-to-day life, like you've experienced a problem or a business you've worked at, you've seen a problem that just wasn't optimal. And selling a service just means you don't have to put any money in, you don't have to build anything. You just go out, you sell, sell the outcome that you know you you think you can deliver and people pay for it and you can deliver
speaker-0: And that's
speaker-1: it. So I did that through websites when I first started out. I sold websites. We didn't have to build a website before, you know, like you paid us. You pay us half up front. We then use that money to either middleman it or figure out how to do it or it did it ourselves and then we got the other half when we delivered. And that can apply to like, you know, window washing or physical like like things like that, or it can also apply to like you know, running a podcast, like interviewing your customer. You can do so many different things and deliver the end outcome without building anything. So if I had to start over, I'd start a service from
speaker-0: Business and take it.
speaker-1: there.
speaker-2: Dope. Well thank you so much, man. Yeah.
speaker-1: Sweet guys, thank you
speaker-2: Take care, man. Thank you so much. And thanks for everyone to listening. Always remember that you can find us on YouTube if you search up PolymathPod, Jira,
speaker-1: G E
speaker-2: A and Matt. A T T.