Dan Martell - Get Millions of Leads With This Strategy

00:00:00.080 We would get hundreds of shares on these posts

00:00:02.640 and we got the blog, literally organic content SEO

00:00:05.960 inbound to the point where we're doing

00:00:07.520 350,000 unique visitors a month.

00:00:22.360 Hey there, I'm Dan Martell, serial entrepreneur,

00:00:24.160 investor and creator of SaaS Academy.

00:00:25.720 In this episode, I'm gonna share with you three crazy ideas

00:00:29.180 that work to grow my business.

00:00:31.360 And be sure to stay at the end

00:00:32.460 where I'm gonna tell you how to get access

00:00:33.560 to this exclusive training called Silicon Valley Secrets.

00:00:36.580 Three growth hacks that I learned

00:00:38.340 from the top growth hackers in Silicon Valley.

00:00:42.300 Let's get into it.

00:00:43.200 So one of the things you need to know about me

00:00:44.860 is that I am a marketing nerd.

00:00:47.020 I came from the technical background, software writing code.

00:00:50.140 And because of that, I'm big fan of deconstructing

00:00:53.220 and reverse engineering things

00:00:54.600 to figure out how they grow, how they work.

00:00:56.760 What are the systems, the approaches,

00:00:58.620 the methodologies, the principles.

00:01:00.180 And when I moved to San Francisco,

00:01:02.680 even though I had a lot of success

00:01:04.400 in my previous company, Spheric,

00:01:05.660 running paid acquisition,

00:01:07.020 back then this is like Google AdWords,

00:01:09.580 pay-per-click campaigns.

00:01:10.940 I wanted to understand how software companies

00:01:14.340 got distribution, ideally for free.

00:01:16.280 When you see all these like freemium tools,

00:01:18.080 I mean, this was the early days of Dropbox

00:01:19.860 and other kind of consumer meets B2B SaaS products.

00:01:23.640 I just went deep.

00:01:24.620 I met the people that literally shaped my thinking

00:01:28.520 around growth hacking, folks like Sean Ellis, Andrew Chen,

00:01:32.280 Heaton Shaw from Kissmetrics.

00:01:34.680 I mean, literally the best people,

00:01:36.440 even a guy named Andy Johns,

00:01:37.760 a lot of people don't know about,

00:01:38.980 but he was the one that really allowed me to understand

00:01:43.020 how growth is kind of like an investment,

00:01:46.160 like you would do for financial investment.

00:01:47.880 You're trying to create compound growth.

00:01:50.120 So I went from learning a little bit of AdWords

00:01:52.800 when I moved to San Francisco to five years later,

00:01:55.180 having spent millions of dollars on paid acquisition,

00:01:58.720 built two venture-backed companies,

00:02:00.560 and been asked to speak around the world

00:02:03.240 on marketing and growth hacks.

00:02:05.260 So today I wanna share with you three crazy stories

00:02:09.420 of different of my companies that I was involved in,

00:02:13.000 how I grew them that a lot of people don't know

00:02:15.000 the behind the scenes story.

00:02:16.320 So let's get into it.

00:02:17.340 Number one, find your pawn.

00:02:19.240 So I built this company called Clarity.

00:02:21.420 You never heard of it before.

00:02:22.360 It's clarity.fm.

00:02:23.460 It's kind of, if LinkedIn had a phone feature,

00:02:28.380 that's kind of what Clarity was.

00:02:29.360 It was an expert network for people to get advice

00:02:31.460 over the phone, people paid for the advice.

00:02:33.620 And because it was a marketplace,

00:02:35.300 we had to figure out how to attract experts

00:02:37.820 that were qualified, that were notable,

00:02:40.980 that had the answers that people might be looking for

00:02:43.460 in regards to getting advice around really like specific

00:02:47.260 topics like cryptocurrency or pricing if you're a SaaS

00:02:51.380 founder or, you know, sales compensation,

00:02:54.060 kind of like really specific things.

00:02:55.860 So, you know, when I ask people if they had to like come up,

00:02:58.920 you know, for you, even like ask yourself,

00:03:00.720 what would be ways for you to create a network of experts?

00:03:04.540 And a lot of people go, well,

00:03:05.740 Cora would make a lot of sense 1.00

00:03:07.140 because there's a lot of people answering questions on Cora

00:03:09.080 and there's kind of this voting mechanism.

00:03:11.960 But if you've ever tried to automate something against Cora

00:03:15.420 and like scrape information,

00:03:17.180 even if I wasn't trying to do anything malicious,

00:03:19.140 it's near impossible.

00:03:20.240 A lot of these sites like LinkedIn and Core

00:03:22.200 have like locked it down.

00:03:23.420 So we were building nine months into this company,

00:03:25.320 trying to figure out a way that wasn't manual.

00:03:27.000 Cause in the early days,

00:03:27.840 we hand-to-hand combat went out,

00:03:30.400 recruited those experts into our world,

00:03:33.700 but I needed a way that was gonna be scalable, right?

00:03:35.900 Cause we had the information

00:03:37.480 for what the market was looking for

00:03:38.900 based on the search terms and clarity,

00:03:40.520 but we needed a way to go out and get these experts

00:03:43.260 kind of source them from these pools of smart people.

00:03:48.260 So we kept trying to approach it, trying to figure it out,

00:03:51.820 testing different strategies.

00:03:53.020 And then one day I was like on my way to work and it hit me.

00:03:57.160 I said, huh, what about SlideShare?

00:04:01.060 So SlideShare, it's actually lost quite a bit of momentum.

00:04:04.340 It used to be like the place that anybody did speaking.

00:04:06.940 I used to publish all my slides there.

00:04:08.460 A lot of my friends, if you,

00:04:09.820 all the event organizers kind of put things on SlideShare.

00:04:12.320 It was kind of like a social network for your presentations.

00:04:15.640 And the cool part is two things.

00:04:17.320 One, if you search a term on SlideShare,

00:04:19.180 you would find all the experts on that topic.

00:04:21.940 And number two, that helped me and Clarity

00:04:23.860 try to find and source those experts

00:04:25.320 was the last slide typically contained their email address.

00:04:29.580 So that was a really great way for us

00:04:30.880 to take somebody looking for an expert

00:04:32.320 and reach out and get them.

00:04:33.780 And we literally went from like mediocre traction

00:04:36.780 to all of a sudden just being able

00:04:38.900 to source experts on the fly.

00:04:41.120 We actually built this internal tool called Bonjour

00:04:43.180 that was like one part automation,

00:04:45.040 in one part, you know, a whole team in Manila

00:04:47.700 trying to help us reach out

00:04:49.400 and curate all these incredible experts.

00:04:51.200 And for me, that is the crazy idea

00:04:53.780 is where is your pond?

00:04:55.360 Where are your pond of either customers or partners?

00:04:58.780 Where are they hanging out?

00:04:59.880 What is not obvious to other people

00:05:02.600 that you might be able to discover?

00:05:04.980 And that to me is the creative aspect of growth hacking.

00:05:07.720 So ask yourself, where do my customers spend time

00:05:10.380 and how do I go fishing in those ponds

00:05:12.420 in a way that is aligned with their best interests

00:05:14.640 so that it's value added and not just leeching.

00:05:17.300 Number two, who's got my list?

00:05:19.760 You know, I built my first company ever,

00:05:22.000 it was called Maritime Vacation.

00:05:23.360 And, you know, the long story short is my dad had a cottage

00:05:28.440 and he was getting calls all the time.

00:05:30.460 So I would sit there and watch my dad, you know,

00:05:32.980 answer the same questions.

00:05:34.260 Like, does it have, you know, does it accept pets?

00:05:37.140 How close is it to the beach?

00:05:38.700 Is it available?

00:05:40.000 And I remember, you know, I'm 17, 18 years old.

00:05:42.440 I was 17 at the time when he first approached me.

00:05:44.640 And I just asked, hey, if you had a webpage

00:05:48.540 that listed all the information, would that be valuable?

00:05:51.540 And he's like, yeah, that'd be amazing.

00:05:53.260 You know, this is early days of the internet.

00:05:54.760 And I said, okay, what would you pay for that?

00:05:57.940 So the fun part is, is I got my dad,

00:06:00.100 I think he said a couple hundred dollars a year.

00:06:02.400 I got him to give me $500 because I said,

00:06:04.260 I gotta build this thing.

00:06:05.100 I'm not gonna charge you to write the code,

00:06:06.800 but I knew I needed enough money

00:06:08.320 to be able to buy the servers, right?

00:06:10.340 So like I needed the code that I was gonna write

00:06:12.220 to run on a server.

00:06:13.460 This is early, way before Amazon Web Services

00:06:15.620 and other tools like that.

00:06:17.280 And so I started writing code

00:06:19.260 and I built this whole application.

00:06:20.700 Essentially, it was like a very simplified version

00:06:23.160 of air bed and breakfast

00:06:24.480 so that I can not only create a listing for my dad,

00:06:26.520 but also create a place for other people

00:06:28.880 to list their cottages.

00:06:30.120 That was the big idea.

00:06:30.960 That's why I called it Maritime Vacation.

00:06:32.360 Maritime, the Maritimes is where I'm from in Eastern Canada

00:06:35.780 and it was maritimevacation.ca, you know, like Canada

00:06:39.540 and like, you know, really kind of a small idea

00:06:41.700 but it was the first thing I ever built.

00:06:43.820 So anyways, it's great to build it,

00:06:45.980 but now how do you get the customers?

00:06:47.700 So what I remember like struggling,

00:06:50.120 like how do I find the other people like my dad

00:06:53.500 that had cottages?

00:06:54.560 And one night I was hanging out with my buddy, Dave.

00:06:56.780 Dave was a bit of a stoner, okay?

00:06:58.660 Really liked the guy, meant well,

00:07:00.280 but wasn't too motivated in life.

00:07:02.060 And I was kind of struggling with this question,

00:07:03.660 like how do I get people to know about my website?

00:07:07.060 And Dave kind of says in his like stonerish kind of like,

00:07:10.500 He's like, yo, dude, there's this tourism guide.

00:07:13.500 And I'm like, a tourism guide?

00:07:15.240 He's like, yeah, dude, there's this guide

00:07:17.020 that they put out, Tourism New Brunswick puts out.

00:07:18.980 It's got all the cottages and all the bed and breakfasts

00:07:20.980 listed in the guide.

00:07:22.620 And I was like, what?

00:07:23.880 So got my hand on a copy of the tourism guide,

00:07:26.840 opened it up.

00:07:27.580 Literally, it's like what to do in New Brunswick.

00:07:29.680 And then it's just a whole directory

00:07:31.180 of cottages and bed and breakfasts.

00:07:34.680 So I had the information, but it was in a magazine.

00:07:37.500 I had to get it into some way of automating it.

00:07:39.400 So I hired my little brother, Mo.

00:07:41.620 I put him in front of my computer for like three bucks

00:07:43.480 an hour and I built a Microsoft Access database.

00:07:46.060 And I said, Mo, enter in all this information.

00:07:48.220 So he did that.

00:07:49.100 Then I created a mail merge on Word

00:07:51.320 and built this like form letter that essentially said,

00:07:54.820 hey, we're Maritime Vacation.

00:07:56.360 If you'd like a listing for your cottage,

00:07:58.780 fill out this form, include three photos.

00:08:01.660 It's $30 for the listing,

00:08:03.140 but if you wanna have your photos back,

00:08:05.720 add an extra $5 so that I can ship the photos back to you.

00:08:09.400 So I printed off hundreds of these form letters,

00:08:12.820 folded them up, put them in the mail and shipped them out.

00:08:15.600 I mean, this is like super ghetto.

00:08:18.160 Like there was no fanciness.

00:08:19.760 This isn't like advertising, but I sent out the mail

00:08:22.760 and I remember a few days later, not a few days,

00:08:25.800 it was essentially like 10 days later,

00:08:27.660 my dad came back and he had a handful of envelopes

00:08:30.480 and he just looked at me and he said, what did you do?

00:08:33.100 And I was like, what, did that come from me?

00:08:35.720 And he's like, yeah, and we start opening it.

00:08:37.980 Not only did people order the webpages

00:08:40.520 for their bed and breakfast or their cottages,

00:08:42.400 but there was also money in the envelopes.

00:08:44.240 Like nobody today's world would send cash

00:08:46.720 in an envelope through the postal mail

00:08:48.520 and people did back then.

00:08:49.940 So that was the beginning of kind of like,

00:08:53.200 how do I think about growth?

00:08:55.300 It's not about building something, anybody can build it.

00:08:58.100 That's not the riskiest part about your business model.

00:09:00.560 The riskiest part about your business models,

00:09:02.300 can you get in front of your perfect fit customer?

00:09:06.000 That's what I call it.

00:09:06.940 and present an offer that's compelling and valuable enough

00:09:10.420 for them to wanna take action

00:09:12.060 and make it easy for them to take action.

00:09:14.940 But the question you gotta ask yourself is,

00:09:16.960 who's got my list?

00:09:18.700 Number three, viral content.

00:09:20.520 This is probably my favorite crazy idea

00:09:23.620 because when we were building my company Flowtown,

00:09:26.720 Flowtown was a social marketing application

00:09:29.240 for small business owners.

00:09:30.440 So essentially, if you think of like email marketing,

00:09:32.880 I saw in 2009, the future of like early days of Twitter,

00:09:36.920 and Facebook, where there will be essentially a tooling,

00:09:40.280 a set of applications that would help small businesses

00:09:43.460 market on social media.

00:09:44.780 So Flowtown was that product.

00:09:46.280 And one of the core hooks that we did

00:09:48.240 was we took an email address

00:09:49.680 and we gave you all of the social networks

00:09:52.000 that that email address, your customer or your lead was on.

00:09:55.380 So that made it really easy for you to build campaigns

00:09:57.780 to reach out to them.

00:09:59.080 So that was cool, built this first MVP,

00:10:01.600 got early customers, got things to like ramen profitable.

00:10:04.720 But for us to get real growth,

00:10:06.460 we needed more eyeballs.

00:10:07.740 The product sold itself if people heard about it,

00:10:10.320 but we needed a really cost-effective way

00:10:13.840 to get people aware of it.

00:10:15.320 So one of the things that I saw going on back then

00:10:18.100 was a site called mint.com.

00:10:19.960 And Mint had one of the most beautiful blogs out there

00:10:24.400 and they were consumer.

00:10:25.400 So they were trying to create just content

00:10:28.340 that would help consumers understand their personal finance.

00:10:30.760 And then obviously if you wanted to do that

00:10:32.420 in an automated way, Mint is the tool for you to do that.

00:10:36.340 And one of the things that Mint did

00:10:37.880 that I thought was cool,

00:10:40.460 I just didn't understand how to do it for us,

00:10:42.140 was they created these really cool infographics.

00:10:45.040 So like pie charts and workflows

00:10:47.300 and all these different things

00:10:48.240 to explain what they were selling.

00:10:50.860 And one of the ways we thought of,

00:10:53.900 and I didn't know if it would work,

00:10:54.940 was, okay, well, I don't have anything cool

00:10:57.400 that I can infograph.

00:10:58.580 We're a business to business marketing tool.

00:11:00.540 But what if we found other data sets?

00:11:03.060 What if we found interesting information

00:11:05.360 that other people had created and we visualized it.

00:11:08.700 So we found other marketing companies

00:11:11.300 that had SMB marketing data.

00:11:12.820 We found other people that had written these like detailed,

00:11:16.080 like how to do stuff,

00:11:17.400 but then we asked to partner with them

00:11:18.720 and we co-created these infographics.

00:11:20.960 So think like, you know, these really long,

00:11:23.480 they were big before.

00:11:24.860 And cause that was another thing

00:11:26.360 that mint.com did really well is these infographics.

00:11:29.180 And we just started publishing these

00:11:31.120 and we started promoting them

00:11:32.740 and we got really good at like sites like Dig

00:11:35.140 and Reddit and a bunch of different distribution channels,

00:11:38.200 but the infographics were so valuable in their own

00:11:42.240 that people would just share them.

00:11:43.600 We would get hundreds of shares on these posts

00:11:46.040 and we got the blog literally organic content SEO inbound

00:11:50.280 to the point where we're doing 350,000 unique visitors

00:11:52.920 a month, all through this crazy idea of saying,

00:11:55.220 let's go find some data that we think would be interesting

00:11:58.620 to our potential customers, co-create it, co-produce it.

00:12:01.740 So when we went to somebody that had a data set,

00:12:03.440 we said, hey, we wanna visualize it.

00:12:04.720 here's an example.

00:12:05.920 They're like, that's amazing.

00:12:06.840 It's like, well, we'll create it.

00:12:07.820 You publish it on your blog.

00:12:09.280 We'll publish it on ours maybe a week later.

00:12:11.280 So we added some value.

00:12:12.240 So we got the credit or the ability to get the data.

00:12:14.760 Then we published it on ours.

00:12:16.060 We linked it up.

00:12:16.880 We asked them other people to link it up.

00:12:18.940 And we partnered with this company down in LA

00:12:21.100 called C5, column five.

00:12:22.900 And I got to tell you those crazy early days

00:12:25.960 of building content of these infographics,

00:12:29.100 it blew up to the point where the infographics

00:12:32.400 were featured in marketing books.

00:12:34.500 People asked us for the rights

00:12:35.980 that we created these like marketing assets,

00:12:38.100 if they could republish them in their books.

00:12:40.280 And it was a real honor.

00:12:41.160 And it was cool to see some of them go like crazy viral

00:12:43.380 where they get thousands of shares.

00:12:45.260 And again, it's just these crazy ideas

00:12:46.760 of like looking around you and trying to see

00:12:49.380 what are other people doing and can that work in my industry?

00:12:52.700 But that's how we use viral content

00:12:55.080 to really get distribution for my company Flowtown.

00:12:57.380 So quick recap, three crazy ideas

00:13:00.100 that helped me grow my business.

00:13:01.540 One, find your pond.

00:13:03.280 Number two, who's got your list?

00:13:05.300 And third, can you create some viral content?

00:13:08.320 So those are some fun stories of my entrepreneurial journey

00:13:11.260 and some crazy ideas that I've had to help grow my business.

00:13:13.880 But I want to also share with you a resource

00:13:16.500 I mentioned at the beginning,

00:13:17.540 which is Silicon Valley secrets.

00:13:19.400 Like how to growth hack your business

00:13:21.340 based on some of the strategies that I learned

00:13:23.520 from the top in the world.

00:13:24.700 People that worked at Facebook, Quora, Twitter, et cetera.

00:13:28.460 These are folks like Andy Johns.

00:13:30.120 If you don't know who he is, I think he's now,

00:13:32.580 He's still involved in Wealthfront,

00:13:35.060 but Andy was the, he worked with Chamath,

00:13:38.400 who was the head of growth at Facebook.

00:13:40.760 I met Andy at an event.

00:13:42.200 He shared some incredibly powerful principles

00:13:45.840 for how he approached testing different growth ideas.

00:13:48.680 So you can click the link below

00:13:49.620 to get access to that exclusive training

00:13:51.820 just for my community.

00:13:53.200 It's called the Silicon Valley Secrets

00:13:55.140 for growing your SaaS or your software company.

00:13:57.380 Be sure to click the link to get access to that.

00:13:59.340 And if you liked this video,

00:14:00.360 please, please, please leave me a comment.

00:14:02.200 Let me know what you liked the most,

00:14:03.500 what resonated with the most.

00:14:05.000 Be sure to subscribe to my channel

00:14:06.580 and smash that like button.

00:14:08.320 And as per usual, I wanna challenge you

00:14:10.320 to live a bigger life and a bigger business,

00:14:12.300 and I'll see you next Monday.

Dan Martell - July 26, 2021

Get Millions of Leads With This Strategy

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