How To Create Viral Content That Drives Revenue

Taylor Wells (00:00.562)
Hey everyone, welcome to the GTM News Show. I got Brendan here today. Hey Brendan.

Brendan Hufford (00:05.981)
Hey man, how are you? I'm excited about this, this is gonna be awesome. I'm over- over-caffeinated. I have a- like my coffee cup is as big as my head. Uh, so I'm ready.

Taylor Wells (00:15.654)
And you have Marcus Aurelius staring down at you. We were just talking about that.

Brendan Hufford (00:20.217)
Yeah, man, and my collection of like vaguely entrepreneurial and whatever else Funko pops on the other side. We like to have fun.

Taylor Wells (00:27.646)
No pressure. I love it. We have it take takes a village right Awesome, I want to have Brendan on he actually I featured him in the newsletter a couple weeks ago and We connected and wanted to have him on the show For a lot of reasons first. He creates a lot of great content online around B2b marketing content

Etc and even before they hit record we were talking about you know, what would be a great title for this? And I think it's a combination of two things like how to create great content to go viral on LinkedIn and other platforms but then also drive revenue because I think you can Obviously create lots of content that maybe gets impressions and attention but doesn't necessarily deliver business outcomes So Brendan, let's kind of frame up the conversation For the audience on how you view this idea

content IP and what does that mean to create content that can really get a lot of impressions but also drive revenue.

Brendan Hufford (01:29.105)
Yeah, you know, I noticed two things happening in the market. Uh, number one was that kind of two things happening at the same time. The first one was that simply every company I worked primarily with, uh, SaaS and software companies, I felt like everybody was making a category. Um, I remember when I joined active campaign, I went in-house at active campaign for just shy of two years. And.

our CMO rebranded ActiveCampaign from email marketing to customer experience automation. Fine. Great. No judgment. The problem was when I was going to ActiveCampaign, I was coming from a SaaS marketing agency where I was the SEO director. And you would think at a software marketing agency, they would be well aware of all the big like martech companies out there. And the response when I said, Hey, I'm leaving, I'm going to ActiveCampaign, 50% of the people were like,

Hey, congratulations, it's a huge company, great product, awesome. The other half of the people, software marketers, had never heard of Active Campaign. They're like, I don't know what that is. And I'm like, they have 160,000 customers and roughly, you know, $165 million in revenue. How have you never heard of them? So we take this company who has a huge customer base, huge revenue, but an awareness problem.

where people don't know them, and we're gonna take them out of the category that they are still not fully in, which is email marketing and marketing automation, and we're gonna make them this new thing, customer experience automation. You can see how that would fall flat. So I noticed my company and all these other companies creating categories. Everybody had a buzzword of we are this new thing, right? I think everybody got like really excited about like drift and gainsight creating categories.

The problem was when you create a category, you have to ride the wave that's already happening. You're saying, I see this thing happening in the world, I'm going to name it, and we are going to exist to help people ride this wave with us. We see this all the time in just the real world, right? Like our work is not real. But like, Taylor, in the real world, we see these things called conceptual scoops. And I hadn't heard that phrase until a couple years ago, but I had seen them in the wild constantly.

Brendan Hufford (03:47.181)
This idea of the great resignation is a conceptual scoop. It was seeing what was happening in the market. Same with quiet quitting. We're all B2B professionals, we're all aware of what those are. This was journalists seeing a thing happening in the world, a problem that was going on, and just giving a name to it. There was no stats or data necessarily at first, but they're like, I think this thing is happening, let's give it a name. And I think...

this is my hypothesis, is that companies would be much better served naming the problems that their customers have than naming their solutions. We tend to skip that part of category creation where we name the old game, we name the problems. Andy Raskin writes a lot about this really, really well. I love him. We skip over that part and we jump right to naming our solutions and it falls flat and we've...

you know, we put our heart and soul as marketers into the marketing that we're creating, the work that we're doing, and for it to not resonate and then kind of go, oh, why did that happen? Most often it's just because we skipped the problems.

Taylor Wells (04:55.306)
Hmm, Brendan, that's awesome. And I love starting with category creation. And I've seen over the years so much of just confusion in the market when you come up with these new categories, right, where you're like, wait, what are you? How do I compare you? How do I do you compete with something? Do you replace something? How do you contrast? And everyone, we all are fear avoidant, right? We all want to like, hey, how does this all match up to what I'm currently doing, other things? And I think there's actually, Simon said, next, start with your why.

I think a lot of folks, there's kind of something in that where like with the category creation, it's like, hey, how are we different? What's my why? How are we, you know, it's like branding, right? Like how do we position ourselves versus everyone else? And how do we stand out versus, and then there's also the other end of it, which is like a strategic narrative, right? Which is what you're talking about with Andy Raskin and talks about really what's from the position of the consumer, right? And I think we're missing kind of both of those things. You do need your why. You do need to be like, what's...

How are we different? Why don't we get here? But then also the strategic narrative and even combining like a story brand, you know, Donald Miller's, the hero's journey, putting yourselves in the customer's shoes. And what I've, oh, Joseph Candles, yes, yes. He he he.

Brendan Hufford (06:07.609)
Joseph Campbell's Hero's Journey. I have such a gripe with Storybrand, forgive me for five seconds. Storybrand is a whole book, a multi-million dollar business that literally rips off the life's work of Joseph Campbell and does not mention him anywhere in it. Donald Miller says, I noticed this when I was watching Indiana Jones and Star Wars. And if you read anything that George Lucas writes, he's like, I just followed the hero's journey from Joseph Campbell.

Brendan Hufford (06:36.729)
I have a big issue with literally taking a person's life work, market-twisting it, and being like, it's story brand now, and things like that. But the hero's journey is real. Joseph Campbell went and did the research, hero with a thousand faces, found that this is the mono-myth that has existed in human culture all over the world since the beginning of any sort of recorded history and even oral storytelling. So it absolutely works.

But the problem is that inciting event that causes the hero to cross the Thro- like we skip that part. We all skip to like the lightsabers and the Death Star and all these things. And we're like, yeah, but like Luke didn't want to be a loser on Tatooine. And like, we skip over that, those, those core problems that push people to make a change in the first place.

Taylor Wells (07:27.114)
100%, yeah, thanks for the good call out, Joseph Campbell. And also, I think in that there's creating that connection with your audience and your buyer, I think there's a million and one ways to solve a solution, right? There's 100,000 SaaS platforms with globalization, there's so many service providers, everyone's competing for their business. And so I think when you really go deep into a problem.

Not only shows you care and you have empathy and you understand your buyer, but you build that trust, right? And I think that's something I notice a lot of times too when we don't spend enough time on the problem and Really don't even understand the problem, right? I think that's the biggest problem with sales marketers anyone and go-to-market is we're usually not our buyer, right? we've never been in our buyer's shoes and so actually I have this analogy of Be like Daniel Day-Lewis, you know, Daniel Day-Lewis has won more Oscars than any other for best

Taylor Wells (08:21.854)
actor than any other person and he takes years to get into his character, right? He quit acting because it was too intense. He was in character for too long and so I think about like that's getting into that problem getting into your character's problem getting into the mind of Of your buyer and your audience so cool. So talking about obviously the problem getting starting there What other elements of this kind of content IP? Are really important that folks should think about

Brendan Hufford (08:51.185)
So I think it's first like sitting down, figuring out what the problems are, right? Understanding your customer and your audience. These are two different things. Customer research is like your one-to-one, hand-to-hand jobs to be done interviews. Like figuring out what is happening in their lives that is causing them to make these decisions where maybe your product or service or whatever is a solution. Audience research is a little bit bigger. We're zooming out and saying, hey,

These are our exec customers that we already have right now, or if we're really early in product that we're interviewing, because we're trying to figure out what to build. Zooming out is like, hey, what does the larger audience want? And how do we help them? Especially in things like B2B, where it's like, we are helping them succeed professionally. This makes a huge difference. An example that resonates a lot with me is, do you know anybody that has like sleep apnea or anything like that? They really have trouble sleeping and breathing at night.

Brendan Hufford (09:46.309)
A lot of times what people think is the impetus to use a breathing machine at night or to get surgery or whatever is like, oh, they have low quality sleep, they're tired all the time. And there's a part of that. And then there's this phrase and this phenomenon that happens called a sleep divorce, which is where you are snoring so much and so violently and waking up so much throughout the night that your spouse is unable to sleep.

and it causes the two of you to sleep in separate bedrooms. Or you do get the sleep apnea machine, and it's so loud and obtrusive, you know, this giant, you know, like, I don't even know, astronaut headset on, right? That you get this thing, and they call it a sleep divorce. I have never heard of a visceral statement that resonated with me as much as that. And when I heard that, it was like, oh.

Brendan Hufford (10:42.665)
That is what happens. I don't want that. I don't want this machine. I wanna get surgery. Like surgery is scarce. All these reasons people would not do that. I will get that because I don't wanna get a sleep divorce from my partner or my spouse, right? It's naming a problem. We're not giving a clever name to the solution. So I think first is figuring out what the actual problems and pain points are using things like having conversations with people using things like.

Brendan Hufford (11:09.673)
What's it? Chris Voss, Never Split the Difference is a great book of figuring out how to go deeper without just being like a patronizing or, you know, a insolent child and just being like, why, why? Get like four levels deep. A lot of times our pain point marketing falls flat because we're looking at surface level pain points. When you go three or four levels deep, you can give people that like gut punch and they're like, oh, that is really.

Brendan Hufford (11:34.717)
Like if we're doing sales tech, it's like, you know, hit OTE and like make more money. Yeah, but like, how about never get put on a PIP ever again? Right, like all of a sudden it changes, right? Stop having your parents question your career choice. Like there's stuff in there that you can get to in these conversations. And then we simply, and this gets, I tell this gets like a little like hand wavy and marketing drum circle, but like give it a name. Two or three words max.

Brendan Hufford (12:03.237)
I love words that start with the same letter sometimes, so they kind of rhyme. The great resignation is like a great recession and stuff. I love that, like, spend time wordsmithing this stuff. I was driving in the car on the way back to my office a minute ago and I'm like, I don't know if I even love content IP. I don't know if that's even the right phrase. I don't feel like that hits hard enough and is enough of a problem. I'm talking about the problem in that phrase.

Brendan Hufford (12:32.005)
So you're constantly word smithing this. That's a first step. Then the question is like, cool, cool. Brendan, I'm bought in. Let's create words for the problems our customers have. How do we get it in front of them? And I've kind of found that this really simple five step framework works. We're creating content around the problem itself. Not our solutions. We're just naming the problem, sharing data, sharing facts, sharing information that's making people go, oh my gosh, this is a huge problem.

Step two, sharing content, and every marketer skips this second step. Everybody's bought in, yeah, share content around the problem. Share content around the first roadblock to the problem. As you start to solve this, you will run into this next issue. What is that issue? In the world, like I used to do a lot of my work around SEO. I still do, but it was like my sole focus. I noticed the first roadblock was explaining SEO to your CEO.

Brendan Hufford (13:30.245)
CEOs just didn't get SEO and you being like, well, it's a black box and Google and backlinks, like that didn't help them understand. So I just gave my audience a framework for how to explain. It's the IAM framework, content asset and medium helps them explain SEO to their CEO. So name the problem, name the roadblock, give them a template. It doesn't have to always be like, we're not giving people like Excel files and stuff.

but just give them a simple template to solve that problem. It can be a way of thinking about something, a couple steps, some three step framework, whatever. Then share a customer or client case study of somebody solving that problem, that piece of content IP. And then finally do, I call it a high level interesting roundup. Maybe that's not a client of yours or a customer of yours. How did they solve that problem? How did they deal with that? The same thing that you help people solve.

Right? So problem, roadblock, template, customer story, and then like a high level interesting roundup. And that gives us five good pieces of content around that piece of IP. You can keep going with that. More problem stuff, more roadblocks stuff. There's more, there's way more in there, but we have this five core pieces of content that we know will not only, let's say go going viral in the B2B world, especially on LinkedIn usually means posting something.

you know, inflammatory about a company or hiring practices or, you know, career stuff. But that doesn't drive revenue. And that's part of the problem. It can get you a lot of eyeballs, but why are they going to stick around? And if you're talking about a specific problem set, talking and you have this like owned language, right? When you give people to solve the language to describe their problem, it's like shut up and take my money, right? They trust you more than anybody else.

So when you give them that, that's how you not only go viral on LinkedIn, but also have something that contributes to revenue and pipeline. And this kind of hidden third piece that is a thing you don't think about until you're leading a big team, especially in marketing, which is hiring. How do I build an audience of people where the best in our case, like the best marketers in the world want to come work with you.

Brendan Hufford (15:39.869)
That's a thing, like nobody talks about that piece of it. Where it's like, oh, how do I attract what, like if I were to go in-house right now, I know I have enough audience and relationships where I could pull people out of current roles. I could definitely find a ton of people who are not, who are unemployed or underemployed right now. People who are freelancing and happy doing their own thing, but would be more than happy to go in-house to work with somebody else. I can give you five people right now that like I would shut down everything to go work with them.

Brendan Hufford (16:07.365)
If they called me and were like, hey, can you come work at this company? You gotta shut everything down. Absolutely. The question is, how does everybody build that for themselves? You know?

Taylor Wells (16:17.138)
Super cool. I love that. And just kind of going back through what you just shared, it's actually even back to Chris Voss, Neverspil the Difference book, he talks about the idea of mirroring, right? And I think that's, and even therapists, right, do this really well where they just repeat back what they hear, what they, you know, and it creates not only that trust, that understanding, but you grab their attention, right? We're like, oh, and then you want to hear them say, Chris says, that's right.

Right? And that's almost like when somebody's reading your post, you want to be like, Oh, that's right. You know, that's exactly it resonates with me. I love for you to spend a little bit time kind of go through these. The first roadblock to the problem. I thought that was really interesting. And you're right. I never see that. Tell me maybe why we never see that, why people aren't focused on that. And what does that do maybe in the audiences in their mind when you're able to give them that first robot? Does it like go a little bit deeper into the problem?

So you create more connection or yeah, what's your thoughts on that? Why is that important?

Brendan Hufford (17:20.005)
Yeah, so let me give you an example. I worked with a MarTech company who, one of the pieces of IP that they really worked on, they were a digital asset management software. So it's what you use after you outgrow Dropbox and Google Drive. You have too many digital assets that are flying all over the place. You can't keep track of them. Sales is using the wrong thing, and marketing's got this, and what's the ad creative, but that's gotta be different and resized for this. Like e-commerce brands run into this a ton.

And so do a lot of others. And what we realized was like the product solved that. And a lot of times when you're creating software or marketing software, you're like, yeah, we have the problem. And if you would just get our software, you would have the solution. So they just keep pressing like, this is your solution. This is your solution. There's other problems that are gonna happen, right? So there's things that happen along the way. So the issue is that like you have with digital asset management,

Right now you have this what we ended up calling relay race marketing, right? Where people are just handing off assets to each other, just passing the baton over and over and over and it creates bottlenecks and then people, you know, the more handoffs you have, the more likely the baton is to get dropped. It's a beautiful analogy, right? Relay race marketing. It also sounds like I'm big on, again, this is like the woo part of marketing, but like I'm big on mouth feel. Like how does it physically feel to say these words? Sometimes you say it out loud and you're like, that feels gross.

Brendan Hufford (18:46.609)
Like that's not it, because people are going to say it to each other on, you know, in conversations like this. And if it doesn't feel right saying it, they're not going to. So with relay race marketing, what we realized was the first roadblock to solving that problem, like, you know, the problem, you're committed to solving it. Now, once you use digital asset management software, your team has been so dependent on one another. When I need something, I go to a person or a person comes to me and it's the passing of the baton. But now.

Brendan Hufford (19:16.165)
you're passing the baton to yourself. You're moving to a self-service model. Taking an organization that has historically run on people asking and requesting things constantly from each other and ask them to go self-service is a huge roadblock. We're asking for organizational culture change. If you tell people that that's going to happen, or it is currently happening to them, again, it's like shut up and take my money. You know exactly what we're going through.

and you've described it. Or you've warned me ahead of time of like, hey, just letting you know as you start to try to solve this, you're going to run into this next thing.

Taylor Wells (19:55.238)
I love that and that's almost it's twofold. I mean obviously you're building that trust and you're going deeper and you're It's that it's a continuation of the problem, but it also is value in and of itself You're like warning them of like hey, you're gonna go down this path and it's also like hey Here's a warning or here's something you should think of or here's something you can should consider And it's providing some sort of value impact even

without even going into your third point, which I think is also something that's missed a lot, is providing some sort of template, providing some sort of value. And I always think of, I mean, marketing in general, but content specifically, marketing and sales, I think all, and really all of go-to-market, how can you be your organization's first product? How can you actually provide value in exchange for attention? And I think the best companies that do this are, every interaction with a buyer,

before they become a customer, they're actually helping them solve a problem, giving them little tidbits of knowledge so that they wanna come back for more. So I'd love to hear more on number three of the template. Does it solve, what type of problem does it solve? Number one, does it solve the entire problem? Does it solve a portion of the problem? What's your thoughts on the third point? Yeah, there.

Brendan Hufford (21:08.829)
Sometimes it actually is just like an actual template, to be honest with you, right? Like we work in software, you know, like I work in software. So like a lot of the world is still using Excel for stuff. Like there's a very good chance that the people you're trying to reach who are not ready, I call this the pre-buyer journey, give them the template. Give them, when I was at Active Campaign, I personally built like a hundred of these scripts.

deck templates, Excel templates, budget templates, like everything that you could want that just helps them do the thing that we're helping them do, right? So sometimes it is that easy, right? Like if you're a compensation management software and you're like, oh my God, these huge companies don't even use anything, like they're still running all of their comp out of Excel, great. Give them the Excel template. And it's like, well, then aren't they gonna use that instead of our software? They already are.

Like we have to live in the real world of like, if they are happy using your template and not your software, first of all, we have to question why the software exists, right, if it's not drastically superior to Excel or Google Sheets. But second to that, like, who are they gonna come to? Who are they gonna trust? And brand your template, make it beautiful, right? Put your brand colors in there. Put your logo in one of the cells. They'll delete it, that's fine. They still remember where they got it.

Especially if they're using it constantly. Taylor, I have been using this same, a friend of mine shared a projects and projections Google sheet with me probably six years ago. And it is still how I keep track of all of the clients I work with and all the revenue that I make. Like it's so silly, but it's just a Google sheet. Like it's not fancy. But like I remember who gave that to me and they have my trust forever because of that.

Brendan Hufford (23:03.241)
I've also paid them a lot of money for the things they offer over time. So I think that that's a real... Sometimes it is literally a template. And sometimes it is... And this is the thing, also I want to be really clear, we should have led with this, of I'm not better than anybody at this stuff.

Brendan Hufford (23:22.437)
The problem is when you're in house, you don't have time to sit and just like fucking think for a minute. Like you, there's no thinking time in a lot of companies. It's just production time. Produce output, output. And then once we get past output, it's impact, impact metrics constantly. And you don't have time to sit and just be like creative and be like, well, I wonder what my customers problems are. And I wonder if these are even right. Like we've been saying that customers problems are the same for the last 10 years. Like maybe they've changed. I spoiler they have.

Brendan Hufford (23:54.252)
Like that sort of stuff makes a huge difference. So sometimes it's also just giving them advice or a framework for thinking about, if people were to rewind or re-listen to the whole conversation so far, you and I have probably given five or six frameworks already. You already have these things in you, right? And if you don't have templates and frameworks, ask your customers, how are you solving this problem right now? Oh, I use this like thing, you know,

Brendan Hufford (24:22.491)
or sometimes it's just like, oh I have this way I think about something. You're like, cool, codify that. Create a framework out of it. My friend Natalie at a company called Novatic had this framework that she was talking to me about. It's called the valuable and unique framework.

That's like a template in her, call it like the VU framework. So it's just simply, we don't release any sort of marketing materials or we don't do any sort of marketing campaigns if they are not both valuable and unique. A lot of times we think things are valuable, but it's the same crap every marketer at every other company is doing. For her, it has to be both.

Brendan Hufford (24:56.893)
That is an example of like a template or something that we can give to our customers where they're like, okay, cool, now I have this new operating system for the world. And that builds trust.

Taylor Wells (25:08.858)
Super cool, Brendan, that's awesome. I love that it's almost like a stepping stone to obviously your service or your software or your product. It can kind of be a good in-between. HubSpot does a great job of this with all of their templates on their blog and whatnot. And it's kind of a stepping stone. It's good in-between. You can provide some sort of value. I love also that you said ask your customer. If you don't have the exact framework, ask them what they're currently doing. That's always a great.

place to start when it comes to marketing or sales or anything good on market is just ask your current customers what they're doing or how they perceive you or their problems, et cetera. That's super cool. Well, in closing, I love to hear just, I think the two next points you talked about was customer case studies, which I think is pretty, I think everyone in general, those are, I'm sure you have some interesting ideas on how to do those better, but for the sake of time, I'd love for you to wrap up on the interesting insight.

And yeah, just any thoughts or takeaways people can, how to extract those interesting insights, is that an outcome a customer produced and you're kind of resharing that, an extension of the case study, or what's your thoughts there?

Brendan Hufford (26:16.277)
So in a nutshell, the case study piece is very much like how customers solved content IP, right? Like how did they solve our IP? The cool thing is, is if somebody doesn't know like what that IP is, you can attach a metric to it. Like how so-and-so conquered relay race marketing by increasing or decreasing metric, right? And it's like, well, I want to increase or decrease that metric the same as them, but also it opens a...

Like a lot of us hear about open loops. I like to call these things curiosity levers of like, what is that? What is that free? What is relay race marketing? Like I get that they, but what was that thing?

And it makes you want to, like, again, we can learn a lot from like B2C, the B2C side of things. I've used a lot of like consumer and general public examples in this, because I want you to see like this stuff is everywhere if you just zoom out a little bit. So on those customer case studies, I focus a lot not on like how they increase the metric or tactically what we did or whatever else, but like, why was that a problem for them? What were they going through? I want them. I want my potential customer or client to see themselves in that.

of like, oh they went through this, I am Luke Skywalker, and this company or this person or this, whoever is Obi-Wan Kenobi, right? It puts you in the seat of guide, as opposed to main character. And unfortunately in a lot of case studies and stuff, the company kind of becomes, and the software becomes the main character. We help them do this and we help them do that, and we help them do this, and it's like, yeah, but you're kind of just talking about your solution a lot. Like, put the knife in and twist it a little bit on the pain point, like, that is the whole point of that.

Brendan Hufford (27:52.567)
focused on saying what our solution did and all these outcomes. And then on the other piece of like a high-level interesting roundup, find out how other people are solving this. Find out how people your audience or especially in B2B who are the companies your audience cares about. If I'm in cybersecurity or threat intelligence, tell me how CrowdStrike does this. Tell me how record get on the phone with Tom Wentworth at Recorded Future who I love.

Brendan Hufford (28:22.007)
You know what I mean? He's their CMO. So like Probably not him but like figure out who they're who has the title of your customer at this company Find out what they're doing and that might not be a play for everybody but pulling your audience into your content and putting the wrapper of your IP around it of how all these people are solving your Thing that you their problem that you've created IP around is incredibly powerful

Taylor Wells (28:48.038)
Super cool. That's awesome. And then lastly, you kind of threw an additional tidbit, which was really around like employer branding in a way of like, how do you get your, you know, build those relationships with people through content? Probably one of the most missed opportunities I see, especially, you know, this year, maybe not so much, but as far as with layoffs and whatnot, but even still finding great talent is always a challenge.

Thoughts on how to create I mean obviously your content IP or your content that you're putting out there is gonna build relationships with folks anything else you can add to that builds that relationship and Ultimately the opportunity to be able to hire or work with those folks down the road

Brendan Hufford (29:29.421)
Yeah, I read this thing this morning from Joe Chernov at Pendo. And I'm going to see if I can find it for you really quickly. Cause I felt like it was so elegant. Uh, so Joe Chernov at Pendo says, every time I leave a meeting with marketing leads at Pendo, I'm reminded of that for all the focus on new tech data, KPIs, emerging strategies, the CMO job ultimately comes down to hiring. Get hiring wrong. And none of that stuff matters. Get it right.

and all that stuff begins to fall into place. Thanks, team. And I was like, this is, and I saw it because Kyle Lacey, who's the CMO at Jellyfish, had commented on it, who's also an amazing CMO. But like that employer brand, like when you're the ones that are defining the problem for your customers, again, we think that like the category creation matters, and you have these like category people being like, well,

Well, Gainsight and Apple and all these other things. And it's like, you guys are literally cherry picking three to five companies and ignoring the other 99.999% of them. Like, sure, some of those people do it, but we're looking at, like survivorship bias is 100% the story there. We're like, well, they survive, so they must be, like, that's not how that works, right? So that employee brand, like when you're the one that truly owns the problems of the customers,

not only do you get big customer love, but everybody begins to hear that, hey, it's really cool working on support at this company because customers kind of love it. They have problems that they love the company and the product, right? Or they love the brand, or it's great to do marketing there. Oh my gosh, you should come here and work on the sales team, dude. It is so much easier than fighting the uphill battles at these competitors. And it's not always because you're a leader.

It's you might just be a regular player, right? You might not even be the category creator, right? But that can absolutely happen. And that's how you kind of close that gap.

Taylor Wells (31:25.518)
I love it. And I would even argue like even looking at Steve Jobs or anyone that's created a category They had tremendous empathy and they understood their customers so well and they you know, like I mean they're all infamous for being focused on the customer and creating an amazing product and The category almost came out of that right didn't start with them creating this new thing and then working their way backwards it came out of Understanding the market understanding the customer understanding the competition understanding all those key elements

And then from there creating an amazing product which then in of itself created Yeah

Brendan Hufford (31:59.677)
Yeah, but people skip it, right? They're like, look at this, the you know, it's like our freaking phones or what they're like, look, it's this. And what they forget is that like Apple, I think they got some absurd loan from like a rich uncle or something. Initially, they immediately took on money. But what's important, like, first of all, that's interesting, just the idea of like, it was just them in their garage bootstrapping it false, totally false. They raised money immediately. But what they did with that money was look at their audience and look at their customers.

Brendan Hufford (32:29.489)
Right? That was the first thing they did was customer research and audience research. That matters. And that's a thing that gets skipped with Apple a lot is it's like, well, they're these visionaries and they created the iPod and it's like, no, MP3 players already existed. They were, they were and have been all category creators are maniacal about interviewing their customers and figuring that stuff out. And I think that more companies would benefit by not jumping the shark and figuring out what their problems are and naming those.

Taylor Wells (32:57.802)
I love it. That's awesome. I think, yeah, in closing, yeah, super great. Just in the regards of like go deeper with your customers, understand their pain points, understand what's really going on. Like you even said, not even the three levels of why, but even deeper than that or understanding really what's going on. And through that, creating your content. And I love even what you said earlier about the frameworks. I was actually just listening to Larry Summers on the All In podcast.

And he had this quote, which I thought about frameworks. It was really interesting because he was talking about regulations. And he said, you need frameworks for freedom to thrive. And it was about regulation and whatnot. But I think in general, finding that framework, whether this content IP framework or the framework you have in general for how do you solve your problems. And through that, you can then have creativity. You can then push the boundaries, but you still have it within these realms of restriction to make sure you still.

drive revenue, even if you are, you know, trying to get that post to go viral or trying to get the most attention, you still are getting the baselines done, right? You're still protecting the brand, you're still understanding your customer, et cetera, et cetera. So, super cool. Awesome, Brendan. Thanks for coming on. How can folks follow you and connect with you online?

Brendan Hufford (34:11.045)
Yeah, obviously I share a lot of this on LinkedIn, right? That would be the first thing. Brendan Hufford, you can misspell it as much as you would like. You could also Google Brendan Hufford or Brendan Hufford LinkedIn. The best part of having a really unique name. I feel terrible for my buddy Justin Jackson. Good luck.

Brendan Hufford (34:29.157)
ranking well for that. But like if you Google Brendan Hufford, no matter how bad you spell it, you'll find me. And LinkedIn is the first place. And then I have a newsletter that I write to about 26,000 SaaS marketers every single week called Growing Up. That's where we kind of go behind the scenes and talk about how SaaS and software companies actually get customers by interviewing the people that work there.

Taylor Wells (34:51.469)
super cool. I will put all those links in the show notes. Thanks again for coming on Brendan and we'll see you all next week. Thanks for listening.

Brendan Hufford (34:58.045)
Thanks, Taylor.