The Winding Road

Evan Dunn: How to Grow Your Marketing Career with Twitter

• Travis L. Scott / Evan Dunn • Episode 47

Share episode

Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.

0:00 | 36:17

In today's podcast, we chat with Evan Dunn Director of Growth Marketing at Syncari.

From social work to writing poetry and creative writing to marketing Evan has had a unique career journey . Evan believes in creating conversations that grow revenue.

Topics discussed:

  • A family journal
  • Marketing copywriting ….and poetry?
  • Raising over $400,000 in Kickstarter funds, 
  • Growing over 50,000 followers on twitter
  • What is happening at Twitter?
  • How active are you on LinkedIn?
  • Could you see really quick results in terms of relationship building on Twitter, or does it take time?
  • Do you have Twitter lists? 
  • Are you engaging through the app itself or on the desktop? 
  • What advice would you have for people who have recently been laid off ?



Connect with Travis L Scott:


Connect with this week’s guest  Evan Dunn

Follow Winding Road Careers:

Ep 47  - How to Grow Your Marketing Career with Evan Dunn

Travis: welcome to the Winding Road podcast. today's guest is Evan Dunn. He is the, director of Growth Marketing at Syncari got it, got it right. I think this time mispronounced it. Last time we talked, welcome to the podcast. Really looking forward to, to chatting today. 

Evan: Yeah, thanks, Travis. Been looking forward to this as well.

Travis: Yeah. And, and I think you have a pretty interesting career path. did, didn't you say you started in social, social 

Evan: work? I did, yeah. I started, uh, got outta college with a linguistics degree. my wife and I wanted to go do some translation work internationally and, Realized we should probably pay off some student debt first.

So, got a job at, AmeriCorps at a social work organization here in Seattle, and that was a lot of fun. working with kids, healthy dating relationships program. first of it's kind in the United States actually. Wow. Where we would take middle school students after school and, and train up high school mentors to help them learn about healthy relationships and boundaries and stuff.

Totally unqualified for the role, obviously, but,you know, a couple years into that, just needed to make more money than what a social work entry level,job can get you. And, ended up freelancing, doing some writing. So I have a bit of writing in my background, poetry and, and just creative writing, for a gentleman who wanted to launch a, a blog and it kind of all fell into place from there.

Travis: Nice. And do you still still write? 

Evan: Yeah, still write lots of poetry. if you go to a family journal.com, we own that domain as a family. Nice. put up some stuff there. Photos, my wife's a photographer. I put up poetry and obviously do a lot of writing and marketing. So, that bridges well and, and, you know, developed out from working on that blog learning social media marketing.

back in 2012, 13, right. sort of the heyday of Facebook advertising and, and, organic Twitter use could actually get you somewhere. So we, we talk all day about that. But, yeah. 

Travis: Nice. Very, very cool. And so, so yeah, when I think about marketing and, and copywriting, and then I think of poetry.

They, there's a little bit of a, a gap there it seems like. So how are you able to t. what you write more creatively into what can sometimes be kind of dry with marketing and sales. 

Evan: Sales. Yeah. Yeah. sometimes I'm not, you know, sometimes you just get into this jargon ru where, you just sound like a robot, right?

Mm-hmm. , I find I have to care a lot. What I'm talking about in order to sound poetic and be compelling, which the, you know, back in August we had a couple newsletters we put out that right, who just kind of riffed from some really passionate, perspectives on the single source of truth being dead, right?

Which, if you're in the data world, is really hot topic, hot subject. and,those were our best performing ones to date, you know, 55% open rates and, high click rates and, you know, you're not always able to do that. Right. And I learned this the hard way cuz beca, you know, getting into the corporate world, professional world, I didn't really know what I was stepping into at all.

I just had some ideas that I thought might work about social media marketing and blogging. And some of them worked and some of them didn't. Right? What worked in particular was getting on Twitter and reaching directly out to people. I raised over 400,000 bucks in Kickstarter funds, just doing that. Wow.

and, Then that also works for building my audience. And I found a couple automation tools, you know, which they always pop up and get shut down by Twitter or not. And we'll see if that changes. But, and then,found a great tool called Manage Flitter. Still friends with the founder Kevin Garber.

Evan: They got shafted by Twitter, changing its API rules, in 2017 and had to shut down the product basically. But, you know, basically built my career off of like writing and. Twitter. Wow. You know, really organically reaching out to people. Cause then you get a, you know, you get 50,000 followers. I think I have like 52,000 right now.

And people are just like, whoa, this guy has 52,000 followers. You must know something. . this is half true, . But, but you know, as I was saying, stepping into this sort of corporate world that found jargon everywhere and was trying to like learn it while, also translate it to myself and then translate it to customers.

I'm very often not able to do that. And the, the biggest difficulty of that in my experience is actually believing that the jargon has more value than it does. Mm-hmm. . I find that most of it exists because someone at some point wanted to label something, which is fine, give it a name, right. And sound like an expert.

And, ever since some of those kinds of terms got adoption and some didn't, There's a whole conversation to be had here too, Travis, about categories, right? Like, if you're in software, like, you know, how do you name something, call something and, and position it in people's minds. Cuz it really matters.

It's very, very, very difficult to do in a way that's approachable. 

Travis: Hmm. Yeah. Yeah. That's, that's interesting. And yeah, a lot of different ways we, we could take, take this interview. Yeah. yeah. Where do you want to take it? You know, like, so I guess what I wanna, I definitely wanna get into Twitter, especially with everything that's going on, and, and, and what's interesting is like I'm, I'm recording these podcasts.

in sprints and, and what I'm recording now, and actually you're my last one of this sprint and, and it's for Q1 and so mm-hmm. , by the time this is published, Twitter may, may not be around, so we'll see. yeah, I'm trying to create 

Evan: Evergreen payments platform, I believe. 

Travis: Yeah, exactly. And, yeah. Have you, have you gotten your, your blue badge yet?

Freight box? No. 

Evan: No . No. I mean, Twitter never knew what it wanted to be, right? That's the trick. you know, so the thing I'll say is, if you're in marketing or you want to get into marketing, think about I think two things, right? One is your job is actually to create relationships, right? conversations, and.

In doing so, like what are the critical paths, the shortcuts you can take that other people aren't taking? Because back in 2013, you know, this is still true. Frankly, Travis, like no one. Is running bio searches on Twitter accounts and reaching out directly, not via dms, but via the public tweets, right? Dms are often used for spam.

So like these are you simple things I noticed include into, and I was like, wow, you know, I'm the only one reaching out to these people in public tweets. It shows up differently in your mentions, right? shows up as a mention so it shows up in a different spot. and there's all these opportunities like that, right?

For a while here it's been slot. , right? So there are people listening that want to break into the marketing world, right? If you think about how can you create relationships faster and at a higher volume, that's really your primary job. You, you wanna find the right topics to center those conversations around, but if, if you're able to find ways to get in front of the right people to open up conversations that are interesting.

The rest falls into place. You know, the channels follow that mindset. Right? Yeah. 

Travis: yeah. And, and, and how, how active are you on on LinkedIn? 

Evan: Yeah, pretty active, right? And I think there's, yeah. Do you have a follow up to that? No. Nope. I was just gonna, yeah. You know, LinkedIn is interesting now, right? Like it's trying to figure out, I just got the notification about some features that'll be rolled out by the time this interview comes out.

Right? you know, it's going to have, click to conversation ads. So an in feed ad sends you to an inbox conversation with. A company that's actually really cool, because it's letting me, and I've found some ways to get really high click through rates, right? Use those conversation starters in big graphic feed images to kick off a one to one conversation.

Cause that's the value of any social platform is not, frankly, not the one to many. if you could pull it off, great, but if I had tried right now to become a big LinkedIn influencer, There's not enough room, you know, it's saturated. So instead I comment to people I care about, right? And I, I reach out with questions and I ask questions, and I, you know, create conversations and, just get a lot of anecdotal value that way, which prompts then, you know, newsletters and ads and the things that scale that marketers are known for.

so yeah, LinkedIn is a great, like, input tool and sometimes an outreach tool, but it, it's really trying to wrestle. It's identity there 

Travis: for sure. Yeah. And how is one Twitter, LinkedIn, one more of your go to than, than the other? 

Evan: That's a hard question to say. I think LinkedIn, is great for maintaining relationships with known quantities.

Twitter is excellent for cold outreach. I just reached out to the president of a company and asked that question I was telling you about Travis around the customer data model example, and he tweeted back and was like, you know, we we're, yes. May send him an email and, and he'll send examples, you know, So, and I met a lot of people that I still work with and love working with.

that founder manage Flitter, Kevin Carper, who's onto different apps. you know, we've been friends for years because of connecting on Twitter and them using his app and, building a relationship that way. Nice, 

Travis: nice. Yeah. And you and I met on Twitter, and there you go. And, 

yeah, because I searched for bios for, I think you have rev ops or marketing operations probably in, in your bio.

Evan: Nice. 

Travis: Yeah. and, and Twitter is interesting, because I, I started using it early on, and then, you know, probably 2000. Gosh, eight ish, really early when the organic reach was and you could like, have conversations with, famous people more easily. And it wasn't just flooded with stuff with crap, right?

and then I think I decided to like rebrand myself. Like, and, and I got a new Twitter handle in like 2011, 12, and just after that, just hasn't really done, done much. And I, I probably just killed any momentum I had with, with my old, old handle and I've never gone back to that. But, I was a recruiter back in the day, so LinkedIn was really where I lived.

and, and so I think I've just carried that on and how LinkedIn's got much better since, since then. so that's where I spent a majority of my time, but, I, I feel like I would like to get more active on Twitter. and I think it is in the, in the, in the conversations, right? that's what it was kind of built to do.

Travis: And, I, I just feel myself like dabbling in it a little bit. And that's why you probably, you'll, you'll mention something to me and it probably takes me two days to, to get back. cause I'm not in it every day. Oh, no worries. Message me on Sundays. That's when I pull it open. And I'm just like, I have two accounts.

I have one that I just kinda rant on sports and politics and the other is more professional. And, I'm on my, my sports handle on Sundays. there you go. Joint conversations about my bes, good or bad. But like, I think the question I and probably some other people have for you, and if Twitter's still around by the time this airs, like how much time could you expect to spend, to start?

Could, could you see really quick results in terms of the relationship building on Twitter or, or does it take. Take time. Should you be 

Evan: ready to be ready. It doesn't take much at all. And it, you know, I'm always telling SDR this like, you know, especially cuz in LinkedIn Sales Navigator, now if you're running through a lead list, you'll see the contact info up front and center.

So you'll have to click into the dropdown that you do on the main LinkedIn navigation. So you'll see if they have a Twitter account, he popped that open so you don't have one. You go sign up, verify your phone number, add a profile image, add a bio, go follow 10 accounts. Ask anyone you know on Twitter to follow you, to ask me with a mention f and p.

Done. I'll follow you, you know, to follow 50,000 people. Obviously I don't use my feed very much, but. And then you can, then you run a bio search, right? you can get simple or fancy with it. Just look for the titles you go after, right? And ask 'em a topical question. Don't pitch, right? This is not gonna get you anything anywhere these days anyway.

you know, but if you can find a hot topic that your company's attached to, right? Then ask 'em about it. Ask for their perspective. You know, say, give 'em a comment. You've been leading this company for this many years, right? you know, should companies be focused on this or this, right? Like, should they invest in this kind of software right now, or should they invest in this?

that's just, you know, imagine you met 'em at Starbucks, right? Like, how would you strike up a conversation? You wouldn't be like, well, did you want a demo with your latte? You know, you'd be like, oh, so what do you think about this? That's what people, people want to give their opinion, right? that's what I find pretty universally true.

but yeah, it's two minutes and you're up and running Nice. With a new channel, 

Travis: if you're not in the feed, how are you, kind of hopping into conversations and, and finding things? Is it a lot through the search or do you have lists? 

Evan: Yeah, I make a lot of lists. you know, I think Twitter's always under undervalued its list.

Like if I could sit down with Elon Musk right now, I would, here's what I would tell him. lists are everything, right? Because the biggest problem with Twitter is they're so lightweight on personal identification. So it's really hard to map to all possible contacts on Twitter that are valuable in a given domain.

As in you can't always tell from someone's. What they're about, what they're interested in. Often people make weird bios, emoji bios, whatever. Yeah. You know? And people don't often use their business emails with Twitter, so Twitter has a hard time matching Right. Audiences. but if they could basically make lists the centerpiece of Twitter, right?

You know, you would only need one account. You could be like, here's my, my list for engaging with Bengals conversations here. My, here's my list for marketing, right? and recruiting and, and funding a career. Yeah, so I use list, but primarily, you know, I spend time with the search filters, right? And, search different terms.

I have alerts for Google alerts and such things for different terms, and, get notified about conversations that are worth jumping into. And, you know, only do it occasionally, frankly. but that's the beauty of it. The, if you're focused on reaching out to individuals, right, you're not playing an algorithm game.

So it doesn't matter how frequently you post or you know, you could find a tool for auto retweeting. You know, pick a hashtag that's nice and safe and comfy and auto retweet stuff. So it looks like your account's not dead. But other than that, you know, The tweets that you tweet, two people, Travis only show up.

They don't actually show up in your main bio bio. When someone's on your page, they have to click the tweets and replies tab to see them. So it's not like you're even like risking a brand or anything. Right? Like I copy paste messages all the time, right? Like, I wanna ask these 20 people the same question.

Mm. So I do. 

Travis: Nice. You know. And are you, are you mostly like engaging through, through the app itself or through a different On desktop? 

Evan: Yeah. On desktop. Yeah. Just, yeah. Oh, through a tool? No, there's not really a tool that does this well. Like Hootsuite for a long time had a pretty good like feed monitoring thing, hashtag monitoring.

But the bio search capability, managed Flitter was the best tool for doing that. Nice. Was, 

Travis: yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Tweet deck. I used to use that, time to time to kind of organize lists and keep 'em all in one place. Mm-hmm. , like all in one, one screen. Do you ever, or have you ever, or do you ever, use like Spark Toro to do some research into, to topics and who follows who and 

Evan: try to find like influence mapping tools and such? Yeah, I have in the past, I haven't used, them in a long time. I used to top influencer list for digital marketing cuz I have a lot of followers and I have digital marketing in my bio.

But, you know, and, You know, I think, I think you could, I think, Sifton is another tool, S Y F T E, and they monitor communities as well, slack communities and newsletters and stuff, and Quora. so there's a lot of value and tools that help you track conversations. Absolutely. I think the trick is I always find myself at startups where they're still defining product market fit, right?

Mm-hmm. . And so the stuff I want to track, is very low volume or nonexistent because you're creating a category, right? So, yeah. yeah. 

Travis: Nice. Very cool. awesome. And then, kind of coming back to your career path in trajectory there. So, you know, when you, when you were making the pivot into something for more money, with an interest in writing and, and, and poetry, like why marketing?

How did. 

Evan: Happened. How was that? Yeah, I mean, it happened really organically that someone reached out with a writing role or No, I reached out, I applied for a writing role and didn't get it. like content writer kind of thing, really basic. But they shared my resume with this gentleman who wanted to launch a leadership plug, and from there I learned WordPress social.

Writing newsletter, ebook creation. So basically that's what I did freelancing for a couple years, was that weird mix of things, right? Then needed to supplement then and you know, frankly, very difficult, right? To freelance and the 30% tax issue, right? Like you gotta have a solid base that's consistent, to be able to pull that off.

And then, so I started working with an agency in social media marketing cuz you. Kind of found a fit at agency I still work with and use today. Market Tiering group. I spent almost a year there and, and then found another gig at a startup that, was doing data analytics. ended up leading product there after four years, I believe.

And then, building AI models for analyzing television. you know, audience metrics versus what's in the content on screen and being said in the audio. and then that kind of collapsed, so moved on to,marketing roles that I could land,because I'd done some performance marketing consulting work.

and, you know, joined Convoy as a senior digital marketing manager, and then joined Airlock as a head of growth marketing for the us. And then here I am as the Director of Growth Marketing at Sinky. 

Travis: Nice. And, and, and how would you, like, what, what all goes into to growth marketing for people who are That's a good question.

Kind of pivoting, wanna pivot into marketing? There's so many things you can do. yeah, 

Evan: yeah. That's the, that's the sum of the marketing game, right? Is there are so many things you can do. And frankly, marketing has always had these titles for these catchall buckets of, basically where the goal is. to bring more new people more often and to repeatedly back to the business.

Right? for a long time, that was digital marketing manager, right? Mm-hmm. , then it was performance marketing manager, especially if you were an e-commerce or something has shifted, especially in B2B SaaS companies, which is the space I've been in for a couple years now. to growth marketing or demand generation.

They're generally equivalent where growth marketing has more of a role in like some basic management of like the website and, and email. things demanding can often be really focused on paid media and or, you know, communities, organic, social,and Yeah, growth marketing. I think if you had to try to sum it up, it would be, owning all digital properties that scale, right?

So you've got website, email, paid media, often growth marketers do own events. We have an events person at Sinky who's excellent. So, that's separate function. And you know, your objective in a b status environment is to drive pipeline, right? To create opportunities, sales opportunities, deals. the, that happens sometimes through legion and also happens through directly supporting the pipeline, how fast it moves by reaching out retargeting, people who are at those companies, with advertising.

And, you know, setting up the email newsletters and nurture sequences, managing the website for the blog content seo. SEO s Eem tend to fall under growth marketing in these demand gen B2B SAS environments, particularly because search is essentially demand mm-hmm. and, yeah. So there's a ton of different pieces to it.

You know, I think if anyone wants to break into this kind of real growth marketing or dimension, there are a few good things they could, could try to to do. One is, try to get a small advertising experiment. Done somehow, right? So, maybe you're in a content management role. Ask if you can create three different LinkedIn posts and pay, you know, one to $2,000 each to to promote them, right?

Evan: And then analyze the results, get deep into LinkedIn ads and the click through rates, the engagement rates, which drove, you know, actual comments versus, engagement to the site. And, so paid me to experimentation, keyword research for seo. There's a lot of great content out there, on how to run good keyword research.

Recommend looking into bottom funnel, terminology, meaning someone's looking for alternatives to a competitor, right? Or, reviews or pricing of a competitor. or you know, the top like best software of X category terms, right? that signal someone's shopping. If you can find someone who's shopping, you can make content to that.

and then, probably a third place to innovate, is, like web analytics, right? Like, finding opportunities to reduce friction on a website, using Google Analytics, which that game is gonna change a lot with GA four versus Universal Analytics rolling out. it's painful for me and I know something about this stuff, but, You know, being able to look at things like what pages people come in on, the landing pages versus, where they leave, how far they get, where they go.

trying to paint that picture of a journey through a website, is super valuable and very, very few good marketing companies and teams do that well or even at all. Yeah. 

Travis: Yeah. Yeah. I think, I mean that's, that's fantastic advice. And I think it could be challenging for people even who have been in, in marketing for a while because the terms, this, you know, things keep getting different names for the same old things, right.

Like, and yeah. And I think. Rev ops, like, and, and nobody knows what the hell Rev is really. you could talk to five different people and get five different definitions. but I think part of that is kinda what you were just describing of, of like mapping customer journey. And, and from a rev op perspective, it's.

What are the touch points between sales and marketing? Right? And understanding that and removing friction, for, for someone to go through the process. And I think it's super important and I don't see a lot of that being done either, you know? and, yeah, with Googling analytics and, and GA four, I mean, that's, I feel like I've been in there recently.

I, I've avoided GA four as long as I possibly can. Me too. mean, I've set it up for people and like said, Hey, just at least get the data flowing so you're not starting from scratch in June, you know? and then I just don't look at it again. but I, I was in there recently and I, I feel like they've made some changes.

Travis: I think they're gonna have. If they're, if they're gonna get people to continue to use it, and not, not switch to something else. and I have a two month old baby, and, and on my mornings it used to be spent writing and, and doing creative work myself. when I don't have hands free, it's gonna, I mean, I, I could dictate what I wanna write, but that's different.

Like, it just your mind to your hands and typing something out is a whole different thing. Mind and mouth. Right. and so I just watch a lot of videos in the morning while I'm feeding a baby and I've been doing a ton of like, HubSpot certifications. I'm kind of getting tired of, of those. So this week I've really like started digging into GA four.

It's like, all right, let's figure this out. Yeah. Conversion tracking, how is that done? Apparently through tag manager. and, so yeah, just been really digging into GA four this week. And, and, and yeah, and mostly because I have some clients who, so when I started in, when I made a pivot into marketing back in the day and I was in recruitment trying to, to work my way out, Started doing side gigs as well.

The same, same thing that you did to get, get into it and, mm-hmm. , I, I started in, in paid, paid, paid search mostly, because that's what I found interesting. You could show some really quick results versus SEO where you can do all kinds of stuff. Yeah. Nothing. Right. and and I have a cousin who, owns a, a paid media, paid search company in Indianapolis, and she was like one of the first 10 Google AdWords back then Google AdWords employees at Google.

And so she, she knows a lot about it, , and, and she kind of helped me get started and, and learn the ropes there. And even though I've, I've moved on from that and, and moved into ops, which again, like the, the depth and breadth of marketing. Like I was doing ops in a certain way and always kind of like found my way into that kind of stuff in marketing and never knew it had, it had its own thing and that it was its own like career path.

and so once I found that out, I, I just am like, all right, I'm all in on this cause this is the fun part for me of, of marketing. and I still have clients who want me to do some paid, paid search and, and things like that, so, mm-hmm. . So trying to get that set up. But, but yeah, it's, I mean, it's constantly changing and, and just when you, you think, you know something, Google after 20 years decides to just completely change, change its interface and change everything, right?

Travis: So mm-hmm. . So, so you have to be willing to, you have to like learning, I think, to be a marketer when you, that's. Agree 

Evan: with that, to totally agree with that. I think, you know, I just did a post on this on LinkedIn recently, but, You have to like learning, you have to show that you can learn something quickly, right?

So people listening to this who want to get into marketing or into a new type of marketing or any, any role really, but particularly sales and marketing roles, I think there's a really set playbook you can run for. You know, let's say you have a first conversation with a company, 15 minutes, whatever, to make sure you're real human, you're not weird, you move on to the hiring manager or you know, adjacent.

And, you research the company in a lot of different ways. You, you, look at Google Trends related to them, their topics, their brand, even if they're that big. Obviously this works better for smaller companies where people care more about that, but even a bigger company visit the website, break down how they position their products.

Do they use different words? Is there some confusing stuff, like stuff that doesn't make sense to you on their website? Ask about it, right? Document this all in a Google Doc. Keep going. Go to their glass door, look at reviews for people on your team. And also tell if you should run away from the company.

But it'll tell you like, you know, what are people working on? How are they talking? You can get on Blind App and see like anonymous feedback on the company too. You know, type into Google site colon, the company names. If you type site colon syncy.com, you'll get our top indexing pages. So you scroll down, you look past the main pages, like the product page, and about page.

You get a, which blogs are the top ranking? Right? Make that observation to them, oh, I found these were the top ranking blogs on Google. You know, does that fit with your current targeting strategy? Is that the kind of stuff that you want to be ranking for? Right? Like, if you can reflect to someone. Even if you don't know the category or the role that you're a quick, quick learner who's thorough, that's most marketing roles and even most sales roles, right?

that's account research. that's market research, right. You know, I think there's a, That learning aspect is vital, and, and marketing leaders recognize that too. You know, they invest in people who are there to research and learn and, and have a growth mindset rather than a fixed mindset. Right? 

Travis: Yeah, absolutely.

And I may, I may have to push this, this episode. Higher sooner, because I think there's a lot of relevant stuff here that's timely. And some of the things you were talking about there led me to think about like, what's going on right now with all the layoffs and mm-hmm.

unfortunately, a lot of marketing people, are, are getting laid off because for whatever reason, Doesn't make sense that marketing is among the first to get cut when you think that you'd want to keep marketing and keep it, keep demand going, right? Mm-hmm. , but, you know what, whatever, what, what advice would you have for people who.

Have recently been laid off and, and, and, you know, let's say the economy may continue to worsen and like it, it could be a while before they can find something. Should they think about pivoting? Should they think about doing something on their own? How, how would, how would you 

Evan: advise that?

Yeah, I mean, depends how jaded they are with the, venture capital model, right? Which is where a lot of the layoffs are happening because the valuation changes, right? And that's why, you know, people out that Amazon and Facebook met our, you know, doing layoffs, that's really what it's about, right?

Their market cap dropped and they have to reflect a better balance sheet. so. Go look for companies that are bootstrapped, that have no venture capital, right? obviously I work at a company with venture capital. lot of it has to do with the ramp time, right? And how recently they raised around.

So you can go back to venture capital, but you know, again, to that research document, like, okay, I see you took money from these companies and they got these people in their portfolio, right? you know, those companies are suffering too, right? Like, are you guys in a better position, how, you know, you've raised recently like.

You know, are you at a burn rate that's, that you feel comfortable with for the next, you know, one to two years? Right. what happened lately is a lot of companies got really aggressive, on their burn rates, particularly in engineering and in sales and marketing roles. And, thought that VC capital would you.

venture, it's redundant anyways. VC money would just be right around the, the bend like it has been for years. so I definitely think, like, think about the business model that, that you're comfortable with, right? And if you're willing to take a risk and you can handle some equity risk, you know, make sure you still check out the fundamentals, of the company and the financials and, and, And pick something that has some stability to it.

Evan: The other thing is product market fit, as you can tell by How clear the pain language is on a website, typically on their social? Do they know exactly who they're talking to and exactly what painful things about that customer's life they're speaking to? you know, I've been at a few different companies and most, don't have product market fit.

I'm very fortunate to be at a company now that is very hot on the heels of product market fit, and in some ways has really nailed. But it's the hardest thing for any startup to do, and a lot of startups grow ahead of having pmf. it's always gonna be hard to make magic happen in a sales or marketing role when the company doesn't have fit.

like it's pretty much impossible to scale until you have rental market fit. It, it is impossible. You have to experiment like crazy, be super adept at change management and. And really be able to take a beating, a lot of nos to find those yeses, right? once you do, it's amazing. so, you know, which is the other thing about venture capital, last thing I'll say on that, right?

Evan: Like, watch out for companies that have raised too much cash too quickly, it's a sign that they are, they're riding a wave that is dying and they didn't solve cash flow and, and sustainability. Soon enough. Yeah. 

Travis: Yeah. That's great advice and, and, and great things to, to look for. and the pain language is, is interesting.

cause I mean, I, I. See Company's websites all the time where I get, I get to their homepage and I have no idea what they're for and who they're for. Like is that a pretty clear indication that they are, are struggling to find that Yeah. 

Evan: That pain feeling. Yeah, absolutely. Right. Like it doesn't take much to up update copy on a website Right on, on a homepage.

Right. and, It should reflect the flagship problem space to use the lane methodology language that a company deals with. And if it isn't clear what that is from the get go, or they start off with really boring jargon about a category or something like that, then you know, have a hard time succeeding in a marketing role.

Hmm. 

Travis: Yeah. Yeah. One, one of the only startups I worked for, in Seattle, back in the. What I mean, it was, it was in the recruitment space, which I had come from. Right. And I knew it. but man, we had such a hard time. Like, like we overcomplicate it and, and just kinda always changing kinda the, the what, the who, and, and I remember when I left there in 2000.

I think it was, or the end of 2008 and I'd moved back to Denver. I mean, had horrible time to quit. Quit your job right when everything tanks. kinda like what I did a month ago. , my timing with, with leaving jobs during bad economies is, is kind of a problem. But, and I was like interviewing with companies in Denver and I remember being in an interview and the person asked me, well, What, what did that that company do?

What did you sell? And I had the hardest time explaining it to, to someone who wasn't in that space. And even, even if they were, I would have such a hard, it just, and I was just thinking, man, no wonder we were struggling because like, can't even describe what we do. Like what's the benefit, what's the value, and, and what it is that we did.

And so I think so many startups have that. that they don't really, they have an idea and it's a good idea at first, and then it just kind of gets away from 'em and becomes over complicated. Right? 

Evan: Yeah. You know, that's, it goes back to this idea of conversations, right? As a marketer, your job is to create them.

It's also where you learn the most, right? In dialogue. Not, not even a synchronous dialogue, real live back and forth. That's where you learn, you know, And you can tell by reading someone's body language and facial expressions and tone that you missed the mark and you were too vague, right? Mm-hmm. , I really recommend Shelley TURs, to an MIT researcher reclaiming conversation.

she misses the mark on her view on work from home versus in office, but, she's absolutely on point with the premise, which. We have lost the discipline of having regular conversations with real humans in real time. And most of the technology we interact with today actually takes us to, distraction and, asynchronous conversations, which are just not the same training for our brains.

Evan: Mm. , know, and, that applies a ton to marketers, right? Like, if you can get on the phone with someone, if you can get a q and a back and forth with someone, if you can, you know, just ask to record interview conversation, you know, is a really common bridge that can be made leap that can be made into marketing from like customer success people.

Why? Because they talk to customers. You just learn to extrapolate wisely from those customer conversations. You're. Yeah, exactly. right, and, and apply that. You know, let's, okay, I heard this five times from these six people, so let's go, go to market with that. That's what they called it. You know, they'll tell you, right?

And they'll tell you in plain language, right? Like, this is how I think about this. I use it for this. Oh, I used to have to import these files this way and drag data this way. And oh man, I spent five hours a day in Excel, and now I only spend. There's your website, . Yeah, exactly. 

Travis: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I mean, I think there, there's something to be said for having conversa real conversations.

and Zoom helps a lot as well. Mm-hmm. , I do miss old school phone calls, to, to be able to walk around my office and walk around and talk, you know? Mm-hmm. , I, I don't like standing still. That's why I stand, but I definitely don't like sitting, and talking. But, but yeah, I think there's. You know, something to be said for having a conversation that starts in Twitter or starts on LinkedIn.

Travis: And then taking it to, to a call, even if it's just one call, that you ever have with that person, I think it then changes that dynamic of the online communication at that point. Right. I think it helps with the context of someone's posts and comments because now, You've heard their voice before, you know, and you understand their tone.

And, I just think there's a lot that goes in, you know, that I, I think it's just a good thing to do, just get, just have conversations with people. Yeah. Which is why I do this podcast. 

Evan: Really. Yeah, yeah. No, I totally agree. It's, it's the stuff of real innovation, right? Is how you stumble upon new ideas and codify good ones and, and find opportunities to collaborate and.

and, you know, people are crazy willing to help someone they've had a real conversation with. It's the other thing, you wanna break into any sort of role, just ask to for 15 minutes of someone's time, who's in that role, right? you just ask them questions at the end of it. Be shocked if they don't offer to make introductions or, or referrals, right?

Evan: Mm-hmm. , 

Travis: Yeah, exactly. yeah, I'm always, always surprised, like, I mean, I don't have a lot of clients right now. I'm just building things back up, but yet my days are full of calls and they're not sales calls. They're not, you know, like, yeah, I, I'm just like, man, why am I so busy, but I'm making any money?

How's this work? But I mean, it's just, I enjoy the conversations. I learn a ton. Mm-hmm. , I, I just kind of solidify those relationships that I, I've kind of started online. And at some point, you know, I'm trying not to have expectations about it. Mm-hmm. , but karma's a thing. And, somehow, some way I think I just, I just interviewed Jenny Blake, for the second time on the, on the show, earlier this weekend.

We talked about serendipity, and I think serendipity is just like it's a part of life and, and your career. Like things just happen. You are in the right place at the right time and you can't explain it, and something just happens. And I think you just have to put yourself in that position with no expectations and things will just happen.

You can't even predict it. , 

Evan: you know, you should connect with Kyle Frees. Have you connected with him before? I don't think so. Sounds kind 

Travis: of familiar though. 

Evan: Just, he's got a new, marketing op consulting shop and, yeah, you should connect with him and, and see what he is working on. Nice. That's good.

I'll do that. Yeah. Cool. Yeah, this has been a lot of fun, Travis. Thanks for your time and, you know, I appreciate that you're doing this for people to help 'em figure out best ways to get in a new career paths. 

Travis: Yeah. Yeah. I appreciate it and, and, great conversation and, and, glad we got to talk again.

And, and thanks for coming on. 

Evan: Yeah, likewise. Take care of Travis. Thanks.



Head Shot

Travis L. Scott

Host