Building a Social Proof Engine with Adrian Alfieri, Founder & CEO of Verbatim

Adrian Alfieri Joins to Discuss Social Proof Engines Same way if you're writing a newsletter or on LinkedIn, you need a really good hook when you're looking at the above the fold on the case study should have a great catchy title, ideally a great logo, big metrics. The buyer or user in this case singing the praises of this product. That should be the above the fold before you even dive into the content. Let's say you're you're a buyer. You go to their case studies page and there's like 2 case studies and you look at the dates on them and they're like 4 years old or one year old. That's a huge red flag. The design of case studies is so poor across the technology industry and it frustrates me to no end. You need 2 pages that are really well designed and you don't need to reinvent the wheel. The common problem at bigger companies is that the account managers core KPI is retention renewals and they tend to bear hug their happy customers because they don't want anyone messing with them. This is a problem for case studies and it can be solved by. Speaker 2 Welcome to the GTM Engineer, where we share the hidden stories, cheat codes, and mental models behind the rise of GTM engineering and AI and sales and marketing. I'm your host, Noah Adelsten. Today I had Adrian Alfieri onto the pod. Adrian is the founder and CEO of Verbatim, a case study agency that does 7 figures of revenue and works with companies like Profound, Granola 0, and others. Adrian has been running the company for over 4 years as they've done thousands of case studies and he also invests on the side. During the podcast, we talked about everything you need to know about amplifying your customer stories. We hit on the value of case studies. What makes for a great case study, how to effectively action on the case studies you have across your website, sales, motion, and more. We talked about why it's generally better to drip them out over time versus publish a ton at once. We get into how to set your site up and the best way to amplify your case studies. And Adrian talks about what he looks for in a company's case studies to determine how much customer love they really have and whether to invest. If you want to level up your customer testimonial game and this is a good podcast for you. This episode of The GTM Engineer is also brought to you by Octave. As a GTM Engineer, you've probably realized by now how important it is to store update and action off of the context in your business. The knowledge from sales and marketing like Icps, winning messaging, competitor positioning, specific use cases of your product, and so on usually live in gated docs, call transcripts, e-mail templates, and other tools. Octave's GTM Intelligence layer solves this problem by pushing all of this strategic context plus new dynamic context like intent signals into every system that you've built while also making the system smarter over time automatically with every new gone call or every CRM update. I had the chance to dig into how Airbite, an open source data integration and ETL platform valued at over a billion dollars, used Octave to more than double their SDR e-mail to meeting book rates, and I wrote a deep dive article on exactly how they did it. And you could do the same. There's a link in the show notes if you want to check that out. And if you want to get started with Octave, there's a special offer for the GTM Engineer listeners of 4000 credits and 1st month free. Thanks again to Octave for supporting the community. If you want to find more content from the GTM Engineer, you can follow us on Spotify and subscribe on Sub Stack. There's also a link in the show notes to apply to the GTM Engineer Lab, a quickly growing community of GTM and aspiring GTM engineers that comes with product discounts. Private AMA is a private Slack channel, in person events in New York and San Francisco, and much more. With that, here's Adrian. Hope you learned something useful. Adrian, thanks for joining on the GTM Engineer. Speaker 1 Yeah, man, stoked to be here. Let's jump into it. Speaker 2 Yeah, I'm excited to chat. Adrian Alfieri's Path to Founding a Case Study Agency Do you want to just kick off with your background and what you've been working on recently? Speaker 1 Yeah, Yeah, for sure. Contacts founder and CEO of Verbatim. We started about four years ago and we're a case study agency for some of the fastest growing B to B SAS companies out there. Speaker 2 Nice. And what were you doing before? How did you end up starting the business? Speaker 1 Yeah, background, right out of undergrad, I did three years in early stage investing focused on venture in San Francisco and LA and then it hit a point where I was about three years in. I always tell friends this, that after a few years doing early stage investing, you kind of need to make the call about whether you're like a lifer VC and you're obsessed with the craft of capital allocation or you just like working with founders in early stage teams. I was definitely in the latter bucket. And so I hit a point where I was like, all right, I want to start working with founders. I want to be in service kind of this ICP. But I didn't know what my skill set was Classic like 24 year old junior VC that doesn't really know what he's good at. And so I convinced a handful of buddies. I was in San Francisco at the time, convinced a handful of friends who running B2B SAS companies out of Y Combinator had all raised like 3 or 4 mil. And I basically went to them and I was like, hey, I don't know what my skill set is, can I come work with you? Fractionally, my master plan was to go work with like 3 or 4 friends and then whichever one I got along with the most or that I thought was growing really quickly would join full time. And that was kind of like the early phase of Verbatim where I was contracting and freelancing with a handful of friends. It hit a point where all of them slowly siloed me into not only content, but specifically product marketing and customer marketing and social proof. And again, I didn't come from a content or marketing world, so I was pretty confused. It's like, are you all putting me into this exact same niche focused on creating social proof content, then distributing it effectively to drive pipeline? And what I kind of realized was if you look at the broader early stage content services market, there is endless PR firms, endless SEO firms, endless branding agencies. I'm sure you've worked with a lot of those over the years. But for some reason, like unbeknownst to me, I'm still confused about it to this day. There is no one just like owning social proof and case studies, customer stories, testimonials, despite the fact that if you talk to a lot of early stage founders and early stage teams, that's like highest on their list of like high ROI content assets that you could build way higher than SEO or Geo or PR other channels. And that kind of like dichotomy confused me a little bit. And so I said, all right, you guys are going to be my first clients. I'm going to try launching like a services business around this. And yeah, it was four years ago. Been off to the races since and it's always been the exact same focus. Social proof. Speaker 2 Nice. And and so you guys are actually just creating customer stories at a like really high quality for a bunch of companies that want to be able to amplify what their customers are saying. Speaker 1 Exactly. Most teams, we only do B2B, we only need to venture back. Most teams typically start with us. Cedar Series A, we like to say, hey, if you only have one customer who does, who's the design partner and sure, if they're happy yet or they can't speak to metrics yet, don't work with us, maybe you can do that one in house and you can hack it together. We really like teams to come to us when they have like 3 to 5 happy customers in the same ICP that are paying and can speak to metrics, then you can build a real motion around it. And again, even if that motion is like a case study a month, that's typically where we like to start. Again, big difference between like a one off project and hey, there's some early signs of product market fit here. Let's build this into emotion the same way you would build, you know, good and more emotion within growth or demand Gen. or paid. Big difference between one off versus like hey, let's actually scale this as a recurring action. Unpacking the ROI of High-Quality Customer Stories I think it's obvious to a lot of people, but I'm just curious since you see it every day. Like how would you describe the value of having these high quality customer stories that you know you're able to share as a business? Speaker 1 Yeah, I think there's two buckets. I mean, the bucket that we always talk about with teams that we're about to start working with is, look, if you go from no case studies to case studies or bad case studies to good case studies on a recurring motion, right, not a Sprint like 1 going out every single month to going out every single month, then you turn into a recurring motion. Immediate outcomes that we're looking for is compressed time to close, so shorter sale cycles and increased win rates. The immediate RO is if you start using these across the sales process, it could be top funnel, mid funnel, bottom funnel, it could be index one, pagers, landing page, any funnels that you're building out. That's like immediate KPIs that we should be tracking against. But I think this, the second broader bucket is one of the things that is always exciting to me about case studies and social proof in that say compared to SEO and I got nothing against SEO. I think it's a great channel. If you're building a bunch of SEO content, you're not going to use SEO content across landing pages or across your site. You're never going to put like an SEO blog on LinkedIn through a founder profile or put it or use it across the sales funnel or I think that's what's really interesting, a case study. It's like a really good case study, really good storytelling metrics, a bunch of fruit testimonials talking through like live orchestration and use cases about how teams are using your product day-to-day that can be used across every other channel, not just your sales phone that can be used on site on landing pages. Paid campaigns. A lot of teams increasingly are coming to us to get clips from case study videos to use across paid campaigns. You can use them across LinkedIn X whatever social channels you're using inbound nurturing flow, the signal based outbound. We can dive into this probably a little bit later, but I think that's broadly speaking what's always excited me about it. It's like you can use these in perpetuity across every single channel versus one done paid campaign. Like, hey, if it worked, great. If not, we're starting from scratch, you know? Speaker 2 Yeah, it's kind of the tide that lifts all boats. I'm, I'm curious, as a buyer, you sort of expect, like most sophisticated companies are going to have some level of stories about customers that have seen success with the product. And I think historically I've discounted those have been like, yeah, like, you know, they're just like weaving it in whatever way that makes their business look good, you know? But but that doesn't necessarily indicate anything because like everybody has these stories. Like, like, how would you like respond to that take, you know, and and maybe it's about like the quality of the customers, you know, of the content that's being created. Speaker 1 Yeah. I think a big part of it is the sounds kind of counterintuitive, but the volume in the consistency in which they're produced. If you go to, let's say like a Series B or C company and they have, you know, either like 2 row static logo brag bar on their homepage or it's one of like those rolling and scrolling bars. Increasingly, I think Vanto is one of the first ones to do this where you're actually like linking case studies directly on those logos. There's a big difference in the volume inconsistency between let's say you're, you're a buyer and you're potentially buying like a go to market SAS tool from like a series C company and they have a bunch of logos and you go to their case studies page and there's like 2 case studies. There's like 1 case study and you look at the dates on them and they're like 4 years old or one year old. That's a huge red flag. I always tell teens this of like, hey, if they got 10 logos that they're sharing with you and no case studies or like 1 case study from those 10 logos, those customers are not as happy or they haven't hit time to value. They may not be unhappy, but they definitely haven't hit time to value because if they had, they'd be asking them for a case study and they'd be building a customer story against it and using those, you know, all across the website versus the company's. Fantha is actually a very good example here where I I would guess 90% of the logos in their brag bar of say the dozen logos on their homepage they have case studies with. And then you go to their case studies page and they're shipping a new one or two new ones every single month. And so again, you can if you're just evaluating a case study one off and you're seeing like way overdone metrics that are like 1000% increase in conversion. Yeah, I would definitely take those with a grain of salt, especially if there's only a handful. But a big part of it is volume. Like even at Verbatim, we try to ship at least a couple case studies every single month because the minute they start going dry or people say, hey, you work with these companies, there's no case study here. Are they even happy using you guys? Did they say they wouldn't go on record for XY or Z reason? Maybe they'd have a product problem with what you're building. Volume is always something I look for and that's always been kind of like a founding pieces of verbatim of overwhelmed buyers, social proof. Not overwhelm them with like 2 case studies. Overwhelm them like the amount of testimonials and the amount of case studies you have because it hits a certain point of saturation that you're like, I got to learn more. There were like 100 case studies on this website and like 100 different quotes. This many people, you can't make this up about this many people, right? Speaker 2 Yeah, Yeah, that that's actually a very good point where it's like, OK, there's one or two case studies or a couple years old, maybe they could have fabricated it. Or it's like, you know, if they claimed to have 5000 customers and two people are telling the story, like what does that mean? But but when you have a like very steady volume and it's, you know, happening all the time and it's like, look, like here's all these recent examples. And and then you also probably have just like the more case studies that you create, the more kind of nuances for instances or types of companies you're able to tell stories about. And, and then the higher percentage chance, the next person who comes in the door that there's actually like a relatable story to them. You know, I think about like at Rivlin, we sold like 2 employees to like 5000 employees. And, and so you know, across every industry and like in many countries and, and, and, and across like many different products until you know, every case study would apply to maybe like a very small fraction of, of the overall number of businesses. Speaker 1 So. Speaker 2 Yeah, that makes sense. How to Create Engaging and Impactful Case Studies What about? What about what makes like a high quality case study? Speaker 1 Really high quality case study, obviously outside of good metrics in the Bragg bar. Catchy title, good testimonials throughout. I really think it's just about like twisting the knife, good storytelling. You can tell a story. But again, the best movies that we watch, the best TV shows that we watch, there's a ton of ups and downs. And I think it's kind of the same way with case study. And so whenever we're maybe I'm interviewing Noah on behalf of like verbatim or a different software tool, maybe I'm running a different company and there's a big difference between me saying like, hey, what problem LED you to us in the 1st place? What challenge were you dealing with? You could answer that and then we could just move on. OK, What was onboarding like? Very big difference between asking that follow up question to wait, wait, tell me more. What's the knife here? If you didn't, if you didn't come to us and solve this problem, if you stayed with the status quo, walk me through six months down the line, 12 months down the line, what were the business impacts of that? What metrics suffered as a result? How did your job suffer as a result? Teammates mad at you was a Peace of Mind. Was it a qualitative thing? And you just like, keep twisting the knife until sometimes people that you're interviewing just like, get more annoyed and more ticked off. That's really good content because a lot of the time when we're running these interviews, if you keep twisting the knife, they'll get to a certain point there. I was just so fed up with this damn tool that we were using and support wasn't answering me. And I knew that in two months, if I kept using this, the team was going to be frustrated at me because I couldn't deliver metrics to my C-Suite that really needed them. When you get to that point of they're just like visibly upset of their, you know, maybe other status quo that they're on, that's a really good story. Versus if it's Monday morning, like, hey, no, why'd you make the switch? You were like, yeah, we're thinking about different tools. We evaluated you guys. You seem like a good fit. That's not a great story. So again, I always use the analogy of just like twist a knife, ask really good follow up questions. So we're good stories. Speaker 2 Yeah. So, so there's a level of detail in in the story and in what it actually meant in terms of like outcomes that you can kind of get to the more that you like twist a knife and dig deep in. And and then it seems like there's another piece of this, which is just like what would happen without the tool and, and like really understanding that piece that's. Speaker 1 Really, really important. And then I would say the second component is kind of what we were jamming on earlier around live use cases and kind of like post onboarding orchestration. I think a lot of case studies kind of skimped the detail here, especially with a bunch of AI native companies, which are like pretty technically complex, especially as they launch new features, new products and new live use cases. I think a lot of case studies kind of like skim over the components of like how this thing actually works in real time. This is something that we talked to a lot of teams that we work with of like, hey, if we had to choose between the decision maker that we're interviewing, maybe who had like purchasing decision and like a live user, we always want the live user. In a perfect world, we have both or maybe it's the same person, but live user that you can actually talk through like hey, use case, use case B, use case C, not just give me the high level like day-to-day log me. You log in, what do you do? Do you log in daily? Do you log in every single morning? What is the step by step workflow? How are you actually using this thing? And then you can talk through outcomes. But I think especially right now as one, there's a lot more companies launching really quickly and then two, they're launching products and features faster than either of us have ever seen. A lot of the time case studies kind of like skim over the real meat of it and you want something to send to someone. Maybe you know, a live sales process, not just the metrics that are testimonial and maybe good like before and after pain points, but you actually want to like learn what it is. I can't tell you the amount of times that we'll consider working with a team and we look at their existing case studies. Sometimes teams have shipped a couple that aren't as strong and the solution section is like 3 sentences and it's like if I was a buyer, I have no idea how your product works. Like tell me more, walk me through so I can actually learn from this. Speaker 2 Yeah. So two questions that this brings up for me. The 1st is on ROII think like any, but you know what, what I've heard and and seen directly and then also felt is that ROI metrics tend to kind of, you know get drowned out because everybody can kind of come up with a way of spinning, you know that the story in such a way that the ROI is positive. Like what is your view on that? Do you agree with that? Like do you think there's certain ways of showcasing ROI that are more valuable? Speaker 1 2 notes here. 1 I think really strong ROI metrics that are quantifiable. A big part of that is kind of the hook. Same way if you're ready a newsletter or on LinkedIn, you need a really good hook when you're looking at the above the fold. We can talk about design in a second, but like when you're looking at the above the fold on the case study should have like great catchy title, ideally a great logo, big metrics, first testimonial of you know, the buyer or user in this case, like singing the praises of this product that should be the above the fold before you even dive into the content. So a lot of the time a big part of the metrics is just to grab someone's attention and then it's like, is this believable? And then you get them to start reading. Sometimes if you just show them a block of text, it's like, OK, you need something to actually pull in the reader. So a big part of it is like just a good hook and grab, yeah. Speaker 2 And and what's a good example of that? Speaker 1 I think a before and after of a case study template that we're looking at, you could have title and then you could just go straight into the content, the title and then maybe the CTA. And then you can say about the company and it's like 2 paragraphs about the company. That should be 1 liner in a sticky bar on the left right that no one cares about. And then you finally get into the challenge section and there's no subheader. It just says challenge and then it's like 4 paragraphs. And that's a terrible hook because you just showed him a block of text and the first two paragraphs are completely useless. The after there, I think Unified is really good. All this the after is again, big logo, big title, big metrics up across the top, big testimonial CTA. And instead of like a ballot or intersection, it goes right into the meat of it with a good sub header, not just the problem, but specifically explaining the problem really quickly. That's the hook. And then you get them to keep reading. But I will say the second component to this is there are different buckets of metrics and how strong they are, right? You could say even at verbatim as an example, right? A lot of teams come to us and say, hey, I want to increase win rate, so I want to compress time to close, but I also want to drive a bunch of qualified pipeline. Again, case studies are not perfectly attributable, but a lot of folks will kind of say, hey, before and after when we're running our own case studies. Talk me through pipeline that was influenced by case studies. You know how to use it across the different motions and then let's try to qualify them. There's a big difference if we're doing a case study with a customer of ours four months in with there was a 25% lift in qualified pipeline versus there was a $1.75 million uplift in qualified pipeline driven by forbid. Those are very different metrics and you would see one with you know 1.75 million with a dollar sign attached to it and say again, do I believe this TBD, but it's going to make keep reading versus 25% lift in qualified pipeline. Again, that metric is better than no metrics, but there are levels to different types of metrics. Speaker 2 Yeah. So a lot of it is like, what is the way that you're actually weaving the metric where 1.75 million is a lot more powerful than 25%, even if the actual and outcome is similar. And then on the actual like hook piece, you know, it's like specificity thinking about it almost just like a LinkedIn post or a piece of content when you're telling this story to highlight the high level and then get people to actually want to be able to jump in. Speaker 1 100% and this is a side note slash rant slash venting session. The design of case studies is so poor across the technology industry and it frustrates me to no end. You need 2 pages that are really well designed and you don't need to reinvent the wheel. Go to whatever website you like, go to Ramp, Rippling, Brac, Santo, whatever company you like and find their case study template and find their customer collections page, which can be like a fairly standard grid format. Give those to your designer, say, dupe these and then change the little things depending on our color palette or branding. And again, you can change things from there. There's a lot of moving variables, but you don't need to reinvent the wheel when it comes to a case study template. You can just choose one you like. Most folks kind of looks look the same. There's like a couple different variants, but the amount of teams that come to us and they're using the exact same template as a blog, as a case study template, I got it. Like it takes 30 minutes to find one you like. It takes 20 minutes to send it to your designer, whether a freelance or in house design team or an agency if you want to work with that. And it should take a designer like 2 hours to do. But in Figba and then review, do some iteration cycles to make sure it doesn't look exactly the same and then share it with your web flow or framework developer and get it shipped. That is a one day project that is fairly low lift. But the amount of teams that do not do this and their case studies look absolutely horrible despite having sometimes very good content, like the writing is actually really well done, the storytelling is good. It frustrates me to no end because maybe you just raised a huge Series A and you have like all these big investors, all these great customers and those customers have amazing stories to tell. But if those articles look like an SEO article instead of living in a case study template that's really well designed, again, thinking about that hook up top, those design components for that above the fold are really, really important outside of content writing style, twisting the knife and pain points and ROI metrics. That is one of like the lowest hanging pieces of fruit that you can start with. And again, it should take a day if you do this well. So really recommend teams like start there or at least parallel path that with ramping up the actual interviews in the case study motion. Speaker 2 Yeah. OK. So if we take a step back, list all the things that are important in case studies, you have the design that's, you know, half a day to a day of work to just make it good. You know, go find some company that's on the bigger side and just copy their template and, you know, make some small adjustments. And, and that gets you most of the way there off the bat #2 in the case study, tell it just like you would tell a story on LinkedIn, you know, or any piece of content, which is like lead with a good hook that's intriguing, you know, and all the headers, you know, have enough information that gets people to want to click below, you know, high quality subheaders, etcetera #3 when you're actually doing the interviews, specificity, dig the knife, get really deep into like, you know, what they're like true pain is, and, and why they're actually going with, with the product. And the number 4 is just like consistency and frequency. And, and, you know, the more case studies that you have, you know, consistently over time, the more proof you're, you're kind of building and, and you're just reaching A saturation point of like, obviously our product adds a ton of value. And there's like 0 doubt about it. Is is there anything I miss or or that's also important beyond this? Speaker 1 Yeah, I think you're noted about like removing any risk or perceived risk in a buyer's mind is really, really important. So you can frame it as overwhelming with social proof. You could also frame it as reduce removing 99% of doubt in a buyer's mind for them to at least move forward on AP to Z or a partnership or a pilot or an annual contract with an opt out period. That's another really good way of framing it. Drip vs. Sprint: Managing Your Case Study Pipeline I'd say the last component, we can talk about distribution after this, the last component there to double click on what you said about consistency. A lot of teams will say, hey, we haven't shipped any case studies in the past six months. Let's do 10 this quarter. And then they do a Sprint and they burn themselves out and they use all their customer logos and then they don't produce any case studies for the next 6 months. Now again, case studies are better than no case studies. And it's totally fine if you want to do Sprint if you have no case studies, like, hey, let's do three a month for the next couple months to build the library from that point, unless you're ramped like a crazy hyper growth company that you need all the like, you really need a high volume of case studies because you're launching new products, you're going to new markets, you're going to new G OS, you're going to new segments. Like that's really when three or four a month is more required. But a lot of teams will want to do a ton and then get burned out and won't do any after that and then say, hey, in six months we'll be back. That is not the way to go about it. Do a Sprint if you don't have any yet, maybe two to three months, but come back to at least at a drip like one a month on a consistent cadence. Again, coming back to the thing we talked about libraries getting stale or companies wondering or buyers wondering why you haven't shipped any new case studies in the last six months. People have questions like the same same thing when I go to a blog page and it's like they clearly invested in GO or had an agency on retainer for six months and then that retainer ended three months ago because they haven't produced anything yet. Like when I'm considering buying products I will go to, again, this is because I'm in content, but like I'll go to their landing pages, I'll go to their blog pages, I'll go to their use case pages and you can tell when people aren't shipping anything. And that's always, again, it's maybe not a red flag enough for me to not buy their product, but it's always like a little yellow flag. It's like, oh, they haven't shipped any new case studies in the past six months that something happened. They haven't shipped any new content in the last three months. Did something happen here? And again, you don't want your buyer coming into a demo. So I, I really think the consistency is underrated of just at a minimum, just do one a month. As long as you're growing decently well, you've signed a great product, market fit, you should have a new customer ready to go on record every single month. Doesn't need to be more than that. But like at a minimum, consistency is such a big factor here. And the same goes for any other good machine. It could be paid, it could be e-mail, it could be outline campaigns, it could be, you know, iterating across your sales process. It could be launching your landing pages. It could be LinkedIn as another good example. Don't burn yourself out, just get it going and then get started on a consistent trip and then you can skip. Speaker 2 Yeah, and, and so in theory, a Sprint could work if you hold the content and then drip it out over time. But you, you probably run 2 risks. 1 is like, you interview a customer who like four months from now wasn't happy anymore. Or like #2 you, you make like substantive changes to the product or you learn like, new things about how you want to tell your story. And then you're kind of like stuck with this older stuff and, and, and also just like this kind of like, you know, building the consistent muscle 100% over these matters. Speaker 1 We had a team that came to us a few weeks ago and they had like 10 case studies, but it was all before they pivoted to come building like AI native version of the product. And it wasn't just changing some of the copy, it was like very different product workflows and orchestration on the back end. And they needed to redo all of them. But they had used all their essentially chips with their customers because it's a big ask, like, hey, you guys are busy, you're doing us a favor. You're hopping on a 30 minute call, you're reviewing the view ones like you're involved. It's going to take a customer a couple hours to kind of help you get it over the line. And they've used up like all of their goodwill, all their happy customers, free pivot. And now they felt weird about going back to them, Hey, we need to do a net new interview. We need to do the approval processes again. And they just felt really awkward about it because they'd done a Sprint instead of doing it consistently and then realizing, oh, shit, we're pivoting. We need to pause this. Let's pivot, rebuild product, and then we can start this again. And so again, think about it from the lens of, you know, you've limited goodwill from your customers. Maybe your champions will be down to do these things if you're really good friends with them, But for the most part, you've limited time with them. Make the best use of it, especially if your product is changing all the time. Speaker 2 Yeah, 100%. This gets into the other question I was going to ask, which is like you're an outside agency, you're coming into these companies maybe like, you know, some of the people there before, probably often you don't. They're entrusting you with like their most important customers and to tell those stories. Has that been hard, getting them to make the intros? Have they been reticent of that going in? Speaker 1 Before starting verbatim, I always thought they would be. In a lot of the case studies that we've done on behalf of our clients, multiple teams have said that it actually, they actually prefer it because it makes them look more professional that they hired a shop to do this. They want to do it correct. They're not just like shopping on a 15 minute Google Meet. And hopefully it works. It's like, hey, we value your time so much that we pulled in experts to do this, to tell the best story and make you look as good as possible. Again, I'm talking my book a little bit here, but that was actually counter intuitive because I always thought people would be reticent to do that. We definitely had some teams where like when we're on boarding, they want to make sure they're freemake correctly. They want to make sure there's no cross wires. People can understand that we're an external party doing this. But yeah, over the years that was definitely like an unexpected. I, I, I definitely didn't expect customers to be like, Oh no, we actually like it that we kind of feel more professional. I will say something that I think especially when it comes to customer support and onboarding and human aspect, it can be a little awkward. Let's say Noah is a client of Verbatim. It can be a little awkward for me to say, how'd you like working with me? Was onboarding good? Did you like DM ING with me in Slack 24/7? Like those questions can be a little awkward versus an external party saying, hey, I've heard from a lot of other customers, Noah's team on the CX side is really professional. Tell me more about that and then they can really like you guys up versus they're kind of being like a little awkward, especially on the on the people and CX out of things. Speaker 2 Yeah, there's a good point. So #1 when you bring in an outside agency, it actually makes it look more professional and then #2 easier for them to talk you up when it's not like directly to your face. What to Look for in Legitimate Customer Success Stories So from outside looking in, when you go look at a bunch of case studies yourself, like what are the things you're looking for to kind of just sort of like for these legit and high quality case studies versus versus not? Speaker 1 It's a really good question. I think it is very clear when teams are ghostwriting case studies on behalf of their customers, the biggest tell is #1 length and depth and #2 this is super nation, the case study world. Lack of testimonials, like first person quotes. Because if you're ghostwriting a case study, if I say, hey Noah, can we do a case study for verbatim? We're just going to like ghostwrite it. Can you just approve like we're buddies. Can you approve this on the side? And you say, yes, I'm maybe going to make up one quote for you or I'm probably going to ask you like, hey, can you say 1 nice thing for like the big quote above the fold? Most ghostwritten case studies still have that big quote because people know well enough that you need at least one good quote. But when you read the rest of the thing and it's maybe like 500 words, kind of surface level, like especially it doesn't have the like twist the knife pane before, it kind of like skips over that. Noah was unhappy with his old solution. He was looking for options. He found verbatim That's pretty quickly skinning by the before and after. And then as you read through those sections, they're not only kind of surface level, but there's no first person quotes. It's all editorialized. And again, a good case study should not be all first person quotes because it needs to be editorialized across any, let's say a solution section. You were usually leaving it at least a handful of quotes. And then most good teams doing case studies are using quotes to break up sections partially just visually, it's very helpful. And then partially because it's again, just layering in first person social proof throughout. So it's like editorial weaved in quotes, social proof, breakup section, move to the next. And so when you start seeing a lot of case studies, it's like that was 100% ghostwritten because there's no first person quotes here. And it's a little bit service level, it's a little bit short. Now, again, I'm not saying teams should not do that. If you're bootstrapped, if you're a precede, if you not sure if your product market fit yet, absolutely ghostwrite your first one. So you don't need to work with your beta or an external firm. But once you hit a certain point, reach some degree of product fit, you have consistent customers that are hitting time to value. You should probably stop ghostwriting these even again, even if you don't work with verbatim or an external person or shop, if you want to do them in house, great. Go interview your customer and interview them correctly and get as many quotes approved as possible. I think a big component of the value of doing interview case studies, which most teams should do, is you come out of it. If you've a lot of quotes and you get the that bucket or that asset of quotes approved, you have that. You have that asset for the next three years of whatever quotes in there that are already approved. In three years, if you want to do a paid campaign, a specific use case or a specific ICP, you have like 10 quotes approved from the specific customer in this ICP. So that's also one of the benefits of like getting these things approved, a lot of first person testimonials versus if you wrote a ghostwritten case study and only have one quote and only have one quote. And that's going to be a little awkward to go back to that same customer and say, hey, we got to do an interview so that we can actually get a motions approved. Speaker 2 Yeah, so so you basically have like a war chest of quotes, often many of them in the article. And then there's kind of like a level of depth and art. So, so that the other question I was going to ask, like what what do you recommend companies do to find the companies that are worth asking for case studies? Strategies for Identifying and Engaging Happy Customers There's obviously the obvious, like ask your account managers and like they'll tell you who the happy customers are. And you know, like look at the big logos that like are well known and you know, and, and go after them and build good relationships with them and make sure that they have a good experience. But is there anything non obvious in terms of actually like finding the companies that are happy you know and and getting them to be willing to tell their story? Speaker 1 Yeah, a lot of thoughts here, the counterintuitive one, and the simple advice is probably the most effective is just ask your damn customers. Most people don't do this or they're very scared. In all fairness, a lot of founders, especially at like Cedar Series A, they're the ones that close them because they're still doing founder lot sales and they're just reticent to ask them. They just feel awkward. They're like you're paying us. You just signed a renewal or maybe you still, you're still giving us a ton of feedback on product. Like we just kind of feel weird. Most teams, if you're building a pretty good product and they're paying you for it and you have a pretty good customer service or you're a likable person, they'll probably say yes. They may say, hey, I'm super slammed right now, but I can do it in a few weeks. Most teams, if you ask them and they're paying and they seem happy, they will say yes to 20 to 30 minute, you know, hop on Riverside or Zoom to do this. The amount of teams that this is always my advice for teams like just ask, don't overcomplicate it. Don't overcomplicate the language. So that's number one, which cannot be overstated. Very important to just go on screen 2. The more tactical the copy in which you ask them is very. So there's a big difference between saying, hey, I'm doing a podcast, YouTube case study, webinar series, and I want you to do an hour podcast that's going to be live streamed on YouTube and X or even if it's not live streamed, you're going to your face is going to be on camera the whole time. And no one's actually going to like review that video and make sure it all looks good. And you need to have good lighting and this and this and this. Again, totally fine with podcasts, but the ask for a case study should be very lightweight. Like your response rate or your confirmation rate or opt in rate for case studies will go down. If every ask is like, we're doing a 45 minute YouTube podcast thing and we're going to make a case study written variant of it 20-30 minutes over Zoom and Riverside. It's as casual as it gets. You have final cut, very important, especially bigger companies with PR teams or legal compliance teams. You have final cut. Our job is to make you look good, that's all it is. Hopefully we can Co promote this like you know, this is PR and press for you guys too. If they asked a super lightweight, they're going to have higher optim rates. Third component at slightly larger companies where you have like a growing either post sales or account management or customer support team. The common problem at bigger companies is that the account managers core KPI is retention renewals and they tend to bear hug their happy customers because they don't want anyone messing with them. This is a problem for case studies and it can be solved by having a very clear top down directive of if it's head of CS or head of account management who's reporting to the CEO of hey, top down from exact level. You are now in charge of getting one to two. Let's say we're going for two case study month cadence, your team CEO to Head of Account management, your team is responsible for giving marketing to intros a month and that's going to be reported on your KPIs, which you're going to send to me and your reporting end of every month. Great. That's all that needs to happen. And again, here's the criteria. We're looking for specific use cases, maybe talk to your sales team of like, hey, we're getting a time inbound from the segment, maybe Series 8 from tech, like we want some of those. So let's make sure we're overweighting around those use cases without ICP. So talk to sales, get feedback on criteria, but it needs to be talked. What does not work, and we've seen this over and over and over, is head of product marketing keeps pestering account management or the head of account management or head of CS for case studies and head of CS. It's not a core KPI, It's not in my reporting. I'm in charge of retention and renewals. Maybe this will impact that. So I'm just not going to do it or I'm going to be very difficult to work again, which is totally fine. That's their incentive versus like founders will all ask me this like, how can we make sure it's a bigger growing company? And it's like, hey, top down that's in their reporting every single month that is now a KPI for them. Again, it's not above retention and renewals, but like they're going to send you that every single month as part of their end month reporting and adding that to a dashboard. That's all you need to say. Yeah, you just can slack them. And it's, it shouldn't be like, right. It's like you are now reporting on this. And if marketing does not get 2 intros every single month or it's blocked, you go to the DRI for those intros in that stream. If it doesn't happen, you got to tell me why can't? Speaker 2 Yeah, yeah, like that. So number one, just ask more often than you might think #2 make the ask easy, be thoughtful about the way you word it and then #3 create the right like incentive structure for the teams, interactive customers every day to like actually be responsible for driving there. So, so the other So the other question I just have to ask because you also are an investor and it's like you're, you know, all day talking to companies, customers. What Customer Feedback Reveals to an Investor Like what are the very specific things that you've noticed or look forward that would tell you like this company and this product are actually like outstanding when when you're talking to customers versus the ones that are kind of like middle of the road? Speaker 1 Yeah, 2 components for context, do a bunch of Angel investing on the side. I'd say 70% of it is in active clients that we're working with anywhere from precede, seed, Series A. My small Angel checks tend to get priced out at Series B and beyond. But yeah, let's say we start with Noaa's B to B fit tech company just came out of YC. You got 5 customers and you just raised a $6 million. The two biggest things that we're looking for is 1 spectrum of customer love. We do thousands of case study interviews over the course of even six months or a year. There is a big difference between when you hop on a call and you can tell that Noah's buddy is doing him a favor and it's another YC company who's a design partner and is actually not paying or did this for a gift card or did this because he likes Noah or went to high school with Noah and you've never met this person in your life. Maybe you're serious a company and you're head of sales or or someone else close the deal like a senior aide close the deal. They don't even know you and they are so obsessed with your product. When you're twisting the knife, they're like, you have no idea my pain before I hated my old solution and they have crazy metrics and they can just talk and talk and talk and talk and you feel like you're not dragging information out of them. They cannot stop talking about Noah's company, especially in those twisting the knife moments. And they're just so excited to keep working with you. All the metrics are good, the quotes are outstanding. There's a clear before and after and depth of pain before and depth of so joy or excitement after onboarding those verses. Oh, it's Noah's batch made from YC and he's doing him a favor and he likes the product and he's paying for it. But you know, 20 minutes in they're giving one liner answers and you're not getting much out of it. Just it's, it's day and night. Yes, it's a spectrum, but it's the classic like, hey, answer one out of 10, but you can't use 7. It's very clear. If it's in the 8 to 10 category, it's like, OK, this is really interesting. That kind of piques my interest. Or if it's six and under, it's like, OK, that was a favor being called in. And they're still trying to find product market fit. That's component #1 component #2 which is actually a better signal. It's just velocity of introductions there. There's a Series A company we recently started with that. We started just doing one a month. By month three, they had ramped up to three per month and we're now like seven months in and they're maintaining the three month cadence because they have so many happy customers and they're growing so quickly because they're launching new products and new use cases. So they want case studies to document that. They're launching into new markets and new geos. They want case studies to document that. And every single customer again falls in the no sevens 8 to 10 category of happiness, but just the pure velocity. Again, contrasting this, we had the series B company raise a ton of money and we kicked off, we signed like a six month contract. We kicked off, they made one customer intro in three months. And we had to proactively pause the agreement because we were like, what are we doing here? We're supposed to be doing one to two per month and you can't even get us any interest. And so again, there's this is kind of dovetails into a conversation about like, are we in a bubble? Are we in an AI bubble? On one hand, you see some of those companies and you're like, we're in a bubble and then you see others and you're like, no, no, no, this is really working. Their customers are ecstatic. They're doing 3 or 4 a month. They're not only continuing with us, but they're expanding with us and they're all in the 8 to 10 happiness category. The velocity again, is really understated of. They're not just happy customers, but they're expanding and we're getting intros for three months out because they're so happy and they're just trying to get more in the door. And again, sometimes those are the companies that it's like not necessarily Tier 1 investors, sometimes companies overseas or middle America, not in like hot San Francisco, New York circles, but their customers are obsessed with them. Incredible metrics, incredible stories, incredible kind of night and day before, after. And the velocity is just ramping and ramping, ramping. Those are usually the ones that I'll say, hey, is there a round open or can I sneak into check on the last valuation? Speaker 2 Yeah. So number one is, is almost just vibes base you get on with the customer and like pretty quickly get a sense of how into the product they are with, you know, the degree of excitement that they talk and how much you have to pull versus their sharing the information. Then the second is velocity, like companies that just have more customers to throw. Key Traits for Hiring Top-Tier Content and Marketing Talent So this sort of like next thing I wanted to to dig in on with you is like, if you're a business and you're trying to staff out customer stories and content and these different things, like who are the sort of profiles of people that you should hire and put on these projects, etcetera. You you work with a bunch of businesses, you know, you work with a bunch of people at these companies. I'm sure some of them are better than others. What are the profiles, I guess, like beyond the kind of seed Series A where you're like you're working directly with the founder, like what are the profiles of people that you generally work with? And like, which of those sorts of people do you find to be like the most effective at their job? If you're a business thinking like we have a bunch of happy customers, we can go like contract out some of the work, but we also need somebody to like to be like the primary person responsible for making sure that this all happens well. Speaker 1 I would say the best point of contacts for us early stage, we're usually working with CEO directly and then I'd say at like Series A+ there's usually head of go to market, head of growth, founding PMM, head of product marketing or Series B and beyond head of marketing or CMO. My favorite point of contacts to work with are recently hired founding PMMS or doesn't need to be head of growth or head of GTM. It could be head of marketing or head of product marketing with a lot of overlap on growth demand Gen. or go to market. I think what I really appreciate about working with marketers is that they're quality first and they're craft first, which really matters. And you can tell by if you're have worked with a head of demand Gen. if you look at the copy on their outbound campaigns tends to mean by not very high quality. But what I do really respect about growth go to market demand Gen. folks, is velocity and expectations around speed and iteration. And so when you work with someone that has both of those skill sets, that really cares about the craft and quality, but also is not pulling punches around speed and velocity of delivery, those are the best people because it also pushes to get better. It's like, hey, if you have those combination skill sets, you call it a founding PMN, you call it a head of growth Marketing could be a scene though too. When you have those two skill sets, it pushes us to improve quality. It also pushes us to increase velocity. And when you have both of those things, you tend to have a very good kind of like social proof engine within a broader content go to market. But I will say in terms of teams that we just really like working with, I think the best partners, and this is advice for just working with partners or vendors at large, is the teams we really like working with. It's like always pushing us on quality and speed work, work in progress, everyone's work in progress. We're always trying to get better. So push us there, but also be a really good person to work with, be really nice, be understanding, just be likable and be good to interface with. The amount of teams that fall in one of those two categories, there's probably a reputation around like demand, gender growth people or salespeople that are just pushing on quality and velocity constantly. But are kind of an asshole to deal with. You don't want to work with those. You also don't want to work with counter intuitively, the really nice person who's your point of contact who's not pushing you to get better constantly. When you have both, it's a really natural partnership. And so again, role title doesn't really matter. It's more like, hey, can you push us on quality? Can you push us on velocity? And also just be a really great person. Speaker 2 Yeah. And, and so if you're a business trying to hire one of these people to, you know, work on both like case study related things, but but probably also just like content and, and other pieces in general, like what, what would be the, the main traits that you would try to screen for? Speaker 1 I don't know about traits necessarily, but my favorite is always like when we're making hires, hey, build out a 3069 day growth plan. What are you going to do in the 1st 306090? And then you can pretty tell tell pretty quickly just velocity what they want to get done and how ambitious that 306090 is, especially when you leave it up to them like, hey, this is the core KPI for your role. This is the secondary KPI. How do you want to get there? What's the pace you want to move? What channels do you want to launch? If it's ambitious, then great. And they want to move quickly. Then you can dive into like deeper factors, go to reference calls, see how they work with the team. But a lot of folks will like, oh, this is the core KPI month one. It's ramping up talking to customers, not saying you should be talking to customers. Month one is talking to the team and ramping up and reviewing our software stack. And then month 2 is we found the new vendors and we found an external partner. It's like, whoa, what are we talking about? Scaling Your Content Strategy Beyond Case Studies For sure, in your time with all the case studies at Verbatim, I'm sure you've also just like seen a lot of content engines in general. What are the things that you've kind of learned about what makes for an amazing content engine outside of just a lot of customer stories? Speaker 1 I think if you're C series, AB2, BSS company, starting with the fundamentals first and then layering channels on top of that, probably similar how you approach like good market or dimension broadly fundamentals should be outside of like a decently good marketing website, decent landing pages across product solutions, LinkedIn Finder content. Again, you can do it in house outsourced case studies. You can do it in house outsourced on a consistent trip. And again, if you have two customers, fine, just do one a month and then slowly ramp up over there. But starting with those two. And then you layer on product marketing, could be tactical guides, product releases, documentation and then layering on sales enablement US versus them pagers like in the footer on your website could be objection handling, could be 1 pagers specific bill for the sales team. It could be hidden or it could be live on the site. Then you can layer on macro thought leadership and that could be lead magnets, quarterly reports, benchmarks. And then you keep layering from there and also expanding on the distribution of it at the amount of teams that come to us. And they're like, I want to do a benchmark for it. And I'm like, awesome, Have you done any LinkedIn content? And they're like, no, it's like, OK, let's like start there and then build layers over time. But again, I like to go 1 by 1 or maybe 2 at Max. But if you're ACEO of founding PMM and those are the only people even touching marketing on your team, don't try to launch 10 things. Don't skip steps. Start with LinkedIn founder posting. Start with social proof. Make sure there's clear DRI for each of those and there's a clear work stream and then layer on the next and then. Speaker 2 Pops yeah, take take one work stream at a time, make sure you nail it, that there's a clear owner, move on to the next one. As opposed to, you know, getting super ambitious on day one. That's something that you're not going to be able to accomplish. Speaker 1 Well, especially when it's ACEO that is in the process of hiring a marketing lead, but hasn't hired them yet. And I always get a little nervous when we get brought on next to a SEO firm, Geo firm, NPR firm, and the CEO is the only point of contact. It's like, how in the world are you going to manage all of this by yourself? A lot of time we get brought on along with LinkedIn ghostwriting, like exec social firm. Usually we get brought in at the same time. And then after us three to six months later, once those work streams are built, hey, we're going to bring on like we get this ping all the time. Hey, we're thinking about SEOGEO, same shop, different shops or in house hire. How should we think about this? And then you keep layering from there. Speaker 2 Yeah, Yeah, that makes sense to me. Leveraging Case Studies Across All Marketing Channels And then, OK. And then let's just talk about using the case studies to, you know, to of their ability, I guess first, like, how do you guys use your own case studies to, you know, squeeze the most juice out of them? Speaker 1 Yeah. There's 4 main channels and again, each our spectrum of baseline and then actually doing them well. So channel #1 is on site. Now, the baseline that most people do, which is not good, is you have a case study that's in the exact same template as a blog or an SEO article, and it lives in your blog page, resources page, and it's in a grid next to all this shitty SEO content. That's yes, it's on your website. That is not case studies done well on site, right? So people say, oh, I got it live. That's not getting live. Getting live is customers tab in the NAV bar unfurls to a custom customer collections page. This could be standard grid, could be something funky or custom. If you have a good designer living on that page could be featured. It could be standard grid. You could have filters that's baseline. That's like, OK, you got custom templates. He did this Well. Next layer on site to that is, hey, this one has awesome testimonials about the specific use case and there's a great metric about it that should live on the correlating use case landing page within the product drop down from the NAV Awesome. OK, now we're launching sales name US versus M1 pagers that live in the footer. Oh, there's another really good quote from this competitor in this different case study that should probably live with the footer of that page, right? So this is layering on site distribution done really well. Hey, we have logos, but we could probably link the case studies to the logos like a fan or another company. We just did the sounds all the time where we do the first wave of case studies and we get 3 approved and they're all live and they look great on site. And then you look at the homepage and there's like no testimonials. It's like, all right, just take the testimonials, put them on the homepage. And so again, there's layers to on site distribution done well or not done well. So 1 is on site. We do that too. Second is socials. Again, depends where your customers live, but it's mostly LinkedIn right now for B to B. Some people use them on X2, some people use them on YouTube. We don't see that much like Instagram or Facebook, but it's basically LinkedIn founder profile. Now. Again, there's layers here. There is OK Adrian posted a new case study on LinkedIn and some good copy, good visual and then I never post it again and no one on my team hosts a company account doesn't post it and it's not linked anywhere in my profile. That's like baseline. OK, you've got it live. But we have some case studies like Unified was a former client of arts and they're a great logo and we had a great engagement with them. I've posted that case study like a dozen times over the past year and a half since we launched their like case study motion together because there's again, a good case study has different use cases and components and before and after and quotes and metrics. There's like 10 different stories to tell within a good case study. Again, if it's done well, OK, great. Let's repurpose that with different visuals. Man, I forget what I saw on LinkedIn this morning, let alone yesterday. You could just keep repurposing these as long as it's not every single day the exact same case study, just different image, different angle, different quote. Great. Keep pushing it every single month or every couple weeks even if you want, especially if you don't have that many. Now again this done even better is you know verbatim our kind of external facing teams, myself and my CRO, we don't have the big BD or sales team, but companies that have maybe they have two SDRS, 2 AES and head of sales and head of partnerships, maybe they just are like a confounding growth or GTM. All of those folks are involved in live customer conversations. Some of them are in charge of sourcing origination, some are just in charge of closing inbound pipeline and staying top line with those deals. All of them should be using social proof content and pushing it on their own socials. Again, some companies, let's say like a beehive or a ramp do this incredibly well. Some teams it's just the founder profile and no one else is posting. And that always confused me because if I was an AE and I was trying to get deals closed, I would be posting on LinkedIn because my prospects who I just talked to, hopefully if you're good A, you're connected with them on LinkedIn. And even if they see one piece of this content, now you are top of mind, even if for a millisecond. And again, there's layers to doing this. That's kind of the top layer that you start doing this. Well, third component, e-mail, I won't dive too deep in here, but there's your baseline newsletter and then there's next layer nurturing flows focused on case studies. So again, depends on the stage of the company and certain intense signals, but you could do these weekly like a verbatim. We don't have a complicated product or a case study agency. Everyone in our pipeline that we've talked to gets an e-mail every single week with a plain text case study from us. It's not the full thing. It's kind of like a shortened version. And then you blink out very simple. You just get hit with a case study every single week like clockwork for like 30 weeks. And then again, layers outside of this is if you get any good outbound e-mail, any seriously sized company, you're going to see case studies and metrics and testimonials or link outs. You probably see these in your inbox or intent based outbound, which again, you can do it. Let's say you have a you're running a fintech company and you have a specific product around security or compliance embedded or like embedded payment rails. Again, if you're on that page, Oh, there's a case study, the payment rails. So that specific use case, great. Let's start dripping in that case study to them using outbound place or they were on the case study page for this specific logo. Let's send them that right away. Again, you can use tools like unify or common room. There's a bunch of others. Speaker 2 Yeah. OK. So you have #1 on here, which is website, don't just like slap the case studies that you have on your website. Be thoughtful about where they go. There's, you know, things around the NAV bar, how they tie into the product pages where it's surface on the home page. The second is social content on, you know, LinkedIn. Like not only should the founder be posting other stuff all the time and you can repurpose and post, you know, the same case study many times over, but like all of your salespeople should also be doing that. The ones that are interacting with customers, you know, should be friend requesting those customers if they're doing a good job. And then if they're constantly posting about case studies and stories and that's building the brand that the third place is an e-mail. Probably depends how big the database is, but you know, you can create these like really powerful nurture streams where you're just hitting these people who've interacted with your brand over and over with new case studies over time. You can put it into outbound plays. And then, you know, probably at the most sophisticated level of this is when you're matching like, you know, the perfect case study with the prospect based on the needs, etcetera. And then was there a fourth? Was there a fourth category? Speaker 1 Yeah, 4th is which is your sales funnel, right. So if I'm selling to Noah in our first call, I'm saying, OK, I know what works at a series B health tech company. If I have a series B health tech case study, I am sending you that in our Zoom chat saying, hey, you can, you know, you can take a look after this. And then in the follow up, hey, this isn't a series B health tech, but it's series B fintech, similar use case. You should check this out. If you ghost me, hey, we just launched a new one a month from now. I'm going to send that to you. Or you can just pull through our quotes from it and share them. Or you can pull the actual sample work in our case that's a little bit more sophisticated, but this is not that complicated. It's use case studies in your show's pipeline in live on calls and follow-ups. Even when you're when you're signing a proposal, sandwich it with case studies. You just want to overwhelm social proof. Again, in your words, which I really like, it's not just overwhelming social proof. It's just removing any doubt that you should at least pilot this. Speaker 2 Yeah, yeah, 100%. And then you didn't say this explicitly, but I imagine it's in the social one, which is like go test the customer story content on your paid ads and see if it outperforms. Speaker 1 We don't do that, but especially if you're getting video clips from some of the case study interviews, Riverside or in person if you want to do that, yeah, Again, we don't do paid for pay them, but a lot of teams are doing that. Adrian's Top Software and Creative Growth Campaigns OK, cool. Yeah. So usually just like to ask everybody two things at the end. Number one, what is your favorite underrated software tool? Speaker 1 OK, I saw this question prep for this. Technically, I don't think they're called a neobank, but I love our banking platform Meow. I don't know if you've used Meow or chat with Brandon in the past. They're in the broader packed worlds, commendative world of like ramp and row and recur and other folks. I, I've never like actively recommended a banking partner before, but we love them. This is not a paid promotion. They have great interest rates. They're building a ton into the platform these days and we do all our like APAR through them increasingly raising like a lot of debit and credit cards through them. I will very rarely recommend making product. They're fantastic. We've been like very happy customers of them. Speaker 2 Nice. And then what about your favorite growth hacker creative campaign that you've? Speaker 1 Oh, I just, I meant to show this live nominal which billion dollar company? Now they've raised a huge round, a little over complicated, but they're essentially like data infrastructure for hardware engineering teams. Their head of marketing sent me their physical product catalog that kind of came along with the launch. And in it they had a printed case study. I've never actually seen a printed case study, not like in basic like printer paper, but like perfectly laminated on both sides sandwiched in a product catalog. And it was the first time I've ever seen a printed case study before. And I was like, damn, this is a really cool growth hack of like maybe I'm about to close Noah and imagine I'd just send you like a printed catalog of like 20 case studies through. I think that's so cool. I've never seen that though before. Speaker 2 Yeah, a way to just, like, make it even more real. Exactly. Nice. Well, this has been super fun. Thanks for coming on to the podcast. Speaker 1 Yeah, man, this is fun. Talk to you soon. Speaker 2 Thanks for making it to the end of the pod. If you haven't already, don't forget to hit follow on Spotify and find the link in the show notes to subscribe on sub stack. Until next time.