Develop Yourself

Inside the Email Infrastructure of High-Growth Companies

• Brian Jenney

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In this episode of the Develop Yourself Podcast, I talk with three email and growth experts about something most developers overlook: email as a serious  money maker.

I’m joined by:

  • Mike, founder of Seventh Sense, an AI-powered email timing platform
  • Boris, Senior Digital Marketing Manager at Educative, one of the largest developer learning platforms
  • Doug, CEO of Optimize 3.0, a HubSpot Diamond Partner agency

We dig into:

  • How AI is reshaping email marketing
  • Why email is still the most reliable channel you can own
  • The biggest email marketing mistakes that founders and developers make
  • What it actually takes to build a product that sells—not just one that works
  • And real advice for developers who want to turn skills into a business


🎙 Guest LinkedIn Profiles

Mike Donnelly — Founder, Seventh Sense

https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikedonnelly1/

Boris Robles-Slyusar — Senior Digital Marketing Manager, Educative

https://www.linkedin.com/in/borisslyusar/

Doug Kirk — CEO, Optimize 3.0

https://www.linkedin.com/in/douglastkirk/


🏢 Company Pages

Seventh Sense (AI-powered email timing platform)

https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-seventh-sense/

https://www.seventhsense.ai/

Educative (developer learning platform)

https://www.linkedin.com/company/educative-inc/

https://www.educative.io/

Optimize 3.0 (HubSpot Diamond Partner agency)

https://www.linkedin.com/company/optimize-3-0/

https://optimize3-0.com/

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SPEAKER_02:

Welcome to the Develop Yourself Podcast, where we teach you everything you need to learn your first job as a software developer by learning to develop yourself, your skills, your network, and more. I'm Brian. Today on the Develop Yourself Podcast, I'm going to be talking about something a little bit different than usual. Usually I talk about software, startups, learning the code, but today I want to dive into something we don't talk about nearly enough email. Not your email kind of email. I'm talking about how companies actually use email to drive millions in revenue and what developers, founders, and even marketers might be able to learn from that. And to do that, I've got three incredible guests joining me. Mike, who's the founder and CEO of Seven Sense, an email performance management system that uses data in AI to figure out the perfect time to send email. And he helps companies like HubSpot and Educative boost their engagement in sales. I've got Boris, senior digital marketing manager at educative.io, one of the biggest online learning platforms, and one of my personal favorite ones, and he didn't just pay me to say that. It has like 3 million users. Boris runs through email marketing, affiliate programs, and their AI powered recommendation systems that help developers keep learning. And last but not least, we have Doug, who's CEO at Optimize 3.0, a HubSpot Diamond Partner agency that helps small and mid-sized businesses unlock revenue with smart sales and marketing automation. It's a lot of people. I'm way outnumbered. Now you might be wondering, what do these three guys have in common and why are they on a tech show with me? And I think that whether you're a developer and you want to build a stats product, you're an entrepreneur, and you're trying to figure out how to make marketing and email work, I think you're going to find this conversation useful. We're going to cover how AI is reshaping email, what makes for truly effective outreach, and what it takes to build a product that sells and not just one that works. Mike Doug Boris, welcome to the show.

SPEAKER_04:

Thanks for having us. Thank you. Excited to jump in when Me too, man.

SPEAKER_02:

Because if you're listening to this show, you've probably got an email from me at some point. I do some email marketing, but I know a lot of people out there are like, just what is email marketing? Mike, do you want to just tell us like just in a brief what is email marketing?

SPEAKER_04:

It's a way to influence people that are in your database, build stronger relationships, educate people. It's the one marketing channel that every organization owns. It's the house you own versus the house you rent, which social networking, etc. You don't control the algorithms, who sees what, when do they see it, how often do they see it. With the power of email is that you own that capability.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, actually, I really like the way you talk about emails. Sometimes you say that you help earn attention. And email right now is probably the most reliable marketing channel to do that. So I would describe it as gaining or earning customers' attention. Sorry for the low cost.

SPEAKER_02:

But Doug, yeah, you want to, I don't know if you have anything to add to.

SPEAKER_00:

Well, yeah, email is misunderstood in this day and age in some respects. I like how Mike has described it as a channel you own. I'd qualify that a little bit because you have to earn or find the people to put in your database. Then and you have to be very conscious about what you email them because you can lose their attention fairly quickly. Uh it's very much of a nurture of that database and making sure that you're engaging with people and you're not ending up sending the wrong message, which could end up hurting your reputation and other things that can happen to you as you if you abuse that channel.

SPEAKER_02:

Oh, yeah, 100%. I do a lot of email marketing. People that sign up for the newsletter, a lot of the sales and people that have come through parsity have come directly through email. And when I speak to a lot of people and like, oh, I want to do a business or something, one of the first things I tell them, which is often kind of counterintuitive to what they think because they see social media and they think, I just need to get a big social media following. And I'm like, if I was gonna start over again, I'd probably focus even more on getting a large email list because, like you've all just said, it's like the one channel you actually own. Before we get into that, Mike, I want to know what led to building a company around sending basically better timed emails. Can you kind of give us a brief synopsis of what is Seventh Sense and what led you to building this company?

SPEAKER_04:

Yeah, absolutely. And first and foremost, I want to say, Brian, thanks for having us on. You know, I'm glad I found your podcast because I've actually become fascinated with it. So I appreciate it, man. Absolutely awesome job there. So it was really around scratching my own itch. I started my career as a software developer in the biotech world where we mapped the human genome. And then I made the jump to the dark side of sales, and it was specifically technology sales and selling high-dollar ticket items, you know, anywhere from$100,000 to multi-million dollar opportunities, long sales cycles, complex technology. One of the things that I just started recognizing was reaching people is just getting really, really, really hard to see executives and decision makers. And some of these decision makers that I had been working with for years, like a few of them had actually been to my wedding. And that's how close we worked together, how close to friends we became. And at times I would call them and I'd be like, or they would call me and they're like, Mike, this project's getting delayed. And I'm like, that isn't my fault. What do you mean? Like, I've reached out to you, I've called you, I've emailed you, I've got I get hundreds of emails a day, I get dozens of phone calls, dozens of voicemails a day, dozens of text messages a day. I had one executive who I was very good friends with when we were thinking about starting the company. He said to me, Mike, if you send me an email after nine in the morning, I will never ever see it. And I said, Well, how can that be? And he said, Because I go to meetings starting at nine, I come back to my desk around 6:30 at night, and I go to go to the bottom and I hit shift delete. And I was like, Well, that's pretty convenient. And he would tell me, Well, if it's important enough, you'll email me tomorrow. And I'm like, Well, as a salesperson, I simply can't do that. Yeah, I think a lot of good salespeople do this intuitively, which is they pay attention to people's patterns. Like, hey, don't ever try to reach Jeff on a Friday because Jeff always plays golf on Friday. Don't reach out to Jen on because Jen has some other conflict on Monday afternoon. She never answers her phone. So I specifically I really paid attention to these behavioral patterns. And one day, as kind of like the whole big data craze was coming about. Now I had always been in very large data, I just kind of had this feeling of like, why am I spending so much mental energy on this? I'll bet if we analyze just like the metadata in my email, the to, the from, the cc, the timestamps, you could probably build people's patterns around email. And so I started kind of working on a prototype. And as as part of that, we I outsourced a little bit of engineering. Uh that didn't go so well. But the whole time I was looking for somebody that I could co-found the company with, and all of a sudden it dawned on me like, oh my gosh, I have this amazing, like top 1% developer that's a customer of mine. And I started really reaching out to him and saying, hey, let's go have lunch. I'd love to explore this idea with you. So we were a couple months in of just kind of having conversations, and he's like, okay, you know what? This actually makes sense. So we built a prototype, and I can walk you through kind of like how we got from prototype to first customer to where we are today. But it was really just about scratching my own itch. And as part of building that prototype, that's where the light bulbs went off of oh my gosh, people do like you can really see people's digital patterns by looking at metadata, and you even have social networking sites doing it, you know, social networking companies doing it today, etc.

SPEAKER_02:

Um interesting. Okay, and I think a lot of people, me included, are going to be really curious about this thing. And maybe Doug and Mike, you can speak to this. How do you go from something like idea to saying here's a prototype and then giving somebody giving you money for this product?

SPEAKER_04:

Back in the day, we so I started really kind of playing around with this idea back in 2012. Technology is obviously vastly different between 2012 to 2013. The first piece was to just say, okay, is this something that we can actually build? Because it's never been built before. So that was kind of like the first step. And we said, okay, this is something we can build, it's gonna have all kinds of scalability problems, etc. And I can go through all kinds of challenges we ran into there. But then it was about socializing. I wanted to see my own inbox and see if my hypothesis was correct. But then it was all about can we actually prove that this data can add value to an organization? So I took the prototype, a sales deck, and I had a gentleman, his name is Craig Abod, he's the CEO of CaraSoft, which is probably one of the largest companies in the world that you've never heard of.

SPEAKER_03:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04:

Um, I don't even know how much revenue they'll do this year, probably 30 to 40 billion in annual sales. Um I went to him and I said, Hey, here was my hypothesis, here's what I came up, here's you know, supporting data. Would this be of you know, if if we could integrate this into your sales process, would it do you think it would add value? And he said, This is brilliant. Like we're having all of these problems, Mike, which is customers aren't answering their phones, customers aren't responding to emails. Even our largest customers they may take days to respond, which is, you know, you you've got, I don't want to call them arrogant, but you've got some arrogant people that think, oh, well, I send an email. I always get a response from Jen, and it's like, yeah, but you might get a response from Jen, send it to her on Monday, you might get a response from Jen on Friday. What did you just lose? Four days in your sales process. And what do you want at the end of every quarter? It's four more additional selling things. So he aligned with all of the problems and said, you know what? I'm not gonna pay you, but go talk to my IT organization and see if they can get you the data you need. Okay. They had a custom CRM that they built internally. We started playing around with it. It was, it was truly a nights and weekends project. I had a full-time gig for a better part of a year and a half while we were building this.

SPEAKER_03:

Okay.

SPEAKER_04:

And so we integrated this data and what we call an individual's profile back into their CRM. And what a sales rep used to do was they would come in in the morning and they would say, you know, based on XYZ criteria, these are the 50 people I need to call today, and they would smile and dial throughout the day. Or these are the 20 deals that I need to send follow-up emails on, and they would just write when it was convenient for them and send it when it was convenient for them. And so we took about half of the sales organization, which at the time was around 300 inside sales reps, now they have over 3,000 inside sales reps. We took half of them, we trained them on how to use the system. And then the other half, we just said, keep doing what you're doing. So it was a true kind of A-B test.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, A B testing.

SPEAKER_04:

And so we let this run for about six months. Obviously, we're continuing to enhance things, make things easier, etc. And then we did the back-end analysis, and the CEO said, look, if you can give me a fraction of a percent, connects and email responses, and it just a fraction of a fraction of a percent.

SPEAKER_02:

Because they're at such a big scale, like that's massive, right?

SPEAKER_04:

Right. Any organization would want a fraction of a percent. Like, if I can give you a fraction of a percent on your 401k, you're probably gonna be pretty happy with how very limited with doing nothing potentially. So we started analyzing the results, and we were too, we were like, there's no way this is possible. So their connect rates for reps that were utilizing our system versus not, their connect rates were about 27 to 29 percent higher by getting people to answer their phones.

SPEAKER_03:

Okay.

SPEAKER_04:

Let's look at this from a different metric, which is what is the length of the conversation when you connect at a personalized time based off of the historical interactions? Hey, I called somebody and they answered their phone. Like I got lucky. Yeah, the talk time was on average 38% longer if you used our system, which were all indicated, and the CEO's like, dude, let's figure out pricing, whatever you want to do. Very cool. So that was in 2013. Okay. That was around the September time frame of yeah, September of 2000. We chose the deal in October of 2013. I quit my job in November of 2013. So they became our first customer. Fast forward 12 years later, now they have 3,000 sales reps that use our product every single day. Wow. Um, so just the power and the stickiness of it has been tremendous. So that's kind of where we got our start. Now we thought we were gonna be the next, you know, billionaires, but then that's where the that's where all the roadblocks started popping up all over the place.

SPEAKER_02:

And so that's that was kind of the starting. That's okay, that's nuts. And as you know, I mean, I think people know this intuitively. Like you get an email or a phone call at certain times of day, like on a Friday afternoon, no one wants to talk about business or something like that. I've noticed that Tuesday days are a good day to send out emails for my particular business. I have a really small email list. Anybody like any one of you can probably answer this, but like, what is so important about sending a person the right message at the right time? How important is that? And how do you do that without a system like Seven Cents? How are you all in your own respective business, like deciding when to send out emails to people? And what kind of data do you look at to even do that? That'll be hard because we all use Seven Sense.

SPEAKER_04:

So, you know, more like to answer the question, right? Like one-to-one email, you can rely on intuition if you're working on an opportunity. But you're also going to run into that same situation that I talked about where, you know, I'm working on an opportunity with Jen. I sent her an email on Monday afternoon because it's convenient for me. And Jen really spends quality time in her inbox on Friday afternoons, and then she finally says, Oh, there's an email from Mike. I need to respond to Mike. But again, what I've just done is I've extended my sales cycle by about four days. Whereas if I would have sent her an email on Monday that I had a higher likelihood of her responding, I got a reply the same day. And that's why they always say, like, have you ever noticed, like when you send an email, you either get an immediate response or no response at all. And per your other comment around like Friday afternoons, you feel like maybe that's not the correct time for your audience. I will tell you anybody that's listening to this that wants to talk, call me on a Friday afternoon. Anyone that wants an email response, email me either super late at night, email, or email me on Friday afternoons because that's when I clear out my inbox. I like my inbox at post zero by Friday when I shut my laptop and I'm like, you know what, I'm gonna go have dinner with family. I'll do some work over the weekend, but weekends are more of like just you know, kind of stay away from the day-to-day operations and really do some deep banking and more strategic, more strategic work for the business. So it's all dependent on the individual. Then you start thinking about things like time zones. And if you don't, even if you have a very localized audience, we see this all the time. People engage 24 hours a day, seven days a week. You might have, you know, nurses that are on your list that like to listen to your podcast, but they work in the middle of the night. Yep. So they're never engaging with your emails ever since COVID. People have moved all over the world. You know, I like to say there's no silver bullets.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, that makes a ton of sense. I've kind of just been experimenting with my fairly small list. It's less than 10,000 people on the list that we send emails out to. Now, I'm actually on educative's emailing list. And Boris, I know you are one of the people behind this. You send an enormous volume of emails, right? Like there's three million developers or something like that on your list. What's like the hardest part of getting that right? Do you ever freak out before you hit that button?

SPEAKER_01:

So the funny thing is that you mentioned, oh, I heard like whenever people say, hey, I think like Wednesday at one o'clock is the best time to send an email, it's right for me because it's not true in AIC, especially if you have a large list, because as Mike mentioned, there are time zones, there are different behavioral patterns. What if you know some folks are just taking a few days off or they're on vacation and just stop checking their inbox and they come back? So like how do you like identify, you know, it's it's nearly impossible to figure out which day of the week or time is the best. So when dealing with the large list of like educative over a million context when you're receiving our emails, uh to answer your question, I don't really freak out because thankfully we use seven cents, which is optimizing our send time, optimiz, you know, sending emails at the most optimal time. And the reason because if something goes wrong, the email isn't blasted to everybody. We set different time windows, one or two or three days, and within those days, we can even tweak the subject line or the content depending on the performance.

SPEAKER_02:

Okay.

SPEAKER_01:

Helping us to maneuver depending on the data, real like live data that we're receiving from back from HubSpot, because we're using HubSpot as our CRM. Honestly, just kind of looking back, I joined Educative two and a half years ago, and again, that was my first time kind of managing. And honestly, there is no way, especially in the age where the SEO, like organic traffic, is down, we can't control that part of marketing. The social media has become it, it's only where you have to understand the patterns, the algorithm, how the algorithm works, so you can work favorably and whatnot. The email still remains that tool that allows you to reach folks like at the time you're actually wanting them to see that email. But still, there are some additional filters from Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook, whatnot. They have they're making this game even more difficult because again, the entry barrier is pretty low because anyone can go buy a list. Oh, that's right. Right. So as a marketer, I hate those obstacles, but as a user, I love it because I'm being protected by these bigger guys, again, Google and other companies. Because if that wouldn't happen, I would just get blessed like I don't know, 200 emails per hour or something.

SPEAKER_02:

Oh, yeah. I've like gone through and cleaned out my inbox recently, which kind of leads me to like I'm curious, uh, all you are here would I consider experts on this. What are some of the biggest mistakes you see people make when they're doing email marketing?

SPEAKER_00:

I'd like to a little bit of that and say that I work with a lot of companies around their email strategy and they just don't know. It's a technology question, but it's also a content question. And the content is where I think a lot of people are unsure of what to say. They may fall back. I see a lot of people falling back into hey, you know, we went to a webinar or we went to an event or we launched a new product. And that's not helping you. I preach a concept that actually wasn't really created by me at all, but as this guy who was also a HubSpot agency back in the day, early on, by a fellow by the name of Marcus Sheridan. And he was like, he had this whole concept of they ask, you answer. And it's a really powerful, simple message that I try to convey to our clients is that you have this wealth of content that occurs during sales conversations. And if you can capture that and turn that into what you're emailing about, the questions that you're getting, you're gonna get people's attention because if they're being asked in real time, you can answer those questions in your emails and anticipate those questions. And I really ask people to lean into that as a strategy because you're helping people, you're not selling. And you already know what the questions are, you've already got it at your fingertips. So, you know, back in the day we used to. Try and get all the salespeople together and talk and write down subject, you know, like all the questions and then build that content. You know, but today with AI, you can get all those people on the call, like we are now. Synthesize that data with AI and turn it into email content. So it's even easier now to get it out and do it more efficiently. And I think that that's been something that I feel like is where I see people not having that. You just plant the thought in their head and give them these steps and they can execute it.

SPEAKER_02:

That yeah, I've learned a lot. I've done like 700 phone calls with people over the last few years. Like 700 phone calls are just callers from the show. No intention of doing sales, but it's taught me so much. And honestly, that has informed a lot of what I've written because it's been a long time since I've been a beginner developer, honestly. But those conversations have helped me understand some of the pain points of the people that are probably listening to this right now. You mentioned AI. I gotta always bring it up on these shows. And I'm especially curious, Mike, or actually anybody, but especially maybe Mike, because you built this app. How did you use AI to build this? And how is AI integrated into SevenSense?

SPEAKER_04:

Yeah, so we did not use any AI coding tools to build uh to build things, but I our best friend in today's world. But yes, we do employ AI. We've built our own models within the system. So we initially started off with just purely a statistical model. AI has so many broad terms today. It started off as one piece of the product, just purely the send time, started off as a statistical model. And then when we started getting into things like, hey, what is Brian's probability of engaging versus Boris versus Doug's probability of engaging in this specific email? That's when we built a really deep machine learning model. Um and then we just continue to enhance those, you know, all day, every day. As far as our development process is concerned, oh man, maybe about a year, year and a half ago, we started like kind of playing around with cursor. And today, I don't want to give away too much. Well, I'm happy to give it away because it's it's we've built an internal tool that utilizes Claude. It will go through our entire software lifecycle development process, both documentation, it will build tests. So we're actually thinking about spinning it off as a separate because it's just unbelievably powerful. So, yes, we are we are leaning into AI very, very, very heavily. That's this sounds really interesting. I would encourage you to have my co-founder on because he'd love to chat about that.

SPEAKER_02:

Okay, cool. It sounds like you guys are using, I don't want to say real AI. I mean, I've worked for a couple companies that essentially, you know, were wrappers around open AI. I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with that. I think you can make great products by doing that, but it sounds like you were actually deploying your own models out to the cloud and using those like proprietary models, which is super cool.

SPEAKER_04:

Thank you. Yeah, that's exactly. We don't rely on any uh external models.

SPEAKER_02:

Whoa.

SPEAKER_04:

And it's actually interesting. Some of the larger enterprises that we talk to and that are customers, they actually wouldn't be allowed to do business with us if we used some of the larger language models. Yeah. If we're a wrapper sitting on top, purely because of the training models and you know, who knows what open AI gonna do with that stuff, what they're gonna do with it. It's gonna be very hard if you go and like you build a wrapper around something, and then customers like, oh, well, you gotta build your own LLM, and it's like, well, whoa, whoa, whoa.

unknown:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04:

This has been invested in building this stuff.

SPEAKER_02:

We're not gonna build it in a couple weeks or a couple years. Uh we're kind of screwed at that point. That makes a ton of sense. I think that's also interesting for a lot of people that are considering building companies that are kind of wrappers around these tools, that all sorts of compliance issues can likely crop up, and you may be excluded from working with really large companies that have a lot more compliance and things like that that they need to satisfy. I want to get more like into the marketing side too, because this is something that I know that a lot of people are just like aren't used to this idea. They think, okay, I want to start a business. I might need to get a list of people. I know I need to write about them, about something, but Boris, you you do this like as your bread and butter. If you had to go back and like talk to yourself and tell yourself something to do differently, or something you would tell people that are new to email marketing to do, what's like a piece of advice you'd give them for how to write compelling emails or just not to screw up email?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, I actually wanted to add back to your question around the most common mistakes. From a technical perspective, the worst thing you can ever do is just start, you know, register, say, your Google Workplace and just go buy an a list somewhere or just download it elsewhere and start blasting them with the email. So Gmail, just going back to the previous point that the companies are now trying to protect the recipients, the inboxes from being bombarded by hundreds of emails a day. They have learned all these patterns. So if you're just going to blast a huge list of recipients with irrelevant emails or the emails that they're not even connected to them, I'm not even talking about receiving the prior consent. So that's number one issue. Don't ever do that. Second one is the technical policies on how you warm up your IP reputation or domain reputation, or whether you actually have to purchase a dedicated IP address because all those technical parts are really important, especially at the beginning, because there's this warm-up process where you have to build this. The thing is, you don't know how it actually works under the hood. But what I can say as a marketer, what I can assume is that there's some sort of score attached to every single business or business domain. And then you have to build that score up before you actually start getting some engagement back. Just as an example with Educative, to be honest with you, I don't think you're receiving emails every single day because Seven Center is a smart distribution of emails. But just as an example, we have this Wednesday email product update sent to basically entire list. And Gmail knows that that's our best performing day. That's the largest volume of the email that we're sending through HubSpot. However, we tried to send it on a different day, but it just completely crashed, like the worst performance for that type of email ever.

SPEAKER_03:

Oh wow.

SPEAKER_01:

What that means, I tried to dig into that, and what it means is Gmail just already knows that we're kind of that's not our typical behavior, right? Because we taught Gmail that's what that's what we do on the weekly basis. Now we kind of went off regular cadence, and now we're starting doing it differently. So and they start to suppress that because what if what we're doing? We're spamming them, right? Yeah. So many of this technical stuff that you at least learn the basics and start emailing the list with some type of strategy. I'm not even talking about basic stuff like segmentation and you know, things like that for listeners, especially if they're starting their own.

SPEAKER_02:

That's something I didn't even think about. I didn't even think that they would track my behavior as a sender and realizing my biggest day is Saturday typically. I never even thought that maybe if I had things that were out of that norm, they might actually suppress it. Now, both you and Doug use seventh. I'm curious, what has been a takeaway or something interesting that you've seen from using the product?

SPEAKER_00:

Well, helping my sender score go up. Imagine if I have a list and I'm sending an email to a company. I happen to have 20 people on that list and they all hit that server. You're gonna get flagged. So, you know, Seventh Cent can kind of recognize that you know the people at the other end might open it at different times and it would stagnate that send, and you wouldn't be exposed in that regard. So it's it's incredibly helpful in that respect, you know, so that you're you're not uh it'll take care of some of these things for you behind the scenes in person.

SPEAKER_02:

Oh, that is cool. So it just like integrates and kind of just decides in quotes like here's how we're gonna do this to give you the best possible outreach for your emails. Well, that's super cool. And you don't really have to think about it, right? I'm assuming you're just kind of done.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, oh that's cool. You know, there's some other things I'll add to like what you should when you should do some basics is think about like when you send an email, make sure it's from a person. You know, don't send that info at your company or something like that. Have it like it looks better. Try some personalization tools in your email that helps. First names are like company name within the body of the email as well as the subject line. Think about even adding it into preview text because that's another way you can do it. You kind of also want to keep images at a minimum because images can be a red flag and also open differently in all the email clients. Even the number of links that you put in an email. You got to be careful about that because they'll be recognized as like if I have six links, it looks like a big sales email.

SPEAKER_03:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00:

A very focused tight email that means it's kind of light and has one call to action in it, that's gonna get a better end rate, let's say, and accept it, but also you get a better response because you're focusing people on that message.

SPEAKER_02:

I'm taking some of this down right now. I think I need to pay attention to this. This is good stuff. Boris, what about you? Like any interesting takeaways from like specifically using Seven Sense? I'm just curious because yeah, I subscribe to the emails, obviously. But yeah, anything interesting you've seen from using that product?

SPEAKER_01:

I think for marketers, it'll be a great helper when trying to negotiate the strategy with the leadership because at different companies, the leadership may not necessarily understand all this kind of details about email, the technical part or best practices that which doc just covered. And basically the way it goes is that they have other priorities and they say, Oh, let's just send it to everybody. So basically every single email becomes a priority and has to be sent to everyone. Yep. You you kind of skip the step of explaining that optimized it there. So when using Seven Sense is just doing it all automatically, and basically I kind of have the shield and then say, Hey, well, Seven Sense decided to send it to this specific audience because it was the most optimal decision at that specific time. So that was my main takeaway. Yeah. But I have become a huge fan of the software because if not seven sense educators, the entire email program will end, to be honest, with the amount of emails that we're sending on a daily basis.

SPEAKER_00:

That's you know, there's there's another cool feature inside the software. You can actually create an email and set an open rate that you want to get for an email. So everywhere from five to seven, ten percent, fifteen percent. I let Mike explain a little bit more the technical aspect of it. Let's say to send an email to a list, I want to ensure that I get a 15% open rate for that email.

SPEAKER_02:

Okay.

SPEAKER_00:

You can set that within the email that goes out.

SPEAKER_02:

Oh, this is really interesting, as I know, and maybe other people open rate is incredibly important. I mean, for obvious reasons, you want people to read the email, but also I believe, and you would all know this better, if you have a low open rate, that can also hurt like further emails from going out. If you have a really low open rate, you may be marked like a spam or something like that, I assume.

SPEAKER_00:

Mike can explain. So you have this one technology within the software that says, okay, we're going to optimize when we send it, but we're also going to look at it that this email when you send it and ensure or try to get to this suggested open rate that you want for that email.

SPEAKER_02:

Okay.

SPEAKER_00:

Two aspects of it.

SPEAKER_02:

That is interesting. Yeah, I'm curious, like just how do you because I what I imagine is it gets to the point where it reaches that, then it stops sending the email or something?

SPEAKER_04:

No, not necessarily. So essentially, what the one of the pieces of the AI that we've what we've trained it to do is say, look at Brian's pattern of engagement, look at Boris's pattern of engagement, look at Doug's pattern of engagement, understand what their pattern of engagement is. The great thing about data is the AI has seen people that looked like Brian before. And then the AI can say, well, I've seen people that look exactly like Brian that have this pattern. What was their probability? Like at what rate did they engage in the next email that was sent to them? So it is not content-based, it's pattern-based. I've got a target open rate of 20%. It packages everybody at 20% probability or greater together. And it averages those people together and it says, okay, if I average everybody that has 20% or greater probability of engaging in this email, the average is 27%. So the AI is then going to say, okay, I've got actually 7% that I get to play with. And then what it's going to start doing is start grabbing people that fall below a 20% probability of engaging. So those people might have a 0.1% probability of engaging to a 19.9% probability of engaging. And it grabs as many of those as it can until the full average of the sending audience is at 20%. Very so it's doing probabilities, and that's how it determines who the email is going to.

SPEAKER_02:

Damn. Yeah, no wonder you got a good product here. Jeez. And I swear to God, this isn't like a commercial. I'm not getting paid at all to do this. I do email marketing, I think it's one of those things that like really no one talks about. And it's really funny because I think most people that want to start a business, they think, uh, you know, obviously you have to have a product, you know, obviously you have to get the word out. But then no one really talks about the other part. I'm a pretty small business, I'm not nearly as large as most of your customers, but I know how important this. That's where most of our money is made, which is usually why you get into a business in the first place. But before I let you guys go, or before I get into some hot takes actually from you guys before we take off, I I want to know just this. Like, imagine you're a lowly developer like me, right? And you want to start a business. What is like just some basic advice, uh, especially Mike and Doug, that you would give to somebody who might be from like a coding background or just maybe just not in business that says, I want to like start a business.

SPEAKER_04:

So I'll start there. And this is a conversation that I have actually with my older son almost daily. Like he he sits there on his phone, he plays video games, or find something that you are absolutely passionate about and go look if there's any products out there that help with this passion. Go try out one of those products, see what you like, see what you don't like, see if you can make it better, and just go build the thing. And you're gonna learn a lot about building the thing. Um, and if I was a developer, they still travel every once in a while. Build something for yourself, and then if you have the passion behind it, and it's like, oh wow, then you can start showing it to people. You can get like real honest feedback. What I would not start with, unless you've done this multiple times as an entrepreneur, is a pitch deck. We made this same mistake. We went, we could do a whole podcast on Mike pitching the top-tier VCs in the world, and all of the responses that we got back, and the whole fundraising, you know. But uh again, if you could find something, if you have a pitch deck, you're not gonna get real feedback.

SPEAKER_03:

Yes.

SPEAKER_04:

When you start getting real feedback when you have something that you can actually hand to somebody, and they you come back a couple weeks later and you say, Hey, what'd you think? And if their response is, Oh, I haven't logged in, I haven't looked at it, I've given it to 20 people and all of them give you that exact same response. You probably don't have a sellable product at that point. You don't even have something that somebody wants like even experiment with, adopt. That's why when you see products that go viral, it's because they have that viral component to it of like, hey, this either can help me believe people buy products for one of three reasons. One, it either makes them money, it saves them money, or it makes them lazier. And when I talk about lazier, that can also mean reduce risk for them. Um, and those are the three reasons why people buy solutions. So, long story short, find something that you're absolutely just 100% passionate about because if you do strike some level of gold, as much as you might read on TechCrunch and all these other places, there is no overnight successes. Yeah, again, we've been building this business for 13 years, and I'm still waiting for that hockey stick curve of growth. We have responsible growth, yeah, and we don't grow at all costs. We've decided that bootstraps help fund the company worth seven figure a year, ARR cost. Well, thank you. But it's 13 years of like really, really hard work. And if I wasn't so passionate about it and trying to help our customers, I would have given up five years ago. I'm giving up part of my life to build this company. So uh, you know, I don't know, maybe one out of a million gets, you know, strikes gold and it goes viral day one, but that usually doesn't last either.

SPEAKER_02:

I love everything you said. I think that's I mean, I'm on a much smaller level, but even so, it's like anything that's worth doing, it's usually gonna be hard. And it's true. Like, I think a lot now with social media, we reward the people that have these massive successes so quickly. Um, and that's just not the reality for most of us.

SPEAKER_00:

You know, less so from the kernel of the idea and building it from there, but I see a lot of companies just make mistakes by having balkanized tech stack and they waste a lot of time trying to make things work and talk to one another. When you have your CRM and then your email and your social media and your website, and they're not all interconnected, you're just wasting time. You know, there's solutions out there, I think, that do a lot of that. Obviously, it's HubSpot is one. And there are a lot of different price points that you can do it. But you know, you you save a lot of heartache, I think, when you think about an integrated solution, because you you don't want to burn so many cycles and man hours to get you know these things to work because you want to, you know, do the other things that make your business thrive. You know, you shouldn't have to worry about like the plumbing working at all. So it I would say, you know, think about a coordinated tech stack.

SPEAKER_02:

That that's actually a really underrated one too. And I bought this business that I currently own, and it was like website here, marketing tools here, and it was like a custom-made site. And it was tough because every time I do marketing stuff, I'd have to code the stuff myself and then make sure the integrations worked and make sure the cloud service provider, it was a nightmare. I switched it all over and it made my life so much easier. And then I could focus on actually doing the actual business rather than coding, which I do for a living. And I'm like, okay, cool. Yeah, it freed me up a ton.

SPEAKER_00:

Excellent. It's not like having me, I think about all the issues that are under the hood around email marketing.

SPEAKER_03:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00:

That I don't want to have to worry about. Take that away from me. It's part of my tech stack, because now I need to focus on the content of that email, and no one's gonna help me. So that's an example right there.

SPEAKER_02:

Too many developers love to tinker around with stuff, but it's not making any money doing that. What were you gonna say, Boris?

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, sorry. I was gonna say this is a perfect segue to the point I was actually going to make. Um I do have a little bit of data analytics background, but at the same time, at educative, I work with uh a lot of content writers. I read this content and I kind of understand our audience, developer audience. And here's what I would say uh developers tend to be introverted generally, just naturally. Yes. And my advice would be to just go out there and try to have conversations with non tech people. Marketing sort of has become tech industry or tech field on its own, but try to talk to people who are not like pure developers. And while talking, you can discover all those niches where you can actually start to apply your skills because if you're a beginner. At the moment, like what you could probably see in front of yourself is so there are different programming languages. There's Python, there's Go, Ross, and whatnot, right? But learn, like, try to see if there is actually the app to feel out there in the market. Try to learn more about that or like whatever marketers are actually like in desperate need right now. And try to see if those technologies are applicable to what you might be potentially building, and that can help you kind of choose the direction. And just as Mike pointed out, if that's your passion, just keep doing it, doing it, experimenting, and then eventually you'll get to a product that will just be offering that specific solution for you know whatever needs and problems exist out there for non-tech people.

SPEAKER_02:

I think that's a big one too. We like developers just get so caught up in like, I'm not building another tool for developers. And I'm like, there's so much more out there than like more developers that need more tools. We already have a lot of tools for ourselves. Excellent points, guys. That was really good.

SPEAKER_04:

I'll bring up one other story because this one I think will hopefully resonate. I was talking to a friend of mine's son who's about to graduate from University of Virginia with a computer science degree, and he was telling me how he's just absolutely fascinated with ethics and AI. And I said, Do you know how many lawyers live in northern Virginia and how many I could introduce you to that deal with AI and ethics? They know nothing about technology. Go sit down with one of them, understand what their entire day looks like, ask them what you absolutely hate doing. Go automate that process for them and then iterate from there. You could literally build a product for a very, very niche market that focuses on AI and ethics, and it's a subject that you love, and you get to code and you get to write the code behind.

SPEAKER_02:

I met a dude that did that. He didn't know anything about trucking, and I worked for this guy actually. He has a million-dollar business now, he's very successful, and he didn't know anything about trucking, went to do what you basically said, went to a port of Oakland, California, sat down in the station and learned the ins and outs of this one guy's day and all the things that sucked. And he automated it. And then he built a small yet powerful business. Really cool story. This is exactly what I think that more people should listen to. Before we take off, where can people find you all online? I'll have it all in the show notes as well. Where's the best place to reach you?

SPEAKER_04:

For me, it's email, obviously. Mike M-I-K-E at T H E seventh S E V E N T H sense S-E-N-S-E.com. I'm also fairly active on LinkedIn, but those are the two of course email. That makes total sense.

SPEAKER_00:

All right. Email Doug at optimize3point zero.com. That's the word optimize, the number three, the word point zero, the number zero.com.

SPEAKER_02:

I'm glad you said that because that was totally not how I was imagining it. And for me, it'll be LinkedIn. Okay, cool. And I'll have all those links in the show notes. Thank you all so much for talking to me today. And yeah, really appreciate you coming on the show.

SPEAKER_04:

Thanks for having me. Enjoyed it. Thanks so much, Brian, and for everybody that listened. Thank you as well.

SPEAKER_02:

That'll do it for today's episode of the Develop Yourself podcast. If you're curious about switching careers and becoming a software developer and building complex software and want to work directly with me and my team, go to parsity.io. And if you want more information, feel free to schedule a chat by just clicking the link in the show notes. See you next week.

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