The 6 Types of Ownable Ideas (And How to Find Yours) with Katelyn Bourgoin, Founder of Unignorable

Hey, it's me Dave. Our friends over at CustomerIO are sponsors of today's episode. They're a really cool company that helps marketers turn first party data into engaging customer experiences across email, SMS, and push. And they built their platform for marketers who actually care about the craft because marketing is a craft that takes creativity, thought, and taste. Right now everyone thinks they're magically a marketer because they have access to AI. And the result is kind of painful. More robotic emails, more noise, more bleh. AI isn't magic. It's not going to fix bad strategy or write great copy for you magically, but the best teams also aren't ignoring it. They treat AI as infrastructure. When it's built the right way, it actually makes marketing feel more human, not less. And that's what CustomerIO is doing. Their AI handles repetitive work like setup, orchestration, and tasks that should be automated so that you can focus on what actually matters, the craft of marketing, the strategy, the creativity. This is how good marketers are using AI right now, not to replace thinking but to support it. And this landed with you at all. This idea about the craft of marketing. I want you to go and check out CustomerIO. It's customer.io/exit5. Go and check them out. Customer.io/exit5. Hey, it's me Dave. Today's episode is brought to you by Consensus, the interactive demo platform. Look, most of your buyers have already decided whether they like you before your sales team ever gets on a call with them. They've asked chatGBT and clawed about your product. They found reviews about you online. They've talked to peers who've used your product before. And by the time they hit request a demo on your site, they've often already come to a decision. So, you're losing control of the narrative before the first touch point. And now they have to wait three to five days for a demo. Consensus gives you that control back. They help you meet your buyer where they actually are with interactive personalized AI demos that live on your site. When a buyer shows up wanting to poke around on their own terms, you give them what they want. Plus, you get to see exactly who's watching what they clicked on and who the decision-makers are. Stop being a bystander while LM sell or even unsell your product. Category leaders like Atlassian and Autodesk use Consensus to turn invisible researchers into high intent leads. Go and check them out at goconsensus.com/exit5. They're listening to the Dave Gerard show. This week I sat down with Caitlin Bergoin. She's a serial entrepreneur buyer, psychology expert and founder of Unincomable and agency that helps founders find the one idea that they'll be known for. This was a really fun conversation. We got to revisit some of my paths as a marketer and we went deep on this concept of creating your ownable idea, not really a positioning framework, not category creation, but the actual idea that becomes so tied to you that it sounds like an echo coming from anybody else. An example would be a drift we call that conversational marketing. Caitlin said, "Hey, when you think of James Clear, what do you think of?" I said, "Atomic habits." We talked about a bunch of examples of creating your ownable idea on this podcast. I think it's something that more companies need now than ever. If AI is going to commoditize everything else, the last great thing that we have is our story and our brand and I really like this framing of creating your ownable idea. If you need help with positioning, storytelling, here's a great conversation with Caitlin Bergoin. Would you say, "How was our event?" Is that what you're questioning? Yeah, you just got back from the event. It looked amazing. It was amazing. I was really nervous about doing it. I didn't want to do this event. This was a Dan's idea, but I never told them that. Until just now. It was awesome. They pulled it off. We have one big event in September and I didn't really have an appetite to do more because it's very stressful and it's a lot of work. We did this one and the response initially was slow and then we were halfway into January and the tickets were slow and then we also found out that it was a heavy week of people's kids' head school break. But it ended up selling, I think, 100 was the right amount and it was awesome. It was really, really, really fun. The NPS was 88, which is amazing. The only two negative detractors, the negative response that we got were two people who didn't pay for tickets. They were invited for free. You appreciate what you pay for, right? For sure. But you'll appreciate this. The big hook for this one was really just this bet that people really want a pure group, especially if you're a CMO of a larger company. You can't really share stuff online. You spend all your day talking to AI and chat GPT and the whole value prop was their peer group. We did application only. You had to be currently in-house running a marketing team at a company over a certain revenue stage and it was painful because some people also didn't like that. But the people that were there, they were like, "This was the best event I've ever been to because I felt like everyone that was in this room was my peer. We could be hanging out at the pool, having a conversation, having lunch." And so it was like, "It just reinforced that bet with the positioning." I love that. And I mean, you are that audience. You were that audience several times over. How many times do you ever get to do something like this? It would be rare. I can remember going to an event like Saster as an example when I was a VP of marketing and you happen to get invited to someone's lunch. And the lunch is awesome. It's almost like having friends who are parents are going through the same stage of life that you are. It's just so nice to be able to relate. And we just, the niche happens to be like B to be marketing. But it's really like the cross section of people that are just there, just kind of bitch and vent and it feels really good. It's very good. It's very good. Right? And it's nice not to have to settle that context up. Because I think that's one of the biggest challenges when it comes to any entrepreneur things. It's like, "Yeah, you can get in the room and maybe they're running different types of companies and they're in different industries." But they're all at the same revenue level and it's like, "Yeah, but there's so much context that doesn't need to be said." It just allows for like real talks so much faster. Well, like even if you don't have an answer, you feel like you're talking to someone who, all right, I'm not alone in going through this thing in my business. Anyway, I'm excited to have you on, Caitlin. How do you say your last name? We're going. Caitlin, we're going. I don't know. It's like ships passing the night multiple times I've tried to have you on and finally Aaron reached out and we got you on. So I'm really excited. I see you in the LinkedIn comments. But who the heck are you? Who are you? I love that you're asking me this question. I feel like the first time you invited me on the show, my answer would have been very different. So I'll kind of explain what it is I do. But before I do, I kind of want to demonstrate it. So let me ask you a question. When I say atomic habits, who comes to mind for you? James Clear. Right. Right. When I say start with why? Simon Sinek. Mm-hmm. Okay. Last one. Wait, also, I know these because I'm really smart and well read. Obviously. Obviously. Obviously, these are very hard and you are killing it. Last one. Boring businesses. Is there anybody kind of leaps out when you hear boring businesses? Cody Sanchez. All right. So yes, you are incredibly smart. I wonder for our listeners, I would wager a bet that most people are three for three. And that's because these people are idea owners, right? I believe that idea ownership is really like the biggest strategic advantage for entrepreneurs right now. And it's always been true. You've watched it. You've done it inside of companies. Like I think it's more true than ever now. And so all of you we want to reach with our message. They're just super overwhelmed. And we need to be like really crystal clear about like what spot we want to own in the brain and how we want them to think of us. And so that's what I'm doing today. So I've kind of made some changes from where some of your listeners might know me from my previous company, why we buy. But now I'm going all in on unignorable. And unignorable is the ownable ideas agency. So like we help these big brained experts distilled their best thinking into one idea that makes them impossible to ignore. Awesome. But like your background, you kind of circle around a couple of, so like if we looked at your because ice was just going through the nose from Aaron and it was, she was kind of like, well, you know, her background is not really in B2B marketing. I'm like, no, but that's actually why I want you to come on because our audience is in is B2B marketers. But your all of your stuff is about like psychology, understanding how people make decisions, this power of naming things. How did you get to be that person in marketing versus like, why aren't you like the SEO person, right? Well, it's funny. You ask that because like I used to very much be the B2B marketing person. So previously, if I want to do like a little bit of like, I'll do a very abbreviated background. I started off as an agency owner and was working with a whole bunch of different clients of like wanted to kind of do gorilla marketing. But really I would take anyone who would pay. And but you know, it worked out well. That's a big clients like Target and Holiday Inn. And I got the big idea. I was like, I don't want to sell time for money anymore. I'm going to do something different. And at the time, this was 2013, I was like, but courses are too crazy. Like it's too congested. There's no space there. I'm like, I want to do a tech startup. How hard could that be? Now I'm a non-technical factor. And this is 2013. Well, let's just say it was really fucking hard. But when off phrase like BC funding, built what Forbes said was going to be the next LinkedIn for women failed miserably. It did not work. Went bankrupt and came out of it. And I was like, licking my wounds and like trying to figure out what I was going to be when I grew up. And I was lucky. And that our lead investor had a portfolio of companies mostly led by like technical brilliant founders. And I would go and they're like, we need them to be better at marketing. And like they're good at product. They're about at marketing. You were like, bad at product, but you're good at marketing. I'm like, I know. Thanks for coming in. But yeah. And so I went and I sat down with all these genius people. And I would ask them the question that we care about as marketers, which is like, tell me about your audience. Who are your customers? And I was shocked how often I couldn't get a good answer out of them. Like they would be competing with like, they'd be like, oh, we go up to this audience, but also this one. And one time a founder looked me in the eye and he goes, "Our audience are B2B businesses with anywhere between 10 and 500 employees who sell online." And he was thinking, "Oh, my nailed it. I know them so well." Yeah, right. So everyone, okay. And that led me to realize I was like, "Oh, there's just real huge pain point in that people need to better understand their customers." And to do that, they need to do customer research. And I'm going to be able to productize service agency all around helping B2B SaaS companies do customer research. Guess what I learned? B2B SaaS companies do not care about customer research. But they did care about my little newsletter that I started off as a pipeline builder for my research agency, which was all about behavioral science and marketing and buyer psychology. And so that was kind of like the first onable idea for me was I became known as like the buyer psychology person and saw the impact of that in my own business. And realized through the work I did with building the original unimaginable challenge with the team at Demand Carbos, like, "Oh, this is where I want to live. Like this is the space I'm excited about." Okay, let's do today's episode with a lens towards. I want to really focus on, let's go deep on this topic of an onable idea. And the audience for this is people who, some founders listen to this podcast, but I would say the majority are like, I'm doing marketing at a company. Mm-hmm. And so the lens would be like, "I want to improve the way we tell our story." And this stuff that we learn from Caitlin is going to help us do that. Okay, so first, you've kind of already answered this, but like, let's just set the stage for an onable idea is, you talked about book titles. Is there more than that? Oh, yeah. So like, I see an onable idea as like, it's the strategic territory that you can claim and become known for. So if that concept that becomes like so identified with you, that it sounds like an echo coming from anybody else. So in a lot of times-- By the way, I like this, the reason why I like this is because, I think this is related to positioning, storytelling, people talk about category creation, but break something down that's just really simple. It's not some official, you know, complex name. It's not, you're not trying to do some, some crazy, like what is your onable idea? I love when people can simplify things that way. So yes. I think people need to be communicated with that way too, right? Like one of the things from behavioral science, and it's not just a behavioral science thing, like there's two sides of the brain that we were talking to. And one of them you have to earn time with. And that's the one that actually takes time to process your message. Most of the time, you have to have to get it right away. And if they don't get it right away, they're not going to pause, lean in, pay more attention. So I think so often we try to like create these like, really clever categories. And it's like, this is like distinct, but like, it's actually fancy and exciting. And I feel like the reason that onable ideas aren't just about categories. A category is one type of onable idea. Oftentimes, you don't need to create a new category. Like I'm like, I'm not a believer in like category creation is always the answer. I think it can be the answer. And I've seen you and other brilliant marketers help teams do it really friggin well. But it's not always the answer. But there's other ways that founders can go off and become known and create a conversation in their space beyond a category. Okay, so you have six, there's six type of onable ideas. Can we hand on them each? Yeah. So I started bringing this out because I was thinking like, how do we actually make this really actionable for folks so that they get it? And like, guess a category is one of them. So, you know, a category that's like the new type of solution or market space that you're going to be the obvious leader. And so you think about what you're the work you did at drift. It was the conversational marketing, right? That was a new category from a person who's like a thought leader perspective, a man and a tip it out. I don't know if we ever had her on the pod, but she's brilliant. And like, he's created like zero click content. Yeah, that's for category, right? So that's just one type. Another thing you can become known for are coined problems. So there's examples of this like Seth Godin has the dip Andrew Chen has the law of shitty click. Shitty click throughs. Oh yeah, these are really good. I'll give a podcast listener and ex-if i member shadow Brendan Hufford. He has one that he talks about that. But he's named check box marketing. I love that for him, right? And the suddenly he puts a name to something. And as marketers, we're like, that's what I've been doing. And why? I know the problem is like when people try to do it for their like, software companies, it becomes like the first AI native purpose built solution for HVAC contractors. And it doesn't work the same. No, but he gets it. And so like, this is the thing I feel like from a company perspective, like, yeah, a category is an obvious one. But it doesn't always need to be the one. Think about like, this isn't B2B. But like, think about one of my favorite examples of a coin problem is for breeze. They had nose blindness, right? Look, it's like people didn't realize that their house stunk. So they educated them by creating a problem, nose blindness, and sales spiked, right? They're like, oh my god, I do have pets. I do have kids that play sports. My house probably does stink. And I'm just nose bluff, do it. Like, it's such a great way of taking something that exists in an existing category and showing the problem. I think that Chris Walker did this so well when he talked about the attribution gap. And he basically created a assault against attribution. And like, he's like, dark social is like the answer, right? Like, you don't know what's actually happening. It's almost like sometimes we obsess too much over like the name for it and where it's going to fit in G2 and how Gartner might think about it and like the analyst name versus like what sounds like specifically when you said Chris and you said the word like assaulting this category. It's like he was going after attribution. And so it's like, oh yeah, it's like name the problem, right? It doesn't have to be the like, I remember Ag Drift as an example. We hated the name conversational marketing because it was like so literal. We wanted something like cooler than that, you know? And then when you were at Drift, I remember hearing conversation marketing thinking it was really good. But I remember you named an enemy and it was like the form, right? No forms. Yeah, that was perfectly good. Absolutely not. Like probably the best target customer for Drift is at this point I'm like, offering a consultant. But how if I didn't go on a call with your team, end up getting the conversation for us users? Sure. Wait, can we talk about why that worked? It absolutely works because they got the end of the day. We need somebody to explain to us why the thing that we're doing isn't working in a way that we actually want to buy into. And so often when people try to push their narrative down our throat, it's telling us that what we're doing is wrong, but not giving us an alternative, right? Absolutely. You said it perfectly because we didn't want to alienate the people that we were trying to sell to. And so the message wasn't like, hey, dummy, you're doing it wrong. Like do it our way. So we like the whole story that we told was like, it's not your fault. It's the tools that you were given to do this and the form. We made the form the enemy. By the way, what's so funny is to this day, I will say something. And so we'll be like, well, you used to form for this. I'm like, that was one company 10 years ago. I'm the head of marketing there. You don't think I'm going to be pumping the company's narrative. And you will build an earth and it friggin worked, right? Like you guys were an underdog. You were coming in. You created like it was a beautiful display. What else? What are the other types? This is a fun topic for me. So I'm being distracted. All right. So we've got method or framework, right? So when you think about like a method, a great example is like the story brand canvas. We've all been-- Challenger sale. Yeah, exactly, right? Like these are great ones. They're particularly strong for kind of like expert entrepreneurs, but absolutely works in it like selling tech to. Then you've got like the identity label, right? Like Sean Ellis came with the growth hacker. Let me tell you, when my startup died and I was trying to say what I wanted to be when I grew up, there was a very long period of time where I was thinking I was going to be a growth hacker. Ultimately, it was not the right fit for me. Me too. Me too. I realized it much rather be a storyteller. But like the identity label giving somebody like that thing that they can step into. And then one that I think is really cool and it's fringe and there's not as many of them, but when it works, but damn does it work, is like what I call it the x versus y. So it's like creating like a this versus that distinction that changes how people think of other choices. And that person I love who does it really well is like Cal Newport. He's got deep work versus shallow work, right? You hear that and you're like, well, wait, what am I doing? My whole day is so much work. Oh man, I'm too much of it. But like immediately it changes your thinking. Immediately, you're like, I want that other answer. And these are the types of ideas that I think when you really nail it, this is the type of thing that can make a career. This is the kind of thing that can make a company, but it's really hard to do. So like, let's say I'm listening to this and I, my company is like a, we make webinar software. There's a million other vendors out there. We charge a little bit more than everybody else, but it's really good. But it's not different, right? It's like, where would you start? Like obviously it's so high level, but. Yeah. So here's where I would start. Because this has been though I've been trying to grapple with. It was like ultimately like what I went into doing this work. Like I so I brand the unignorable challenge with the team of demand curve 1900 entrepreneurs went through it trying to build an unignorable personal brand. The last exercise was always identify your big idea. And it was the thing that was the hardest and the ones that figured it out. It was the thing that was the catalyst. And I saw is like, this is actually what it's all about. All the other stuff that we talked about in that program 30 days, I'm like, that shit was nice. This is the piece that actually matters the most. And can this actually be broken down and taught in a way that creates impact? I don't forget now because it seems like usually when happens, there's a bit of magic involved, right? Question. Is it hard because in order to have a good one, you have to like, say no to certain things or have a differentiated point of view about like who or not for? It's a boat up saying to know that with a thousand good ideas and trying to own a good one. But here's the thing like so when I went into started doing this work, so I started doing some work with like our beta clients. I've only like, I'm very new to this. I'm still learning so much. There's like you might talk to me in a year and I'll have a completely different opinion. But like at this stage, what I found is like after like digging through, trying to do this with five different entrepreneurs, relying on gut intuition judgment, which is like not repartly. You can't reproduce that like in a meaningful way. I was like, I had this a hot moment in the fifth one I was running and I realized the thing that connects it, the thing you need to do first, is you need to help people basically identify their central argument that their ownable ideas built off of. So going back to your webinar example, right? Why in the world would these founders knowing how competitive the webinar space is knowing that there's a million different solutions out there? Why would they actually decide to get into that game? There's probably some bet that they made some belief that they have about what's wrong with the other solutions about what the markets deserves and isn't getting that was foundational to them deciding to go into that game. And what you need to do is you need to dig in and you need to find that. But you don't just find it and ask the founders who guess what the founders are going to have all the right answer. You need to also map it to what the market wants and what they need to hear. So it's like what is the founder saying what does the market want to hear what's other people saying in the landscape that we can avoid so that there's white space. That's the part that makes it hard. But if you configure that central argument, you can like build everything on top of it. So I think about you and I was chatting with Aaron on your team and prep for this and like I was like what's Dave's central argument because I've been following you for a long time and I love the work that you do. And there's a few that are like qualifiers and I'm like, but I think the thing that for me, I remember what he said this is like one of those like mind-blowing moments and I feel like it's a thread that runs through so much about you do and you can tell me straight up if I'm completely wrong about this. I think the central argument for you is that B2B company should act like media companies like they should pay attention was happening outside of B2B. They should put a space in front of you that you actually care about and invest with like a charming character that you can buy into. They should think about entertaining and not just trying to like ramp specs down your throat like I feel like that's something that when I think of Dave, like that feels like it's key to the work you do. Would you say that's true? I would take that. Sure. Hey, it's me Dave. This episode is brought to you by our friends at NAC. 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After the email goes live, NAC also gives you performance insights and recommendations so you can see what worked and how you can make the next send better. So if execution is the thing slowing your marketing down or you just want one system that takes you from idea to shipped to learning to improving you should check out NAC, go to NAC.com/exit5. That's K-N-A-K.com/exit5. I can't say that I set out intentionally to do that, but I think if I was to be a rapper, if I were to weave the things now and I think if I were going to go start a new company and build a product, right. We would absolutely trade on that story and use that to tell that story, right. It's like Zoom, the founder of Zoom, Eric Yuan, he was like, I forget exactly what it was, but he was like the lead engineer at WebEx. And it's like when Zoom came out, everybody had known what video conferencing was. It was just like, he was probably at the top of his game and wanted to spin out his own thing and he made his own thing and that's the reason why you should, they made it better faster because the engineer was proven, right. It was like in the drift story, it was like, hey, these guys were part of the founders of Drift, we're integral part of building the product at HubSpot. And so therefore they're the perfect guys to rewrite the playbook because they wrote the original one, right. And it's like, you look in the pantry and my kid's snacks, it's always like healthy granola bar. Caitlin was a mom who was fed up with feeding her kids, you know, sugary ingredients. So she created blah, right. Like that. But I think people listening, they're like, well, I hear you, but like I work for this, like, you know, cyber security company or I work for, you know, manufacturing company and, you know, Cleveland, it's, that doesn't work for me, Caitlin. So here's what I would say to them is that like it is really hard to do, but I think it's either going to happen in one of two ways. It's not going to happen, which is like, boo, boo, like that sucks. And you can win without having to figure this shit out. But oftentimes when you win big, it's because it's so clear, it's because that message is so compelling. And like there is a way to kind of like reverse engineer your way to this. And so like again, I talked to it like, you have to think of like what is the founder story, but you also have to think about like, what does the market want to hear? Like I'm a big buyer psychology nerd, right. And so like you start with like, what does the markets desire? Like what is it that they're trying to achieve? This feels a little bit reminiscent of like the whole story brand like heroes journey. It's kind of like a shortened version, but it's like what's the person actually trying to achieve? Like what's the desire? What's blocking them? What's the problem? What's your unique insight as a company? Like what are you going to share this unique? Like I remember when you said B2B companies should act like media companies. I was like, shit, that explains so much. But why things don't work? It explains so much what Drift's doing and why they're sorry for that. By the way, I'm the reason that like every fucking SaaS company has a podcast. I'm sorry about that. We don't need that. I'm sorry. Those marketers are probably doing a better job because they're actually able to get the founder to talk and to share their genius in a format that's probably hard to get out of them. Most of the time was they're so friggin busy. All right. Side note, usually I have slack open during these conversations because I have like a podcast channel with my team and I'm like, I send the screenshots or I'm writing things you're saying because we're going to come back to it from later. I always get a comment from someone he's so distracted. But Matt, Matt on my team, this must be because you're Canadian. Yeah. Dude, she's awesome. I listened to her on J-Class podcasts. I love that episode. I regularly, this is no bullshit. I regularly think back to her frameworks. He said, if she hasn't already, you should ask about the chocolate covered almond analogy. So I don't even care if this is a complete break from what we're talking about. Can you please tell me what is the chocolate covered almond analogy? So this is basically B2B company should act like media companies. The idea is that like I feel like there's two types of content out there. There is just plain snackable kind of like pure entertainment and there is like very like logical dance value like in terms of like this is how you solve this problem specifically. I think the male ground, what I tried to build with why would I buy was a chocolate covered almond, which is something that was like nutrient dense and almond's good for you. You're not going to feel that guilty, buddy. You get something valuable. But it's tasty. It's fun and you crave it. And like it's why I tried to make learning behavioral economics, which is not the most sexy thing. Fun. And like I turned it into a chocolate covered almond. I feel like that's our job as marketers, depending on what industry you're in. There's no. Oh, that's a great shit. That actually ended up being a great segue into like what we were just talking about because you could be like back to that webinar example. Couldn't one of the ways you could create your own old idea here? If you lean into the fact that like most webinars are boring, most webinar software is boring. It's clunky. It's just made a completely different fun or reverent way of doing it. And that's why we're different. Yeah. And that could be it, right? And you could talk with these little few features that you might have that you frame in a way that make them the fun webinar, right? Like this is like the way like, yeah, it's like you turn it into your chocolate covered almond. Ultimately, what you hit on there is that central argument, which is like most webinars are boring, but they shouldn't be because the best converting ones are actually fun. And like that's an argument that's different. It's unique. Show me that in your marketing. Show me that in your content. Yeah. I like these questions because I think it's like, if you're listening to this, the goal is not to like instantly have one of these ideas, but it's almost like there's like a worksheet here, which is like if you can't answer any of these questions, then you got to go sit down and figure out your angle. Because I actually think that's the most realistic outcome is a lot of times people are like, well, we don't have any of these things. Okay. Then we got to go back to the drawing board and be strategic, right? But I mean, I want to ask you because like you've done this inside of multiple companies now. So like, let's look at driptives in example because I think that so many of your listeners will understand that like, what was your process for pulling out of the team, what you needed to help them shape that story that was so successful? I had the best setup ever. This is unfair. David, who is the founder and CEO of my boss was like a super genius at marketing. That is a nice advantage. And so everything I learned, I learned from him fact fact, you know, I've obviously like innovated, you know, taken some of that stuff and it's shaped who I am. But he and I think this is why it can't be fake. He genuinely, both of them, the founders, David and Elias were like, they didn't see the company to them like the product roadmap and strategy was marketing. And any great founder like understands this. It's not an afterthought. And so it was like the product, okay, they had a strong point of view on like the type of company that they wanted to create in a particular category, what they wanted to disrupt, which brands they liked, how they wanted to do it. And I just got to be there and like soak it all in and execute it. And so my ultimate like meta lesson there is like, I think the founder needs to have a strong point of view on marketing because marketing is not just promotion and like which ads you're gonna run like marketing is a fundamental piece of the DNA of a successful business. Dave Kellogg at our event. I want to try to look this up really quick. He had this quote from Peter Drucker, quote, Peter Drucker, quote, about marketing. And I had never known that Peter, do you know this quote? I know a bunch of his, but I don't know if this is marketing one. Business has only two basic functions, marketing and innovation. And he said that back then, like how much more true does that build? This was in 1954, but he basically, I'll find the quote later, but the point is basically like marketing is literally everything the customer touches and sees. So, you know, back then in the 50s, I was different, but today that's your website, how people interact with your you know customer service team, how they show up in an event. And I think those guys just believed in that from the beginning. And so I think the real thing is like, if you want to compete and win and see marketing as an opportunity like play offense with your company, then it needs to be taken seriously at the founder level. And then everything that I've learned from doing X to five in all my last companies, is I realize like that's actually the, that's the 99% of it. All the other stuff that we argue about online about attribution and mqls and this and that. And it's nonsense. It's all solved by like that. And that's why I'm really relating to this idea of vulnerable idea. I love this. Like I've been thinking at this post I want to write a vote how you know how they say that people's dogs come to look like them. Like I think like people like if you look at the most iconic companies in history, and then you look at the founders like they are shadows of the founders. Like you look at job. Like you know, he was a calligraphy nerd and he bought very few things, but when he did, they were exceptionally beautiful. And like you look at like Elon Musk, like he's kind of a big child and there's like a fart sound in the car like these are like absolutely look at Toby at Shopify is another good example. Like I don't really have a design example of this, but just the way he writes. I feel like that has yeah. You guys from base camp, right? Like like you can see the fingerprints of the founders all over it. And like for your listeners who are at companies right now, like if there is a founder that doesn't want to, that doesn't have big thinking on the product, the space that they're in. Like that's like a you should run kind of scenario. And I don't hate to say that because like, but the reality is like you've got to have strong opinions on why you're doing what you're doing and how it's why now and why you and like if that's not there and that's not clear and it's not coming from the top, marketing can't fix that. Marketing can extract that when it's unclear because it's often unclear. Yeah, that's the most realistic like action item from this conversation. Like maybe there are founders that are listening, okay, I got to go work on that. I sharpen that. If it's not you, you know, you talk about how the marketing team's job should be to get it out of them. Is that one of the takeaways here? Like if I'm listening to this and I'm a marketer. 100% and the marketing shop is taking it out because here's the other thing. And I'm sure we've all experienced this in our own life. I am a huge believer in what I call the experts paradox, which is this idea that like when you are too close to your own thinking, it doesn't feel that novel or interesting to you. And therefore you might have like this brilliance in you and you don't even think to share it because it's just so commonplace. So you've got these founders like if they're not spouting off wisdom all of the time, it's not because it's not there. It's but it's not being mined properly and they don't actually see it. Like it's like what is this saying? The cobbler's son has no shoes, right? Like we just don't see our own brilliance in a way that allows us to capture it well. And that's why having a team and a marketer who can actually go away and kind of extract that like I remember when you were doing drift, you had the podcast with Dave and you would just go and like pull good stuff out of him all day long, right? So if he probably wouldn't think to share because for him, he's like, oh, doesn't everybody do it this way? No, you're effing genius. Like not every big thing it that way. Well, also I think just like anything that seems obvious to you is usually nobody else has the guts to say it or share it. And so it's like sure it might be obviously like you read that book, but like you know, you're the only one talking about it. So what else? So I mean, I think that when it comes down to this stuff at the end of the day, like my belief is that we have to be very deliberate as you believe, like you do very deliberate with the space you want to own in the minds of your target audience. And I think now with like AI generated content, like there's always a lot of noise. Like it's just exponential noise now. And so I think it makes guts to say like this is the thing we want to own. And most teams don't want to say that because it's scary and they'd rather change it every couple of months. And they'd rather like, you know, like, oh, like this competitor is to this. So we're going to make this slight adjustment. But it's like, you really need to have the conviction to say like we believe in this. And we're going to go deep in this. Yeah, we're going to listen to the market. Yeah, if it's not working, we're going to be open at changing. But like let it have a chance to work too, which I think a lot of leaders don't give marketers the chance to do. Yeah, that's a good piece of advice because it's hard because it's not always obvious. And so it's not like Eureka, we got this. This is the name. This is the idea. You kind of have to feel like pretty strong about it. Then you have to go out there and kind of test it in different ways. But I think you have to in the drift example, is like we were testing messages. But the core idea was never going to change. I think today too many companies can become guilty of just like too quickly changing the whole thing. It's what you know, I did it when I was building my tech company pivoting was like celebrated, right? Like I remember telling people I was like, well, you know, that like Instagram started as like a gaming thing. Like it was just like it was so easy to go like, oh, this isn't working right away. And I understand that because like when you have a limited runway or like in my case, like when we were starting, like I was paying my dev team out of my own pocket, you need shit to work. And like that's a lot of pressure that founders are under. And therefore their teams are under a lot of pressure too. But at the same time, nothing will ever work if you keep jumping. Okay, so we want people to think about this. Honable idea. Is there a resource anybody if I want to go work on this? If I want to like give like a mad libs or something like how can I go sit down and dedicate? I just go for a walk in the forest and think about what my ownable idea is. How can I make this happen? So you could read our newsletter because like in the newsletter, like we're breaking down all the time. Like we're sharing the different components. Yeah, what is it? How does somebody get it? So it's be unignorable.com. You go to be unignorable.com and you'll be on the sign up page for the newsletter. At this stage, that's what exists because like we're in the weeds kind of like doing the work with clients. And so we're not actually there's not I'm not teaching all the methodology because I'm figuring it out as we go. And this is the reality too that I think a lot of people are afraid to say it's like there are answers that I don't have yet because it's going to take a number of reps for me to be able to see. Yeah, I can tell you that's the way to do it because I've done it a few times and that's commotic at that way. So like right now I'm very much in like that like honeymoon phase of like I figured this out like for five clients. I helped them find it. It wasn't repeatable until the last one. And I'm hoping that I'm going to go into this and make it repeatable again. So I can't tell you what exactly the process looks like. What I can tell you is think about any company that has been in breakthrough success. Think of what any individual thought leader that you aspire to be like and you can see that they have one. If that's a reality is like you're like these people have these ownable ideas. It's clear to me what they're about. Then you should probably take it seriously yourself, right? I like that. Okay. You as a creator as somebody trying to I'm now your mofrokes on the client side. So maybe your newsletter isn't as big of deal. But you spend time on X. You spend time on LinkedIn. I've seen you on podcast and videos. What's working for you right now and how are you spending your time when it comes to social media? Good question. I would say what's working for me is like finding this way of saying the same thing a thousand times because that's how it moves. And so for me it's like now that I know what my ownable ideas right. I know like what my central argument is and I'm really clear on that. It's like I built this which could be helpful for some of your listeners because we're always told like say the same thing a thousand times. But how do you do that? For me, I like there's this thing called the authority flywheel, which is basically if you talk about the problem that you're solving. You share your point of view on the problem. You share the big promise that people are going to get from working with you from using your software. And you share the proof and you do that consistently. And it's all wrapped on your own idea that allows you to kind of get traction and that allows you to kind of really start building momentum. And so for me what's been working is just that like I create all my content. I know what my center is. And because I'm clear on my center everything else just is more impactful. And so I'd say that finding that center and committing to it is what's working for me. I like that. Do you have a goal? Do you try to publish a certain amount of time post per week or are you just like creating when something comes to you? So I have like I've got like a I don't know how you do your creative stuff. I feel like everybody wants it to be this like incredible system that's so easy for me. Well, you almost have a hundred thousand followers on LinkedIn and someone once told me if you have a hundred thousand followers on LinkedIn, you might as well be Mr. Beast. So like you basically made it. Well, you have how many? Oh, I don't know like 190 seven thousand something. So you're like Mr. Beast. Who's counting? But like for me, I like when an idea comes to me, I go for a walk every morning. I think I use that time to think as opposed to like always consume. And I have a cloud project where I use like to help me co create and like create content. And I like just drop the idea. Then I'm like, this is what I'm thinking. This is like the angle. And I use those four lenses of like, okay, this is a problem post. I just like saw somebody post with this. I want to share my point of view on it. And it's not this big sister bad thing. I remember chatting with saw Hill Bloom's COO and like I was like, tell me about like the backend system. Like how are you guys doing kind of how do you play? And he's like, he just writes anything. So at that day. And like nobody wants to admit that a lot more of that happens. And then we'd want there to be this like brilliant system. But oftentimes it's like when it comes to true thought leadership stuff. And it's like, this is my thinking. It comes you in the moment. you just like share it because you're. - Which is like, that's the whole thing going back to this ownable idea thing. That was also a key thing from like the drift stage. I think so much of those good messaging and positioning ideas, they didn't come like, Caitlin and I weren't like meeting and having like a brainstorm session. It just was like, you talk about it at work and then you just go away and then you're on a walk in the woods and like, bam, oh, it hits you. Like you have to, you know, we have to remember this is a creative pursuit. I think you have to give yourself space for that. So it's nice to hear it. I see here, I'm not alone there. - I think like, and I supposed to do it today, like I was just thinking about Andrew Chen's like law of shitty clickthroughs. Like the one thing that I keep baking, and I want to show you a few marketing audits, so I feel like they're probably at the stage where I am like, I am feeling overwhelmed by all the change for me. I, and the thing that I keep going back to is that like, I fundamentally believe, and maybe this is just like confirmation bias, but like I fundamentally believe that marketing is going to be even more important in these coming years and that the marketers that like really like just commit and like dive in, like because things are going to speed up so quickly, like the things that work, the law of shitty clickery, like this right at which something stops working is going to be so much faster. I guess what that means? It means that the creative people get to set what the next thing is and the next thing and the next thing. So we're still going to be important. We're not, we're not all going to be somebody's Mac Mini so that they're running open-cloth on and their whole marketing team is like fired. I really think that marketers have a huge opportunity to win in this future and that this is our time really. I think there was a long time attack. You worked in tech for a long time. I worked in tech for like for a long time. I think that there was a long time where marketers were like the second-class citizen and everyone just thought you just layered it on and if you actually had to do marketing, your company was doing something wrong. There was very much a stigma around marketing. I think that now we're going to be the MVP's and that the companies that see that are going to win and the companies that don't aren't. And so like, gay for us. - Well, that's good 'cause my whole entire YouTube feed is how everybody replaced their marketing team with clock codes. So I hope you're right. All right, Caitlin. - I'm trying to make up the ad revenue, right? - Yeah, fair, also fair. Whatever. - Noth said it's a dirty game as any man worthy of fame. I guess. - There you go. - Anyway, it's great to have you on. Thank you for coming and sharing this, Caitlin Bergoyne, check her out. She's on LinkedIn. Check out her newsletter. Send her a message and be like, "Yeah, I need some help thinking about my ownable idea. How does this sound?" And I love it. It makes me think like, what is the, you know, I think sometimes I get too caught up in, am I using this positioning framework first this and this and this, and it's like the concept of an ownable idea is good and bring me back to the no forms roots. So great to see you. Thanks for coming on. - Good to see you, Dan. - Hopefully first of more conversations in this. - Absolutely. Thank you. - Hey, thanks for listening to this podcast. If you liked this episode, you know what? 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