00:24:04 · Kieran Flanagan
[00:24:04] S0: Yeah. And I'll put it back into the methodology so people understand. So we we kinda... We did the express. I'll skip over Taylor for a moment. Taylor is, like, how you take that taste profile and craft things for people that make it feel specifically for them. And what we're getting into here is there's the Amplify, which is a new set of distribution playbooks for marketers, and and then Evolve, which I... We can talk about at the end maybe, which is how you restand up your marketing team for the AI age. But in terms of Amplify, which is, like, what are the new distribution playbooks? Like, forever... Especially in b to b, it's been a lot of, like, content search, SEO, email marketing automation, B2C, it's been a lot of paid advertising creators. And so in B2B, how did we... What are the new kind of distribution playbooks we stood up? Well, content is actually still a big part of how we acquire demand. We just went into different places. And so YouTube has been a pretty big success for us. And so we went into YouTube because we were like, kinda works similar to like Google search, but it's much more defensible, And that was part of a media network we stood up. And so we bought a company back in 2021 called The Hustle. And people might know that show from My First Million, Shaan and Sam's podcast. And so I led the acquisition of that company. And within six months, we had built a creator network around it because they they were... They had such great podcasts. It was a great way to start to build a podcast network. We built a YouTube network. We have a creator program now with 350 creators that are part of that media network. We have the hustle How does
00:25:29 · Guillaume Moubeche
[00:25:29] S1: that work exactly? Like, the the creator network? Is that, like, people you pay to create content, or do you sponsor, like, their videos, or how exactly does it work?
00:25:37 · Kieran Flanagan
[00:25:37] S0: Yeah. We stood... The way I stood that up was kinda like a little bit like a VC program, which is, basically, there's four tiers. And based upon your audience size, you are in a certain tier and you get paid based upon your impressions. And we took half your ad inventory, and you could still resell the other half, and we locked that in for a two year contract. The thing I ask all the time is, well, what is the unfair advantage? How do you win? Right? Like, if you compete with the same things, you get the same results as everyone else. And so what we were trying to figure out is, well, what is our unfair advantage here? Well, the unfair advantage is when you look, there was two things that were... We had two like main insights here, which was creators wanted predictable revenue. And so the way they acquired revenue was like sell an ad space. And they were never sure how much ad space they would sell in a, you know, in a given month, in a given year. And the second thing is most of the growth... A lot of the growth for creators came when other creators mentioned them on their show. So what we did was we built a network, and that network was, you know, had had an array of different creators at different levels, and we could lock in a contract for two years at the CPM rate that they had then, and then we could cross promote all those creators to make those shows much, much bigger. So I'm not... I don't think I'm able to say the names. So one of the bigger... Some of the bigger shows five x their growth in the network. And so we now are getting a huge amount of upside on that CPM rate because we had locked it in here. Now they were getting tons of upside as well because they were getting predictable revenue, and they were getting predictable... They were getting predictable revenue, and they were growing their audience. And then they can renegotiate after two years, which is a whole other thing.
00:27:17 · Guillaume Moubeche
[00:27:17] S1: So just to be clear, sorry to interrupt, but just to be clear, it means that the ad space you bought, for example, for a big creator, instead of having that ad space talk about HubSpot, you would talk about another creator inside the program, that way, your show would would jump to...
00:27:37 · Kieran Flanagan
[00:27:37] S0: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We would talk about HubSpot. So we we we could do whatever we want with half the inventory, and so a lot of it would go to HubSpot, and then some of it would go to other career programs. Nice. You could only... If you were the... And then the other... There's an incentive to get up the tier and grow your audience because if you're the top tier, you can get cross promoted by the entire network. But if you're in the bottom tier, you can only get promoted by the other people in the bottom tier. Now sometimes, like, if you're doing well, we can give you a bump and have some of the bigger shows cross promote you. And so we started that podcast, and then we went to YouTube. And we... We've recently started... We've been doing a lot of that on newsletters. We bought the hostel. We bought a couple of other newsletters since then as well. So that has actually surpassed... We used to create a lot of our demand through search content, like a lot... You know, blogs and all of these other things. We generate way, way more demand now through that network than we did through the the other... The kind of more search driven content. And so that was one of the that was one of the plays we invested in terms of... Now that that... I I think if you're if you're watching this, you're like, sure. Like, you know, it's pub... There's a public figure that we spent $2,027,000,000 on the hustle. It's not easy to build that out. I do get that. I think that is, like, the ability for a big company to do that. But the learning for any company is, well, what is the unfair advantage? How can I win in something? And I do think creators are part of everyone's marketing strategy, whether you're big or small. It just, it varies in terms of what kind of scale.
00:28:59 · Guillaume Moubeche
[00:28:59] S1: Yeah. And whenever you have to allocate your budget and you see that SEO typically is going down like 80%, Like, do you decide to stop SEO? Like, do you decide to maintain it with like a smaller team? Like how exactly do you manage all of that?