[Music] You are listening to the Sassius podcast in the world. Born in the Nordics, democratizing B2B Sass knowledge everywhere. Hi, I'm Daniel. And I'm Thomas. And we are experienced Sass professionals that are curious about how other successful Sass companies go to market, scale, build winning teams and great products. Join us on our journey as we speak to Sass leaders trying to get hold of their secret sauce. And today's guest is Yuleen van Krikken, founding partner at the Growth Syndicate. The demand-gen part of it is a lot of people that don't know that they have a problem. They feel a pain, they feel the ach, but they don't feel it enough yet for them to take action. [Music] Are you building a Sass business? Achieving ISO 27001 or SAC2 compliance can help you win bigger deals, enter new markets and deepen trust with your customers. But it can also cost you real time and money. Vanta automates up to 90% of the work needed to get and stay compliant. Get audit ready in weeks instead of months and save up to 85% of associated costs. Over 6000 fast-boring companies use Vanta to manage risk and prove security in real time. Sassius listeners get 20% off.
[email protected]/sassius. That's vant.a.com/sassius. Hello and welcome to another episode of the Sassius Podcast. It's summer and I hope that you are some place warm or cold depending on your preference. We are moving on here also on a little bit of a summer break here and there, but the content is flowing and Daniel anything you want to say before we move on. Did you learn how to surf? No, so what Daniel is referring to is that I've been at Hawaii visiting my daughter here for a few weeks. There is an opair and surfing and balance sports are not so much for me. Alright, so for everybody listening to this, I'm sure you would agree with me Thomas. I know you tried. I know you tried many times. Why don't you share a picture on LinkedIn with one of the better attempts? Let's see. But anyway, we are not going to talk about the generation of embarrassing pictures. We're going to talk about the man generation and join us and speak to Yulin. Today we are super happy to have Yulin, the founding partner at the Grove Syndicate Hears Against in the Sassius Podcast. So warm welcome Yulin. Thank you. We're very nice to be here and excited to get started. We're super excited to have you here and there's two things that the listeners need to be aware of. One is that we just met a few minutes ago for a chat about something completely different, somewhat related I suppose. We were in the same space and we talked about some co-labs and so on. We found out we both have some passion for the main topic of today, which is the man generation. Then we said, why are we not just not jumping over to Riverside and recording a podcast. So here we are. That's the background story of how we got here. We got really excited by a statement that you'll invite. The other thing that made me react a little bit is like, Thomas didn't go for your last name. Thomas was up. Well, I'm not intimidated. I can do it now. Fahikin. Really good. Pretty good. No, really good. No, really good. I'll take it. Okay, super. But why don't you start by telling us a little bit more about yourself? Yeah. So I'm Julian, live in Amsterdam for the past 10, 12 years. I've been working in startup scale of land in marketing and growth. Really focused on actually, I've done a lot. I've been in leadership roles from companies that just started to series C and my passion lies within demand generally, Jen marketing. I've done a lot of things growth hacking when there was no growth hacking because there was just no money. So you need to try something creative and yeah, started a couple of months ago. We started the growth syndicate, which is a company that provides interim head of growth services that regards to marketing and growth and really tried to help companies take that next step. Yeah. And what's your background within B2B SaaS? My own background is marketing. So I've always done marketing roles, growth roles, VP of marketing, marketing director. I've done the whole spectrum. And you work for some cool company that raised a lot of money. I mean, they weren't necessarily just cool because they did. Yeah, they're FinTech in the UK. And they raised 100 million. And they had no marketing and we built their marketing machine from scratch, which was very excited. It's a hard space to enter FinTech, but especially from a marketing perspective and a brand, but it was a really nice challenge. All right. Any other companies that people might know of? I work for Impraze as the marketing director and that got acquired by BetterUp. BetterUp. I think a lot of people know BetterUp as a coaching company and online coaching platform that acquired us a couple of years ago, or as part of the acquisition, which was one of the best learning schools of my life to be part of an acquisition. That's an episode of its own. It feels like, but like if you would tell us like the one main lesson from that M&A exercise that you will bring with you for however long you're in this space, what would that be? I always thought that companies of that size have got their marketing figured out, but they don't. Oh, that was for me. Like I built this whole plan of how we did our marketing, how we set it up, how we created content to demand, to leads to the whole whole shebang. And I was actually kind of surprised that there was so much deal to do at BetterUp that they didn't, that I haven't done at that point. Even though that is a strong brand, but there was no demand motion yet and even though they were so successful, which for me was like, oh, okay. This gives hope to the rest of us. Thank you, thank you, Jogi. Oh, but I think I have the same sort of experience having worked with some really well-known luxury brands and you think that they have all the money in the world and should have state of the art, IT systems, but they really don't have. They focus on other things, I guess. But talking about the growth syndicate here, what's very short, what's your business about and who's your ideal customer? Yeah, so we focus on B2B companies, SaaS, but also marketplaces, not just, but definitely B2B because that's, it might be more fun because it's storytelling. Yeah. I like to do, but what we do is we do two things. One is we build a foundation to scale, like a lot of companies struggle with building a repeatable commercial motion, right? They have a couple of things that are working, but they don't know how to take that to the next level or they hit a certain limit. But a lot of times that comes from not building your foundation correctly. So where are your ICPs? Who do you focus on? What's positioning around that? What's the messaging around that? And how are you going to use that messaging to look at different growth levers as we define them? So what are different opportunities in the market that really can unlock a door that bring you from 2 million to 5 million? And that's not an, oh, let's optimize the paid ad campaign. That's really, looking at your pricing, looking at a completely new channel, is there SEO? Are there competitors you can work together with? So there's these massive things and mostly it's focussor and messaging and ICPs. Who do you focus on as a company that really brings that scale? And that's what we're trying to do in an infrastructure. The last thing I want to mention is that we really want to make ourselves obsolete. So we want to build a in-house knowledge base for that company itself so that they don't need us after 9 months and they can run it themselves. We hire somebody for them and they can then take it from there. Cool. Fantastic. And one thing that I don't want to call it a prep call, in the other call we had, you said something that the trigger does in a good fun way, you said something, a lot of companies know how to capture demand, but they don't know how to create demand. What does that mean? What did you mean by that? Yeah, so demand generally, Jen is being used interchangeably a lot of times within companies. And for the record, lead Jen is capturing already existing demands. So that there's people that are searching for a solution, high-intense people that have a problem. The demand, Jen, part of it is a lot of people that don't know that they have a problem. They feel a pain, they feel the ache, but they don't feel it enough yet for them to take action. What your job is by generating demand is for them to start feeling at it. You need to start creating enough touch points with that user or with that prospect or whatever the name is you give to the people out there. For them to start realizing, hey, have a problem. And I'm sticking for a solution. That's a lot of times what people struggle with or don't even know that there's a difference. Let me say it like that. They think it's, I turn on an ad or I turn on a campaign, I get leads. That's a lot of times that something we still see, but it's you guys know that as well as I do. That's not how it works. But now when you say it, I mean, it sounds like a no brainer. So why are not people doing this? Are they stupid? No, no, no, no. So when I started as a marketer, everything became measurable, right? Through Google, through platforms to pay, all these channels were relatively new. And we went from emotion to communications as marketing to.
revenue marketing, right? Driving money. And that has changed because everybody's doing the same, everybody's using the same channels, everybody's targeting the same people, everybody's creating AI messaging and products are also not that different anymore. So it's very easy to catch up as a product to, if you're not a very difficult product, but an essence, a lot of these tools are relatively easy to build. So people, you can't, how do you differentiate that's to a brand and through storytelling, but a lot of people don't know how to do that. And that's where the problem lies, and it's also a thing that people don't know how to measure it because you can't measure brand, not directly. You can't say, I do this brand campaign, and this is how many leads I got out of it. That's just not how it works. And I think it's important for people to realize that you need to invest in demand generation in order to capture leads in the end. All right, so this is a little bit going back to the goal of times where the sort of the TV commercials, infomercials, and the newspapers, and the magazines, and so on. Yes. So what are we seeing currently right now is that there's a dark funnel, right? It's, yeah, it sounds like a scary, yeah, what is that? So a funnel or like a customer journey or journey that your user takes from the first touch point all the way to the end, especially the beginning of that journey is dark, which means it's not linear anymore as we did in the past. You have an ad somebody clicks on the ad, the land on the website, they fill out a form and they become elite, right? Because of referral platforms, Reddit, LinkedIn, all these extra channels where people are talking, where communities are being formed, a lot of the decision making and a lot of the familiar, familiar, familiar, er, I can't say that word, but going familiar with your brands is at happens before they even click on your ad. And that is when they see a post of a CEO that they admire and they don't do anything, they just see the post. Yeah. Or they go to a conference and they see a great speaker or they see a stand, they don't leave their details, but they see it. Or they get a message from their, for their colleagues on Slack, which hey, this is a great tool. What do you think? All these different elements happen. You can't measure them. The only thing you measure is the last click, which is somebody's gone through this whole journey and then typed in "fascist" on Google, "went online", put in a form or signed up for the conference and that's the only part you measure. The scary part with that though is the way you just described it now. That's so much work for a marketing team to make sure to be present in all those forums, in all those dialogues. How do you even approach that mission? So it starts again and that's also something we do at the Grotesch Indigate is focusing on the right ICP. Getting to really know your ideal customer and where do they hang out? Exactly. Because they don't hang out all at the same place. They hang out at specific places because in essence, where humans were kind of sheep-like, we act in the same way. It's been hard to say. A very blunt Dutch way of saying it, but human behavior is predictable. We want to be a part of something. It must be much harder to find where people hang out. When there were one or two TV channels and the one was with commercials and before the eight o'clock news, you know that you can reach a certain target group. Now there is all kinds of different social medias and forums and communities and whatnot podcasts. So it seems like a jungle. Is that one of the reasons why people are not doing this? Because it feels I mean too hard to get started with something or. I think there are two elements here. Of course, there is a it's overwhelming. I think there's also a lot of saturation happening in certain channels. Be the one to stand out. Look at LinkedIn. Look at our own LinkedIn game that we're trying to play. You're beating up against a lot of different people that are trying to do kind of a similar thing. I think why people don't do it is because we come to live in a space, especially within startup scale of scale of land, where we always go after the new shiny thing. And we want instant results of that new shiny thing. AI is now something. Okay, we're going to do a campaign around AI. That needs to be the new thing. We had it with crypto. We had it with so many of these different things that came into the space. Everybody started to focus on that. COVID was not a great one. Everybody started to message around COVID. So but that's short term gain, short term demand that you can get. But it's not a long term strategy. Long term demand generate a creating a brand takes time because it's not one touch point, right? I think on average it's 15 touch points you need to get somebody from a senior brand for the first time to taking an action that you want them to take. That's a lot of touch points. And those touch points go over time. It's not like Monday, you does this Tuesday, does that Wednesday, does that. It's a you need to be there in all these different moments at the right time with the right message in order for them to move forward. And you can't track it. So for a marketer or a commercial leader that needs to have a conversation with their CEO about this, it's very hard because you're actually saying I need dis amount of money. The most amount of money isn't demand actually if you're doing it well in my opinion. Right. I can't track it. So I can't give you numbers. But I will tell you in the end, you will get more leads from this because that's what you need to do. So I have this crazy idea. I hope you're up for it. What we'd like to do in the podcast here is to see if we can get some really, really tangible and hands-on advice that we can all walk away from here. So basically, I'm asking you for free consulting hour. What if we play with the thought here? Let's take a very traditional industry in the sense of that it maybe is not as far advanced with its digital revolution as some other, like the construction industry. And now let's play with the thought that there's this great SaaS company that has developed this fantastic product that's going to make all the parties involved in the construction parties from our municipality to the constructors, contractors and whatnot and sub-suppliers and so on. They're going to work in this magical tool together and project will never be delayed again. If everybody just works in this, there will not be a construction project every delayed again. Like let's imagine that is the SaaS product and Thomas, what should we name the SaaS product? Utopia. Utopia. There we go. So we give Utopia in your hands. Clearly nobody in the construction industry knows of Utopia or that they need Utopia. How would you create demand? What are the five things you would do? Well five things. So let's start with the first part and this is I'm repeating myself a little bit but that's for me very important. If you look at the different buyers within the organization or the different companies that you could sell this to, always start with the ICP that you can find online. Because if you can't it's harder. There's still I will give an example what you could do for the ones that are less online but it's easier if you have some form of an online presence because then you can you at least know where they hang out. I think that's one thing you need to figure out and a lot of times people all think that everybody's online did. A lot of times they're not. They're not especially the blue color part is not. So I can give you a good example. It's not so we work with manufacturing companies. One of our clients. Also quite old school. Not all of them are online. Not all. Most of them are not online. How do you get in front of them? So what I like about the market is it brings the creativity back to marketing. It's not just here's your ad click on the ad convert. It's like how can you create a campaign or something that's tangible for the person you're reaching out to. So what we actually did for the manufacturing company is we made custom parts, little parts that they might need and we send it to them, brand it. Oh nice. It was a very small thing what we did. What do you mean with a part? So manufacturing is most around about creating parts for, pay me small parts, big parts and parts for for products. Yeah exactly. To for aviation, to pharmaceutical industry, to you name it. So I get a small piece of metal with a sticker or. Yeah. So we made a 3D printing and then we send it up. We did the same for example company that that focuses on merch, but for very more traditional companies. So we actually built the merch. With a with their brands in a nice package with our logo on top and we send it. So these are things you like it creates the creativity. But what the goal is for the month is create that touchpoint. But in order to do that. So one thing is before you start with all the crazy campaigns, you need to have that foundation. So you need to know how to speak to construction people in this sense. So what do they do? What do they like? How do they behave? And the best thing you can do is interview them. So that the first thing for me is interview these people. Get to know where they hang out. What do they like? What don't they like? Right? Focus on
on that on that part. How did they speak? Because language is such a powerful tool in this, especially in the world of AI where we live and wherever they're talking in the same way, right? That's that's the first thing that I would do. Then once you figure it out where they hang out, if it is online, there can be communities that can be sometimes it's a meetup, it can be some places where they hang out. And you need to focus on that. So it's not like a mass targeting to everybody. It's like, okay, let's take this specific group, go there, talk to them and get them to our platform. And I think especially in these most old school industries, there's one big problem. And that's something you need to work on through content is a lot of times there's no trust. I don't know if you guys have seen it as well. Trust is a big portion of why people don't take your product. So you have these four forces that create or prevent somebody from change. This is like trust is something that is a fear. People are scared. They've done this for 30 years with their own little sheet and writing it on and they don't know how to change. So you need to make you need to create a trust and creating a trust is really focusing on working on that relationship between people and showing them that you can do it better. But a lot of the times, especially in a new market and the mountain is effort. That's what I'm trying to say. It's not easy. I wrote a block article, go check it out and now you know what we do. It's not like a just hiring a ghost writer on fiber and then start pushing out articles. No, no. A couple of times a week on LinkedIn. Exactly. So for the manufacturing space, we really tried to hang out where they would hang out, get them on board, get them excited. And the more the brand grew, that easier it became. Yeah. Because the trust comes naturally then, because they've seen you enough. But the first time when you generate demand, I would not go wide. I would go specific. Focus on an ICP one or two and put your effort into getting them excited and getting them familiar with your brand and your solution. Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. And one thing I want to then to ask you because in reality, I can see how there could be potentially be a conflict here. Because you want to start with the process of really understanding your ICP, like you said, speak to the construction workers, interview them, understand where do they hang out, how do they speak, who influences them and so on. And then when you understand those, you spend time in their forums communicating with them just like they would expect you to communicate with them. But this takes time. At the same time, you may have raised a little bit money. You have a team and a CEO that says, come on people, bust the phones, call them, call them, email them, book the meetings, demo the tool. And maybe you don't have that maturity. And so how do you find the balance between those two? Yeah. So good to keep mentioned sales because sales in my opinion is a massive part of the mountain from outbound to using them to reach certain people at a certain time. Right. They can be a massive, effective, fennel or part of your strategy. If you have raised, it means you have certain customers. So it means that you should always try to not stop with Legion, but focus on, can I optimize my current channels that seem to be working? And I can, can I make that better? So get more of the demand that is already there. If you're in a market with a lot of competition, that's easier because you can just focus on stealing it from the competition. If you're in a blue ocean, it's already harder. Right. Because if there's nobody there and you're completely in a new space, you need to generate demand and there's no lead capturing. So you can focus on the high intent keywords for people that are already searching online. But in the beginning, if you like most, the assumption I made if you raised money, you need to have at least some form of a customer base in order to get that money. Right. So that means that I would focus on getting more from that customer base, getting more money from the customers that you already have or the customers that are similar and using them because what I said before, trust is one of the biggest problems we see in marketing, not having case studies, no quotes, using the same logos over and over and over again. Make sure that the people that you have on your platform are extremely happy and are willing to talk to you. That's the easiest way to start to a generating demand. Use their network to get ready. So one of the companies that actually the reveal is a product discovery company that was sold last year. And what they did is they wanted to generate demands and they just went to product managers who used their tool. In this case, I didn't use their tool, but just product managers who could use their tool. And they asked them for a quote around product discovery and how important it was. Nothing around reveal. Just around product discovery. And they got quotes from product managers at Mirro, product managers at Salesforce, all these big nips because people always want to talk about themselves, right? They don't mind. And they use that to just put on their LinkedIn. This is important about product discovery. This is important. So like they're not customer testimonials, but they're like ambassadors in the space that talk about the topic that you find important. That was a massive driver for them for leads because you tap into their network, not just your own because you need to build that from scratch. So if you can find people in the space that have that network and use them to promote yourself, that's a very strong tool. Yeah. I think you've been touching upon it that sort of way you need to go back to storytelling and you need to sort of have a message. You need to also, you know, for people that don't feel that itch, you need to sort of show. Scratch it. Yeah, scratch it to be making sure that the problem is monon. So who should be involved with that at the company with, you know, being the face or talking to the audience and so on? What do you say? Everybody. Everybody. So there's a couple. So of course, having a strong founder or CEO that is a thought leader in the space is, is gold. Yeah. Look at yourselves. You're a great example, right? You're very active in the space. And that's very helpful because you build not the brand only around the product or the service that you provide. You build it around you, right? Which helps because it creates credibility. We usually say that we have seen all the problems from zero to $100 million in an error. We do not have all the solutions, but we've seen the problems. Yeah, but is that consistency of messaging and talking and being in the space with the right people, gathering the right people? I think that's very important. That's one thing. I do think for me, everything starts with product, if I'm very honest or service, right? Let's give it a bit broader. But you need to solve a problem. You need to be in need to have a not a nice to have. And in order to build a product that solves a problem, you need to know who you're selling that to. Right? So having a good, clear idea within product, who are you building this for? And then especially with CEOs who are like, no, we need to go this way. You're that way. You're that way, right? You want to have a very clear understanding of this is our audience, this is who we're building this for. And then you can focus on marketing and sales, can focus around the messaging that resonates with that audience. But in my opinion, what I've always done when I joined companies is make, if I had the opportunity, make sure that everybody speaks to customers, even our head of engineering. Yeah. Makes sense. Because you need to feel and know how they behave. Yeah. So I think that a lot of companies, I mean, they have heard this message message that you need to drive demand and probably have started initiatives. But have you seen any examples of companies that go wrong here that sort of they try, but they don't really get there. And where is sort of the pitfalls here? Failing a company doesn't always start with marketing. Most of the time starts with not solving an actual problem. I think that's one thing to start there. So if you're not solving a problem, there's not enough big of an itch. Okay. Yeah. Right? If there's not a, if the itch is nice to have, but you don't mind it, it's there. Then you will never solve a problem. Yeah. Right? And I think a lot of the time she see companies, that's where it goes wrong. Right? It's a nice to have a tool, but it's not something that I really need or it requires a change of behaviors. Like especially SaaS tools that require a change of behavior with a person, it's not in a current workflow and it optimizes your current workflow. It says besides that, you see a lot of times it goes wrong. Because people are habit creatures. Right? So that's where in my opinion, you see it go wrong a lot. The second thing is that there's no consistency in the messaging. So it's very sporadic. Like, oh, we do an event. Oh, we do some PR. Oh, we do a campaign. But there's no higher strategy of like, what are you trying to reach? So what do I always try to do is if you have your customer journey map from all first first phase to the end is that you map your content out per stage and you map out what is the feeling and the emotions and the pain points that they have per stage. And then you create content to focus on these different stages. And I think that's very important. And what happens is that people are just sporadic. Oh, yeah, we did some LinkedIn. It works a little bit. Let's focus on LinkedIn. Oh, we did a little bit of ads. It worked there. We do that. Oh, we did the webinar. Especially the ones that I see a lot is it is webinar for us things to be working and they just keep on doing the webinar or they have a downloadable piece of content. One. And they just keep using that piece of content because it's generating something right now.
But at one point it tries out because you've reached the same audience over and over with the same type of content. Yeah, I'm still stuck in the construction in utopia here, but trying to listen to what you said. So if I would take some of the learnings you just mentioned here, that probably would mean like, okay, there's so many stakeholders in this construction project. Yeah. And does the company that's been hired to cement the roads? Do they care if it's a little bit late or not, as long as they get paid? Probably not. The construction guys, I may be like, do they want to go in and educate like Billy that's been working for them for 30 years on using a new platform? No, but they're not too excited. But what I'm thinking though is that maybe in this case, and we're simplifying here, you go to the person in the municipality that spends the tax money that pays for this whole thing. And you go and be like, okay, you have the biggest itch here because you spend the entire Amsterdam folks money here and building this new thing. It's like it's your head on the line. So you need to make sure to not waste tax money. No more projects that are late. You get him or her on board. And then they will maybe force everybody in like you want to win a project to build something in Amsterdam while you got to be in this platform now. Yeah. So maybe you need to find that person that has the biggest pain that has the most to lose somehow. And you think that someone that spends our tax money? You think that's the big. Well, I think there's you read to good point and that's something we always say you have an ICB and you have personas. If you take a B2B approach, right, B2C is slightly different. But if you focus on the B2B, then you have people who you have the company type of company you sell to, which is. Disappear to people. This amount of revenue situated there. This type of industry that that's more an ICB focus within the ICB of different personas that can be a. A decision maker. It can be a user. It can be all these different kind of roles. What is important when you drive demand or any form of marketing and sales is the same. You need to know these different personas because the messaging is different. If the person using the tool, which in especially in SaaS is a lot of times what happens, right, the person who acquires the tool is not always someone that uses it. And that it's important that you that that you are aware that they have different itches. And that the story that you're telling is different. So if I totally agree the one with the biggest itch is most of the time they want to focus on. However, if that's the person that doesn't have decision power, you're still screwed if I say it very harshly. But it's still going to be a problem because you need to have a different stakeholder that is actually going to make that decision for you. So you need to bring them in as well. So be aware of these different roles within organizations when you're selling. So is there any way of driving the demand that you feel is not used enough, whether it's big potential? For me it's brand. Yes, I think it's because we shifted to more revenue driven marketing. We stepped away from brands. But it's really hard to do brand. If you're a smaller SaaS company and you have this new company name like Utopia and nobody knows who it is. And it's going to take forever for people to relate to that brand in any case. We already have the name Thomas Utopia. The tagline is Utopia never a late construction project again. No, I think when people think about brands, they think about big brands, Coca-Cola, all these kind of massive brands. Yes, of course you have them. But with small funny things that are specific to your audience, you can generate a brand quite quickly. If you have a good product, maybe I can take the SaaS uses an example. You're really successful in the Nordics. But the push towards Europe has been, in my opinion, more recent. But when really quickly. Because you had a great product service use case, whatever you want to name it. And that resonated with people. Your message resonated with people. That didn't take you six years. Definitely not. We can stop the conversation here. Thank you so much. That was a great episode. All right. Now we take the world. No, but I just want to say it's it's it's. If you have the right message and you focus on the right people, like just don't focus on everybody. Take one specific group. Be the best for them. Be there for them. And then the rest comes later. Yeah, right. And I think we've asked like multiple people this. I'm not sure we landed in in an answer that satisfies all. But we want to hear your opinion on this. How do you measure. And motivate the investments in demand generation. There's going to be a CEO that's like, especially now that everybody is short on cash and money. Like they want to know like, Hey, Julian, where are we out here? Like you've been at it for three months. Like I don't see anything. We didn't close anything. Yeah, there are two levels to this. So you always need to keep on focusing on. You need to find a balance between long term and short term. Right. Short term is indeed capturing the same demand that or that there's already there. And you shouldn't stop with that. And you should also keep on optimizing those campaigns, channels. You name it because there's always more to get. It's incremental, but there's more to get. Yeah. I think the story I'm currently telling to you is something that marketers need to tell their leadership team. They need to bring them along on their own journey. It's almost like they're selling a product internally towards their leadership team. It's like here you have a prospect. We need to focus on a specific prospect and really solve some problem. Let's bring the what I look for me always work best is bring my CEO into a lot of the stuff that I did not from a. Here is what I'm doing. No, it's like make him part of the problem. So he also becomes part of your solution. Good point. So if you're talking about, Hey, we need to generate demand. Demand just they're not aware of our solution. They're not aware of that they have a problem. When you talk to yours, the people when you talk to customers, what are you seeing? Bring them in, show them that there's a journey that needs to be taken and set realistic expectations against that journey. One thing what always really helps and especially with CEOs is make small experiments. Like these these things we did with the parts that we're standing to. Two different other. How is the reaction to that show the reaction to your leadership team show the quick wins or not so the learnings right? Hey, we tried this didn't work. Let's go to something else. Yeah. So it's showing them the progress showing them the focus and showing and talking about that journey. And at one point it's it will start and then you see that it becomes like a snowball effect. Yeah. And then you have them, but it's not you don't need to be like, let's spend all money at once. You can make it specific and you can make it small in the beginning. But bring them along on your journey because a lot of times they don't know how it works. They really don't know how it works. And so inspiring when you hear this story is how someone found you or you know when they first heard about you and sometimes you meet people and they have followed you for several years. And you haven't met them before you didn't know about them. So you need some of those success stories that to spark sort of the passion around these kind of things. Yeah, make them part of your journey as well. Like yeah, you as founders do the same. You're in the game. Yeah. Make your leadership part of being in the game. See the see like let them post let them take action. Yeah. Let them speak at conferences. So they get the feeling of like, you know, somebody came to me and reached out to me and they heard about us. And I could tell my story and no ghost writers right? Or AI. Please write content yourself. All right, cool. So, also, I mean, is there anyone that you think has a good story that we should bring on the show here in an upcoming episode? That's a good question. I think product let's growth is a very, I don't know how much you've spoken about this already, but I'll be. I feel that that's a minister, I don't know if you've ever heard about her. She's amazing. And I think, yeah, I think the PLG motion is something that's really. It became a thing and then it went a little bit out again. Yeah, because it's not as easy as people might think it. No, it was right. We know several companies that tried it and then they sort of paused it or you know. But it starts with finding like, is your audience able to do this product let motion online? I think that's where it starts with. I think for me, that's a great topic. I'm interested to see about. Maybe for you guys, I also like this. I think a fractional work in general. I think is an interesting topic. So I don't know if you know who called Beretta. He's a great. He's really in the space of being a fractional, a fractional leader and where this is going towards. And if you see that people are more hired for their skills. Yeah.
at that moment instead of hiring people full time. I think from a stasis perspective, that might be an interesting topic as well. What's the difference of being fractional or being inter-rhyme? Is it just a new cooler word? Yes. Or consultant? No, consultant is different because a consultant just gives advice. They don't help at the execution in my opinion, or I've never seen that. They just give a lot of money for a strategy document that you can use later, hopefully, with a lot of fluff in it. But I see a shift in the work market, which I think is very interesting. Another thing is within, I think, product marketing is a topic that's becoming more and more interesting after feeling that product and marketing are becoming one. Yeah. Lots of interesting topics. And who knows? Maybe next time, we jump on a call to talk about something else. Suddenly, there's a second podcast coming up. Always upright. Yeah. Julian, it was great having you on the show. Thank you so much for being such a good sport and for giving us tips and tricks here on make sure you find that each and then subscribe to it like hell. It should be a new tech line. It could be your new tech line. You find your scratch. Okay, but super. Take care now. Thank you. You'll see you around. Bye. Bye. Bye. All right, Daniel. What's your main takeaway from the episode today? A cliche, obvious one, but I think Julian was on to something really big here when she talked about like, you need to find a big enough problem, a critical enough problem. And that's the one you saw. I think I've said it in the podcast before, like you need to be a life-saving medicine and not just the vitamin. If you're a vitamin, it doesn't matter what you do in the long run in terms of the man messaging and so on, you're not going to win. You need to find an each, as you call it, and that each, if they're not aware of it, you need to somehow make them super aware of it and it can grow into a big mold. And then that turns into something really nasty big problem. So you need to solve it sooner rather than later. So find that each, find the person that has the main issue with that each and start working on that. So if you're a SaaS company, you should look yourself in the mirror and ask yourself, it's if you're itching enough. Or you should ask yourself, like, are you really a life-saving medicine to your customers? Or are you just a vitamin? And vitamin is you can be without. True. Yeah, what about your tones? Well, one thing that I thought was interesting in, you know, no matter what industry you're working towards, you need to find the people that are present online and start with those. I mean, there might be several personas at the company that you're looking for. It's going to be quite hard to reach them if they don't have an online presence. There is a lot of other ways of doing it and I think she touched upon some different things where you sort of, you find whether I hang out no matter if it's online or not or you can send them stuff and so on. But if you want to start some way, it's much easier if you find the ones that are online and that might be, you know, people within purchasing or marketing or sales and whatnot. So you can start building relationship and awareness with those companies. Yeah. So yeah, but for sure, it's a big challenge if you want to do this right, but also great to hear that you can actually build the brand quite fast and expand from that. Oh, yeah, she fed our ego there a little bit. I kind of, I liked her already, but I like her a little bit more because of that. No. Yeah, I didn't know what to say. She was two times. Yeah, that's okay. If we're on to the shameless plug track, then we should also say something about Sassist Amsterdam. So October 1st and 2nd, Sassist Amsterdam, we are bringing the Sass Elite to you for two full days. Actually, it's three full days technically because there is a day zero where we do a bunch of social activities and so on. But we bring everybody that matters and that cares about Sass and that has an opinion and that is willing to share. Yeah. So for two full days, we're going to have lots of learnings and we focus on tactical things, you know, how to do XYZ. That is what matters for us at our events. And let me see like this. You have never seen a better lineup of speakers in a bit to be Sass Conference in this region before. So if you want to learn, if you want to come in network with word class speakers and professionals, you should definitely come to Sassist Amsterdam. And there is a lot of social activities, so we have a lot of different opportunities to meet and get to know each other as well. Yeah. So that's that. There are going to be a lot of more information around that coming forward. And if you're interested in participating anyway, you can always reach out at
[email protected]. And with that, I think we're done for the day. Yes, indeed. So I hope that you continue enjoying the waves. I will definitely not try surfing here, but thank you again for listening and we'll speak soon.
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