The Rise of a Zero Click Future: How AI is Impacting Content and SEO

‍Ivor: So hello everyone and welcome to go to market tales. In each episode, you will meet a go to market leader. The idea behind it is that there's some really great podcasts out there. I think there are a lot of podcasts out there, but there aren't any that are specifically focused on the growth stories. in B2B.

Stories from bridging the gap between the first 10 customers to 100, the path from series A to B to C, or how growth was achieved whilst bootstrapping. And along this journey, each stage and path is very different. And the go to market landscape has been totally upended with the AI revolution. Following on from the episode [00:01:00] with Charlie from OneScreen, this is our third episode.

And today I'm really, really excited, super pleased to have one of the founders from Time Doctor, Liam Headstein. Great to have you here, Liam. How's it all going?

Liam: I am very excited to be here, and yeah, things are going pretty well. Just dropped my daughter off at daycare, and I am ready to tuck in to AI.

Ivor: And yeah, a special thank you for doing this first thing on a Monday morning. So the way I like to kick off is to get a bit of a background and really understand what's led you to where you are today. And yeah, I understand a bit more about time doctor as well.

Liam: Sure. So, Time Doctor is, in the next few weeks, it will be 13 years old, which is wild. The, uh, the HR team asked me to make a video and I thought it was a pretty unlucky video [00:02:00] to make because it's, it's 13 years, but it's been in operation for 13 years. We specifically are a time tracking tool designed for remote teams.

We have team members in 46 plus countries all over the world, and we operate our business remotely. So we believe that that is a better way to be able to run a business. And that was a relatively unpopular idea up until about 2020. Thank God. Much more popular and then it actually got unpopular again. We can talk about that if you want.

But fundamentally for me, we're a bootstrapped organization. So both me and my business partner, Rob, we didn't take any equity. No, sorry, we did not take it. We did not raise any money in order to be able to build a business. And I think that moving forward, we're actually going to see a lot more bootstrapped companies specifically due to artificial intelligence and where it's going over the next couple of years.

Ivor: Yeah. I think that's for me personally, that's a super interesting to dig in to a [00:03:00] bit deeper and we haven't had anyone on the podcast yet that's successfully bootstrapped a business. I'm really interested to understand those key strategies that helped, you know, scale the company, particularly with the, the trifecta of channels that you mentioned before, uh, when we had the initial conversation.

So it'd be good to really understand that a bit more and we can then move on to how we think, uh, AI's impact.

Liam: Yeah, there's a lot of good data to start to come out now about go to market strategies. And really, when you think about the history of SAS specifically, We were much more heavily on the R and D side of SAS. So how did you grow out of business? How did you make a business successful? Well, you had to be more focused on the research and development, the actual engineering of SAS.

Now that's switched. So now go to market strategies are the more effective side [00:04:00] of growing and building a SAS. And that's in part due to the rise of cloud computing, right? You can fire up an AWS server relatively easily. Quickly and easily and be up and running with your sass for, you know, 20 bucks a month.

And also secondarily, just all of the technology that has been built for sass over the last, I would probably say essentially the last decade, we've really kind of entered that new stage. And we're starting to see exactly the same thing with AI, which is Kind of interesting where now the risk is on the R and D side and not on the go to market strategy, which we could probably get into as well.

But if you look at the overall world of sass, if you want to build a hundred million dollar business, a hundred million dollar ARR business, which is our goal. So we're on that particular path. There are only three major channels that everyone uses in levels of importance. The first one is content and search.

So that's the first one. [00:05:00] Most powerful channel. The second one is paid advertising and the third is email. So if you have a CMO that you've hired or a head of marketing and they are not world class at one of those three things, I would not hire them under any circumstances whatsoever. And, and we don't, uh, so inside of time, doctor, we're very, very good at content and search.

We're okay at paid acquisition and we're not very good at email. And that's something that we're actually focusing this year on trying to get as good as we possibly can at email because we recognize that it's a big hole in our business. Because you can be really good at one of those things and you'll probably achieve an eight figure SaaS business if you're world class.

And we're talking world class, I'm talking about 1 percent of search, as an example. Of which. I believe that time doctor is. And if you are in the top 1 percent of two of those categories, you can get to a [00:06:00] hundred million dollars a year. And if you're world class in all three, you can get to a billion dollars a year in revenue.

And this formula is shown to be true multiple, multiple times. And you just have to recognize how can you get really, really good at those three things as quickly as possible. And so that's what we're That's what I'm trying to do in the company, uh, specifically. And I think for anyone that's listening now, if you're reflecting back on your go to market strategy and you're thinking to yourself like, Oh yeah, we're really good at conferences as an example, or we're really good at social media.

Those are actually probably some of the worst funnels to build out a long term, successful, scalable business.

Ivor: Yeah, conferences is a business on its own, right? I think it's easily, uh, you can easily underestimate the amount of resource and level of skill that you need to actually build a successful conference. And I actually want to heal [00:07:00] the onion a little bit more and focus on what's gone well, which is the.

SEO and the content side of things. So how did you actually approach SEO to drive the traffic that you have done? And, and also how does that kind of convert into to customers and what was the journey there with Time Doctor? So,

Liam: the biggest thing that we did is because we had no money in her bootstrap content in search was the easiest way for us to be able to build out a go to market strategy. We didn't have a million dollars a year to be able to put into paid acquisition, and we did not have a sales team actually until 2019.

So we, It was a completely, um, product led operation. So it was a self serve trial that would turn into paid customers. And we decided to commit to search [00:08:00] because it was. And I would probably say, I would not suggest that people do this today, but 15 years ago, when you look at the user acquisition funnel, that's probably going to produce the longest, the best ROI over a 10 year period content and search, it completely obliterates everything else.

Cause if you get really good at paid acquisition, that's fantastic. But paid acquisition changes, right? Like, let's look at what's happened in the last two years. Uh, Tik TOK now has been such a huge aspect. Of affecting the entire game of creatives across all media landscapes when we're talking about paid acquisition.

So the evolution of paid changes very, very quickly, and you can be very successful one month and then very unsuccessful the next month inside of paid. Whereas with content and search, the cap was really much higher. So we just focused on [00:09:00] putting out a blog post once a week. Then we put out two a week, then we were putting out like 10 a week.

I think at one point we had about 40 to 50 pieces of content that we were choosing on our blog. And then on the back end of that, we had a massive linking team. So I think at one point we had about 10 linkers. And I treated them just like a sales org. So we had a metric, which was cumulative domain authority that we focused on, which was don't just go out and get backlinks for these articles, get backlinks that have a high domain authority, meaning there's a higher level of importance for Google for these particular sites.

So at the end of the day, you could go out and get a. Backlink that had a domain authority of 10 and you could go out and get a backlink that would have a domain authority of 90. But then at the end of the month, we would just add up 90 plus 10 cumulative domain authority. And that's how you were measured as a sales, as a backlinker [00:10:00] inside of the organization.

And we comped people based off of that. And that was incredibly successful because we were able to generate links much faster and more effectively than any of our competitors did at that particular time. And we grew that to,

Ivor: Okay.

Liam: we were at like 400, 000 uniques per month through the blog. So pretty respectable, particularly for our niche, pretty respectable amount of traffic, and then the game.

Has recently changed pretty, pretty aggressively. So in the last two years, we've seen Google remove about 40 percent of all of its search traffic to not result in a click on a website, which is kind of crazy when you think about that. So what Google is now doing is saying, well, we're going to try to keep people on Google and give them the answer directly on Google, as opposed to going to time, doctor.

[00:11:00] com. So. In order to be able to get that answer. And that's just a fundamental shift of where search is at right now. And so that's an interesting new moment where we are still, we are not, we, we are not 10 X ing search like we were before. So I would probably say up until about 2022, we were spending every single dollar that we could on search.

And now we're not doing that. Now what we're doing is we're making sure that the search team. Is still in place to manage that growth that exists, that asset that exists, but we're not adding more to it. Um, and we're just kind of keeping it running. So I think we're doing like two blog posts a week as an example, as opposed to 10.

Ivor: And you lead to a really interesting point, and we can talk about how you think SEO is changing and will completely change in the future. And what brand builders should be perhaps focused on in the future with the impact of AI and the [00:12:00] overviews, which I'm seeing and actually using a lot more than I was before, for sure.

And you mentioned that you're now focused on. Email marketing as a channel. And it's something that you haven't been focused on so much before. So could you talk and speak to a little bit about how and, and why you're focused on, on email marketing and yeah, well, the initial results that

Liam: Yeah. So the reason why we are to be completely honest with you, I can give you a politically correct answer. I can give you the real one, decided

Ivor: real one, please.

Liam: is we have a, we have a massive email list, so we can take advantage of that list. And when we've seen other companies that have scaled this, they've really treated their email list somewhat like a form of storytelling.

So our goal is to be able to provide you so much valuable content about the things that [00:13:00] our customers are interested in, which is remote work. That you will want to open up that email every single week and you'll want to be able to interact with that content and never, and I'm not going to say never, very, very rarely do we actually directly reference Time Doctor in those emails.

The goal is to get you addicted to these emails and to provide the value from those emails and that's a long game, right? So if you speak to a lot of direct response marketers in the email world, And there are lots of them that will come in and we'll say, I can, I can double your revenue in, in 30 days.

They absolutely can, but they'll also trash your email list. So your open rate and deliverability will go, you know, we'll be cut in half and you're kind of cutting off your nose to spite your face. So what you need to do is do the longer term play, which is how can I make sure that this content is really valuable to a large group of people?

And [00:14:00] there are companies that are doing this so, so well, the, you've seen a rise of essentially the email list company where it's just basically providing you a really good one is, um, coffee brew,

Ivor: Yeah.

Liam: They have a massive, massive email list and all that they do and what they protect. Above all else is their open rate.

So they are not measured by revenue. They are not measured by any of these other variables. It is how many people open up that email every single week. That is their true Northstar metric. And that's what we've been doing inside of time. Doctor, because if we can transfer our million or so emails. Into let's say 50, 000 clicks per month.

That's a huge shift towards our overall business.

Ivor: What would you say is a good open rate to strive for for the B2B world?[00:15:00]

Liam: I would say anything above 20 percent is pretty good. Anything below 10 percent is actually going to get you in trouble. So you will start to have Google and Microsoft essentially ban you directly at the server level in terms of deliverability, because they'll just look at your emails and say, whoever you're sending emails to. They don't want to see them. So 20 percent would be the minimum we sit right now on the list that we're working the most on at, I believe 40%. And then I've seen people that have had open rates of 60, 70%. On emails. And so that's where the real magic happens, right? Where people are really, really excited. So if anyone's listening right now, I would say never drop below 20%.

If you're dropping below 20%, you're doing something really wrong and you need to stop it. And, uh, the goal for me [00:16:00] would be probably around 40%.

Ivor: And I think it really depends on how big your audience is as well. I think if you're a recently established brand, maybe you started building your, uh, emails in the last year or two. Yeah. Your audience is probably likely to be more engaged than say, if you've been building your audience for 10 years and People's paths have changed.

So I think it's probably a lot easier to engage an audience if they're smaller and if they're all the same type of people for sure as well. Um, okay. So

Liam: No. And the other thing that I would reinforce as well is don't want to get logistics of. Email newsletter deliverability, but prune your list as well. So if someone, if you send someone eight emails and they haven't opened eight of them, send them an email saying, Hey, you haven't opened our emails in a while.

I'm gonna delete you from the list. [00:17:00] I'm gonna remove you from the list unless you, you know, respond and say that you're actually interested and just click on this link and we'll make sure that you're on the list. And that's just, there are a lot of people that will even just look at the titles and we'll be like, Oh yeah, okay.

I'll read that one day. And you'd be surprised at how many people are like that. So it's a really good reactivation sequence to be able to get people excited and back into your list. Because as I said before, if the email is sent and no one opens it, Google doesn't like that Google will eventually get rid of you as a newsletter.

Ivor: the pruning is not just relevant to gardening, but also managing your email list, switching gears. So. Moving on to actually the specifics on how AI is impacting these different areas, and I think I'd like to have a real focus on, content , and SEO. What is , the impact that you're currently seeing with,, SEO and how [00:18:00] is that changing , and potentially impacting the traffic , of brands out there, especially in B2B?

Yeah, of

Liam: best user acquisition channel that I could possibly think of was absolutely true until about two years ago. And now we've seen this massive shift due to large language models where we have Gemini and we have open AI that are completely changing the landscape.

And I alluded to this before, but 40 percent of all searches now do not result in a click. It's a zero click future. So now we're realizing that, um, I don't know where you're at right now, love to be able to get your perspective on it, but on my phone. I have an iPhone [00:19:00] 15, and it has this nice little button on the side that they added, which is a, um, it's like a hot button, so you can assign it to a particular task, and that button now is ChatGPT for me. So I just use ChatGPT. For Googling, right? And I would probably say right now, 90 percent of the use cases that I used to use for Google are now chat GPT related because I just get the answer that I need. Just, I'm going to a, uh, Hans Zimmer concert. I don't know if you know Hans Zimmer, probably a couple of people do that are listening.

He's like a soundtrack. He's like the biggest soundtrack guy in the world. And we're going to this crazy big, huge, um, like 40, 000 people are coming to his concert. And I Googled, how should I dress for a Hans Zimmer concert? Because it's, it's kind of like, it's not a rock concert, [00:20:00] but it's also not classic.

Um, it's not a classical concert either. And Google had no answers for me. I had to go to like page three. To be able to figure out what to do. And then I just asked the same thing of chat GPT. And it said, Oh, well, I've found that historically there are two major categories of people. There are people that dress smart, casual, and semi formal.

Would you like me to show you some images of people's outfits that have gone to a Hans Zimmer concert? I'm like, this is exactly what I want. This is exactly what I want. And, and it is better, right? It's better for the customer, which is the searcher. And when you think about what Google really wants. It's important to understand.

Google doesn't care about you as the person that's trying to write content for the search engines. They do not care about you. Their customer is the searcher this, they want the searcher to be able to get an answer to their question as quickly as humanly possible, and we're [00:21:00] just realizing that in the next.

Five years, maybe less, I would probably say 90 percent of the searches will result in a zero click future where people will not be clicking on a website in order to be able to get that answer. And so you're going to see, and there is a lot of, uh, large language model optimization that's currently happening.

So if you go into open AI and chat GPT, and you ask, What is the best time tracking tool for remote workers? Our tool would come up as the top reference, right? And that's fantastic, but there's no link out. So maybe then you're going to actually type in time doctor. com and you're going to check it out.

But it's again a completely broken session. We have no idea where that's coming from because I can't actually identify what that search query was. That's happening. [00:22:00] And it's also not referencing any of our competitors in there. So it's just giving you time, doctor. So now it is, you're either number one on the search engine results page, and you are the answer to the question, or you are not.

And we have millions of dollars worth of revenue that exists on the second, third, and fourth result of Google. That we currently have as assets inside of, um, our blog and our search campaign. And that's all probably going to go to zero in the next five years.

Ivor: I'm a big Hans Zimmer fan, and one of my favorite songs is probably Time from Inception. And actually, on that topic of time, a long time ago, when I was at school, I really, really remember the first time I saw an iMac. You know, the [00:23:00] one with, um, the brightly colored casings, the ones like the

Liam: Clam show.

Ivor: Yeah, the blue and the green on the back.

And what stood out to me, and today still stands out to me, wasn't actually the computer itself. It was what was on the screen. Everyone had the same thing up. It was Google. And fast forward to today, I'm experiencing a sense of deja vu. And when I walk around this office today, and I've walked around a couple times today, and it feels like everyone has chat GPT open, much like in those early days of Google.

And, you know, AI is just, In our everyday lives, and it's not a novelty anymore. It's how we function in a lot of our roles and day to day lives. And it got me, it really got me thinking, you know, what was the impact of Google? And for me, probably one of the biggest impacts was I [00:24:00] don't need to know things.

I once needed to know off by heart, and I remember having to recite everyone's phone number, friends, family, a few random friends that I'd make, you know, and perhaps some girls numbers I'd want to keep track of as well and remember. Now I can, you know, barely recall the phone number of my own parents. I literally have no idea of what my brother's number is.

And yeah, I think it really makes me wonder, you know, what, you know, Google made us forget the information that we once had to memorize. What will AI replace? What skills, what knowledge will simply disappear because we no longer need it? So, you know, maybe it'd be creativity, decision making, or maybe the way we learn all together.

And I wanted to really, you know, get your thoughts on, on that, what would change in the [00:25:00] knowledge and skills, uh, we need as, as the rise of LLMs continues.

Liam: I was having exactly this debate with a dear friend of mine, Jesse, who is the creative director at Ubisoft. So he just released a triple A title, which is, uh, A new Star Wars game by Ubisoft, and he realized that his experience as a creative director, and I mean, he's not the top 1 percent of creative directors.

He's the top 0. 01 percent of creative directors, and he realized that his capability to critique an image. Is world class because he spent 15, 20, 30, 30 years constantly drawing 20, 000 characters, [00:26:00] you know, video game characters and understanding how they work and understanding how they interact and, and studying design and studying all of these aspects of it. But he's saying now there is no one that would bother to go through those fundamentals. In order to be able to achieve true mastery, just to your point. So, and let's actually bring this specifically into the average VP of marketing, the average VP of marketing should be able to produce a really world class creative, even if they have a creative department, they should be able to understand what creative is going to work versus, versus what creative isn't, but to do that, you need to. You need to launch a thousand creatives on unpaid acquisition to be able to actually get to that point where you have that sixth sense, essentially, you put in your 10, 000 [00:27:00] hours. So who's going to put in those 10, 000 hours? Well, I think the future is that AI will be doing that for you, but then will anyone truly achieve mastery? In what they're doing and and maybe the definition of mastery will change, right? So, and this is maybe because I'm, I'm thinking in a very old fashioned way, but maybe there will be designers that don't know how to design anything. Maybe they'll just be really good at producing prompts that produce a design, but and you can kind of think of the circular logic connected to this.

Well, then that means that anyone can become a designer and where I think we're going is you're going to have this new age of visionary leader. I have a video that I'm putting out in November or December talking about how I believe that there will be [00:28:00] a billion dollar entrepreneur business. In the next five years, there will be a business that is worth a billion dollars that has one person inside of it.

And the rest of them will be AI agents. And once we get to that point, I think it'll almost be like running the 10 second, 100 meter dash, right? Everyone was trying to get to that point in which someone would run under 10 seconds on the 100 meter dash. And then the very next year, there were eight people that accomplished that same goal.

Once it's achieved, you'll just have the, the, the gates will be open and everyone will want to be able to, uh, To do these types of businesses. So

Ivor: oh, Oh, Yeah.

Liam: of jobs would a worker do after that [00:29:00] point?

This, that pod, this podcast is not particularly about that subject, but even just thinking about that right now in your own minds,

Ivor: H A

Liam: I think it's, it kind of blows you away to be able to think to yourself, well, what will people do? In the future, will we all just be creative visionaries building out our own businesses with a whole bunch of agents?

There probably will be a few, but the vast majority of people just won't have access to that type of, um, direction in life and, and I don't know what they're going to do with their lives. So long story short, I think there will be very few people that will achieve mastery in the future. And because of that, yeah.

I think we will become more and more dependent upon artificial intelligence at the point where, you know, if the internet was ripped out of human society, we would probably devolve into a Mad Max world in under 72 hours, I would, I would imagine, and I think [00:30:00] very quickly, the same thing will happen with large language models, and by quickly, I mean, Maybe even today, if we removed large language models, we would have a lot of dependency that would be pretty problematic, but definitively within five years, it would be, it will be as important as the internet itself.

Ivor: And. Before we close off, uh, before we get into your book recommendation. So as a SEO and content expert, we've talked about the importance of SEO in the past, but we've also alluded to. Potential risk going forward and how that can impact traffic with, you know, the revolution of, of LLMs and the AI overviews that we're now seeing and, uh, fewer clicks free to, to websites, what would you recommend, uh, a brand [00:31:00] to focus on with their content strategy, a B2B brand with their content strategy moving forward,

Liam: Yeah, so I've been thinking about this a lot and I don't have an answer. I have what I'm doing now, but I don't know if that's the answer. So I have to give you that caveat beforehand,

Ivor: we'll have you back on when, when you do know the answer.

Liam: yeah, well I hope I find out before other people. And this is the thing that I think is so important and for anyone listening to this podcast right now, if you know the answer to this question six months before everyone else. You will make billions of dollars. It is so important to understand the answer to this question.

I think it's probably the most important question that anyone in marketing needs to answer in the next few years. But how I'm approaching it. Search is dead and I had an existential crisis about that about two years [00:32:00] ago. So search is.

Ivor: So you've grieved, you've gone through the five stages. It's up to you. Transcript,

Liam: I've gone through those five stages, yes.

And it's not going to come back.

Ivor: transcript.

Liam: We have to exist in a zero click world. So it's everything or nothing. Meaning, you do not get an advantage to being second or third place. On the search engines, you need to be number one, right? When someone types in what's the best time tracking tool for remote work and time doctor comes up, you need to be like, it's either that or nothing.

Right? So that's, that's a very important point that I want to be able to reinforce. And there will be a lot of people searching for things like the amount of people that are searching for things will not change. It's just that. They're not actually going to click through to your website anymore, and they won't have different choices.

So they're only going to have one choice. So it's really [00:33:00] important to be able to understand that. And we're designing the majority of our search strategy specifically to target that. On the paid side, I think that all paid advertising Will have the absolute perfect campaigns So if you are trying to learn how to optimize a paid advertising campaign right now You need to stop learning how to do that That is worthless information and it will be made redundant within months and it probably already is redundant at this point There are so many AI tools right now that can optimize your bid prices and how you're going to split test Creatives and all that type of information what you need to get really good at is the creative side So how can you build a creative that's better than everyone else?

How can you tell a story that's better than everyone else? And then with regards to, uh, where I'm kind of reinforcing this is storytelling fundamentally. [00:34:00] How can I build out a story? And the primary way that I'm doing that is through brand

Ivor: 11,

Liam: two years ago, I would have told you that brand is stupid and you, you know, people don't want to pay attention to a time tracking tools brand, right?

And they don't. But the way that I'm doing that is I'm encapsulating. My personal brand as an extension of

Ivor: Our

Liam: brand. So right now I would argue that Elon is bigger than Tesla. Sam Altman is bigger than open AI. Logan. Paul is bigger than prime. Mr. Beast is bigger than. So corporate brands used to be the bigger footprint, but now personal brands are so much faster to build, and they get so much more loyalty.

Build the personal brand and have that feed into the corporate brand. So [00:35:00] have that push back into something to sell. And that fundamentally touches on the most important point. If I was telling someone that was starting today from zero, I would say, don't build, don't build. a solution to a problem, build a community around the problem that you have.

Ivor: exclude,

Liam: So

Ivor: erase,

Liam: to a subreddit about your community and figure out what they're consuming and then build that content. Build, um, TikTok videos, build YouTube content, email newsletters, private Slack groups. Conferences, everything around that community, build a committed community that people love. And then when people have that sense of community, then you can sell them something.

That really truly answers their problem and is not something that is just kind of a quick cash grab, but is something that you are truly passionate about as well. So those are the [00:36:00] current ideas that I have that I'm kind of putting forward. Probably half of those won't work in the next five years. These are my best ideas that I currently have.

I have a lot of friends of mine right now that are actually buying up brands. And they believe that these brands are being bought up for, they believe that they're requiring them for pennies on the dollar. So like I have a, I'm on a laptop right now that costs 3, 000 because it's an Apple Mac book. And I could probably get the same work done with a 300 laptop, but I buy the 3, 000 laptop.

Why? Fundamentally because of brand. I could convince myself that it's for other reasons, but fundamentally it is because of the brand and why I would trust Apple as a company. Regardless of whatever they put out, I would just say, I'm going to buy this Apple laptop or this iPhone because it's Apple. And that's all I need to do because I understand I've got the [00:37:00] benefit of the doubt that I understand that it's this brand that's built these fantastic products in the past.

So acquiring other businesses that have fantastic brand equity is probably another thing that I would look into if you had the money to be able to do it. But, um, As of right now, you know, building brand equity is probably the biggest, biggest thing that I could reinforce to everybody. And if you can't do that, then build community.

Ivor: You know, you're the third guest we've had on this podcast and you're the third person to talk about the importance of brand in the future, particularly with the rise about rise with AI and also the The influence that storytelling has as well, and the importance of authenticity. I think these are super, super critical things also in, in, in the next coming years.

Liam: Well, I think people can smell bullshit a mile away. It's one of those things that if you're, if you really. I think when you [00:38:00] see the vast majority of people that at least I, when I'm consuming content, you can tell the difference between the guys that are just trying to sell you something and the guys that are truly trying to solve the problem and are passionate about that particular problem.

And I think that when you think about brand equity, it's really like, if you could almost kind of define it, it's like many brands, That are, that are focused on solving a specific issue. So with regards to our conference running remote and the book that we had produced, it was such a small problem pre pre COVID, but we were so passionate about that particular problem and we didn't care whether or not we only went after.

You know, a thousand people. There's a great article. If you just Google it a thousand true fans, and that is a perfect framework to build out what I'm talking about, which is [00:39:00] if you can identify a problem, that's small enough that you could identify a thousand diehard fans that would buy anything that you would sell.

If you can just get to that point, then you will succeed because of a thousand people absolutely love you. Then 10, 000 people will kind of like you. And a hundred thousand people will like you a little bit, right? Like it's, it's one of those things that you just have to realize how can you focus in on that niche and build that form of community.

And even if you just only get to a thousand people, a thousand people buying a product for it from you for a thousand dollars a month is a big business. And you need to be able to take that into that, take that into consideration when thinking about where we're going to build out these, these brands in the future.

Um, I, I don't like to talk about social media at all. And I don't think that what I'm saying when I'm saying build community is invest in social media, because it's actually got one of the worst returns on investment of any [00:40:00] channel that you can see inside of SAS, but, um, invest in community. That's where I'm talking.

That's what I'm really talking about. So when you get a customer and they sign up for a trial of your product, get them into your Slack community, get them into a, you know, get them onto your, your YouTube channel, that's not approaching. That's not just trying to sell them the product, but is actually really, really passionate about trying to solve the problems that that community is facing.

And if you can do that, you will kill it. It will, it will work. I believe you'll at least be left with those thousand fans. And if you have a thousand fans, you have a million dollar business for sure.

Ivor: Now, speaking of books, something we do to close every episode is we ask each guest to recommend a book for the next guest for the short reason why. So our last guest was [00:41:00] Charlie, who's the head of marketing from One Screen. And he recommended The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg. And he spoke about the importance due to the psychology, understanding the psychology of how people buy, and tapping into how you can align your brand.

around that. And so what's your book recommendation for the next guest and, and why?

Liam: So I was going to stay zero to one by Peter Thiel. Cause I think it's probably the best book on startups

Ivor: That's the first one I've actually read. So you're the third recommendation, um, third guest offering a recommendation. And I've actually read that before.

Liam: Yeah. It's a fantastic book to really kind of give you the framework of how to build a business. That has long term success, but instead I just finished an early [00:42:00] copy of Wes Bush's brand new book, his sequel to product led, which is the product led playbook. And I think it's getting released. In the next week or two.

And, uh, if you are at all interested in product led marketing, Wes wrote the definitive book on that particular subject, but his next book is really a framework on how to actually build that out into a business. So not just the theoretical framework of this is the way that you should build a product led organization, but the specific guts and bolts of who you hire.

But their role should be, um, what kind of metrics you should be following up on those types of things. And it was, if you are thinking about going in the product led direction, I would probably read that book first before going into his previous book, which is [00:43:00] much, much bigger, but focused more on theoretical concepts.

So the book is The Product Led Playbook by Wes Bush.  

Ivor: Great. Thank you so much, Liam, a super, super fascinating episode. I think a few alarm bells went off in my head, um, as we were talking there and some really, really interesting insights. I'm sure our listeners will love and, and really appreciate. Guys, thank you for joining in to GTM Tales. If you're interested in the topics or want to be a guest for the next episode, then please reach out to us.

Speak to you next time.

‍Ivor: So hello everyone and welcome to go to market tales. In each episode, you will meet a go to market leader. The idea behind it is that there's some really great podcasts out there. I think there are a lot of podcasts out there, but there aren't any that are specifically focused on the growth stories. in B2B.

Stories from bridging the gap between the first 10 customers to 100, the path from series A to B to C, or how growth was achieved whilst bootstrapping. And along this journey, each stage and path is very different. And the go to market landscape has been totally upended with the AI revolution. Following on from the episode [00:01:00] with Charlie from OneScreen, this is our third episode.

And today I'm really, really excited, super pleased to have one of the founders from Time Doctor, Liam Headstein. Great to have you here, Liam. How's it all going?

Liam: I am very excited to be here, and yeah, things are going pretty well. Just dropped my daughter off at daycare, and I am ready to tuck in to AI.

Ivor: And yeah, a special thank you for doing this first thing on a Monday morning. So the way I like to kick off is to get a bit of a background and really understand what's led you to where you are today. And yeah, I understand a bit more about time doctor as well.

Liam: Sure. So, Time Doctor is, in the next few weeks, it will be 13 years old, which is wild. The, uh, the HR team asked me to make a video and I thought it was a pretty unlucky video [00:02:00] to make because it's, it's 13 years, but it's been in operation for 13 years. We specifically are a time tracking tool designed for remote teams.

We have team members in 46 plus countries all over the world, and we operate our business remotely. So we believe that that is a better way to be able to run a business. And that was a relatively unpopular idea up until about 2020. Thank God. Much more popular and then it actually got unpopular again. We can talk about that if you want.

But fundamentally for me, we're a bootstrapped organization. So both me and my business partner, Rob, we didn't take any equity. No, sorry, we did not take it. We did not raise any money in order to be able to build a business. And I think that moving forward, we're actually going to see a lot more bootstrapped companies specifically due to artificial intelligence and where it's going over the next couple of years.

Ivor: Yeah. I think that's for me personally, that's a super interesting to dig in to a [00:03:00] bit deeper and we haven't had anyone on the podcast yet that's successfully bootstrapped a business. I'm really interested to understand those key strategies that helped, you know, scale the company, particularly with the, the trifecta of channels that you mentioned before, uh, when we had the initial conversation.

So it'd be good to really understand that a bit more and we can then move on to how we think, uh, AI's impact.

Liam: Yeah, there's a lot of good data to start to come out now about go to market strategies. And really, when you think about the history of SAS specifically, We were much more heavily on the R and D side of SAS. So how did you grow out of business? How did you make a business successful? Well, you had to be more focused on the research and development, the actual engineering of SAS.

Now that's switched. So now go to market strategies are the more effective side [00:04:00] of growing and building a SAS. And that's in part due to the rise of cloud computing, right? You can fire up an AWS server relatively easily. Quickly and easily and be up and running with your sass for, you know, 20 bucks a month.

And also secondarily, just all of the technology that has been built for sass over the last, I would probably say essentially the last decade, we've really kind of entered that new stage. And we're starting to see exactly the same thing with AI, which is Kind of interesting where now the risk is on the R and D side and not on the go to market strategy, which we could probably get into as well.

But if you look at the overall world of sass, if you want to build a hundred million dollar business, a hundred million dollar ARR business, which is our goal. So we're on that particular path. There are only three major channels that everyone uses in levels of importance. The first one is content and search.

So that's the first one. [00:05:00] Most powerful channel. The second one is paid advertising and the third is email. So if you have a CMO that you've hired or a head of marketing and they are not world class at one of those three things, I would not hire them under any circumstances whatsoever. And, and we don't, uh, so inside of time, doctor, we're very, very good at content and search.

We're okay at paid acquisition and we're not very good at email. And that's something that we're actually focusing this year on trying to get as good as we possibly can at email because we recognize that it's a big hole in our business. Because you can be really good at one of those things and you'll probably achieve an eight figure SaaS business if you're world class.

And we're talking world class, I'm talking about 1 percent of search, as an example. Of which. I believe that time doctor is. And if you are in the top 1 percent of two of those categories, you can get to a [00:06:00] hundred million dollars a year. And if you're world class in all three, you can get to a billion dollars a year in revenue.

And this formula is shown to be true multiple, multiple times. And you just have to recognize how can you get really, really good at those three things as quickly as possible. And so that's what we're That's what I'm trying to do in the company, uh, specifically. And I think for anyone that's listening now, if you're reflecting back on your go to market strategy and you're thinking to yourself like, Oh yeah, we're really good at conferences as an example, or we're really good at social media.

Those are actually probably some of the worst funnels to build out a long term, successful, scalable business.

Ivor: Yeah, conferences is a business on its own, right? I think it's easily, uh, you can easily underestimate the amount of resource and level of skill that you need to actually build a successful conference. And I actually want to heal [00:07:00] the onion a little bit more and focus on what's gone well, which is the.

SEO and the content side of things. So how did you actually approach SEO to drive the traffic that you have done? And, and also how does that kind of convert into to customers and what was the journey there with Time Doctor? So,

Liam: the biggest thing that we did is because we had no money in her bootstrap content in search was the easiest way for us to be able to build out a go to market strategy. We didn't have a million dollars a year to be able to put into paid acquisition, and we did not have a sales team actually until 2019.

So we, It was a completely, um, product led operation. So it was a self serve trial that would turn into paid customers. And we decided to commit to search [00:08:00] because it was. And I would probably say, I would not suggest that people do this today, but 15 years ago, when you look at the user acquisition funnel, that's probably going to produce the longest, the best ROI over a 10 year period content and search, it completely obliterates everything else.

Cause if you get really good at paid acquisition, that's fantastic. But paid acquisition changes, right? Like, let's look at what's happened in the last two years. Uh, Tik TOK now has been such a huge aspect. Of affecting the entire game of creatives across all media landscapes when we're talking about paid acquisition.

So the evolution of paid changes very, very quickly, and you can be very successful one month and then very unsuccessful the next month inside of paid. Whereas with content and search, the cap was really much higher. So we just focused on [00:09:00] putting out a blog post once a week. Then we put out two a week, then we were putting out like 10 a week.

I think at one point we had about 40 to 50 pieces of content that we were choosing on our blog. And then on the back end of that, we had a massive linking team. So I think at one point we had about 10 linkers. And I treated them just like a sales org. So we had a metric, which was cumulative domain authority that we focused on, which was don't just go out and get backlinks for these articles, get backlinks that have a high domain authority, meaning there's a higher level of importance for Google for these particular sites.

So at the end of the day, you could go out and get a. Backlink that had a domain authority of 10 and you could go out and get a backlink that would have a domain authority of 90. But then at the end of the month, we would just add up 90 plus 10 cumulative domain authority. And that's how you were measured as a sales, as a backlinker [00:10:00] inside of the organization.

And we comped people based off of that. And that was incredibly successful because we were able to generate links much faster and more effectively than any of our competitors did at that particular time. And we grew that to,

Ivor: Okay.

Liam: we were at like 400, 000 uniques per month through the blog. So pretty respectable, particularly for our niche, pretty respectable amount of traffic, and then the game.

Has recently changed pretty, pretty aggressively. So in the last two years, we've seen Google remove about 40 percent of all of its search traffic to not result in a click on a website, which is kind of crazy when you think about that. So what Google is now doing is saying, well, we're going to try to keep people on Google and give them the answer directly on Google, as opposed to going to time, doctor.

[00:11:00] com. So. In order to be able to get that answer. And that's just a fundamental shift of where search is at right now. And so that's an interesting new moment where we are still, we are not, we, we are not 10 X ing search like we were before. So I would probably say up until about 2022, we were spending every single dollar that we could on search.

And now we're not doing that. Now what we're doing is we're making sure that the search team. Is still in place to manage that growth that exists, that asset that exists, but we're not adding more to it. Um, and we're just kind of keeping it running. So I think we're doing like two blog posts a week as an example, as opposed to 10.

Ivor: And you lead to a really interesting point, and we can talk about how you think SEO is changing and will completely change in the future. And what brand builders should be perhaps focused on in the future with the impact of AI and the [00:12:00] overviews, which I'm seeing and actually using a lot more than I was before, for sure.

And you mentioned that you're now focused on. Email marketing as a channel. And it's something that you haven't been focused on so much before. So could you talk and speak to a little bit about how and, and why you're focused on, on email marketing and yeah, well, the initial results that

Liam: Yeah. So the reason why we are to be completely honest with you, I can give you a politically correct answer. I can give you the real one, decided

Ivor: real one, please.

Liam: is we have a, we have a massive email list, so we can take advantage of that list. And when we've seen other companies that have scaled this, they've really treated their email list somewhat like a form of storytelling.

So our goal is to be able to provide you so much valuable content about the things that [00:13:00] our customers are interested in, which is remote work. That you will want to open up that email every single week and you'll want to be able to interact with that content and never, and I'm not going to say never, very, very rarely do we actually directly reference Time Doctor in those emails.

The goal is to get you addicted to these emails and to provide the value from those emails and that's a long game, right? So if you speak to a lot of direct response marketers in the email world, And there are lots of them that will come in and we'll say, I can, I can double your revenue in, in 30 days.

They absolutely can, but they'll also trash your email list. So your open rate and deliverability will go, you know, we'll be cut in half and you're kind of cutting off your nose to spite your face. So what you need to do is do the longer term play, which is how can I make sure that this content is really valuable to a large group of people?

And [00:14:00] there are companies that are doing this so, so well, the, you've seen a rise of essentially the email list company where it's just basically providing you a really good one is, um, coffee brew,

Ivor: Yeah.

Liam: They have a massive, massive email list and all that they do and what they protect. Above all else is their open rate.

So they are not measured by revenue. They are not measured by any of these other variables. It is how many people open up that email every single week. That is their true Northstar metric. And that's what we've been doing inside of time. Doctor, because if we can transfer our million or so emails. Into let's say 50, 000 clicks per month.

That's a huge shift towards our overall business.

Ivor: What would you say is a good open rate to strive for for the B2B world?[00:15:00]

Liam: I would say anything above 20 percent is pretty good. Anything below 10 percent is actually going to get you in trouble. So you will start to have Google and Microsoft essentially ban you directly at the server level in terms of deliverability, because they'll just look at your emails and say, whoever you're sending emails to. They don't want to see them. So 20 percent would be the minimum we sit right now on the list that we're working the most on at, I believe 40%. And then I've seen people that have had open rates of 60, 70%. On emails. And so that's where the real magic happens, right? Where people are really, really excited. So if anyone's listening right now, I would say never drop below 20%.

If you're dropping below 20%, you're doing something really wrong and you need to stop it. And, uh, the goal for me [00:16:00] would be probably around 40%.

Ivor: And I think it really depends on how big your audience is as well. I think if you're a recently established brand, maybe you started building your, uh, emails in the last year or two. Yeah. Your audience is probably likely to be more engaged than say, if you've been building your audience for 10 years and People's paths have changed.

So I think it's probably a lot easier to engage an audience if they're smaller and if they're all the same type of people for sure as well. Um, okay. So

Liam: No. And the other thing that I would reinforce as well is don't want to get logistics of. Email newsletter deliverability, but prune your list as well. So if someone, if you send someone eight emails and they haven't opened eight of them, send them an email saying, Hey, you haven't opened our emails in a while.

I'm gonna delete you from the list. [00:17:00] I'm gonna remove you from the list unless you, you know, respond and say that you're actually interested and just click on this link and we'll make sure that you're on the list. And that's just, there are a lot of people that will even just look at the titles and we'll be like, Oh yeah, okay.

I'll read that one day. And you'd be surprised at how many people are like that. So it's a really good reactivation sequence to be able to get people excited and back into your list. Because as I said before, if the email is sent and no one opens it, Google doesn't like that Google will eventually get rid of you as a newsletter.

Ivor: the pruning is not just relevant to gardening, but also managing your email list, switching gears. So. Moving on to actually the specifics on how AI is impacting these different areas, and I think I'd like to have a real focus on, content , and SEO. What is , the impact that you're currently seeing with,, SEO and how [00:18:00] is that changing , and potentially impacting the traffic , of brands out there, especially in B2B?

Yeah, of

Liam: best user acquisition channel that I could possibly think of was absolutely true until about two years ago. And now we've seen this massive shift due to large language models where we have Gemini and we have open AI that are completely changing the landscape.

And I alluded to this before, but 40 percent of all searches now do not result in a click. It's a zero click future. So now we're realizing that, um, I don't know where you're at right now, love to be able to get your perspective on it, but on my phone. I have an iPhone [00:19:00] 15, and it has this nice little button on the side that they added, which is a, um, it's like a hot button, so you can assign it to a particular task, and that button now is ChatGPT for me. So I just use ChatGPT. For Googling, right? And I would probably say right now, 90 percent of the use cases that I used to use for Google are now chat GPT related because I just get the answer that I need. Just, I'm going to a, uh, Hans Zimmer concert. I don't know if you know Hans Zimmer, probably a couple of people do that are listening.

He's like a soundtrack. He's like the biggest soundtrack guy in the world. And we're going to this crazy big, huge, um, like 40, 000 people are coming to his concert. And I Googled, how should I dress for a Hans Zimmer concert? Because it's, it's kind of like, it's not a rock concert, [00:20:00] but it's also not classic.

Um, it's not a classical concert either. And Google had no answers for me. I had to go to like page three. To be able to figure out what to do. And then I just asked the same thing of chat GPT. And it said, Oh, well, I've found that historically there are two major categories of people. There are people that dress smart, casual, and semi formal.

Would you like me to show you some images of people's outfits that have gone to a Hans Zimmer concert? I'm like, this is exactly what I want. This is exactly what I want. And, and it is better, right? It's better for the customer, which is the searcher. And when you think about what Google really wants. It's important to understand.

Google doesn't care about you as the person that's trying to write content for the search engines. They do not care about you. Their customer is the searcher this, they want the searcher to be able to get an answer to their question as quickly as humanly possible, and we're [00:21:00] just realizing that in the next.

Five years, maybe less, I would probably say 90 percent of the searches will result in a zero click future where people will not be clicking on a website in order to be able to get that answer. And so you're going to see, and there is a lot of, uh, large language model optimization that's currently happening.

So if you go into open AI and chat GPT, and you ask, What is the best time tracking tool for remote workers? Our tool would come up as the top reference, right? And that's fantastic, but there's no link out. So maybe then you're going to actually type in time doctor. com and you're going to check it out.

But it's again a completely broken session. We have no idea where that's coming from because I can't actually identify what that search query was. That's happening. [00:22:00] And it's also not referencing any of our competitors in there. So it's just giving you time, doctor. So now it is, you're either number one on the search engine results page, and you are the answer to the question, or you are not.

And we have millions of dollars worth of revenue that exists on the second, third, and fourth result of Google. That we currently have as assets inside of, um, our blog and our search campaign. And that's all probably going to go to zero in the next five years.

Ivor: I'm a big Hans Zimmer fan, and one of my favorite songs is probably Time from Inception. And actually, on that topic of time, a long time ago, when I was at school, I really, really remember the first time I saw an iMac. You know, the [00:23:00] one with, um, the brightly colored casings, the ones like the

Liam: Clam show.

Ivor: Yeah, the blue and the green on the back.

And what stood out to me, and today still stands out to me, wasn't actually the computer itself. It was what was on the screen. Everyone had the same thing up. It was Google. And fast forward to today, I'm experiencing a sense of deja vu. And when I walk around this office today, and I've walked around a couple times today, and it feels like everyone has chat GPT open, much like in those early days of Google.

And, you know, AI is just, In our everyday lives, and it's not a novelty anymore. It's how we function in a lot of our roles and day to day lives. And it got me, it really got me thinking, you know, what was the impact of Google? And for me, probably one of the biggest impacts was I [00:24:00] don't need to know things.

I once needed to know off by heart, and I remember having to recite everyone's phone number, friends, family, a few random friends that I'd make, you know, and perhaps some girls numbers I'd want to keep track of as well and remember. Now I can, you know, barely recall the phone number of my own parents. I literally have no idea of what my brother's number is.

And yeah, I think it really makes me wonder, you know, what, you know, Google made us forget the information that we once had to memorize. What will AI replace? What skills, what knowledge will simply disappear because we no longer need it? So, you know, maybe it'd be creativity, decision making, or maybe the way we learn all together.

And I wanted to really, you know, get your thoughts on, on that, what would change in the [00:25:00] knowledge and skills, uh, we need as, as the rise of LLMs continues.

Liam: I was having exactly this debate with a dear friend of mine, Jesse, who is the creative director at Ubisoft. So he just released a triple A title, which is, uh, A new Star Wars game by Ubisoft, and he realized that his experience as a creative director, and I mean, he's not the top 1 percent of creative directors.

He's the top 0. 01 percent of creative directors, and he realized that his capability to critique an image. Is world class because he spent 15, 20, 30, 30 years constantly drawing 20, 000 characters, [00:26:00] you know, video game characters and understanding how they work and understanding how they interact and, and studying design and studying all of these aspects of it. But he's saying now there is no one that would bother to go through those fundamentals. In order to be able to achieve true mastery, just to your point. So, and let's actually bring this specifically into the average VP of marketing, the average VP of marketing should be able to produce a really world class creative, even if they have a creative department, they should be able to understand what creative is going to work versus, versus what creative isn't, but to do that, you need to. You need to launch a thousand creatives on unpaid acquisition to be able to actually get to that point where you have that sixth sense, essentially, you put in your 10, 000 [00:27:00] hours. So who's going to put in those 10, 000 hours? Well, I think the future is that AI will be doing that for you, but then will anyone truly achieve mastery? In what they're doing and and maybe the definition of mastery will change, right? So, and this is maybe because I'm, I'm thinking in a very old fashioned way, but maybe there will be designers that don't know how to design anything. Maybe they'll just be really good at producing prompts that produce a design, but and you can kind of think of the circular logic connected to this.

Well, then that means that anyone can become a designer and where I think we're going is you're going to have this new age of visionary leader. I have a video that I'm putting out in November or December talking about how I believe that there will be [00:28:00] a billion dollar entrepreneur business. In the next five years, there will be a business that is worth a billion dollars that has one person inside of it.

And the rest of them will be AI agents. And once we get to that point, I think it'll almost be like running the 10 second, 100 meter dash, right? Everyone was trying to get to that point in which someone would run under 10 seconds on the 100 meter dash. And then the very next year, there were eight people that accomplished that same goal.

Once it's achieved, you'll just have the, the, the gates will be open and everyone will want to be able to, uh, To do these types of businesses. So

Ivor: oh, Oh, Yeah.

Liam: of jobs would a worker do after that [00:29:00] point?

This, that pod, this podcast is not particularly about that subject, but even just thinking about that right now in your own minds,

Ivor: H A

Liam: I think it's, it kind of blows you away to be able to think to yourself, well, what will people do? In the future, will we all just be creative visionaries building out our own businesses with a whole bunch of agents?

There probably will be a few, but the vast majority of people just won't have access to that type of, um, direction in life and, and I don't know what they're going to do with their lives. So long story short, I think there will be very few people that will achieve mastery in the future. And because of that, yeah.

I think we will become more and more dependent upon artificial intelligence at the point where, you know, if the internet was ripped out of human society, we would probably devolve into a Mad Max world in under 72 hours, I would, I would imagine, and I think [00:30:00] very quickly, the same thing will happen with large language models, and by quickly, I mean, Maybe even today, if we removed large language models, we would have a lot of dependency that would be pretty problematic, but definitively within five years, it would be, it will be as important as the internet itself.

Ivor: And. Before we close off, uh, before we get into your book recommendation. So as a SEO and content expert, we've talked about the importance of SEO in the past, but we've also alluded to. Potential risk going forward and how that can impact traffic with, you know, the revolution of, of LLMs and the AI overviews that we're now seeing and, uh, fewer clicks free to, to websites, what would you recommend, uh, a brand [00:31:00] to focus on with their content strategy, a B2B brand with their content strategy moving forward,

Liam: Yeah, so I've been thinking about this a lot and I don't have an answer. I have what I'm doing now, but I don't know if that's the answer. So I have to give you that caveat beforehand,

Ivor: we'll have you back on when, when you do know the answer.

Liam: yeah, well I hope I find out before other people. And this is the thing that I think is so important and for anyone listening to this podcast right now, if you know the answer to this question six months before everyone else. You will make billions of dollars. It is so important to understand the answer to this question.

I think it's probably the most important question that anyone in marketing needs to answer in the next few years. But how I'm approaching it. Search is dead and I had an existential crisis about that about two years [00:32:00] ago. So search is.

Ivor: So you've grieved, you've gone through the five stages. It's up to you. Transcript,

Liam: I've gone through those five stages, yes.

And it's not going to come back.

Ivor: transcript.

Liam: We have to exist in a zero click world. So it's everything or nothing. Meaning, you do not get an advantage to being second or third place. On the search engines, you need to be number one, right? When someone types in what's the best time tracking tool for remote work and time doctor comes up, you need to be like, it's either that or nothing.

Right? So that's, that's a very important point that I want to be able to reinforce. And there will be a lot of people searching for things like the amount of people that are searching for things will not change. It's just that. They're not actually going to click through to your website anymore, and they won't have different choices.

So they're only going to have one choice. So it's really [00:33:00] important to be able to understand that. And we're designing the majority of our search strategy specifically to target that. On the paid side, I think that all paid advertising Will have the absolute perfect campaigns So if you are trying to learn how to optimize a paid advertising campaign right now You need to stop learning how to do that That is worthless information and it will be made redundant within months and it probably already is redundant at this point There are so many AI tools right now that can optimize your bid prices and how you're going to split test Creatives and all that type of information what you need to get really good at is the creative side So how can you build a creative that's better than everyone else?

How can you tell a story that's better than everyone else? And then with regards to, uh, where I'm kind of reinforcing this is storytelling fundamentally. [00:34:00] How can I build out a story? And the primary way that I'm doing that is through brand

Ivor: 11,

Liam: two years ago, I would have told you that brand is stupid and you, you know, people don't want to pay attention to a time tracking tools brand, right?

And they don't. But the way that I'm doing that is I'm encapsulating. My personal brand as an extension of

Ivor: Our

Liam: brand. So right now I would argue that Elon is bigger than Tesla. Sam Altman is bigger than open AI. Logan. Paul is bigger than prime. Mr. Beast is bigger than. So corporate brands used to be the bigger footprint, but now personal brands are so much faster to build, and they get so much more loyalty.

Build the personal brand and have that feed into the corporate brand. So [00:35:00] have that push back into something to sell. And that fundamentally touches on the most important point. If I was telling someone that was starting today from zero, I would say, don't build, don't build. a solution to a problem, build a community around the problem that you have.

Ivor: exclude,

Liam: So

Ivor: erase,

Liam: to a subreddit about your community and figure out what they're consuming and then build that content. Build, um, TikTok videos, build YouTube content, email newsletters, private Slack groups. Conferences, everything around that community, build a committed community that people love. And then when people have that sense of community, then you can sell them something.

That really truly answers their problem and is not something that is just kind of a quick cash grab, but is something that you are truly passionate about as well. So those are the [00:36:00] current ideas that I have that I'm kind of putting forward. Probably half of those won't work in the next five years. These are my best ideas that I currently have.

I have a lot of friends of mine right now that are actually buying up brands. And they believe that these brands are being bought up for, they believe that they're requiring them for pennies on the dollar. So like I have a, I'm on a laptop right now that costs 3, 000 because it's an Apple Mac book. And I could probably get the same work done with a 300 laptop, but I buy the 3, 000 laptop.

Why? Fundamentally because of brand. I could convince myself that it's for other reasons, but fundamentally it is because of the brand and why I would trust Apple as a company. Regardless of whatever they put out, I would just say, I'm going to buy this Apple laptop or this iPhone because it's Apple. And that's all I need to do because I understand I've got the [00:37:00] benefit of the doubt that I understand that it's this brand that's built these fantastic products in the past.

So acquiring other businesses that have fantastic brand equity is probably another thing that I would look into if you had the money to be able to do it. But, um, As of right now, you know, building brand equity is probably the biggest, biggest thing that I could reinforce to everybody. And if you can't do that, then build community.

Ivor: You know, you're the third guest we've had on this podcast and you're the third person to talk about the importance of brand in the future, particularly with the rise about rise with AI and also the The influence that storytelling has as well, and the importance of authenticity. I think these are super, super critical things also in, in, in the next coming years.

Liam: Well, I think people can smell bullshit a mile away. It's one of those things that if you're, if you really. I think when you [00:38:00] see the vast majority of people that at least I, when I'm consuming content, you can tell the difference between the guys that are just trying to sell you something and the guys that are truly trying to solve the problem and are passionate about that particular problem.

And I think that when you think about brand equity, it's really like, if you could almost kind of define it, it's like many brands, That are, that are focused on solving a specific issue. So with regards to our conference running remote and the book that we had produced, it was such a small problem pre pre COVID, but we were so passionate about that particular problem and we didn't care whether or not we only went after.

You know, a thousand people. There's a great article. If you just Google it a thousand true fans, and that is a perfect framework to build out what I'm talking about, which is [00:39:00] if you can identify a problem, that's small enough that you could identify a thousand diehard fans that would buy anything that you would sell.

If you can just get to that point, then you will succeed because of a thousand people absolutely love you. Then 10, 000 people will kind of like you. And a hundred thousand people will like you a little bit, right? Like it's, it's one of those things that you just have to realize how can you focus in on that niche and build that form of community.

And even if you just only get to a thousand people, a thousand people buying a product for it from you for a thousand dollars a month is a big business. And you need to be able to take that into that, take that into consideration when thinking about where we're going to build out these, these brands in the future.

Um, I, I don't like to talk about social media at all. And I don't think that what I'm saying when I'm saying build community is invest in social media, because it's actually got one of the worst returns on investment of any [00:40:00] channel that you can see inside of SAS, but, um, invest in community. That's where I'm talking.

That's what I'm really talking about. So when you get a customer and they sign up for a trial of your product, get them into your Slack community, get them into a, you know, get them onto your, your YouTube channel, that's not approaching. That's not just trying to sell them the product, but is actually really, really passionate about trying to solve the problems that that community is facing.

And if you can do that, you will kill it. It will, it will work. I believe you'll at least be left with those thousand fans. And if you have a thousand fans, you have a million dollar business for sure.

Ivor: Now, speaking of books, something we do to close every episode is we ask each guest to recommend a book for the next guest for the short reason why. So our last guest was [00:41:00] Charlie, who's the head of marketing from One Screen. And he recommended The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg. And he spoke about the importance due to the psychology, understanding the psychology of how people buy, and tapping into how you can align your brand.

around that. And so what's your book recommendation for the next guest and, and why?

Liam: So I was going to stay zero to one by Peter Thiel. Cause I think it's probably the best book on startups

Ivor: That's the first one I've actually read. So you're the third recommendation, um, third guest offering a recommendation. And I've actually read that before.

Liam: Yeah. It's a fantastic book to really kind of give you the framework of how to build a business. That has long term success, but instead I just finished an early [00:42:00] copy of Wes Bush's brand new book, his sequel to product led, which is the product led playbook. And I think it's getting released. In the next week or two.

And, uh, if you are at all interested in product led marketing, Wes wrote the definitive book on that particular subject, but his next book is really a framework on how to actually build that out into a business. So not just the theoretical framework of this is the way that you should build a product led organization, but the specific guts and bolts of who you hire.

But their role should be, um, what kind of metrics you should be following up on those types of things. And it was, if you are thinking about going in the product led direction, I would probably read that book first before going into his previous book, which is [00:43:00] much, much bigger, but focused more on theoretical concepts.

So the book is The Product Led Playbook by Wes Bush.  

Ivor: Great. Thank you so much, Liam, a super, super fascinating episode. I think a few alarm bells went off in my head, um, as we were talking there and some really, really interesting insights. I'm sure our listeners will love and, and really appreciate. Guys, thank you for joining in to GTM Tales. If you're interested in the topics or want to be a guest for the next episode, then please reach out to us.

Speak to you next time.