The Journey from $0 to Millions: Daniel Iles’ Social Media Blueprint

If you’ve scrolled through TikTok in the past few years, chances are you’ve seen Daniel Iles. What started as a career in accounting turned into viral success as a finance influencer, leading to the creation of one of the fastest-growing social media agencies today. In this episode of Beyond Social, hosts Reggie Azevedo and Vitaliy Veksler sit down with Daniel to discuss his journey, how he cracked the code on monetizing attention, and why brands need to rethink their social media strategies.

From the power of organic content to tracking the right metrics for business success, Daniel shares actionable insights that can help creators, agencies, and business owners build a sustainable brand—without being at the mercy of brand deals or ad spend. Whether you’re looking to scale your social presence, convert views into revenue, or simply understand the future of digital marketing, this conversation is packed with real-world strategies you can apply today.

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Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction & Meet Daniel Iles
• 5:30 From Accountant to Influencer: Daniel’s Unexpected Career Shift
• 15:00 The TikTok Breakthrough: Why Short-Form Content Changed Everything
• 25:00 The Reality of Brand Deals: Feast or Famine?
• 35:30 Taking Control: Launching a Business from Social Media
• 45:00 The Social Media Funnel: Top, Middle & Bottom Strategies
• 55:00 Views vs. Revenue: What Metrics Actually Matter?
• 1:05:00 The Role of Consistency: Lessons from a Two-Year Content Grind
• 1:15:30 Business Owners & Social Media: Why Many Get It Wrong
• 1:25:00 Scaling an Agency: The Challenges of Growth
• 1:35:30 Organic vs. Paid Ads: The Right Approach for Different Businesses
• 1:45:00 The Hidden Costs of Social Media Management
• 1:55:00 Automation & Tools: Why Tech Matters in Scaling Social Media
• 2:05:30 Social Media Myths & Misinformation
• 2:15:00 The Future of Social Media Marketing
• 2:25:00 Final Takeaways & Advice for Business Owners

Transcript

0:00

If you're a content creator just working on brand deals without your own business to promote, you are solely at the whim of these companies that like come to you and choose to work with you or not work with you. Welcome back to the Beyond Social Podcast, the show where we go behind the scenes on how marketers are doing amazing things. I'm Reggie, one of your hosts, and today I am extremely excited about the guests that we brought in. Chances are if you've scrolled through TikTok in the past five years, you've You've probably seen Daniel Ailes. He started crunching numbers as an accountant and now dominating social as a viral finance influencer. His journey didn't stop there. Now he's leading one of the fastest growing and most successful social media agencies out there. Vitalii and I sat down with him for a fire conversation. It's packed with game changing insights and it'll make sure to help your brand achieve real measurable results. We're excited to share that with you. I promise this first episode is really going to be about my curiosity. Yeah, learning a little bit about what the customers have asked and all that. So that's kind of the goal. But, um, first, thank you. Thank you for flying in from Anchorage. I know it was a very long flight. Yeah, no, it's good. I, uh, I'm used to it. Whenever I got to leave Alaska, it's like a big trip and I like buckle down and, and, really brace for it. Is it always overnight when you got to do it or? Almost always just because Alaska is like way out there and the flights aren't very convenient to get to anywhere else but... I'm good, I slept for 12 hours, ready to go, super caffeinated. 100%. In Miami it's a little warmer so I'm sure. Yeah. We appreciate you being here for sure. So, you know, Vitaliy and I, every time we bring in a guest, it's always interesting to learn about the successes, what have kind of led them to be where they are. And you've gone from accountant to influencer, if I can say it like that, you know, financial influencer on social to now running a very successful business where you're coaching, you're helping, you're an agency. Uh, correct me if I'm wrong, but like, this is a really fast paced move over a short period of time. I'd love to hear. I guess your story, how you got started with all this. Sure. I started in accounting and helping boutique, um, construction businesses scale their business. I was kind of on the like, uh, consultancy side of that. Worked with businesses between one and ten million dollars a year. So pretty small businesses, but I was, uh, kind of like a strategic partner for them, helping them interpret their data because most of the construction guys were, you know, very "constructiony" and didn't understand their business from a financial perspective. So that's what I was there to do. And alongside being an accountant, I was also a real estate investor. I worked up to about 14 properties, uh, 14 units of my own before that income kind of took over the accountant's income. So I left my accountant job to be a full time real estate investor. And on the side, I was also making content on YouTube. And I did that for about two years unsuccessfully before TikTok came around. I started posting on TikTok and almost instantly that was successful for me. The barrier to entry was a lot lower. I was able to make a lot more videos in a single day rather than like sitting down for a 20 minute YouTube video. I could just film a 30 second TikTok for my phone. And so, my second month on TikTok, I had like half a million followers. My fifth month, I had over a million followers. And that really gave me the platform and the confidence to be able to like stop real estate investing and just go into teaching people about personal finance and investing. Uh, their money on social media and that was kind of like my gateway into social media. I had a long stint teaching personal finance on social media. I think it was like two, three years, which like doesn't sound like a long time, but in the world of social media, two, three years is a while. I was doing it for a while. Um, before I realized that the brands that I was working with. really would just come and go and I didn't have any consistency in that income. I made great money, very glad for the companies that I worked with. Um, you know, some really big names PayPal, Venmo, Fidelity, Robinhood, some of the largest financial institutions in the world, as well as some of the biggest like brands in the world all together, Dr. Pepper, Amazon. I'm grateful for that, but it was very much like a feast or famine. And I was always waiting on the next brand deal to come through. Just kind of sit, wait. And it wasn't something that I was easily able to pursue or increase my revenue through any kind of effort of my own. And I even had an experiment where I just like, stopped posting for a while. I initially planned six months. I was like, I'm not going to post for six months. I'm just going to see how with no input my business runs and how much money I make. I made the same amount of money after six months because I just like recycled my old content but the same brand deals still came through so I extended that six months to almost two years where I didn't film any new content other than like once in a while doing a brand deal and my income didn't change. So it was like a testament to that if you're a content creator just working on brand deals without your own business to promote, you are solely at the whim of these companies that like come to you and choose to work with you or not work with you. And then, And then, Because of that and my experience in not having like success to influence the success of my own business, I decided to start my own business on social media so that I could take the attention that I was already successful at getting and convert it into a product that I had full control over. So instead of having to wait for a brand to reach out to me for a campaign, I would just run my own campaign. And understanding, like, how to get the attention, how to convert those eyeballs, really allowed me to have an incredible amount of success from day one. I would see, you know, I can't say the name of the brand, but like these financial companies, they would pay 15, 000, 20, 000 for a single 15 second video that I would do, 15 to 45 seconds, depending on the scope of work. And it's like, man, they just paid me 20, 000 for a 30 second video. That's crazy. They got ripped off, is what I initially thought. Like, they told me the price, so I just took it. But I thought they were getting a bad deal. And then they would come around again next year. And then the year after that. And then like the year after that. And I was like, okay, there's something going on here for them to not be wanting less money. Like, it has to be working for them to some degree. And it absolutely was. It's just because they understood business more than I did. I only understood getting the attention, you know, a few million views. I was like, you know, how's that worth 20, 000 bucks? Well, to an established company, it absolutely is. And when I was able to translate that into my own business, and create my own piece of content that cost nothing. Like I didn't have to pay myself 20, 000 for a 30 second video. I would just post it and it's free to post and it would drive, you know, the same amount of traffic it did for these big brands. As soon as I was able to capitalize on that with my own business, instead of lining the pockets of like these large corporations, I was just able to put it into the bank of me. And that's when things really took off for the company. Wow. So, I mean, it sounds like the equation there for you was, first learning how to get the attention and then realizing that not just getting them, but it's keeping their attention and then monetizing that somehow to build a successful, monetizable, profitable business. Because I guess you were kind of doing that for the other folks, right? They were definitely being able to make some money. I wanted to dive into like that YouTube period, right? Because for almost a year, you said you were posting. And I mean, a lot of people would have given up a couple of weeks in. I think the majority of people who are trying to create content online to a certain degree will usually give up before the first six months. So how important was that consistency for you? And I guess kind of what motivated you to keep going? I could see that other people were successful. And so I knew that it would work for me, if I could just be like those people. And one of the things that um, stood out to me about everyone else is that they were doing it for a really long time. So I just had different expectations going into it than I think most people. Most people they, they post their first video and they're like, ah, shucks, this one didn't work. And they post 10 more and they're like, oh, the whole thing doesn't work. And it's like, no, you just posted 10 videos. You know, social media works, but if you adjust the timeline to, you know, your expectations of it working in 10 days. You're, you're rarely going to have success. But if you expand that time horizon to a couple of years, you know, if you're new, if you've never done something like this before, I think it'd be kind of weird if you were really good at it on your first day, right? Some magic. Like you never start a job and you're like, I'm going to be one of the best people in the entire world on day one or like in month one. That's crazy. No surgeon thinks that, right? They take 10 years before they even start getting properly paid for their work. And I think if you just had that perspective, it would be a lot easier to be successful. But I started posting on social media. The first year I got absolutely nowhere. Second year, I got my first thousand followers. The two years of posting two to three times a day got me 1000 followers. And then, when I translated that skill set, that knowledge, uh, everything that I had learned on YouTube, which is a really competitive platform. By the way, never recommend someone to start on YouTube, you're gonna get crushed because all the other competitions have been doing it for like 20 years. Oof. Look at the biggest accounts. They have two decades of experience, it's hard to step up and compete with them. But I started on a platform called TikTok, which was really new back then. And the competition wasn't as steep back then. It's still not. The distribution platform is really easy to get into. Anyone that's wanting to start, you're going to have such an easy time with Short Form. But I started there because of the skill set that I built over the last two years on YouTube. Really grinding my teeth, having no success, and still like Putting in the work, I had half a million followers within my first two months posting on TikTok. So relatively, it blew up fast. Two years, a couple months. But in the big picture, it still took a while. Yeah, because it was two years and then I got half a million. Right, right. So, I mean, one of the things that I find really interesting is a concept that people who watch or listen to our podcast, but also the agencies, the social media managers that I talk to in Vista Social, It's always this notion of attentions, people's attention, the public's attention. It's always shifting. Do you feel like some of the skills that you were able to pick up when you were doing YouTube and then into TikTok, are those, are those things that have to constantly be adjusting the strategy? Or do you feel like there's almost like a formula that could mostly work if you kind of just stick to it? Yeah, I think the strategies and trends are always going to change. I think there is some component of that to success on social media, but that's like the 5 percent of the success that you could have. And if you try to rely on 5 percent chances, you're not going to be able to have a business that's 100 percent like capable on social media. And I think the other 95 percent is just general skill and communication. Like, camera. Camera communication? Like, being able to not be shy when you're looking into the camera, or like... Sometimes it's the shyness. You could play that off. You know, you, you can have as many edits and takes as you want, so it's not a really big deal. I think most of it is just being able to know your customer and communicate really well to them. And that comes with experience. So when you work with your customers, I want to hear a little bit more about your agency and what you guys do right now as well. But have you found that those skills that you were able to get with your, your team and your experience, is it pretty transferable to the different industries that you guys work with? Yeah. That's one of the things that was actually really surprising for me is understanding that anyone can be successful on social media as long as they're successful somewhere else. I think of social media just as like a medium to communicate. So if you're really good at something and can communicate your success in that medium, in that platform, like if you're a doctor, if in your hospital or in your clinic, you can talk to patients very well, diagnose well, and prescribe things that are successful for patients. That method of communication should translate over to social media because the only difference is instead of going one to one, one to your patient, you're going one to many and talking to multiple people at once. And it's actually even more powerful because you can help so many more people with a single conversation instead of only having the person that's in front of you in the clinic. But the consistent variable there is that you have to be good at what you do, you have to actually know it, because if you're just trying to fake it on social media, The downside is that instead of just one person knowing that you're faking it, you're going to have millions that know you're faking it. You've got to have some, some real skills, some real experience, and some real success in the real world that translates to being able to commun... well, maybe it doesn't translate to being able to, but if you're able to then translate that into communicating that well on social, that could be the formula to success. Yeah, it's just putting that successful person with a good idea or a good thought that has worked in their niche, their business, whatever their medium on social media and just communicating that. But one of the, one of the things, again, going back to maybe some of the questions that I've come across with our customers or even, you know, with Vista Social, it's like, man, the grind. I'm a business owner. I'm posting content. I've been told to post three days a week. Now I'm being told to post five days a week. We've got our ads turned on and man, it's, Huge hole in my pocket at this point and the biggest thing is like, man, I want to drive results. Can you tell me a little bit about what results means for a business owner and why we should focus on results versus views, for example? Yeah, I think views are a leading indicator that sometimes are not congruent with the lagging indicator that people are actually interested in, which is revenue. I think as a business owner, all of our goals are the same. Money, right? Very simple. But then they look at success metrics like views or engagement or followers and try to attribute those to perceived success. And it's completely incongruent to actual revenue. And oftentimes, for many B2B business owners, if they have a professional service, they are actually, uh, very rarely going to overlap. If you think about a, for example, uh, just using a well known name, Hermosi, he targets B2B business owners doing over a million dollars a year for his, uh, private equity, like, you know, um, investment house that he does. So. So, that offer is for business owners making over a million dollars a year. And the people making over a million dollars a year do not go on social media very often and leave a bunch of comments and leave a bunch of likes and spend a whole bunch of time watching videos. So, if he tracked only those view engagement like comment metrics. You'd very rarely see that his target demographic engaging in that way. And it's completely opposite from what his actual goal is, which is revenue. It's almost like a false metric that gives you a false positive. Like, I'm getting more views, I'm getting more followers, I'm getting more engagement, but the business owners he's targeting don't do that kind of stuff. And so with my content specifically, I only get like a million views a month now. It's actually not that much. But, and I almost get, Like no comments, no likes, because business owners don't do that. If you're running a million dollar business, you might scroll on TikTok or Instagram for a little bit, but you're not going to be super engaged in the community, commenting on all my posts. Like, none of my private clients do that. But they do follow, and they do see it, and when they have that problem that I can solve, uh, they just work with me instead of continuing to Engage in the free stuff. So it's a very different metric to track, um, and it's difficult to track, uh, the revenue coming exclusively from social media. But if you can get a good system to track that instead of the views, the engagement, the likes, you'll be way better off. Is, is there anything that fundamentally a business who is trying to maybe pivot or transition into being conversion or dollar focused? that they would need to do if their strategy thus far has been views or engagement. Is there something so fundamentally different in the way that the content is created, the strategy behind the social media or the marketing in general that needs to shift? Yeah, if they have been really focused on views in the past, sometimes this happens to such an extreme case where I just recommend starting a brand new account. Um, when you focus on views and when you have a top of funnel approach that gets views at any cost. You often stoop to levels in the business that are non congruent with your actual target demographic. So if you're making dancing videos or memes or whatever on social media but trying to get business owners as clients, you're actually probably repelling the business owners by making memes and content that they wouldn't naturally watch. So if that's been your entire strategy so far, and you have a lot of followers and a lot of engagement, you're Like that from that kind of content. I'd probably recommend just closing your account down, starting a new one, actually talking about what your customers want to hear. Because on the old account, you've built up so many followers that are non congruent and are never going to transfer over, and you've told the platform that those are the people you want to go after because those are the people you make content for. And if your demographic is actually different, if your social media content isn't working right now, you probably need to change something before it does start to work. You said top of funnel, so I assume that there are other activities that kind of lead to them converting. And I did, you know, go into one of your school groups for a bit and learn some of the content there. And I just think it's, it's so interesting your approach and your organization's approach to making sure that your strategy aligns with the end goal, which is moving them down that funnel, getting their interest. Can you walk me through a little bit? And I, you know, obviously we're not going to share everything because, you know, the secret sauce and all that. I'd love to share everything. All my stuff is free. If anyone wants to, like, learn from me, all the educational material that's free for us to give away, we give away for free. It's only the stuff that like actually costs me time or money or my team's time or money that we, that we have to charge for. I don't know if it's the same for professional businesses, but if you're just hoping for the free stuff, all that's available for free. No problem giving that away. I love to give away free stuff because I've learned so much for free stuff on the internet. And I've actually built my entire business on giving away free stuff. Like that's what I do on social medias. Give away free information to as many people as possible. That's awesome. So why don't we talk a little bit about that then? When we, when we talk about, okay, found, The foundations of focusing my social strategy on converting content. I want content that's going to help me as a business owner to drive business. What should I be looking at when it comes to content creation itself? So, I think of social media as any other marketing strategy and any kind of marketing strategy needs to have a system. We think of it as a funnel. So you have a top of funnel strategy, a middle of funnel strategy, and a bottom of funnel strategy. And for top of funnel, you're doing what you can to get in front of the right people and to get their attention. This is kind of like your first foot in the door with the target demographic, the person you're trying to reach. Middle of funnel is once you've got your foot in the door, try to talk to them and communicate that you are a successful business owner in what you do, you have industry specific knowledge that can help them, and you try to build their trust, you kind of nurture that audience. And then the bottom of funnel strategies is what do you actually need to say or what kind of content do you need to post to make money from people and charge for your services. And you need to have all three stages of the funnel to be able to properly get someone's attention and then convert them. The issue is that most businesses only focus on views or they only focus on asking for money and they don't have all three stages of content working in unison to be able to have that proper client journey. And it's a crazy thought, but that's what they do in every other marketing cycle, like with paid ads, with any other kind of traditional advertising. But for some reason, businesses haven't realized the same stuff that works in other media also works on social media. Wow. So we've got that engine going then. Let's say we do have that cycle of. We're producing content for top, middle, and bottom. And I do want to dissect that a little bit further as well. But I think one of the challenges that I'm being transparent, even at Vista Social is attribution. It gets tough, right? And when it comes to organic, a lot of networks don't have links. And, and if they do, maybe links get stripped and UTMs. I mean, a lot of our listeners probably have come to the point where like, I give up trying to attribute social interactions to sales. What would you say to that? First, I do think you have to track. And if you start tracking stuff, you'll be much more successful. It's just like in fitness, where if you track your weight progress, whether you're trying to gain weight or lose weight, You'll probably be much more successful in that endeavor than if you just never look at your weight and then hope you're, you're going up or down. Being able to see measurable progress often results in more successful, long-term, measurable progress. I think just tracking and if, and if you really want to get into it. There was a doctor that did a study and that found the most successful single thing that you could do for weight loss if you're trying to lose weight is just measure your weight every single day. They tried diet, they tried water, they tried sleep, they tried exercise, they tried all these different things, but the one variable that made the most consistent difference, if stripped of everything else, was just tracking your weight daily. And the patients that tracked their weight daily lost more than the patients that didn't and did all of the other stuff. For you guys, for your clients, what specific things are you tracking? What are the activities or the journeys that help you to indicate like, hey, this is working well, let's double down on that? If you want to get really technical on how to attribute revenue from social media, you have to have a separate link that tracks your social media traffic. From every other traffic. If you're running paid ads on meta platforms, that link has to be different. You have cost per click on Google or YouTube ads, that all has to be different. Any kind of advertising medium that you're using has to have separate attribution. Or that type of traffic so that you not only know how much traffic you're getting, but what that traffic looks like, how much money they're generating for your business, and then the downstream effects of how they affect your business. Like if you know all your difficult clients come from pay per click on Google, maybe shut down Google and rather move that revenue to other platforms that seem like they're making you the same amount of money, but just with way less problematic clients. What about organic channels where maybe links? Aren't a thing. No, they are a thing. Like link in bio and any kind of like third party tools that allow you to have someone comment and then you auto DM them a link, just have that link be separate from all of the other links that you use to your website. So we have a funnel for our marketing business that is the same exact funnel, just 20 times over copied and pasted with a different URL slug that channels people into its own funnel. So the Instagram funnel is. identical to the Facebook funnel, but with different links. So I can track how much of my revenue and how many customers come through Facebook versus Instagram versus YouTube versus all of these other things. And that attribution allows me to make really good business decisions on where to double down, which platforms to go harder on, and which platforms to prioritize, not only in terms of views, which is a cool vanity metric, but actually in terms of revenue. And that's where my customers come from. The end goal ultimately is revenue. So really everything from planning, uh, strategic goals, it has to be revolving around business goals, just like ads based marketing strategies are, right? One thing that I'm always curious about, I have conversations with agencies and even brands a lot of the times where, man, it's just a lot of work, creating videos, creating images, whatever it is. And they've maybe decided, you know what, we're going to just post a handful of things every week and, and that's okay. Because it's a lot of work. Do you agree that it's a lot of work? Do you agree that maybe we shouldn't do it if we don't have the time or the ability to invest in something like that? It depends on what your customer acquisition cost is and what the maximum customer acquisition cost allowable is. So a lot of businesses don't really think too much of how much they would pay for a customer or how much their business could sustain paying for a customer. They kind of just get customers and hope that more come through the door. All of the businesses that we work with that say they start with referrals or word of mouth, I hear that as thoughts and prayers. Like, I'm just hoping that more customers come in and I actually have no control over the system. So the first thing we do is we put a system in place for one, tracking what your current customer acquisition cost is, understanding what the maximum allowable customer acquisition cost is, and then putting a media system in place, whether it's social or paid or whatever, to acquire customers at or below that customer acquisition cost to be able to reliably and predictably scale the business. I don't know if that helps answer the question. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Absolutely. And it's hard, right? Because if you don't know, one, how much it costs you to support or to deliver for that customer, then it's going to be hard for you to do the rest of that math and understand, okay, how much of a budget do I have? Does social fit into that? Does ads fit into that? Like referrals, affiliates, there's so many different channels, right? But like, I'm also curious to understand from your perspective when we talk about maybe a traditional spray and pray method, you're going to go on Canva, use a bunch of templates. Fill in my calendar for 30 days with designs that I pulled off of that. Um, how effective? Something like that. Yeah, it's probably not very effective at all, which is why most people, uh, that do that stop doing that very quickly. I don't think social media, a lot of people when they're just starting out, think of social media as like a billboard. Where you pay money, and your thing gets shown, and then like hopefully someone calls. But pay money, get results is the, that's the expectation that people have getting on social media. I think of it a lot more as like a relationship. And if you've ever just like paid money to the person you're trying to date and then hope it works out, you know that that's not like actually what happens. It takes a lot of time, it takes a lot of consistent effort, and it takes actually a lot of hard work dedicated to that thing. But once you have a great relationship, You, you know, you're set for life. Ideally, that's the goal. And so, instead of having this short term perspective of let me just throw money at the problem and hope it gets solved, you should treat social media like a relationship, where you expect to be in it for the long term. You expect to have a consistent amount of effort and a lot of work over that period of time. But you also have the expectation that it's going to be the best thing you've ever done. I'd love to kind of hear from you as we wrap up. Like, I'm a business owner, been on social, maybe I've got a team also that's working with me to get our socials going organically, maybe some ads. What are kind of your top suggestions? That are going to be the biggest differentiators if they just make these three or four switches in the way that they're executing their social strategy. I think of paid ads and organic social media as two sides of the same coin. So, whether you're running ads or just posting for free, hoping to get customers, both of them are content. And if you can just be really, really good at making content, making good video, and communicating your thought to the ideal customer, you're going to be successful no matter which one you do. But then the time horizon changes between organic and paid. Paid is very, very quick. You can spend 100,000 in a single week and reach tons of potential customers, drive revenue for your business. It's expensive. You just spend 100,000 bucks. Alternatively, you could post on social media for years, get up to hundreds of thousands of followers, and then post 15 videos, pay nothing, and still drive hundreds of thousands of dollars of revenue for your business. That was our first month in social media is just having an incredible amount of revenue come through. from the audience base that I had previously built and the skills that I got in making the media. Both work, and it depends on your level of patience and commitment to the process. If you know you're going to be in this for 10 years, go the organic social media route. Practice those skills, build that audience, because once you do have the audience, it's completely free to get customers. Your customer acquisition cost is like 10 dollars that it takes to edit the video. Versus on Facebook, you know, you're going to be paying out 30 percent of your entire business's top line revenue or more to get customers. And that's a really expensive drag on your business. If you can do both, you know, start with both, but it depends on what your goals are and how patient you can be with this. Patience. Patience is key. I guess every guest almost talks about that, right? You're not going to get results overnight. And obviously maybe you make the little lever on the ads and within a week, you're going to spend a lot of money, get some results. But I'd love to hear a little bit about what you guys are doing with your clients. Cause this is super interesting. You, you and your team have a ton of knowledge experience that you've gathered executing real life results for yourselves. And it's translated into being able to execute results for your clients. Can you talk to me a little bit about what you do for them? Some of the you've been able to drive. Sure. We help people build brands on social media or their coaching consulting agency and just basically help them get in front of millions of potential customers without having to pay for ads if they don't want to. A lot of our customers actually come to us spending 50 to 100 to a couple hundred thousand per month on ads. And when they have the social media systems in place, when they're able to make organic content that really performs well, we have some of them that just turn off their ads altogether. And they either scale their ads back, they save 50 percent on their ads, one, because the creative is better, that drives better results, but two, because they have a more loyal following that would convert without having having to see an ad and some that just choose to not play the ads game altogether because every single month you know you have to pay Mark Zuckerberg to be able to promote your thing and every single month you start at zero and if you don't pay into it you don't get customers from that platform and social media is the exact opposite where the more you pay into it with your time and effort in building the audience the easier it becomes to build that audience. And if you look at Mr. Beast on social media, you know it took him years to get to his first million. His second million came a year after. Ten million came a year after that. Hundred million came a little over a year after that. And then two hundred million came less than a year after that. So it's this exponential trend in the positive direction of you making more and more money, the bigger you can build your audience instead of the inverse effect. The Facebook where the bigger you get, it actually costs more to reach new audiences because you're going broader in your targeting. How hands on do you usually get with, with your clients when it comes to working with them to build that audience that they can tap into over time to decrease their ad spend or turn it off altogether? Yeah. So we usually with audiences or usually with customers, we start if they are spending on ads at improving their ad creatives. And that's immediately anywhere between a 40 to 80 percent cost savings for them. Some it's a little bit more, but those are usually outliers. If they're just making really bad ads, that's the first thing we fix. And we save them more than the cost that it takes to work with us, usually in month one, just by improving their ads. The second approach is over a little bit longer of a time horizon. So it's building up their organic social media, building up the brand that they have, and how they're known in the space, to be able to make more than ads ever could. And usually that takes three to six months, but we're very involved in the entire process of social media. The only thing we don't do It's actually get in front of camera or the client because they're the expert. That's not something that we're ever going to be able to replace. But if we can be the expert on social media and they can be the expert in what they actually do for their business, perfect combination to just really be successful on social media. Perfect partnership. And I know that you mentioned that, um, long term relationships obviously are there, but the goal is really to help the customer internally with their teams learn that they're able to execute that. Yeah, so we don't operate like a regular agency. Just because regular agencies suck. I've paid for them multiple times before. And it's the same kind of perspective that doesn't work on social media, which is like you pay money to a billboard and you get customers. Really, social media is about building that relationship. And so we show our customers, our clients, how to build a relationship with their audience on social media. And once they understand that, once the systems are in place, social media isn't hard. Like once you have a million followers, social media is super easy. So we come in, build out the systems, train their team, show them what they need to be doing. And then after a few months, we just step out and let them run their own thing without having to, you know, continuously charge them every single month for it. That's amazing. I'm sure they're super grateful and as a result they develop new skills. Their team's able to execute that. That's amazing. Yeah, so Daniel, um, With your agency and with the need to scale the agency hire people, onboard more customers I'm sure you're using a lot of tools. Can you walk us through the tools you're using, why you're using them um, and maybe uh, Kind of we can lean into the social media management aspect of it specifically, but you can maybe set the ground by just sort of outlining just broadly the tool set that you're using. Specifically for scaling the company, I think a lot of people overvalue the use of tools. Like everyone has access to the same tools. It's not like one company is using a specific tool that you're not and that's going to be the growth to scaling. I don't think it's, it's like specifically related to scaling, but yeah, there's a lot of tools that we use to be able to manage all the clients and have a large team doing all the complex stuff. Um, so of course the basics like Slack, the Google suite, all those are daily for us. And then in terms of social media management, there's a few, um, like platforms that allow you to better communicate with customers through automated DMs that we like to use. And then of course, the big, big lever that we just recently found out over the last six months is being able to post for clients without actually having access to their social media platforms. Because a lot of clients, they feel fearful to give out their personal credentials to the social media platforms. So we needed a third party platform to post on their behalf, handle it for them without leaking that sensitive information. And so that was one of the big changes for us. You said the last six months. I want to dive into that. So why, why in the last six months, I guess? Have you kind of decided that it was important to pursue something like that? Yeah, just taking a page from what our customers wanted, understanding like what they were coming to us asking for. One of those big things was like, Hey, can you just like handle it all for me? If you have a client that says that, you have to be able to also post because that's a really big friction point and it's a way that you can provide a lot of value for the customer by saving them time. Having a platform that allows you to do that. Uh, was able to, uh, just increase, uh, the stickiness of the customers and be able to improve their, uh, LTV for us. But I'm assuming there is a point in time. So you started an agency, you've gotten some successes, right? You've gotten some customers, as I'm sure some other agencies watching this would go through kind of similar process. Is there a point in time when you sort of just realized that in order to continue to grow, you must use certain tools? As in, otherwise, it's never gonna sort of scale, right, or, you know, by how many customers can you truly manage without having the right automation tools and, you know, what is automation in your case? Yeah, on social media, if you are manually posting your own videos, you're like literally wasting the most important thing in your business, which is your own time. So the next step to that is hiring someone to post for you. And then the furthest extent of being able to outsource and kind of automate that is using a posting tool like Vista Social to just like have all of your content go out with a single click of a button. Like that's the biggest time saver in that continuum that you could possibly have. You mentioned using perhaps assistants to post on behalf of customers. Instead of, let's say, using an SMM tool, because I kind of see that as a progression, right? So you have somebody starting to service customers, manage their social, at first it's easy, a handful of profiles, then they get an assistant, still easy, maybe a dozen profiles. Um, then it becomes more and more challenging. Uh, but isn't there sort of a fundamental trust issue also, uh, and risk issue for the agency in doing it in this way? Not to mention the whole scaling problem. Due to the fact that you would have to own the credentials to social profiles. of your users. First of all, I guess my question is, A, did you ever, were you ever in the situation where you own in the spreadsheet somewhere credentials to these social profiles? B, is that maybe still the reality where in some cases you have to? And maybe C is, are you committed to just not doing it anymore? Yeah, I think Having your social profile passwords, like, handed over to any agency is an incredible risk. I would never recommend that to anyone that's on social media. Never give out your credentials to your personal brand on social media. That's the worst thing that you can do on social media. I can't think of anything more dangerous. So we've never personally accepted client social, like I specifically never asked for them, I never want to hear them and I tell clients do not give that to anyone because it's very risky and it puts the liability on us. We've always either not done it or had a third party platform that does that process for us or has some kind of intervention in place to work. Like an SMM tool. Yeah, yeah, yeah, right. Got it. But in terms of, uh, and, and obviously, Full disclosure, that's what we do, right? So we are a social media management and we exist for that purpose. But I've seen mixed reactions from people, agency people, that is, when it comes to managing social. As a matter of fact, I'm kind of saying agency, but I guess it also applies to any organization. That has, uh, social profiles to represent them, you know, online or, you know, within social, but somebody needs to have those passwords, right? So who has that in the organization? So I suppose the problem is sort of, you know, more applicable, applicable to more organizations, just agencies. Yeah. Uh, but I guess I've heard sort of this anecdotal kind of feedback that, hey, in some cases, You've got a customer that is so difficult or that is so hands off, busy, you know, running their own business that they just don't want to participate. They, they, you know, here's the password. And unlike maybe places like Facebook, where you could delegate some of the managing access through Facebook, but at TikTok, you know, you, you would have to own the password. So you're saying that you are just saying no to, in that situation, or are you kind of saying, okay, maybe in some cases we still would do this. Yeah, specifically with how we solve that problem is we use Vista Social and I, you know, just for full transparency, thanks for having me out here, but like I tested almost 30 different competitors. Like I personally went through, signed up for their program, paid for it, and like used their social media management tools to find out which one was the best. Most of them were missing very key features that I know are very important to actually grow on social media because I have the experience of getting millions of views and I would never recommend my client use one of those simply because it's lacking feature that I thought my clients could not live without. And then of like the 10 that had all the features, I tested all of those and some had issues with content distribution. So I'd post a video and it would get like, One view, or like 10 views. If you've ever used a social media management tool like that, you know what I'm talking about. And then, of the few that were left, uh, it was just a matter of like, how many platforms could I post to? You know, some of them were missing YouTube, which is a really key platform for me and a lot of my clients to drive revenue. YouTube is a massive platform. It's one of the biggest. I can't not post on YouTube. And so it came down to really just you guys. And I'm saying this completely as a third party, like I chose to throw my account at the risk of like, you know, any of these things that could happen with these poor social media management platforms that you guys are not for six months before recommending it to any of my clients. I put my own millions of followers on the line with a social media platform and trusted you guys with that. And then once it worked, once I saw that I was getting, you know, all the, all the benefits without any of the risk that some of these other platforms had, I decided to roll out to my entire client base. Awesome. I mean, first of all, thank you for trusting us with all of this. To touch upon the point you made about tools may be impacting the performance of your content. And this is something that Reggie, you probably have a lot more sort of anecdotal knowledge of users reporting, that maybe they're not seeing performance on their social, uh, when posting through SMM tools versus when they post natively. Um, what's, what's I know that's been a lingering topic, almost sort of like an urban legend that SMM tools sort of somehow are impacting negatively the performance. Are you still seeing this? Has that dissipated? And if so, then maybe we can talk to Daniel about what he thinks about that as well. Yeah, that's a good question. First, I just want to, everybody listening or watching, Daniel, we brought you out, so I want everybody to understand fully. Daniel has been using Vista Social for a while. He's a customer. But, uh, as connecting with you and your team, we just thought it was so cool how you guys were able to scale your agencies, the results you've been able to drive for clients. And that's, you know, the big motivation to bring you out here is to talk about how, how can we help our customers or even listeners to be able to replicate some of that success in our agency. So disclosure there, just to make sure that there's no awkwardness in that regard. But absolutely. I think that the biggest, area that we see a lot of these questions come around like,"Hey, I'm using this tool. I'm using that tool. I'm nervous. Is my reach going to decrease?" We see that a lot in kind of the pre sales, right? So before they sign up or they try us out, they're exploring, maybe they heard something online or they watch an influencer online who's talked about that. Um, I haven't experienced that. I know that as an industry, there was some third party research that was done that was, was paid for about half a decade or so ago to try to get to the bottom of this. But yeah, I'd love to hear a little bit more about your testing and, and I guess how important that was, right? Yeah, I've, I've noticed this with some tools myself, personally posting on my accounts because I've never risked a client account on something like that, but I've more so noticed it way more commonly with clients that have a social media manager or a VA or someone else posting on their behalf, like 90 percent of the time when they have someone else posting on their behalf that's a VA they get like 10 views or 5 views on their videos when they post. And it largely is due to the geographic region from which their assistant is posting. So if they're posting outside the U. S., if they're not using VPN, they just like limit the views because there's not a large audience to test in that country and so it never gets distributed to a larger audience. So if you're using a VA or an assistant or whoever to post your content and you're not getting the views you want, the immediate upgrade you can make is to a social media management platform that posts for you and just have that same VA post through there. That way you won't get that limited distribution. Uh, or of course, you know, you could have the whole thing with them having a VPN and then logging into the VPN before they post from the country. But then you're still kind of risking giving your private account passwords to who knows who in what country? Yeah, and the challenge with VPNs too is like, sometimes those IPs will get blacklisted by these networks, right? Oh yeah, VPNs are totally known. So, there's no hiding behind a VPN these days. Uh, VPN addresses, they're mostly data center IP addresses. And they're just known to be data center IP addresses. So, yeah, I think if networks did want to go after IP addresses and people's presence, Um, I think for us and for tools like ours, right, um, posting happens through a server, in our case it's hosted in the United States. I think most of our competitors, at least, you know, the top dogs, uh, they are also hosted, sort of, in the United States, so, it's mostly representing a fairly trusted set of IP addresses from which the content originates. Yeah, but you're totally right. We've had situations where VAs will be in various sort of locations and one of the reasons why they were using an SMM tool besides the whole password business and security is to kind of shield that sort of location element. Although I always wondered, since our servers are in the States and kind of maybe it's helpful to the U. S. based customers. What happens to, say, Australian based customers? Are they okay with the US IP address surfacing? Or do we need But in any case, I think that kind of me, the techie that I am, kind of, it always interests me what it actually means, if it is a relevant sort of metric. But to the question of performance, You mentioned that some tools did still give you perception or feeling or direct sort of information that the performance did degrade on your content when posted. Why do you think that is and have you seen it consistently or is it maybe more? Because part of the questions that we've seen is like, hey, it's happening, but oftentimes, hey, Is it just the content itself that's non performant? Is it the time of day? Is it just something within the network like some sort of a fluke? Because a lot of these findings weren't consistent. Yeah. Um, what has been your sort of, um, opinion on this and experience with this? Sure. So I tested this myself and the reason I have such a strong hypothesis that this is the case as of like last year is I tested a social media platform. While, you know, testing all these others for my clients, myself. And I had millions of followers, I was averaging tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of views on my videos. I used one of these platforms, posted on TikTok, I'm not going to say the name of the platform. And my video got 10 views. So I go from an average view count of like 60, 000 views per video, down to 10. Wow. And I was like, oh, there's something about this one. And it might be that they were posting, you know, with a server that's not in the U. S. I actually had a client who traveled to Colombia. He was consistently getting thousands of views on his videos, if not tens of thousands. He traveled to Colombia. One week he was posting himself. He had like a string of videos only get 100 views. What do you think happened in his videos? I'm like, I have no clue, man. A month later, we found out He was in Colombia during that time. He didn't use a VPN and it just didn't get distributed the same way. I'm not saying that that's always the case and that not everyone has that experience, but if you have the choice, I would say post, if your audience is in the U. S., post from a VPN or a server that is in the U. S. or use a tool that does that for you so that you don't risk that. Right, but assuming you're using the tool, are you still seeing in some cases with certain tools degradation of performance? Yeah, yeah, there were some that I tested. Again, I'm not going to name names here. It wasn't you guys, that when I tested, it performed worse, and that was one of the reasons why. And in your findings, you're saying that some tools did and some tools don't. And I find that, again, me knowing how these tools operate. Yeah. Meaning that we all use the same sort of APIs that these platforms give us. We go, go through. It was a really small tool they used. It's a, it's a. Yeah, yeah. It was like a four person team that did it. But, okay, so maybe it was just a matter of maybe them not being fully approved or something. Or fully compliant. Fully compliant. Possibly. I know that there are these tools that kind of do things that are not supported by the APIs. For example, publishing of stickers to stories. And I think a lot of these tools, they're using scraping effectively, right, to publish. So one thought that I always had is that obviously these tools would behave very differently in terms of performance, versus the sort of the API based tools. But now within the API based tools, there is still a good dozen from what I would consider highly respectable platforms out there. Some are very known. Um, have you found them to also maybe suffer from some of the performance issues? I think it depends on your definition of Well known. I, I've looked at all the competitors, and you guys were the only tool that like really had everything that I know to be necessary to be successful on social media, and also didn't limit reach. It's like this Venn diagram of like, do they have all the tools that someone actually needs to be very successful on social media, and do they not limit reach? I think you guys are the only one. And maybe there was one more and they were just like, not as well supported on some other platforms. In your opinion, if the platforms do somehow penalize or treat content from third party platforms as second class citizenry, why do you think they may do that? Um, so what do you think drives the platform to maybe not like certain content or a certain content as it originates content from a certain user. I don't think that they necessarily dislike content from a region. But let's say you are posting an English speaking video from Colombia. The way that the platform is going to distribute that piece of content. First it's going to test a small segment of the demographic. And if you're posting in Colombia, that small segment is going to be people in Colombia, local to the area, uh, near where you're posting it. And I noticed like my feed when I, you know, flew down here to Miami. There's a bunch more Spanish content than what I saw when I was in Alaska. So it really depends on where you're posting from to test that small market segment. And if it's unsuccessful, if that piece of media you post is unsuccessful with the testing demographic, it's not going to be distributed to the wider demographic. It's not going to reach millions of people or tens of thousands of people if it underperforms a smaller user segment. So that's probably why. But that's like account specific, right? So that's like a particular user. But here we are sort of theorizing and I'm thinking about like if there's a situation where a particular tool cannot be trusted because somehow the network doesn't like the tool, um, and could it be because of Maybe some, I guess, abuse or some lack of enforcement by the tool of who is also a user, because you're not going to be the only one using the tool. There are, you know, thousands upon thousands of other users. And if the other users, if there is more abuse of sort of content, more spammy content kind of originating from one platform, would that be potentially the cause for everybody on that platform to sort of be brought down in terms of performance? I'm actually not sure how the tech side of that works. One of the things that you said earlier that kind of made sense to me was like, your servers are in the U. S., and that seems to be a very important thing. In other countries, or if another platform's servers are in China, for example, and if that piece of content that they post gets distributed to a Chinese audience first before going broader, it would make sense that an English speaking piece of content distributed to a Chinese audience wouldn't perform, and so it gets stuck at 100 views and never really expands beyond that. Good point. Just a hypothesis. I kind of had a theory too, though. I mean, when you're talking about, like, maybe potential abuse, or, I think there's two things that come to mind. One Is that, I wonder if, when we talk about failure rates, right, technically speaking, we send content out to those networks via the API, and then they're either going to accept it, and it gets published, or they're going to say, hey, there's something wrong with this, and then they bounce it back. I wonder, if because we're, you can speak about this a little bit more than me, we're so diligent about trying to make sure that we decrease as much failures as we can. If just our higher or like tools like us who have higher, like say, acceptance rates of posts that are going out, um, end up just, I don't know, possibly getting better. It's very possible because sort of, yeah, part of our sort of design principles sort of included, um, this realization that it's very difficult for the user, such as you would say, let's say, for example, you're uploading content for a client to upload a single piece of content is going to work across multiple channels. Video content specifically, uh, video formats, video dimensions, aspect ratio, sort of all sorts of things. So, our platform does indeed do a lot of sort of processing of media for each network. Therefore, it reduces sort of the failure rates with networks. It's possible, uh, that that is a contributor. Somehow, though, uh, An additional layer that we also have, I think, that is perhaps is not as enjoyable by some users, but is certainly sort of, um, respected by them at the same time, I suppose, is our enforcement of anti spam kind of behaviors within the system. An example would be, you can't really post the same content. over and over within a short period of time from our platform. Um, we're doing this out of, sometimes in some cases, we have to abide by these rules as in the network requires it. In some cases, there are such blatant indicators of abuse to the point where, uh, and, and, and again, Reggie could talk about that, where the users will be asking this most, uh, I don't even know how to describe it, the content repeating. This is one of the questions that just baffled us for so long. Somehow people feel that they must repeat content over and over again and that's acceptable. And why in the world do we not have the feature where you can just say publish it five times? And we talked about this in a previous episode. I know, Daniel, we chatted about this earlier. I think that there's There's a time and a place. Let's put it that way. You had a lot of success in our previous chat, where you took a break for, was it like a year or two? And you just recycled your content. But you had two years worth of content that you were recycling into that period. What we're talking about here are requests like, I want to be able to take this post and publish it every 45 minutes. Or, uh, these 17 posts every single day, or these, I mean, we do cap some of them at like 25 posts a day. Some people will reach out and say, hey, like, I need to post a hundred, a hundred tweets. And we've been reluctant to build it, although some of our competitors have it, right? I think the term that they use is evergreen content. Content just gets sort of recycled. And, and you, and, and, and, and Reggie's right. I mean, you've spoken at length about quality versus quantity. And, you know, uh, and, and not be the billboard, right? Um, What are your thoughts on platforms that sort of continue to offer these features that are clearly almost anti purpose? Yeah. Uh, but yet you can still recycle content. As a software. You guys are in a tough spot because you got to give customer what they want, or else they're going to turn. But at the same time as a software, you have the benefit of having thousands of customer journeys, very well understood. And you can see at a high level what the most successful customers do and what the least successful customers do. I think there's some responsibility that you guys have of pointing your customers in the right direction. and disincentivizing negative activities that would eventually, you know, ruin their social media brand and then have you lose them as a customer because they can no longer Uh, Afford or Justify to do social media. So one of those is posting too frequently. We recommend our clients never to post anything that's the same piece of content within a two month window. If you post something, you got to wait at least two months before you post it again. And even then there are some other requirements that we generally recommend for best practices. But when you have a massive video library of thousands of videos, it would be silly never to do some reruns. And actually the most popular like network television is reruns. Like people want to see it again and right now the platforms don't have a really good method of distribution of old content. Basically if it's been on the platform for two weeks. It's never going to get seen again by anyone unless they like, purposefully scroll back through your channels and like, watch it again. So there is a justification for posting it a second time, but with the underlying principle of understanding that you are trying to do this for your relationship that you're building with customers. Or with clients on social media. And you would not want to over spam them with the same exact piece of content. So you really gotta put customers first. And that's what all of the social media platforms do. Is their main income source, the customer that they're serving, is their user. It's the people on the platform. They want to respect their customers, their users. And if you can align your goals with theirs, that's great. So if you have an amazing piece of content that gets 10 million views, post it again for some new people to see in a couple of months. But if you post it every 24 hours, you're going to be wasting their time. They're going to not want to follow you. And in turn, the platform is not going to distribute your posts better in the future because they see you as an abusive, uh, account. I like that. That's great. We've been waiting. We've been really talking to a lot of customers because we're really trying to figure out, this is one of the most requested functionalities, let's be honest. It still is, yeah. I would love it, by the way. Yeah. If like, you could push a button and then like schedule it to auto repost in two months, give me like 60 days, and then just like have that. But still control the window a little bit. But that's what I'm saying. Maybe there's like a middle ground here where we have it, but it's like. I think... Yeah, so obviously, as you can tell, you know, we have certain product customer relationship tension, you know, within our team. Because you know better. And the customers, they request things that they don't know because they don't have as much visibility as you guys do. Some things I feel like I know better, but some things I feel like the customers know better because on the ground, things are always less theoretical and academic than sometimes it is in the tech. But I think the, um, there's nothing in the system today that necessarily would prevent them from publishing every two months and we try not to go overboard with too many restrictions, because obviously we can't predict every legitimate case and need for this, so there is this balance. But I think we started off the conversation by talking about sort of the, um, where the applications can become less performant. Simply because on those platforms, users are behaving in more erratic and more spammy ways. That's been my sort of concern throughout all this time, how do you give users functionality, but don't create an environment where things like that thrive? And not to sort of say that I'm necessarily concerned about a user who is sort of experimenting and failing as a result of repeating content, but I'm more concerned about this shadow kind of banning almost situations where all of a sudden the entire platform begins to underperform on network and now the users who are just legit and doing things much, you know, much more sort of, uh, objectively well, all of a sudden they get penalized. So that's been sort of the internal tension. Uh, but I want to kind of cover one more topic. is, um, have you with SMM tools, which we've now sort of established to be sort of integral to sort of an agency setup. Have you found, um, limitations of these platforms to be sort of detrimental to the point where you have to go out of these platforms to do this? And the reason why I'm asking is because I know for a fact that simply because we're using APIs that are more restrictive than native apps, there exists limitations within SMM tools. Have you found, how have you dealt with them? Have you found them to be just too much to handle? Have you found workarounds? There's nothing with Vista Social that stands out to me as like a limitation. The current stories. No. So you guys don't really use them? Yeah, the, specifically with stories, It's a lot more of a live feature that you don't want to schedule and have posted in advance. Uh, just like going live. Ah, that's interesting. So you're not even thinking of stories as a scheduled content. Like it shouldn't be. It's a good point. The most successful stories are not going to be scheduled. And there are instances where like promotions need to be done on a certain time at a certain hour. There's definitely cases for that. But that's if you've got like a million followers. Most people under a million followers would benefit a lot more by not having any functionality to schedule their stories. Like lock that feature, because it's not going to serve the customer, and even though they want it, like, it's not going to be helpful for them, it's just going to waste their time. Like, they should be on their actual phone, talking to their customers, or like, making the story right there. If they, and we've noticed this through, uh, client data as well. If they make a very polished story, or a very polished static image post, it looks commercialized. And it actually performs worse than something that is a little bit more organic, a little bit rougher around the edges, because that seems more authentic to their audience. Got it. What about some other limitations? Let me just sort of go on record here a little bit. So for example, uh, some content does not arrive in real time. Certain networks don't report. Comments like YouTube, for example, doesn't report to any tools real time. Have you found that to be, like, unacceptable? Because, obviously, sometimes we find users agencies, as an example, especially up and coming ones, that come from the environment where they used to have an app, and everything is real time in the app. And they go to an SMM solution, and things are just not as real time sometimes. And, obviously, they're like, hey, you know, I can't run my business if things are not real time. Can you run, is that a realistic ask? Well, have you, is it possible to run a business if it's not real time? Is it okay to respond to a comment an hour later? Like how, have you, what, what have you seen? I think of real time versus like scheduled and planned as two separate pieces of content. I'm talking about more like on the comments that are coming in, like coming in, let's say you posted a video and the comment, you If you're using the, obviously like a YouTube app, you can see the comment right then and there, you can respond. If you're using an SMM solution, at the best it will be, you know, a few minutes later, in some case could be like two hours later. Have you found that to, because we see users who see that as a big deterrent to using SMM tools, is it a big deterrent? There's, there's one case for immediately being able to respond to someone. And there's one case where you plan and organize a response later or just have some delay in feedback. And it's both in how users engage with your content and with how you engage with those viewers. If you need a quick response to something, go live. That's why live streamers are so successful. Their chat is always blowing up and it's always like, what's happening that second? Uh, Twitter, or sorry, um, Twitch has that figured out really, really well. And their live experience is always great. The VODs that they do, which is like a delayed viewing thing, is very bare bones. Because they understand that they prioritize live engagement. So if you want live engagement, post a story and engage with the story live, uh, or the responses or the comments you get on there. If you want like actual comments from customers or from viewers or from whoever's engaging, go live. YouTube has that function where instead of just publishing a video and scheduling it out, you publish it and then you have like a live, they call it a premiere. So there's a separate function for that. Otherwise, for every other thing, there's an expected amount of delay. If there's ever a promotion that you're running that you need a quick response to, or you need to be able to catch people right when they comment. You have automation tools for that. Software like ManyChat to be able to respond to someone and give them a link if you absolutely have to have a quick response. I think that function of a delay, whether it's a minute or 15 minutes, is completely irrelevant because most of the times in that situation you're not posting the type of content where the viewer expects a live and instant response. And if you were needing that kind of thing you'd use a different medium like lives. I love that. I'm going to cut this piece, I'm going to send it to our support team so that when we get those questions, it's like, Hey, here's the answer for you. You guys are justified. No worries. How about, um, probably one of the most painful areas in SMM sort of tool usage is profile disconnections. Profiles disconnecting for variety of reasons. And that's been such a sore subject to the point where we are having to sort of, provide sort of education to the user that that just sort of comes with the territory of being of using SMM tools, because the alternative, as we said at the beginning, is to just do it directly, which we've already established is unscalable, so you have to use SMM platforms. But unfortunately, these connections that you make between the profiles and SMM platforms. We wish that they were permanent, and in a lot of cases they are. Certain networks are really good at keeping those connections quite, quite stable. But certain networks are not, like Meta, as an example, is notorious for this. Um, and people, every 30 days, sometimes every 90 days, it just really depends. Sometimes it's very, sort of, out of the blue. You may have a customer who changed the password and accidentally checked the box that says disconnect all apps. And all of a sudden the apps are disconnected. Obviously it's an existing issue. It hurts, I guess, productivity because you have to attend to these issues. But have you found that to be a deterrent enough of, uh, or maybe you've developed some processes around that? I think expectations are the biggest thing there. And I know that that happens all the time because of the platform APIs. So I don't even worry about it. And we kind of tell our customers that, hey, this is what we're doing. Spend 10 minutes getting logged into this one social media management platform, and then you're never going to have to log into it again until Instagram disconnects it, which happens regularly. So just expect that you're going to have to log in again soon and relink it one more time. It's not a function of the platform, it's a function of the actual social media app. And as long as we set good expectations, like, Hey, you're probably going to have to log in and do this again later. When it does happen, it's not a surprise, and it's not a shock, and it doesn't feel like it's their fault or someone else's fault. Like, oh yeah, that's what happens. So you basically educate the customers. And what if you have a customer who says, this is annoying, I don't want to do this, here's my password. Back to square one. Well, there's, there's ways, there's ways around that, right? Yeah, you know, that's about picking good customers. Oh, yeah. And, uh, yeah, I choose not to work with people like that. Yeah, that's fair, that's fair. For sure. I was gonna say, too, like, so, I remember a conversation that, that was brought up to me a couple weeks ago by our support team, where there's an agency and they had specifically switched over because, they were experiencing these disconnects with another tool that they were using and, you know, I kind of walked through on that call with them. Okay, well, usually it's this or maybe this or this that would have caused it. And, you know, we bundled up, I kind of, you know, helped them to get on board and get all set up and, They were set up for success. Let's put it that way. A week later, they email in and so Humberto from our support team, he's asking me, he's like, Reggie, I was on the call with you. Like, we, everything is fine. Why is everything disconnected? And the customer was pretty frustrated. Come to find out, um, the employee that connected all the meta profiles left the company. Uh, and at that point, you know, there's not much we can do. Uh, but at the same time, you know, educating, explaining to them, Hey, like this is where you can kind of see. Which employee connected the profile and, you know, understand that if somebody is going to be left over the organization or is going to move on, you'll need to do authentication. So I definitely agree there though. Education, the expectations, making sure that there's clarity on how and then how to, how to resolve it as well. I think anybody who's sort of using this as a business endeavor is totally fine with this, especially if you set the expectations, provide necessary how to's and troubleshooting guides and things like that. I think we found less of sort of tolerance to this. Uh, within an SMB and creator community, I think they expect behaviors of the SMM platforms to be a lot more aligned with the native experience that each app has. Um, so that's been more of a struggle for us, uh, than I think the agency, but I think, uh, you're totally right. And that's sort of been the path for us as well, is to, uh, educate people on, on the matter. And luckily, I think with our platform, it happens less, uh, sort of, uh, um, less often. As we've sort of been in this for long enough to know how to deal with some of these disconnections, how to prevent them in some cases, there are some tricks at play. Yeah. Um, but yeah, totally. Almost sounds like, I'll be honest, it almost sounds like a therapy session. Oh yeah. Like we're venting to you and you're like, no, you guys are fine. You're good. Yeah. I appreciate that. Nah, just kidding. No, but that's awesome because like not often do you get to actually talk to somebody who lives through these experiences. Here we are, you know, building a product. But, uh, and, and I guess, We do talk to customers, Reggie does a lot, and you know, I chip in on demos, and I love sitting on these demos, just kind of hear what people really think about what you're building. Yeah. But having you sort of sitting in and kind of just providing, um, very sort of realistic, on the ground, like, listen, this is kind of the way it works in real life, is amazing. Yeah. On that note, I'd love, because in the beginning, you mentioned something, so I'd love to kind of dive into that. Yeah. You said you looked at, I think it was 30 tools, which came down to maybe 5 or 10 tools. And you said that mostly before you even got to testing their product in, in posting things, it was where their functions that were core to what we need in order to be able to successfully help our customers. Yeah. Do you mind pointing out what some of those things were in your decision? I don't remember them off the top of my head. I had a really big list when I was interviewing a lot of other companies of things that I was looking for. One of them was being able to connect like a Google Drive account and post from there instead of having to individually upload a single video like five times once per platform. Because at that point it's not like even automating, like you might as well just upload to the native platform. Uh, the other one was scheduling out in advance and understanding like how that would work. Some apps limited you to scheduling like in the next 24 hours and for some reason they wouldn't hold the ability for you to schedule out weeks in advance. There were a lot that were limited in how they displayed the media on different platforms. It's almost like they hadn't even used the product themselves because they would compress the file to where the video quality was far lower on Instagram, but it would work fine on YouTube because the two platforms compressed differently. So lots of issues like that that we just found through testing was not up to our standards, but you guys had it all. I'm glad you guys figured it out. I'm glad it looks like that from the outside because certainly I, I, I mean, as you described all these issues, I know that we've been kind of fighting them off for, you know, pretty much as long as we've existed. So glad that at least, you know, we've accomplished a, you know, fairly good degree of success with that. But yeah, fantastic. Uh, thank you for coming today. And Reggie, do you have any follow up? No, no. I appreciate you joining us here today. Uh, this is great. I mean, this almost seemed like a session for us to like talk about how this social, how good we are, but I think it was even more instrumental to understand from an agency perspective, like what are the things that are key to scaling? What does that progression look like from getting to a VA to then implementing security processes? And scheduling. I'm glad we were able to get into some of those, what we thought were theories, but definitely seems confirmed here is that there are elements and variables that could very well lead to someone getting decreased reach if they're not maybe using the right tool. Yeah, absolutely. So I guess what we are sort of, let's set sort of the ground for this sort of conversation. So as a business, as a brand, the goal is to succeed, right? There is a question of how do you succeed from the marketing standpoint? How do you achieve the results? Yeah, absolutely. The challenge for any brand is, brand is not, may not have enough marketing expertise. So a brand or a business would have to bring that expertise if somebody like yourself, right? Uh, then, and it creates this entire sort of food chain almost, this entire sort of, chain of different elements that are sort of interconnected, right? So you have the brand, it has to bring in a marketing agency, a marketing agency needs to get the tool, the tool needs to deliver to these social sort of spaces, those social spaces then bring back the result back to the business, and on and on it goes, right? So more marketing, the tool is still there. So I'm kind of viewing Vista Social here as a bit of a, almost like a constant, almost like we are essentially the sort of like the vehicle of delivery. of whatever marketing decides to do next time. But since we are not at the forefront of this relationship, we're somewhere sort of in the middle. So in order for anybody to get to use Vista Social, they will need to, A, first exist, think of what they do as marketing, bring in the marketers, and only then we sort of come into play. So when I talk to, for example, small business owners, They don't necessarily think about SMM solutions because that just to them, it's, it's, it's a mechanic. Like it's, it's not a sort of what's going to make or break their success. Like it's not what's going to make them. But I also feel like a lot of the, particularly small businesses. They really grow disenfranchised and unhappy, uh, wood marketers, they oftentimes, they are let down by their marketing sort of hires or VAs or whoever they bring in to help because marketing needs to get executed in a way that sort of brings the results back. So, and, and if they don't begin that execution, they never come to be using Vista Social because that just sort of further down the line for them. And for, success is not just bound to using, you know, a platform. We're just, again, we're just a mechanic. We just, you know, we just have a vehicle here. I think any really successful business cannot rely on just the most successful people to run the business. Those are outliers. Like, they're very rare, actually. And I think, even further... The business or the marketing? Sorry. They can't rely on the business of customers that are most successful. Like, if your business only exists by having the most successful people work with you, it's not going to work out. And even further, if you're only catering to like the top half percent, the people that are above average in their industry, you're still missing out on incredible market share and you're going to make way less money because by definition, half of people are below average. So how can you cater towards a wider market, whether people are going to be successful or not, and just give them the vehicle to at least try? That's the entire platform of commercial gyms. Like Planet Fitness, 98 percent of their members don't show up month to month. The only reason they exist is because 98 percent of people that pay for it don't do it. But they continue paying for it because it's the opportunity that they've provided. That anywhere you go in the world, basically, you can go somewhere and work out. Or anywhere in the U. S., wherever that is. So they don't actually cater towards the only successful people that are IFBB pros or massive power lifters. They actually cater to the opposite end of the market, the people that they know statistically aren't going to be the top performers. And because they know their audience, because they choose their customers, they're able to be way more successful. Knowing the audience is important. I've always felt almost sad to see so many marketing initiatives kind of get underway, right? Um, businesses that are getting started, right? And obviously, you know, regardless of sort of your background, chances are you won't be able to sort of, I have enough expertise to do it all, including marketing. So you then end up relying on hires, agencies. And those relationships are, I don't know, I'm a cynic, but I see a lot of, um, disenfranchisement, a lot of, uh, failures in those relationships, uh, sometimes because the agencies don't necessarily treat their customers as, um, in, in, in a way that it indeed results oriented. There, a lot of them are very focused on process kind of metrics versus the objective metrics. Hey, we've posted 20 posts for you. We've done email campaigns for that reason. We should go on for another three months or another six months. Uh, but the businesses can't necessarily oftentimes afford long running campaigns that aren't producing outcomes. So, but they have, they struggle because the agency or the, you know, whatever the, the VA is clearly doing the work. How do you square this? How do you offer businesses this sort of, uh, methodology or. Uh, a process to know, like in, in cases when you understand marketing, it's going to be easy for you to track, right? But majority of people, most likely, I'm included, doesn't really understand the nuanced marketing, you know? How do you, uh, how does that work? You know, how do you, what do you tell the business in that case? I could do, do it the best job in the world at what I am specifically hired to do, which is to bring leads and traffic through organic social media, but no matter how good of a job I do, if the business is not set up to succeed independent of me, it's not gonna work. An example is if I drive, you know, a thousand customers to a business that isn't ready for a thousand customers, let's say they think they're the best business in the world. They charge a third of what the competitors charge. They're really, really good. And they're a third of the cost. I bring them a thousand customers, their business blows up. Because suddenly they have too many leads to handle. They can't deliver. They get a bunch of negative reviews. Now no one wants to work with them. Is it my fault? Because I succeeded and brought them tons of customers? Like exactly what they asked for? Or is it their fault? Because they had the wrong product. The wrong price point. The wrong delivery method for what they thought they wanted. And until I accept full responsibility, and like, become CEO and hire my own employees to do that? I don't have control over that. So marketing agencies are always going to be liable and they're always going to be thrown under the bus, even if you are successful, because of the faults of the business owner. So what do you do in the case when, say the business is great, the idea is fantastic, but the space is so crowded and there is so much to spend in that space? I love that problem. And that you, you will fail not because you're not good, but because you're just a one man army or, you know, five man army against legions, you know, of hell, you know, I mean, you will fail by the way, there's no doubt about that. And essentially what you will, well, I mean, you're not going to succeed because again, there are people that are just as serious as you are on the other side, fighting this battle, right? I mean, you're going to go in and you're going to come back to the customer and say something along the lines of probably, Hey, we've tried. We bloodied ourselves, you know, we've done what we could, but there's also not there, you know, because you need to 10x your budgets and the business would be like, listen, I just can't. I think this crowded situation. I love crowded markets because there's an incredible amount of competition and everyone is putting in a lot of work. And if that's the only measure of success of like how much work you put in and how good you can do. I'm always down to compete on that. And I think about social media as like the ultimate battleground, because you're not just competing with people in your market, targeting your customers for your specific offer. You're competing against everyone. I'm competing against people making memes. I'm competing against people making dances. I'm competing against fitness content, and I'm a marketer. Because all of my audience watch those things too, and I'm competing for their eyeballs against information that is way more readily accessible and easier to consume. Is it true that, um, social media offers more opportunity to fight the crowded space versus, say, something more like organic SEO is, is, is less realistic to win in terms of fighting the bigger forces? Somehow I felt that social always is sort of almost like Every day, it's a new day. Every day, there could be somebody who goes viral, even if he wasn't or she wasn't viral before. Versus within like organic SEO, let's say, uh, the process is very slow. The algorithms recalculate really slowly, right? So, your years behind your competition, um, is there truth to this? Is there such a distinction? I think of an example of like a real estate agent and like who they're competing with. If you're doing very sophisticated marketing tactics you're competing against the biggest and most knowledgeable companies in the world like BlackRock. One of the reasons BlackRock isn't wildly successful on social media is because they haven't had as much time in that and experience in that. They also just haven't had as many reps. If you're a realtor competing on social media, you're competing against literal 16 year olds interviewing people outside, like on the street. That's your competition. And the competition of 16 year olds is actually way more fierce than, than BlackRock because the opportunity is also greater and there's just so many more people going after you can, you can reach anyone in the world on social media. So the opportunities are different. I would think about it, Um, from the perspective of, like, there, there's no other market where you can see what literally all of your competition is doing in real time and how it's performing. I can go on my competitor's social media pages, see how each one of their videos did in view counts and get a quantitative analysis of whether they were successful or not. And then I can just use that idea for my own thing, like literally everyone can learn from all of their competition. There's no other market like that where I can go into the back of a private company and see all their financials and understand which products are performing better. Here I have the exact video that they did, word for word, and how it performed across all platforms. And so it makes for a much more competitive environment. You're right. I think analytics wise and just analyzing the data, obviously within social, a lot of it is sort of what is quite available on like the, the SEO space. The reason why I'm contrasting the two worlds and just even comparing them is because, um, when people need something, they go and they search for it. Even today, that's still the case, right? That's where the intent is, right? And capturing that intent. is essentially the bigger game here versus say being viral on social. Uh, at the same time, it feels that the SEO game is much tougher, especially for somebody who's just getting started because of, you know, how slow the algorithms are, how unknown they are, how little you can tell about the performance of your competitors. All these tools out there, like Semrush or something, Um, they charge a lot of money, but it's nothing but a big pretend game. Nobody really knows the traffic. Nobody really knows the Google algorithms, right? So it's a very tough game, but that's where the results are almost, right? For many businesses versus social, I feel like is where you can have that success. Is that true that you can achieve success on social more, sort of quicker, versus winning over ranking positions on, on, in the Google search? There is an analogy that goes something like, if you wanted to get rich in the old Western times, you weren't the gold miner, you were the guy selling the pickaxes. Because if you could sell the pickaxes, you give everyone an opportunity and everyone is your customer. To be a successful gold miner, you have to be the one that finds the gold. But none of the gold miners are going to come back to you and say, "Hey, this pickaxe is broken. It didn't find me any gold." They understand that's not how it works. It's just being a different position in the market to where you can capitalize on the most amount of momentum instead of only succeeding if you win. Right. In your case, I know we talked about this in the previous conversation, but with you're saying, you know, agency, ages of the customer, six months online, unhappy, not driving results. What's been your experience, I guess, in that? How do you ensure that we even bring in clients that you feel like you are able to... And to add to that, that level of impatience, call it impatience, some would say six months is not impatience. I mean, two weeks might be impatience, but to some, six months is a long time, especially if they're small and they're spending money. How do you, I'm sure you've been in that position, right? Yeah. When time goes by and, you know, the results maybe aren't, what do you say? I mean, how do you deal with that situation? I think it always comes down to knowing your customer. More than anything else. And so we know our customers really well. We're very careful about who we choose to work with. So, for anyone making less than 10, 000 a month, we don't even have anything to sell. Go through our free stuff, benefit from it. There's no way that we could charge you money, be profitable as a company, and deliver the results that you expect. I just know that customer demographic. No way I can help you besides for free. Enjoy the free stuff. Once you get better, once you learn a little bit more about your business, once you've got your chops down in that, in that 10 to 50k range, We have a set of resources, a set of software, a set of tools, uh, community, and a lot of coaching that is a lot more one on one that could help you at a low price. Again, because I know that based on our customers, the 10 to 50k a month business owners, if you're making less than a million dollars a month, I know what their expectations are, I know what their requirements are, I know how patient they really are. So I have a product for that specific person. Then if you're doing over a million a year, and then I guess if you're doing over 500, 000 a month, we've got like a whole enterprise solution that is way different. Uh, if you're doing over a million a year though, there's a different way that we serve those customers. A lot more one on one, it's a lot more done for you, and we're still really good with expectations of, you know, how quickly you see those results. But I know that if you're doing over a million a year, you've got some level of patience. And you can make a big investment into something like having our team come in and do a lot for you without feeling the constant pressure of investing into something that you don't see an immediate return on. So it sounds like the And even then, like we have solutions for those business owners because they're doing over a million a month, like they're probably running ads. So we can step into the ads and cover our costs within a matter of weeks. But until you're running ads, until you're doing over a million a month, there's just not enough scale in the business for us to be able to give a really quick ROI. And so with the customers that we can't give a quick ROI, we choose not to work with them at all. And I'm assuming that if you can't get those results, chances are nobody else can either. So it sounds almost like the recommendation to somebody who is perhaps still on the smaller side to really invest into understanding marketing and perhaps doing it themselves. And not look for that sort of opportunity to just outsource it too early. That's maybe where a lot of that frustration would come from. Is that you are small and struggling. You've presumably sort of delegated this to somebody. You took that money out of operations that are already scarce. Yeah. And your results continue to be very small just because everything is small. And that's just not the way to do it. Instead, invest into, say, you know, uh, materials that you have or product that you offer for free, but learn that initial marketing kind of before. I guess we don't see too many businesses thinking that way, I suppose. Right. So a lot of them. hire these, uh, 99 dollar a month, uh, providers that, uh, sort of offer, you know, "Hey, for 100 a month, we're going to do content." But what do you think of those services, by the way, though? That's, uh, Yeah. First, I think knowing your customer is the biggest thing. You could have the perfect product, charge the perfect price point. You could model my business one for one, but if you sell it to the wrong person, you're going to fail. It's like selling scissors to a toddler. Something bad's going to happen. Whether it's your reputation, whether it's a chargeback, whether it's a legal suit. You know, you pick the wrong customer, you've got everything else right, you're still going to be unsuccessful. Because knowing your customer and selling to them exactly what they need, and that unfortunately just takes a lot of business experience and a lot of trial and effort. There's a saying that says, you don't even know how to make a good product yet, you haven't had enough customers. Like, you have to know the customer before you can create the perfect product for them. I think it's very difficult to accept the notion that you don't know your customer. Because I mean, I think even for us, right, I think we've kind of, did not really perhaps think too much initially early on as to who our customer is to us. Our customer seemed as though it It is anybody who has a social profile to manage. But the reality of it is like we're discovering in this conversation is that, uh, customers that are too early may not be sort of right for us and we may not be right for them. Right. Um, but I suppose in that sort of, uh, spirit of things, do you recommend, because I think these smaller up and coming sort of brands and businesses, they're the most vulnerable and uh, to making mistakes and sort of getting into sort of wasteful sort of activities. Uh, all activities wasteful, and the example specifically, it's very tempting. To sign up for these hundred, two hundred dollar a month services that are semi automated or fully automated. And I know some of these services because we service them. Some of these services use our platform to kind of channel a lot of that content. Do you see value in that sort of automation for, first of all, are you familiar with these kind of products? And if you are, like, do you see value or do you just say, stay away? For agencies telling you they're going to do everything for you... Not everything, they're very clear. We're going to do 20 posts a month. Yeah, they're going to do a whole bunch of work for very little money. There's only value in it if you, if you don't get anything from it. But the biggest thing that I think people can get from that is the knowledge and understanding that that shortcut does not work. And then they spend the appropriate amount of money and attention dedicated to an effort that actually will get them results. Wow. Yeah, it's, it's, again, it's, it's, I can totally understand these people, like, they are in a position where, listen, 200 a month is inconsequential, right? Seemingly, there is a promise of certain, right, uh, outcomes, mostly content related, um, and, uh, it's on autopilot. For years and years and years and there's just no, no further progress. So I think we've concluded, right? That small up and coming brands would need to get hands on with it. And from gaining that extra expertise and knowledge, I guess, what are your recommendations there? How does one go about doing that? We see that a lot. with the clients that come to us. They've been through a lot of those, pay me a hundred dollars a month or a thousand dollars a month. I'll handle all of your content for you. And there's a couple lessons to learn there. The unfortunate lesson that too many people learn, which is the wrong lesson, is that social media doesn't work. Content doesn't work. I tried it with an agency. They posted 30 videos. The whole thing's a scam. None of it's real. Sure. Obviously that isn't true. Uh, and the more important lesson probably is that my execution in this specific style was not successful. Whether it's the agency's fault or whether it's the business owner's fault, there's a lot of things that could have gone wrong. And I think that that's the more important lesson to learn. If you can discount the agency and find the best agency in the world, you could still fail if the person on camera, the person making the social media content is not successful at talking to their audience. Or, if, even if you are successful at talking to your audience, you're not a successful enough business owner to be able to convert that traffic in a way that's profitable for you given the time and money invested. Awesome. Wow. Yeah. Yeah. So it almost sounds like for an agency that's nervous or, man, there's so much competition with these very low costs. content machines. It's not like you should be excited about it because they're almost prepping those customers for you as a bigger agency in the sense that you can deliver results if, and maybe goes back to a sales concept, that it's just as important to rule a potential lead out of your sales journey or out of your pipeline than it is to rule them in. I think, yeah, that's absolutely true. And I think that's, that's true for pretty much anybody. I think the, for an agency to consider who their customers are, last thing you want is to onboard a customer. who will be dissatisfied or would fail under your watch, right? I'm sure there are agencies out there who probably maybe don't care, make a business out of it. But I think, uh, in the most sort of sensible way, you wouldn't want to be in that position just like us, right? I think we've discovered that there is a certain segment to Vista Social customers that are more likely to be dissatisfied with the product due to its complexities or due to its, uh, performance limitations, right? Um, and the, this whole, Benefits outweigh sort of the logistical sort of issues, doesn't not exist for them, therefore it's all going to be negative and we are having to kind of also perhaps not pursue certain customers, especially early on in their journey as we would, right? And I think, uh, for them too, they are in their business. I'm sure they're thinking the same way, you know. Am I going to fix, let's say it's a car repair shop, am I going to fix an 85, you know, uh, Buick? Or am I just going to focus on these brand new cars, you know? I think everybody kind of goes through that one way or another. I think it's that acceptance of, of, of, of the need to be selective. Yeah. And, and, uh, kind of keeping the ethical issues of it apart. Because I do find it quite tricky ethics wise. You accept the fact that these companies exist out there charging you a few hundred dollars for content? Because I feel like that is just sort of... I love agencies that say they're going to do everything for like a couple thousand a month. Because when that doesn't work, those customers come to me. They break your customers in. Yeah, they break the customers in. And then on the sales call, we just say, Hey, we're not an agency, we don't do everything for you. But, we can. We can make you seem like the expert in your audience, but you gotta participate. Hope that's cool. And they're like, Oh my gosh, I'm so excited. The other company, they did the exact opposite. It didn't work at all. Really looking forward to working with you guys because I understand that that's what works now. So it's the best thing. Okay. So we're not gonna, we're not gonna go all, um, out on these, uh, companies, you know, uh, running them out of town, but I, I just don't know. I, I feel just personally offended by some of the messaging sometimes, some of the promises. And I just know that, um, From just the ethical perspective, and I don't know how appropriate this example would be for the audience, um, but I had a, uh, a family member, sort of come to cancer, and sort of cancer diagnosis And one of the things that I've noticed when that happens, um, everybody in the family went out Googling or just, you know, whatever, you know, they could find this to the cures and to the reasons, you know, et cetera, et cetera. And right away, I've noticed that everybody, everybody brought back solutions. From let's call them experts or, you know, like all these very odd, somebody offered a, uh, a, an exercise regimen as a way of doing it. Somebody offered the diet, somebody was selling some, some potion, motion, you know, like lotion stuff. And I just knew that they were there. Ready for the people to be searching, or hey, how do I sort of cure, right? How do I get rid of it? And it's just ethically so, and it's so easy to spend on them at that point. All the while, no, I mean, clearly marketing agencies sort of, Cheating their customers out of the money and somebody's cheating somebody out of their lives is not necessarily the same. But it all to me is sort of like feels almost like the same gimmick. I'm gonna do like I know you're gonna search for this keyword as in how do I achieve results for really not knowing marketing or not doing marketing, but I know I'm gonna be right there waiting for you. Because I know that that's kind of people, or maybe like people who are trying to lose weight, and instead of like doing the more difficult part about exercising and this or that, they're going to search, how do I lose weight by doing nothing? And there's somebody on there looking and waiting for you. And I guess I may be like over exaggerating the extent of the ethical issue here, but I always felt it's very, very similar. Yeah. It's very predatorial, right, to be waiting there for somebody to take their money like this. It's, it's very common on social media to give part of a solution with no context. Like the solution of, we'll post one video a day for you, you don't have to worry about the rest, and that's all you've got to do on social media. That strategy does work. There are people that post once a day, and they get incredible results. However, there's also people that post once a month and get incredible results. And the common thing is not that they post once a day or once a month, the results are there in both cases. The difference though is in the execution. How good was that one video if you only got to post once? Versus how good does your video have to be if you only post 30 times a month? And some people, they'll post 30 times a month but not make a single good video. And it's not that they messed up in posting on the right time or the right date or that they weren't consistent for long enough. It's just that the content wasn't even good. Which is the most important part. So for an agency that's starting out, maybe listening to us, I think it's kind of tough to digest, right? Because in part, I can't promise results because maybe I don't know yet how to fully deliver the results for my client. Or maybe I know how to deliver the results. No, I think if you're in that position, you shouldn't be doing marketing. You shouldn't be an agency. Like if you truly, I think maybe that's another issue, right? Is that a lot of people get into marketing and being an agency. Being doing the social media managing. But all they're really thinking about, I'm just going to post content. Yeah. I think let's not even like consider these because. I think if you are I mean you gotta start somewhere, I mean, at one point you started not knowing how to get results. But I mean, can you become a marketer without becoming a marketing person? Like, can you really just kind of begin marketing by start posting without kind of spending time to learn what this is? Isn't this a skill? Isn't there people who go to school? Yeah, there's a skill component to it. I started though with, you know, I started my company when I had, um, like 2 million followers. And I thought, oh, because I have 2 million followers, I can help someone else get. some followers. But what I went through and what I had to do to get 2 million followers is not what most people want to do. Did you read books? Did you go to school? Like, what's your marketing sort of academic background? Yeah, trial and error. If all my clients had to go through what I did to get the 2 million followers, none of them would be around. Did you go to school for marketing? Nothing like that. No, they have to post for three years straight with no results. What does that mean? Three years before you get something. No one wants to do that, so that's not what I sell. My, the way that I got my success is not what I teach my clients to do. Okay. It's very, very different because their measure of success, their timeline that most people are adequate investing into, is far less than what mine was. So how do I come up with the same result that I got, but with the expectations that my clients get? That's the actual really hard part that I had to... I suppose learning from your own mistakes is probably the more expensive way to kind of get ahead, right? Yeah. So, but, uh, to your point, I guess, the marketing agencies, Should be doing marketing, I feel like, if they are able to deliver the results. Can you, like, realistically say that every marketing agency to which you do the demos, or that are using our platform, are results oriented? Or you think that there are cases when they are mostly process oriented? Hey, we're just going to build 20 posts and just be done with it? We have amazing customers. I wouldn't dare answer that question. I'm just kidding. Perfect answer. I would not have expected any other answer. I'll ask it on behalf of the poor marketing agencies, I think the ones that don't deliver results do so in a way that is different than their clients expectations. And if you think about it as like Planet Fitness, does Planet Fitness deliver results? Depends on how you measure results. I love Pizza Fridays. That's the result I wanted. They got Pizza Fridays. You can expect pizza to be there on Fridays, but if the result was I'm going to lose 100 pounds, do all their customers get that result? No. The result that they sell though is this gym is open 24/7 and the treadmills always work. And as long as that is true, the customers will continue paying without feeling upset. But I feel like that analogy, I feel like, so we, Vista Social is the gym, and an agency Is the trainer, I suppose, in that example, right? So, we are certainly always there. Yeah....schedule, you know, etc. But is every personal trainer? Is there still not anything that that person can be responsible for, not deliver? Or is it still like, even a trainer can be at his limits or her limits? When it comes to a certain trainee. They got to go through some basic certification, um, like ISSA or whatever, a body that governs personal trainers to actually be somewhat knowledgeable, but it's in the today so much of the client's results are dependent on the client. So like, I never tell my client, I'm going to make you super rich and famous, get you a million followers and make you ten gajillion dollars. Because no matter how much control I have over their social media platform or how many people they get in front of, the actual results are going to be based on their level of success and their ability to manage that success. I had one client. 24 hours after her first coaching call, got a 6 million view video, like 4 million views on TikTok, 2 million views on Instagram, drove tens of thousands of dollars to her business. But she almost quit because while on TikTok, all the results were very positive and people are speaking very highly of her on Instagram, the 2 million follow, 2 million views that she got. Had hundreds of negative comments. It almost made her quit her entire business. Business makes hundreds of thousands of dollars a month. She was thinking about completely going dark. She didn't message back for two weeks. We didn't hear from her. She was right on the edge of quitting. Because we helped her succeed. It's like, I could do the most for you. You could be one of the most successful testimonials ever, but if you don't know how to handle that success, or if your business isn't ready for it, or if you aren't equipped for it, like, it's not gonna work. And that's not something that I can control. I'm gonna, I'm gonna ask a question there, because I completely agree. There, there's definitely an opportunity there for beyond what you're able to deliver. them to not be ready, not to be prepared for the consequences, but... So are you saying then that you as an agency you guys do at least, you're held by the customers to deliver a certain result though, or is this something a little bit less material, let's say? Yeah, that's something that we've changed a lot through learning our customers. So, when we first started, we guaranteed a million views that was conditional upon a few things. Nice. Like, you will definitely get a million views if you do these things. Unfortunately, despite very clear advertising practices and a signature above and below the line that said, you got to do these things to get this guarantee. Ah, you're one of those. People, people misunderstood what they had to do to get the guarantee. Got it. And it was, in my opinion, uh, a very fair advertising claim that a lot of clients understood, but the few that didn't just made the business far more difficult than it needs to be. So some of the conditions is that you need to post. 90 videos, or however many videos it was, I can't remember. People would read that, and be like, Okay, that makes sense. And then, when they haven't posted 90 videos, come back and say, Hey, I thought I was guaranteed a million views. I'm like, Well, you haven't posted any videos. Like, I don't have any views to give you, because the videos aren't on your channel yet. Like, I didn't get what I came for. Which was the million views. So it's really just setting proper expectations. And right now, by having the expectations be set in a very different way, we're able to have really good client relationships, whether they get the expectation that they came in for or not. That being said, the expectation is very weighted on their results and how much they're able to input. So as long as we have a fair and honest marketing and sales conversation, Our clients are happy. And what I noticed with a lot of our competitors is that they do have promises or claims that even in the best cases, uh, they can't reliably deliver on and that's when people get upset. Awesome. Yeah, so thank you for, for the conversation. I think we've covered a lot of topics. And I think the knowing and helping businesses, particularly early on, I find very challenging. Um, to some degree, even maybe impossible. And I think you've alluded to some of the techniques whereby maybe there should be focusing more on learning versus on sort of hiring right, right away. I think these are some of the things that can probably offer the smaller businesses, perhaps a bit more success. both early on and further down the line. I think you've also kind of helped us sort of rationalize and talk through some of the, um, agency techniques that we're using in terms of content that's being purchased with no strategy in place, uh, tracking, uh, perhaps, uh, not falling into the trap of hiring again, but not necessarily understanding what marketing is all about one area, which is probably outside of the scope for this call, but maybe this podcast, but I think something that I would love to kind of focus on eventually also is on what do we recommend to an agency in terms of how do you find. And I'm sorry, to the business. How do you find an agent? What criteria? Is there a test you can give them? Is there a way to know if they're performing or not? I think we can, we can, that is probably like a whole, you know, episode that we can cover that. As an agency, how do I find businesses that are ready? I think, I think that agency kind of, I feel like understands more because they know the general profile of the business that can succeed. And therefore they're kind of more likely to help them in sort of in the arts of art of war. Uh, sort of, uh, metaphor, the better generals are not those who win all the battles, but those who don't sort of fight the battles that they're going to lose. So I think that's the mentality, sort of, that the agency has, let's just focus on the customers who we can really help. Yeah. I think that's, a very solid, first of all, piece of advice, but also just a very successful strategy to begin with. Just like for us, we know if we, we are much more successful with certain customers than others. We just know it. Right. Um, but I think the, I'm always sort of concerned for the, sort of the smaller guy too. How does that person get started? How does he avoid the pitfalls? How does he avoid being taken advantage of? And I think finding agencies or finding the help is an important part of that sort of life cycle. Uh, probably subject for the bigger conversation, but Daniel, thank you for sitting down with us today. Uh, always, always insightful. I've got a short answer to that agency question. Yeah. Um, I, I hate agencies for the same reason you just said, that generals don't choose to fight battles they know they're going to lose. And using an agency, I think, is a losing battle. Because by definition, what an agency does is provide a service and then charge you a markup for it. If you are getting into that position as a business, you know that you are overpaying no matter what kind of results you're getting. By definition, you are overpaying for the results because there's an agency involved that takes a profit. Okay. So what I love to do is hire agencies for very specific tasks. Like, uh, Web Development or like, uh, Marketing Agencies. I've hired a few Marketing Agencies for my own company that do paid media on different platforms. And what I do is I just tell them very straight up, Hey, we're going to hire you for three to six months, whatever that term needs to be. We're going to learn as much as we can during those three to six months. And then we're going to fire you guys. Is that cool? And if they're cool with that, perfect. They get me for three to six months as a customer. My team's learning internally the whole time. Maybe we staff someone new into our company to be able to handle some more of the work and then we leave. And that's actually exactly what I like to do with my agency. So technically we're a marketing agency, but we don't bring on any customers that expect us to be working for them forever. Like always charging the money or turning off the lights, right? What we prefer to do is work with someone for six months, build up and train their team, right? Maybe staff someone, like an editor or social media manager from our network into their business and, and hold them to a really high standard for that time that we're working with them. And once they've got a repeatable consistent system for results, we dip out. And they own that system and they don't pay a markup to an agent. I think that's an awesome proposition. Yeah, so I think, uh, to, to, to walk away knowing, and for, for the business to know that the investment is not just sort of, uh, um, um, Something that completely dissipates once the relationship is done, there is a residual value. Uh, that's fantastic, yeah, so thank you for sharing that, but I think also the, that topic deserves, uh, Its own conversation. Its own conversation, because we can probably, Uh, this kind of discuss several sort of interesting dynamics that exist in both the relationships, the onset, the middle of the relationship, the ending of the relationship between the old parties. All, all, all. And then by the way, how we all fit in that equation as a platform, because I assure you of some of these dynamics of these relationships fall onto the shoulders of Reggie's team. I was with this customer, now I want to be with that customer, you know, I, I, uh, this agency, I want to be with that agency, or that agency is managing my profiles, I want to take control. So we sometimes are part of that relationships, uh, as, as the transition, you know, things like that. Sometimes dispute as well, unfortunately. So, uh, but yeah, thanks for your time. Thanks Reggie as well. Thank you. Cool. Awesome. How do you know how much money social media makes you? That's the thought, right? It's, it's hard to attribute, I think is what it is. You know, when I talk to customers who are either getting started on social or they're somewhere in their business where they're really trying to figure out how to scale. Yeah. They have trouble really, how do I understand how social media plays into this? That I should be spending more money into this and what am I getting out of it? But how do you quantify that? How do you work with your clients on getting solid information around that? Yeah, a lot of people come to us asking, like, how much money does this really make you? And it's not at all about, like, the medium of social media. That's like asking, how much money does marketing make you? It really depends on your business, what your marketing, what your offer is, what your profit is. All of the other variables, this is simply a medium for communication. I think social media is probably one of the most profitable ways to make money, if you can do it right. Because the actual cost related to social media is almost nothing. It's free to post. You can reach millions of people for free. You've made the media and you can not only post it once and reach millions of people, you can repost it in a few months, you can post it across other platforms, you can repurpose it, re edit it, and distribute it multiple times over. So it's an incredible leverage. And that you're not just communicating to people that you pay to communicate to, you communicate to everyone, everyone in the world can see that piece of media, and it lives indefinitely on the internet. How expensive is it to create content though? Do you think content is as cheap as my phone recording video, or do you think still there is Maybe the costs are hidden, meaning that the cost to post is free, but there's no fee for that. But maybe it's because the actual media, as you put it, right, is expensive. Yeah, there's tons of ways to make social media content that drives an incredible amount of revenue for free. One of the examples is the guy riding his longboard, drinking, uh, you know, that drink that made TikTok famous. The Ocean Spray. That added billions of dollars of enterprise value to the company because that marketing campaign was massive. And it cost him nothing to post. It was free. It was the phone. And he didn't even have like the newest phone. Right? There's ways that you can do it for free. Of course there's a lot of tools that you can use to make it more efficient, faster, better, or improve your likelihood of success. But it doesn't actually cost you anything to post. And what do you think makes content more likely to produce outcomes? Is it the quality? Is it the visuals? Is it the sound? I just, are we trying to encourage people to try with their own content? Are we trying to encourage folks to still produce better quality content? I think quality is king because the only thing other than quality is quantity. And just from a logical perspective, you're never going to win on quantity. There's millions of content creators posting 10 times a day. Like there's no way you as a sole individual is going to beat them on quantity. And so quality is the only other lever you can pull. I want to make a distinction though. Quality does not mean production quality. We've got a really fancy studio here, thanks to the studio host, but I don't think that that's going to be the sole factor in determining whether this show or this episode or this clip is going to be successful or not. It's going to be down to the quality of the content discussed. And host gave an example of like when Theo Von came in here, he spent hours prepping, making sure all the lights, all the camera, you know, when he sat in the seat, it was angled a certain way, he practiced his lines. It is that preparation. That increase the quality, not the actual camera you're filming in. Quality is also the idea, right? So not necessarily as you put it, the production quality, but a concept for, um, the actual, the video as an example, right? So if it's a restaurant, is it a gym, is it a car repair shop, right? So what is the concept? It's still, I see it quite, because I sort of find myself in that sort of situation often, where it's difficult for me to just come up with content. Um, not that I don't have ideas, but perhaps mystic nature is not as developed as, you know, as it should be. I just find it difficult to come up with ideas on what to record, even in the sort of just the non nuanced, normal setting of a business. And I'm sure people would too. Everybody gets phones, so there's no issue with that. But how do you, how do you ideate? How do you come up with stuff to show, to record? And by the way, you also have to do it daily, right? You have to do it regularly, so that's even more difficult. Not a one off thing. Once you get in, you're in. Can't stop. You have to do it a lot, yeah. I think that's one of the most difficult things about social media, is that because you can do anything, It's really hard to find what one thing you should do and focus just on that and be very diligent about it. Um, but at the same time, I think one of the benefits to social media is that you can see in public all of what the competition is doing. And you have quantitative metrics that you can look at to measure their success. So if you're a competitor in the same business as you, got a million views on this video talking about this topic, there's an incredible amount of evidence now that you should also go talk about this topic because it was successful with them. And obviously don't copy them. But you know, if they're a mortgage lender talking about a specific type of funding that they were able to get for their clients and it got 10 million views, You know, when you make a similar video talking about a similar topic, it's probably not going to get 10 views or 100 views, you know, if the source material got 10 million, like, you'll probably get at least a thousand or a couple hundred thousand. It would also be quite disheartening if you don't, right? So you must learn not to get sort of frustrated or swayed by lack of success. I think that's actually a benefit. If you don't succeed, but yet you modeled someone else's success, you can deduce that the topic selection was not the factor that was causing your lack of success, which is an incredible thing to find out and have confidence in. Because then you know it's your execution, it's maybe the set, it's maybe the way you talk, or something else. But you know for certain that that topic works because it worked for someone else. Would it be the fact that they just have a million followers and you don't? And there is nothing you can do about that? That is somewhat true, and it used to be more true than it is now. But a lot of the platforms, at least what we've seen, are less dependent on the success of a creator historically to indicate future potential success. So before on YouTube, like 10 years ago, if you had a million followers, you post a video, it's going to get a million views. It doesn't matter what video you post, You're going to get a million views. And now, the TikTokification of social media has reduced that kind of leverage that big content creators have. And it's more even the playing field. To where, if you post your first video ever, on an account with zero followers, You still have the chance of getting millions of views, and then that reduces the competitive nature of social media to not longevity and history, but rather absolute skill, and that's absolutely something that I'm glad to compete on. Well, that's interesting. So can we then maybe dive into maybe a bit of, um, Uh, what having followers actually means then, so should I be pursuing, because my historical understanding of the followers has always been this, that if I am a follower, say, of you on TikTok, right? Yeah. And you post a video, I will see it because I'm following you. Yeah. It'll be sort of in my feed. And that has been, or if I'm a subscriber to your, your YouTube channel, I'm gonna see that video. So essentially in some ways you are when posting guaranteed to get to me. Right. Um, can we talk about how, what that change represents today? Because like, because, because of that, obviously everybody's pursuing followers. So, but it sounds like we're also now talking about the fact that maybe followers is not as important because everybody has a chance. Yeah. And if you have 10, you might still, you might, you will get a lot more views than 10, but you're not bound by that follower number, essentially. Yeah. I would think of followers as some people that you can reach or that you would want to reach, not people that you're guaranteed to reach. The other way that I think about followers is like a relationship. You know, when you establish a relationship with someone, you've got some kind of trust built. They've trusted you to give them good content, and uh, you trust them to watch your content. Hopefully they watch your content, not always. And just like in a relationship, you don't immediately lose all trust when you make one bad mistake. You know, maybe you post a bad video, it doesn't get a lot of views, people don't like it. Not everyone's going to immediately unfollow you. But if you consistently post bad content, they will unfollow. So it's not that those followers are guaranteeing future success. You still have to show up and perform with every single piece of content that you make. But it's just a better indication of how you have been doing and how much trust you've built with people. And you're going to have followers that are more loyal and less loyal. Depending on how good you are in the future, they may leave... Just build into that dynamic of acquiring and losing followers a little bit. So acquiring followers... Yeah. Happens when your content was interesting, when your content appealed to them, and probably more than once, right, that way to kind of, this is like a personal resource that produces interesting content. Obviously, it's an achievement when you've sort of gotten that follower, you know, uh, but losing the follower, you mentioned bad content. Can we dive into that? Because I feel that bad content is not just bad quality wise. But I feel like you would lose a follower who now feels that you are marketing to them versus delivering the value. So not that the content is bad because that's pretty simple to kind of explain and understand, but wrong content or content that is just maybe pushy or too salesy or that would be bad. But that again would take us back to the difficulty of creation, creating content that makes content creation that much more difficult. Yeah. It's definitely based on the followers expectations. And most people on social media, most people that follow you, expect to get free content with absolutely nothing in return. Like they won't get marketed to. So you're right, when you do market to the audience that doesn't expect to be marketed to, they have a little bit of friction there and sometimes you might lose them as followers. Which is why it's very important to, when making content and establishing your social media strategy, to be very careful of how many asks you have and making sure that those asks aren't ruining your brand reputation or your brand equity. And you'd want to build the majority of your brand equity by just giving, because that's what most people expect. So is it true then that you are essentially asking brands, your customers, for example, right? Um, to not market themselves while marketing themselves? Is that sort of the idea here? There's a strategy to it and I think of it as, um, you know, kind of that top, middle, and bottom of funnel strategy. Where at the top, most of your content and where most of your views are coming from is going to be content that is strictly giving value, giving information, and just getting in front of people for the first time. The middle of funnel content is building trust, nurturing that relationship, and building brand equity with those followers. And then the smallest piece of the funnel, the pyramid, is actually cashing out on that. So how many asks you have. And then within those asks, it's not just, you know, any kind of piece of content that markets your business as an ask, and they're all weighted equally. You have direct asks, where you're telling them, Hey, go to this link and pay me 5, 000. You have indirect ask, which is like, Hey, sign up for my free lead magnet, you're going to get something in return. And that is even not a black or a white, it's a continuum. So how frequently you ask and what those asks mean to the client are very, very important in the overall scope of like brand equity and how you expect to make money. And I always tell my clients that ask me, how soon do I make money from this thing? Um, is that it depends on how soon you want to decrease your brand equity and how much brand equity you have to start. All right, let's talk money. You put the money in, you take the money out. And ideally you would never like, fully liquidate that brand equity. Because that means you have nothing left. You have no people left to sell from you, to sell to. No one else trusts you with their money, and you're at zero. And the goal is to just always build up as much brand equity as you can, and take out actually as little as you can. Because with a long term perspective, It's like compounding interest, you know? It works for you in favor. Yeah. Depositing money in the bank. Right. So you put the money in to take the money out. Yeah. The um, I guess the, is there like a predictable, I don't wanna say like a recipe, but is there an easy to follow or formula for anybody out there sort of to follow when building up that brand equity in terms of how much brand equity related material do you put out versus, I guess the withdrawals are the actual asks. Right? But there is something in the middle that sort of is in between, right? Um, is there like a, an easy to follow formula that people can kind of just maybe think about? Or maybe an analogy that they can kind of use as a measuring stick here? Yeah, I would like to think about it, and it depends on the business. I like to think about it from a bottom up strategy, when thinking about how much of each piece of content should I make. So bottom of funnel first, how many ask posts should I do? And the amount of ask posts you should do is relative to the amount of people that know, like, and trust you. And right now, immediately, if you made an ask, you're going would want to buy from you. Unfortunate thing is most people asking that question, very few people that know, like, and trust them enough to swipe their cards. Well, they want zero followers, so they only have nobody, right? Yeah, so they gotta build up people that know, like, and trust them first. Okay. Right? So how do you build up people that know, like, and trust you? Well, you take audiences that are loosely aware of you, or like have seen your content before, that have seen your videos maybe once or twice, and you provide as much value as possible. You really earn and build their trust. The issue is with people that are asking that question is they don't have many people that have seen them once or twice before, right? They're brand new to social media. Chicken and the egg. Yeah. So for those, before you do that, before you get people to absolutely love your content, you need to get people to see your content in the first place. Put your first foot in the door of them and get in front of their screen for the very first time. And that's the majority of the content you should be making. And then answer the questions in reverse. Understood. I mean, it almost sounds like this applies beyond social. Maybe we, the horse before the cart, whatever it is that they say, uh, I'm a brand. And the goal really is like, man, I have no idea what to do to even market myself. I need more sales. I need to, to grow or even start. Yeah. Before you make sales, you need to have people know, like, and trust you. Before you have people know, like, and trust you, you need to get in front of a lot of people. So the first step is making content that gets you in front of people so you can understand what people like, don't like about your content. It's like people asking me strategy that's very technical about social media. Should I do this kind of post or should I do this kind of post? Like which kind of post performs better? And they're like, Oh, neither. I haven't made any posts at all. Like, well, make some posts first, get some data, understand what works best with your audience, in your market, in your niche, for you specifically, and then based on that data, make some inferences, some hypothesis, and continue in the direction that's most successful for you. Would you think that, uh, uh, some brands, some businesses feel that doing sort of posting content is, comes about with quite a bit of brand risk? If they do it wrong, meaning that, um, and do you see that as a risk broadly speaking? Is there a way to accidentally by experimenting or by not putting out the right content, how much risk there is? On one hand, arguably, there is a risk, obviously, right? That you post something entirely inappropriate. Yeah. But at the same time, Generally speaking, can you really go wrong with social content for your business? I mean, is that that easy? I mean, I feel like social is so, so sort of, uh, right-now-ish, meaning that nobody really has long memory, right? Of what's been happening. I feel like people overthink, including myself. I overthink each piece of content. I'm concerned about the style. I'm concerned about the quality. And for that reason, it just slows down the process. But I'm perhaps older and a bit more sort of old school in terms of brand risk. You know, once something is written, can be unwritten type of deal. You have to kind of school people into kind of taking it easier and just sort of just flowing with it. Being less risk and be social as a more forgiving environment than perhaps, I don't know, uh, older forms of communication. Yeah, I see it as an equation of like quantity times quality. So the quantity could mean how many posts you make or how many views it gets. And then quality is going to determine how that quantity impacts your brand equity. If you post a lot or if you have a video that gets a lot of views with good quality, it's going to improve your brand equity. If you post a lot or get a lot of views on something that has low quality, it's going to decrease your brand equity. And that quality is actually one of the two levers that you pull to influence how much this builds your brand. I understand, but I think my question is slightly different. Let me, let me try it again. So I think the, sometimes I overthink content based on some of my internal criteria for what good content is. And realistically, that's not even the kind of content that's going to resonate. Yeah. But it's only for me, it feels safe. Yeah, right. But the reality of it is that social content It's not for me, mostly. It's for, you know, the broader sort of space out there. And the format there is something that I shouldn't be comfortable with, maybe, to some extent. Like, me being comfortable is, is, is, is not part of the equation. Like, the fact that I want to be comfortable with it, like, And it's not that it's a risk, because I kind of view it as a risk. And for that reason it slows me down in terms of content production. I feel like anybody who takes out the phone and everything they do is recorded, and everything they do is right away uploaded, tends to be way more successful than people maybe like me, who, you know, have to think about it and consult people and edit things. Is that the reality? Is that sort of what maybe you tell your clients as well? For the clients that are uncomfortable to post their first video, I would tell them that it's really weird if you were comfortable to post your first video. Like you've never done this before, why would you feel confident? Like if you have confidence in doing something you've never done before that's delusion like that's unexpected. So it's normal for you to not feel confident posting your first or your first dozen or your first But I will tell you what you said about people that are always on their phone always posting videos Those are generally the ones that tend to be the most successful that also makes sense Is they're the ones that do it the most, so if you can find a way to do it in a way that is enjoyable, or that you like it, or at least is easy, you generally will have more success because you're imitating the qualities and attributes of the people that also have the most success with it which is they post a lot. Yeah, I remember the time, um, and I was in high school, and I guess I was timid as a teenager. And somehow it's sort of, I had that realization that I'm sort of timid and I need to kind of fix that. And one of the ways my guidance counselor sort of recommended I do that is by signing up for public speaking class. Yeah. And I should tell you that I died every day. Yeah. Because there was a speaking assignment every day in front of the class for the entire semester. I literally died every day. And I can't quite tell you that somehow in the end I felt liberated and sort of free of sort of being timid. I suppose in the long term it did help me, but I kind of like I remember, I feel like it's the same thing with social. Yeah. And, uh, but at the same time I find that people just, it's very difficult to overcome this public nature of what you do. So you're not really, in many cases, promoting your brand, right? Or directly, you might be promoting people or you might be telling a story about what's happening in your office or in your store. And that's the kind of content, but that's kind of almost, uh, brings out sort of the nakedness of, of sort of your, Being, that's a very uncomfortable place to be, yet that's not the world we live in. In our, in the world today, everything is on social, everything is public, and you kind of have to get into that group of things. Yeah, I wish when I first started on YouTube, my entire first years of content was terribly embarrassing. Like you would watch that and think like, Oh, is he joking? Is this kind of like a skit? Like it was so bad. And I deleted it all. No one can find it anymore. But I almost wish that I kept it so that I could show my clients, Hey, by the way, this is my first video. And then they can laugh at me and be like, Oh, you're way worse than anything that we just filmed. And it would give them some confidence that like, okay. If Daniel can be this bad for a whole year and still be really successful now, the stars are aligned because I am nowhere near this bad and I can at least wait it out six months until I'm as good as him. So it's definitely a progress that you have to make, but if you never get over that, you're never going to get to, you know, actually being successful and feeling confident. Yeah, this reminds me of our prior product and how I found the video recordings of the demos of how the product used to look and look at it and be like,"Oh my God, who built that?" So, uh, yeah, so certainly, um, people improve over time and, but that's a great, like, way of possibly convincing somebody to do it. Um, I also found helpful in, in, in situations where somebody like me, who is, let's say, struggling putting out content and mind you, I'm having to put out content because essentially part of Vista Social's brand is the brand of, of the individuals. All on the team, and it's been our mission to kind of make individual presence also known. So for that reason, I'm out there, you know, producing content for myself. And, which is difficult because creativity is lacking. I'm a techie, you know, I'm not necessarily, you know, a writer or a marketer or, you know, a comedian, you know, to produce content just like this. Uh, so I have my notes in my phone. So, and what I basically started doing, anytime, anywhere, I have an idea of what I could be talking about, I'm writing it down right away. And that's proven very helpful because basically, yeah, so like anytime, like, and then later like I have some, some 10 random thoughts, some of them I share with Reggie who's like, what is this? So as a matter of fact, we're going to do some of these recordings today as well. Um, but that's been very helpful for me. Just kind of collect my thoughts right away. Yeah, I think that's the best thing. Um, if you're not actually having someone to like document every thought live, put it in your notes and then come back to it in a more formal setting and just, you know, Go through your thoughts. Is there like a number, because I know you talked about that top. That's really where you want to start. You're new to this or you've been struggling. Let's just refresh. Let's start with top of the funnel and make our way down as we build brand equity. What's that suggestion that you might have for someone who's starting out or wants to reset? Starting with top of the funnel. How long should they just focus on top of the funnel and what's that number look like? Yeah, I think until you've made like 60 days worth of content, you really don't have enough data, positive or negative, to inform any future decision. A lot of people are like, I posted for a week, what should I do now? Like, I have no clue. You're probably going to have to go do that for like five more weeks before we make any kind of decision. You're probably going to have to do that for seven more weeks before you think of what the next steps should be. So just like any other scientific method, boiling this down to numbers and facts, for the business owners out there. To create a hypothesis, you first have to make an observation. And if you don't have enough data to observe, there's no way to know what to do next. What are we looking for in the observation phase? Is it the impressions? Is it the views? Is it the engagement? Is it the comments? Like, all of the above? I think it's a heads or tails thing. Like, you're either looking at the success of your content and doubling down on what worked, or you're looking at the lack of success of the content and doing something completely opposite to get to the other side of the coin that is successful. Do you think it's likely for any business, no matter what the business does, to find content that's going to resonate, or is there such a thing as a business that's completely boring and just doesn't have anything interesting to, um, trying to find an example without offending anybody? Well, every business that is successful, sells to someone, and they can make content to that person who wants to buy something. Did I give you that line earlier? That's my line. Is it really? Yeah, I love that one. It's like if you're a successful business owner, you have clients, right? So someone finds it interesting, market to that person. It's just still, I'm kind of like, I'm on the fence simply because I feel like certain businesses are just more exciting than others. Let's do a thought exercise right now then. Throw out a random boring business. I'm trying to come up with it, but I'm just thinking that still, I don't know, discotheques are a lot more fun than, you know, plumbers, you know, I mean. Hey, that's a perfect example. Tons of people get millions of views dancing on TikTok. But how much money does that make them? Not as much as probably the plumbers do. One of our most successful clients actually was a plumbing business coach. And so he targeted not just, you know, service based business owners, not just plumbers, but plumbing business owners, not just any plumbing business owner, a plumbing business owner that was struggling. Okay. So very, very niche. He's the biggest guy in his space now, um, he's got over a hundred thousand followers across platforms and starting to work with us and gets millions, if not, I think it's tens of millions of you every single month towards that demographic, makes an incredible amount of money. And it's so, so niche. I was actually struggling to find competitors on social media when I first started working with him because there were so few. But once he found that audience, once he found out what worked, it's not about what your competitors are doing successfully. It's about which videos of yours were successful. And once you have that data point, you can do 10x, 100x, and be going in the exact right direction. Awesome. Look at that. Every business. Did you know about our plumbing business owner or was that just like a coincidence? No......a random thing....I was going to go with funeral service, but I didn't want to go to morbid. Yeah. No, I don't think we have one of those, but yeah, the plumbing guy is actually one of the most successful clients we've had. He was wildly successful and he was actually through like a podcast format. He was doing a podcast before it was mildly successful. And all we did to improve his social media is we took the most, we took the most successful clips from his podcast that he chopped up out of his podcast, posted on social media. And they performed better than some of the other clips. You know, some had 3, 000 views, some had 300 views. We took those 3, 000 view clips that were relatively more successful and just remade them by scripting out that video, removing all the filler words and making it as concise and as valuable as possible and then refilming it in like a mock podcast format. That was the entire strategy to get him to 100, 000 followers. Now he's doing a whole bunch of other stuff, but zero to 100, 000 followers, just look at what's working and do that even better. Yeah. Yeah. We've got top funnel. I feel like, you know, we've got a lot of understanding here so far from you. I wanted to go a level deeper now for our audience who's, yeah, I'm going to start posting for six to eight weeks. I really want to get a good idea, 60 days minimum of what's working. I'm probably going to look at some competitors to at least get some ideas if I don't quite know. Yeah. But like I'm going into that middle of the funnel. I've got some, probably no brand equity at this point, but what's kind of next, right? We're talking about that middle funnel. What are we going to do with that data? And as you answer that question, uh, let's probably also define what the funnel actually means. We keep on saying top of the funnel, middle of the funnel, bottom of the funnel. I feel like maybe some can get intimidated by the terminology. Yeah. Yeah. I guess all we're, can you maybe just define that? It's not a plumbing reference. Yeah. Just to be clear. I think of, uh, social media just like any other marketing strategy, and that you need to have a system for very consistently getting in front of the right people, getting them as a lead, and then eventually winning them over as a client. And that's effectively top, middle, and bottom. Top, middle, and bottom. So top of funnel is your first, like, step in the door, getting in front of the right people, getting in front of the right audience."Hello, my name is..." and the business'. Yeah. Right."We're located here and there." Like the first video they see from you. Got it. And it's like, I'm sure you've seen this effect on social media before, where you scroll through some content, you see one person's video, you watch the video because it's kind of good, but then like for the next month, you get bombarded with their content, that's the funnel at work. So that was a top of funnel video that you saw first, then you get bombarded with middle and bottom. So from the middle of funnel, you actually establish yourself as an expert, they've seen you once before, and you try to provide them as much value as possible, you try to build trust. Yeah. You think of it as like an email lead nurture sequence or some kind of training material that you can give to them. Basically, all of your free secret sauce that you would charge people for, try to give that away on social media to be able to earn their trust. And then bottom of funnel is where you actually convert. So like what post do you need to make, how do you need to ask for something to get someone to go from social media to a checkout page. Awesome. Is there any element, I guess, to, to, if we're talking about that top of the funnel video, that is crucial, let's say, to creating that piece of content, whether it's a scripting element, whether it's a, a way of thinking about producing that type of content that's going to help you to find some level of success in your first month? I think the best part about social media is that you can look at what your competitors are doing and get instant data across their entire social media strategy of what is most successful. And then if you're starting from scratch, instead of trying to reinvent the wheel, just model what's already successful. I'm not telling anyone to steal content, like that's definitely not it because that decreases your brand equity that has the opposite effect of what you're looking for. But in no other business do you have a very clear direction of exactly what to do, word for word, shot for shot, with evidence of whether it worked or not for the competitor. How do you ask people to do stuff, uh, particularly on places like TikTok and Instagram, where you can't really put any links right back to checkout pages, um, purchase sites or whatever else. Yeah. Uh, what do you recommend? People do, do they kind of, should they be concerned about that as it could create some loss effect, right, on, on, on, on where some of the output is going? Uh, is that fairly normal for social to kind of be in that sort of disconnected state of, hey, I'm going to ask, but they have to find a path to doing it? Yeah, most people, most people have no idea how much money a single social post actually makes them. And understanding that actually saved our business like eight months ago. So we had no client attribution. We were just getting clients from ads, we were getting clients from organics, from email, whatever. And we were really, really struggling because no matter how much more money I spent on ads, we weren't actually making more profit as a business. A lot of clients come to us with the same exact problem. We put in separate funnels for every single traffic source. So they looked the same, they were identical, but they just had a different URL slug. Um, the, the link was slightly different. And so that we could tell, here's how many people came from Instagram this month. They clicked on my profile, came like, here's how many came from Facebook, YouTube, TikTok, email, uh, this ad platform, that ad platform, the third ad platform. And we got back an incredible amount of data. Suggests that 60 to 80 percent of our revenue. What's coming from organic social media, meaning whether I spent 10, 000 a month on ads or 200, 000 a month on ads. Wouldn't matter. 60 to 80 percent of our revenue came from organic social media. So I was pulling up and down this ad lever that actually wasn't resulting in any revenue for my business. And I was wasting an incredible amount of money. The bottom line, sorry, the bottom line is the link in the bio, basically, is what is going to drive traffic. There's a lot of ways to do that. So one of those is, yeah, any kind of link that you use on social media platforms should be different than every other link you use for, like, other platforms to track. You want to have a really clear attribution there. And from there, you can make a hypothesis. So, we saw that 60 80 percent of our revenue was coming from organic social media, mostly Instagram. So, 60 80 percent of our marketing efforts should be on Instagram. And previously, they were on paid ads. So, we made that change. Next, we found that, you know, on social media, we had like 10 percent of our revenue coming from Instagram, or sorry, 10 percent of our revenue coming from YouTube, and like 90 percent of our revenue from Instagram. But I was putting in all this effort making these YouTube videos that at the time were not successful for me, and I just cut that. And same with our budget financially, I allocated my budget for time based on where the results were already coming from. And, you know, despite having millions of followers on, uh, TikTok, Very little of our revenue because our clients are not on TikTok. Very little of it was coming from TikTok. So I cut TikTok in terms of priority and the amount of effort and attention that I was giving it. It's kind of like our trash bin now, whether it gets banned or not. Like I'm not focusing attention there because I know most of my effort comes from Instagram. And I think that's also probably a point of discussion is, which channels, right, should people, you know, brands generally try to go on, right? Um, and there's probably no easy way of determining that until you try, right? And eventually you find reason to. Believe that your audience is not on there. For example, here at Vista, we kind of understand where our audience is. Yeah. And it's also not on TikTok, obviously. Yeah. Uh, and as a result, our TikTok doesn't get as much attention. Um, something that keeps on coming up in our conversation today is like the attribution and knowing and seeing analytics. Not an easy thing to do and set up for somebody who's just getting up and started, right? Especially if you are a small business or brand. Um, and I know that for a fact because we've dealt with that issue recently, you know, having to kind of pull all the numbers together. What do you recommend to brands in terms of, because it sounds really great, right? So you just look at the numbers, you understand the performance and you simply make decisions. Problem is getting access to these numbers and having your mature disposal. Is that A, something that a brand would do maybe with proper tooling or B, don't even try hire somebody to set that up specifically for you. Yeah, there's always going to be some level of uncertainty or revenue that's unattributed. You know, and it would be almost unreasonable to have 100 percent attribution because that means you're focusing a lot on attribution and not other parts of your business. So some percentage of inaccuracy is always acceptable. Like in the scientific method, they're never 100 percent accurate because then you'd have to go down to the atomic level and measure the atoms. Unrealistic. So, you have to understand what your acceptable, like, rate of failure or rate of measurement is, and at least have something in place to measure up to that level so that you can make strategic decisions. Now, if this is a multi billion dollar organization, I'm going to probably recommend a far more sophisticated method of measurement than if it's a business doing a few hundred thousand or a couple million a month. So, the stakes are different. And therefore the measurement tools, the effort you go into measuring is also different. The one thing I will say though is there is data out there to suggest what social media platform is going to be better for certain industries. Right. For certain. Yeah. They did a study that showed, uh, they basically surveyed, uh, Household incomes over 100, 000, under 100, 000, and, uh, surveyed how much they use different social media platforms. And one of the things that they found is that 95 percent of households doing over 100, 000 a month were on YouTube. 35 percent of households doing over 100, 000 a month were on TikTok. So if your demographic is a household over 100, 000 a month, 95 percent of them are on YouTube, 30 something percent of them are on TikTok. And you can make Content for both platforms, but you're going to have a way easier time reaching your audience when you should optimize for YouTube. That's interesting because we recently, um, had a feature added to the platform that focuses on the industry benchmarks. So we have to look at it from a different angle. So we look through like thousands of social profiles, and we try to classify each profile, um, uh, put it into, um, an industry bucket. So we, I think we measure like industry, general industry, specific industry. So for example, manufacturing or, I don't know, we have software companies as an example, right? And then we look at the performance on that profile on that network. So subsequently we could tell a brand. Hey, you are, let's say, um, a manufacturer or plumber, let's say, right? Other plumbing profiles on Facebook, when it comes to followers, this is how they're performing. When it comes to engagement rate, this is how they're performing. So, it's a slightly different angle on this, but at least you're going to have a benchmark. For example, we can tell you, hey, you are within a 20 percentile, which is not good. You want to be maybe higher, you know, things like that. But I think my question, though, initially was a little different. And all these numbers, I feel, are great for those who have them. or, and are able to set up the, you know, the systems in place, right, to collect them. Even our report, for example, it exists in our system, but the person would have to know that we are there. Get an account, connect the profiles, find the right navigation button to get into the reporting section, get to the report. A lot of setup. Again, Kim, is it realistic for the business to set that up, or should they seek help with that specifically? So maybe we're saying, hey, you record the videos. Great, go out, do your content. But right away, You need to seek help in setting up the tracking so that way you know. I think it depends on the size of the business too. There's more than one variable at play here. The way I like to think about it is, I had a client who was trying to set up his email campaign and he was very diligent about doing an email a day. He said email is very important, a lot of my competitors do email, I gotta be good at email. And I asked him like, how much conversions are you getting through? He said, oh not that many. So I gotta do email, I gotta boost it. Like, well, okay, of the conversions you have from email, like, how much do they buy relative to other customers? Like, oh, those are the worst customers. And so it gets me to think, like, why are you spending this much time tracking email, optimizing email, putting effort into email when it's your worst performing platform? And the bigger problem, the actual solution to scaling your business is just going to be to double your ad spend. So we doubled his ad spend. And the business grew. And so, so much of this is... But he was able to set that up on his own. Well... Does every one of your customers is able to set up, uh, tracking on his own? He was, he was, he was building out a really sophisticated like multiple month nurture sequence to sell on email when I had an incredible amount of evidence to say that his email was not a big traffic source no matter what. So, so many people get caught up in optimizing their social media, tracking on social media. How many. Views did this get versus how much revenue did this video make me and they've got like 2, 000 followers. I'm like, okay, relative to the size of your business, this is not a large source of income. I would estimate that no matter how good your social media was, if you're doing multiple millions a month and if you have 2, 000 followers, it's not going to result in any kind of a reasonable revenue for your business. So instead of obsessing over tracking every single penny and cent here. Look at the dollars and thousand dollar bills that are coming from other platforms. So the level of sophistication and tracking that I would prescribe to businesses is directly proportionate to how much we suspect they're making from that platform. So basically, initially, detailed tracking is an overkill? Basically, right? It's a big distraction. It's something that makes someone feel really good when they've got it pinned down, when really it doesn't actually solve the business. Correct. So essentially, it's okay maybe not to do it internally, focus on just top level numbers, views and whatnot on your videos, just kind of get a glance of what works and what doesn't. Yeah. Fantastic. But quick, like, five minute hack for anyone trying to track their revenue or know how much they're making from social media. You've got a copy of your funnel. Make another version of it, change the URL slug to be something slightly different. And then you have two copies, one for everything else, and one for social media. And throw that social media version on all of your social media pages. That way you at least have some estimate. It takes like five minutes to know how much you're potentially making from social media compared to all other platforms. Yeah, I mean, we also recommend, uh, like a link in bio pages to all of our users typically, particularly like on a small business side. Yeah. As just a better, more focused sort of funnel for that traffic because not every business has like a very sort of Responsive mobile friendly because most of this traffic is going to be from mobile phones And and oftentimes that just creates it's just a nicer environment for that traffic to be attributed properly. By the way, if you're a business running ads on social media, 98 percent of that traffic is going to come from mobile. Yeah, I mean, all the social traffic is on mobile for sure. All the TikTok, Instagram, if that's where your investments are. Yeah, you say that because you know that because you build apps on social media. But like, most people watching this, like, if you didn't already know, your website is much more, um, profitable when you optimize for mobile. Wow. Yeah, I think it's even more profitable when you build specifically for mobile. Because these days Uh, Responsive Websites, which means a website that works both, uh, and responds to the size of the device. That's already sort of older school thinking. I think many people are just building for mobile, specifically. It's a very, very specific experience. As a matter of fact, Vista Social, as much as we try to create the mobile experience, we're having to build a mobile app because it's all feature packed. We can't make it responsive, sort of, good enough. So today, you can either use Vista on desktop, or you're gonna have to do it with mobile. Uh, but, um, just due to the complexity, I think not every tool or business is gonna have that problem. Because if you have like a checkout flow, obviously that can easily fit on a mobile sort of experience. Yeah. Awesome. All right. Well, Daniel, thank you. Thank you for being here. Any, anything before we, we head out that business owner agency, that's really, really trying to figure out like, Hey, these two or three things are going to help me skyrocket my agency or skyrocket my business. I need, I need help. Anything else beyond what we said that you think could be helpful? I'll do you more than two or three things. I'll give you like a few hundred for anyone watching this. If you go to my social media page, @daniel_iles, it's on Instagram. I've got a couple hundred thousand followers. DM me the words "free training." I'll send you all of our training material, completely free. Amazing. Thank you. You guys heard it. Go over to the bio, send them a DM. Um, if you guys want to join us, just like Daniel here in a future episode, reach out to us. vistasocial.com/podcast. Thank you for joining us. If you're watching on YouTube or listening on Spotify, make sure you let us know what you think. Take care.