Nathan Yeung is Vice President of CMO Services at Find Your Audience, a leading Marketing as a Service provider.  In this episode, Nathan defines Marketing as a Service and then talks about some of the best marketing strategies for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs). He also touches on the role of metrics, podcasts, marketing tools, and the importance of developing an AI-focused culture.

You can find the whole episode of the Grow Fast Podcast with Nathan Yeung here:

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This is the transcript for this episode:

Mark Shriner [0:00]

David, welcome to the grow fast podcast where we talk with leading sales, marketing and personal growth experts about how companies can accelerate sales, optimize marketing, and grow their businesses fast. Let's go. Hey, Nathan, how you doing?

Nathan Yeung [0:15]

I'm doing well, man, how are you? Pretty good. Pretty good!

Mark Shriner [0:17]

Good. Want to thank you for coming on The Grow Fast Podcast, and I'm really excited to talk to you about something that's relatively new to me, and that is marketing as a service, mass I guess it's called, I don't know if that's the industry kind of way to address it. Want to talk to you about that. First off, whereabouts are you located?  

Nathan Yeung [0:36]

So, I live in Canada, and I bounce between both Toronto and Vancouver.  

Mark Shriner [0:41]

So, I'm right down the road from you. I'm in the Seattle area, in Bellevue, Washington, maybe 15 minutes from Microsoft. So, if you're in Vancouver, are you in Vancouver? Now I'm in Vancouver. So, are you having a beautiful summer, like we're having one here?  

Nathan Yeung [0:54]

It's gorgeous right now. Yeah, got a little heat wave here and there, but it's gorgeous.  

Mark Shriner [0:58]

What are the major differences the way in your perception between Toronto and Vancouver?  

Nathan Yeung [1:06]

Oh, Man, there are a lot.  

Mark Shriner [1:08]

Where do I start?  

Nathan Yeung [1:10]

And it's funny, because, like, so I'm not an outdoorsy guy, because I don't know what it is. Mosquitoes love me, okay? And so I did absolutely massacre, like it's a bloodbath for me. So, I try not to go outside. A lot I do. But like, you know, when it comes to what Vancouver is, very much appreciated for appreciate it because it's not actually very fun for me, right? Because I appreciate it, but, you know, not the after effects of it. So, and I think the other thing, and I'm sorry for any Vancouver people listening, I feel like is a little bit like green wash to Miami. And I'll say this in the sense of, like, we don't really have a ton of industry. It's incredibly expensive to live here. It's predominantly fueled by real estate. It's predominantly fueled by foreign money. And if you look at that, it's like, it kind of sounds like Miami, but we're all green here. We love outdoors. We don't like to drink and party too much. It's like, we love kayaking.  

Mark Shriner [2:10]

That's so funny.  

Nathan Yeung [2:11 ]

I joke about it, and I call it green wash Miami. People get really upset about me, and I'm like, Look, you know, argue. Let's have a, you know, constructive debate about this. It's a beautiful city. I love it. I would love, you know, I want to bring my family up here and in Toronto, though it's like, I wish I went to Toronto earlier. I moved to Toronto when I was like, I want to say 25/26, I can barely remember now. And the speed, the pace, the velocity, the people you meet, the conversations you can have, everyone. I think it's just it's a city where the people that go to that city have a mindset, and that mindset is, let's go do stuff, let's build things. And I think when you go to a bar in Vancouver, you can start a conversation with three or four people, but no one's really interested to have a coffee with you tomorrow. You do a call. You do the exact same thing to Arnold, everyone's going to be interested to have coffee with you tomorrow, or at least the week after.

Mark Shriner [3:07]

You're talking about because they because they have similar business interests. Or is it just, hey, people are much more real or something?  

Nathan Yeung [3:16]

I think so. I think just, you know, I if you look at all the cities in the world. People move to cities for reasons. And I think for the reasons of Vancouver, it's really just lifestyle, whereas I think in reason in Toronto, everyone is moving there because they want to pursue a career. They want to move fast.

Mark Shriner [3:31]

It's funny, you say that because I know a lot of people who moved to Vancouver, mostly from Hong Kong, back during the 1996-97-time frame, right? And they did have a major impact on the real estate market without actually creating any kind of, I want to use the word viable, but, you know, any kind of, like startup culture, for example, there is a lot of businesses related to that, you know, that demographic, but it tends to be more in the well, you can say, a lot of restaurants and in shopping malls and things like that that cater to that demographic. But I haven't seen a huge kind of startup ecosystem that we, for example, that we do have down here in the Seattle area, primarily because of Microsoft and Amazon, which then you have all these people who leave and create their own kind of new startups and so on and so forth. The people that I've met from Toronto, actually, it's funny, I probably know 15 people from Toronto. Not a single one of those people that I can think of right now is originally from Toronto. But there they were all there for, yeah, starting a new life, jobs, whatever, and so but I never kind of connected the dots on that. So, that's interesting.  

Nathan Yeung [4:42]

It's a commercial catalyst to your life, right? You know, if commercializing capitalism is a part of your life, going to Toronto is a catalyst to that, yeah. And, you know, if you, if you think about, like, Vancouver's tech startup scene, it's like, it's sputtering along. And I say sputtering bees, we have some success. Successful exits. Like, Canada has some great companies. We have some great exits from Vancouver. We have some great, you know, startups that are really killing it from Vancouver and Victoria. But the Canadian ecosystem, as a whole, and I'm not even going to get into politics, like, we're really not too late. We're really not built to support it very well. Yeah, it's kind of like, why does Canada not have a FIFA soccer team worthwhile to get into the cup? Well, it's because we're not built for it. It's kind of the same thing, like, we're going to have great hockey players all the time because we're built for that. But when it comes to, like, tech startup, venture capital, private equity, and really fueling that ecosystem, the entire infrastructure of Canada just doesn't do the best job doing that.  

Mark Shriner [5:43]

It's interesting, and I do want to get into the market as a service topic very quickly here. But just another little observation. I've lived in maybe, I don't know, 10 different countries around the world, and the things that I miss, or the things that I appreciate, appreciate about the US when I'm not here, or even when I'm back, is one nature. We do have an amazing amount of, you know, if you talk from Alaska, Hawaii, Texas, California, coast, you know, the eastern seaboard, all that stuff is amazing. The other thing is, is we do have Silicon Valley and that business culture. If you're out of the US and you're working in a European company or Swiss company, if you're working for a Japanese company, and you understand how risk averse a lot of countries and cultures are around the world, and it's not just the aversion to risk. It's creating a whole ecosystem that supports, incentivizes, investing in what we call risky investments, but because you're looking for those unicorns, they're going to pay off. And a lot of cultures and countries around the world don't really get that yet. There are some that are making progress, but that's one thing that I really appreciate, appreciate about the US. I don't know if that makes sense to you.

Nathan Yeung [6:53]

It does. And not only that, talking about Silicon Valley, and you know, there's something to be said again about Toronto in the sense that when you have these centers that are, kind of known, they have their own brand, it attracts that talent. And when you have talent within a tight geographic area, you get exponential growth of knowledge, because now you have all these amazing people who are talented, who are driven, who are sharing with talented and driven people. And So, there's a natural intensification of that knowledge, right? Because it's so densely packed. And, you know, I know people enjoy remote work, but the reality is, is that when you get a whole bunch of really driven, really smart people in a room, you're going to get some really great ideas, and it's going to be way better than a zoom call.  

Mark Shriner [7:42]

Totally agree with you. And if you look at any of the best performers in any field, they always surround themselves with people who are as good or better than they are, right? And exactly, yeah. And it's funny, I'm just picking up a new hobby these days, sailing, and I've surrounded myself by these people who've been sailing their whole lives, and every time I interact with them, I feel like an idiot. I mean, it's hard at my age to just kind of, you know, you know, take a piece of that humble pie and just realize that I'm the dumbest guy in the room on that particular topic. But guess what? I'm learning, man, I'm learning tons. So, it's, it's pretty cool. So, let's get into marketing. Now. What is marketing as a service.  

Nathan Yeung [8:21]

So, marketing as a service is so i the whole thesis here is when I was working as kind of an operational consultant, slash, kind of, you know, person that investor brings in and works with their companies that they invest into, one of the things that I recognized and I've been recognizing basically my entire professional career, is marketing is a really, really difficult function for a lot of companies, especially when it's not at a level of scale. But mind you, I say that with a lot of trepidation, because realistically, every function is difficult until you get to scale. Right? You know that's why I always say it's harder to build a function than it is to run and optimize a function. But there's a  

Mark Shriner [8:59]

Difference between a core function, like building the product or delivering the service that we are selling, versus the promotion of that, right? And, you know, brand image and lead generation and everything like that, which is kind of a different skill set. But go ahead,  

Nathan Yeung [9:13]

Absolutely, and it's a confusing one, because if you don't have someone who's experienced, and if you think about it, the ecosystem of talent in the world. Right? For marketers, they either come from agencies or they come from corporate and the biggest issue with that is, is that when you're an agency, depending on how big that agency is, you're not getting very deep into any specific skill set, but you might be working with a lot of different companies, so you're building a very specific skill set, which is great. So, you're building that, for example, for example, copywriter, you're the best copywriter, so you're amazing example, right? You can write on CPG, and you can do all kinds of consumer package good stuff, right? So, you're like a damn good CPG person, but you've only now learned how to do copywriting for CPG, so you're stuck there, right, right? You're going and it's going to. Be really difficult for you to go to B to B, because it's a completely different skill set. And then you have people who go corporate, who are going to likely have very broad skill sets and only understand a single industry or category. And so what ends up happening is building a marketing team is really difficult because you're trying to find, or ideally, you're trying to find this one person who not only understands your industry or category, but ideally also has a fairly high aptitude across a very wide range of technical skill sets that are required to run a marketing function. And that's just not possible. Usually, a manager who's you know, someone that's an experience worked anywhere between four to six years. Will have an aptitude in one or two areas of marketing. Call it maybe email and CRM, maybe. Call it CRO so conversion rate optimization techniques and demand generation, so paid ads. Maybe it's copywriting, maybe it's branding, maybe it's you know, maybe it's conferences and trade shows. You're going to find someone that has a high aptitude in one of, like, probably one or two of these things, but you're not going to find them across all the skill sets. And that's why marketing is, I think, the most challenging area of a business, because it's the one that requires the broadest set of technical skills, right?  

Mark Shriner [11:20]

I would agree with you. And here's the challenge, where I see it is, if you're that person who's trying to build out that team, whether it's internal hires or, you know, working with freelancers or contractors, you know, if you only are familiar with two or three of those areas of marketing, and you need to bring on, let's say, an SEO specialist, or a SEM specialist, an AdWords specialist, you know, an event marketer, you don't have the experience to really validate their experience and their expertise, right? You're not even sure what questions to ask and what I've seen probably more than any other, I guess, situation, maybe on par with hiring salespeople, is that a lot of times there are missteps, because they get the person on there and then they find out, you know what, they don't really, can't really deliver on the LinkedIn strategy, for example, but on the resume, it looked all good. And, you know, so does that make sense?  

Nathan Yeung [12:19]

Yeah, literally. Why we, I've built this business. You know, to me, the white space that I identified was the fact that most companies have a really difficult time going from one to three marketing people internally. And I always say, if you can afford three FTEs, that's like the perfect sweet spot for you to build your marketing team internally. Outside of that, you're unlikely to ever find efficiencies, right, efficiencies and outcomes. Efficiencies in the sense of, like you can actually afford it, and they actually do a good job, and then you also get your outcome. Because, again, as we said, that person that's doing, you know, got four to six years experience, they're not going to provide all the things you need, and then they're going to provide deficiencies in exactly what you said, the areas of which they are not good at. And So, the whole reason why we built this model is I provide a retainer that's of the same level of hiring someone for full time, but you get access to all the technical skill sets because I have scale. You don't have scale, right?  

Mark Shriner [13:19]

When you say you have scaled, you have you, have a bench, or you have a team. No, I, my team will?

Nathan Yeung [13:24]

I have 26 full time employees, and these people are specialists, right? So, I have, you know, I'm not getting my poor event planner going into InDesign to draft up a document, because it's an inefficient use of their time, right? I don't have my, my demand generator, the guy who is or the person who is running my social media ads going into negotiation conference with a partnership, right? You want people who are in this is like every business you ideally want to specialize so that that one individual is doing a better job with better outcomes in less time. And so the whole point is, and also, as you're building a marketing department, you're typically not needing those two skill sets of whatever you've just hired all the time, so you are inefficiently using that employee probably 50% of time doing things that they that you want them to do, and are kind of just forced to do because you've made the decision to hire a single person. It's you're stuck with it. So, you have to utilize that resource regardless.  

Mark Shriner [14:34]

It's funny, because some of the industry, industries that I've worked in to use your example of event coordinator, the events. These events were very seasonal, and so you know, you might have seven, eight events in the fall, and then two or three months off, and then one or two spring events, and then the summer off, and then you go away for the fall again. And if you've got this full team, what are they doing? So, you've got all that extra bandwidth, and then you have to repurpose those people. Into, but that's not where their subject matter expertise is  

Nathan Yeung [15:03]

exactly, exactly. And So, though the whole marketing as a service is, you know, I'll be honest, there's kind of two main use cases, or three, I would say the first use cases. If you're about to enter into your marketing journey and you're finally mulling over this idea of hiring your first FTE, I would challenge you to go, you know, do you really think that individual is going to meet your expectations? And more often than not, you'll recognize that it won't.  

Mark Shriner [15:29]

Well, here is What will happen. In my experience, you'll hire that person, and the first thing that person is going to tell you is, I need to get some contractors to do all these things that I'm planning, right? So, So, I mean, you know, one way or another, you're not going to get by without getting some subject matter experts in there, because when it comes to, you know, sending out email, email campaigns, newsletters, that's one skill set. Doing the AdWords is another skill set. So, yeah, exactly.  

Nathan Yeung [15:54]

And that's going to be annoying, right? And frustrating, and not a part of your budget. So, that's definitely one-use case where we really much fit in. The second use case is, you know, truthfully, this happens a lot in private equity cost cutting. So, they go, oh, you know, we got two FTEs. But, you know, realistically, Nathan's firm is cheaper, and we'll probably do the same amount of work as those two FTE. So, we'll cost cut, and Nathan's team goes in. And the third one is you do and you are very set on an FTE, so you have a senior, and you fully now recognize that senior has done exactly what they did in the first scenario that you've brought up, which is they need to hire a bunch of contractors, but at the same time, you don't really want to hire a bunch of contractors, because now you have an administrative burden. You have additional communication requirements, because now you have weekly meetings with a bunch of other contractors, and you have all this oversight requirement. So, then we also then fit in there. It's kind of the one stop shop. It's like, okay, you, you've, you've, you've really dug your feet in. The fact that you want a ft, that's fine. I can understand that for some companies, but now this ft really needs strong support, and I don't want to over complicate it for them, so we'll go hire Nathan, because Nathan will now become this FTEs colleague, right? And I think that's the most important thing, is where I really try to make sure that we come into companies as a partner. And I have said this to many companies, I'm like, we work best when their marketing team really, truly thinks of us as a colleague, not as a not as a competitor, as a colleague. So, that senior member is looking to me, it's like, hey, Nathan, here's some ideas. Let's bounce ideas together, versus Hey, Nathan, do this? Yeah?  

Mark Shriner [17:36]

That actually leads into my next question, which is, do you engage on tactical, you know, those like subject matter expert areas. Or do you start off at a strategic level and say, hey, you know what? Trying to do everything? You know, I think there's like 18 different types of marketing, right? Trying to do all 18 at once is kind of a recipe for not doing anything well and spending a lot of money, right? So, let's figure out what works best for you. Do you do both of those, or do you focus on one of the other?  

Nathan Yeung [18:03]

We do both of those, and generally, what ends up happening during discovery? That's really strategy piece. And depending on how institutionalized they want that strategy, because there's kind of like, you know, people like the front load, and most, most people who are making decisions and marketing want, action tomorrow. So, I always go, Look, we can institutionalize and create a very great foundation that can be something that we can iterate every, you know, every six months, create that document, create that plan, have that North Star, have consistency across the organization, but just recognize that's going to take some time. Or what I can do is, during a discovery, I can really quickly tell you what we can prioritize on based on what I currently know in the business. And so that's you. You've literally hit it. On the other hand, I always say marketing is actually far more simple than you think it is, because most of the time my job is a prioritization exercise, right? It's more just like I know that there are 18 different versions of marketing that you could think and do, but here are the highest probability ones that I think are actually going to make an impact your business today. And I was literally just talking to another podcast host on a topic that I'm going to do, and that topic is going to be every channel works for every business. And some people are going to be like, what do you mean by that? And we're like, well, you can send men's clothing on Pinterest, even though Pinterest is predominantly a female oriented platform, and a lot of people will have that question, is like, well, the ICP doesn't, doesn't fit. It's like, you're right, but that's not the point. The point is, is that every channel works, but you have enough time and money to invest to make it work. That's the question, and that's why I say it's a prioritization extra. When you have 16 months, 18 months of runway. Pinterest is not your choice. If the ICP does not match, right, you lean at least resistance, you go where you know you can make sales, or you can least fight qual, really, really qualified marketing leads. And So, my job, because I've been privileged enough to be across so many. Different industries and categories, I can really help guide companies on like, hey, SEO is not a main thing, but I can tell you right now, SEO across every industry generally brings in the lowest CAC. So, you want SEO always working but is it where we're going to invest 90% of our resources or 20% because we just need to start it right. And so this is typically what I do for strategy, is I go, I understand your ICP, I understand the constraints. I understand our human capital, sorry, human financial and ICP constraints. And this is, these are the two or three channels that I think will ultimately succeed for you, and then we can expand from there.

Mark Shriner [20:41]

Makes a lot of sense. Let's talk about, I mean, what's a typical profile for the companies that you work with?  

Nathan Yeung [20:48]

So, the typical profile right now is, you know, on a broad range, it's B2B. So, we've worked in a ton of just business to business type organizations, whether that's SaaS or professional services, or even private equity and venture capital. In terms of our largest part of our portfolio, it's typically like the two to $20 million sub 50 employee B2B, SaaS companies, where they've kind of got traction, they want more scale, but they're not really too sure. They're generally sales or founder led, and marketing has always just been an afterthought. And it's been a maintenance activity, right? We need to look professional enough to make sales but, but marketing has never been an institutionalized function. It's always just been like a necessary evil, because we can't look like we're from the 1950s  

Mark Shriner [21:36]

So, you know, if you think about lessons learned from working with that subset of your customer base, this B to B, SaaS, companies out there that are anywhere from you said to I think, 10 million in annual recurring revenue, what are some things that are working and some things that you know, what you probably don't need, want to consider until you get your series A or B or something like that.

Nathan Yeung [22:00]

Oh, yeah, this is a great question. So, I think the first thing is, SEO works, period, full stop, like, I don't care what business you're in, SEO is always a winner, but it's always midterm, right? So, it's always a midterm activity, unless you're lucky enough that you've had some person who's built some sort of track record and authority on your website, just through some sort of experience, generally speaking, it's going to take three to six months before you to see any fruit from a cold start. So, SEO, hands down, works for every business period.  

Mark Shriner [22:37]

Break that down a little bit. Because SEO even itself, there are, you know, that could be considered to be a kind of a broad term. So, what kind of like specific activities would these companies be doing if they want to allocate some of the resources to SEO?  

Nathan Yeung [22:49]

This is great question. So, I so this is, I'll talk about some problems later. So, search engine optimization is fundamentally about producing content around your area of expertise. And ideally, you want to become a top you want to be an authority in that topic space. And in order to do that, you need to produce articles, and you need to produce articles frequently. And So, I tell a lot of companies, because they become very anally retentive on content. And they go, oh, we need to review this. So, they spend, you know, 32 hours reviewing one SEO article, and then they produce one article a month, and then they and then they blast the marketing team, because they're like, why aren't we ranking? And I go, well, because you're actually supposed to producing 30 so do you want to spend 900 hours? Let me know if you do or 9000 hours. And So, the reality is, I always tell people, it's like, you need to produce six and seven in terms of quality. You don't need a 10. And I always explain this to people because it's like, guess what? You're not ranking and you're not the homepage favorite for every ICP in the market. No one is coming to your website to read the Daily News about your industry, at least not right now. So, this idea, this hyper fixation and truthful overconfidence of how important you think you are, it becomes a hindrance to the SEO activity. Let SEO do what it needs to do, produce articles. Don't over, fixate on whether or not they're perfect, but get the fact that your website is being seen as being a frequent producer of quality articles around your topic, period full stop.  

Mark Shriner [24:30]

And when you say seen and you're talking by the search engine algorithms that, hey, you know what, there's a fair amount of content, fresh content, coming out on a regular basis. Because the other another aspect of SEO is like, is the backlinks. And when you have, you know, influencers who say, hey, you know what, this is a great article, or maybe who somebody is researching a report, they publish a report, and then they reference some of the content that's on your page, and then you get the backlink section. But those are, those are the home runs, I guess.  

Nathan Yeung [24:58]

Yeah. 100% Those are definitely home runs. And people have to understand that Google is a business. That business has resources, and that resource is something they call like the crawling resource. The crawling resource will define whether or not they think you're an inactive website or an active website. If you're an inactive website, you have to prove to the crawler that it's worth the crawlers resource time to re crawl you frequently, right, right? And because, because it's their business, they're that that business is the crawler trying to figure out who should I go visit every so often, because I actually know they do a good job, and they know they do it frequently, and they and they do it consistently, and so you have to get there, right?  

Mark Shriner [25:43]

So, so let me, and I'm sorry, but because, you know, you got me thinking here, let me get your view on this posting, making a blog post on your homepage, versus creating the same post on LinkedIn. And this is the context of B to B, right? So, and then, and then, let's go into the whole application or the use or leveraging of LinkedIn for B2B companies that you...

Nathan Yeung [26:09]

Geez, that's a great question. And the reason I say it's a great question is because I've started recognizing that LinkedIn is, well, I've known this, um, but just recently, it's come across my desk, LinkedIn is ranking for particular keywords now, and so that means your article on LinkedIn is sometimes ranking. In my opinion, you're going to have a challenge on navigating that, and my navigation around that would be if you are a CEO or founder, you want to use your LinkedIn, likely for more personal branding keywords and topic authority around you as a person, and you want to leave your business and commercial keywords for your website. Because the problem is, is that when someone goes to LinkedIn there, it's just like one more click to for them to get to your website. And I would not advise that now, could that change, and consumer behavior change in the future, maybe, but I would be I would not advise to put your most important commercial keywords on LinkedIn. I think you could put tertiary keywords, sort of longer tail, things that you think are not as have as much commercial intent on your LinkedIn. But I would, I would not want to compete with myself. And then also, I suppose I'm also saying, I'm assuming you only produce one piece of content here. If you really, really wanted to do this. You could produce two pieces of content and compete with yourself. But again, we're talking about prioritization here.  

Mark Shriner [27:48]

Well, yeah, in the Issue, Part of the issue is, is that LinkedIn will prioritize posts that do not link outside of LinkedIn, right? So, they'll get so but you know, one of the fastest ways to drive engagement that we found on LinkedIn is to create a newsletter, right? The problem with that is, I mean, you can immediately go out and get 5, 10,000 followers, or even much, many, many more, depending on what area you're targeting, but you don't get their email addresses. Okay, So, do you create a newsletter on LinkedIn, or do you create one in your homepage? But then how do you get people to your homepage to your homepage? You registered newsletter. So, what we're looking at is kind of a hybrid approach, put an abbreviated or summarized newsletter on LinkedIn, and then give people say, hey for the full, you know, newsletter, complete newsletter, whatever, come on over to our homepage and do that that you know. And you could tell me if that's makes sense or not, or if we should be looking at something different.

Nathan Yeung [28:42]

It's so it's so this, you're asking some damn good questions, and I really appreciate that, because this challenges my thought process in so I said you can any business, can work on any channel, and the reason I say that is because it is a personal choice where you consume your media, it's a personal choice, right? And it's also a personal choice which ones ultimately have the most influence and impact. Now, there are averages, meaning certain platforms generally have more influence and impact, but to certain individuals, they will that that's a factor of just your own subjectivity, right, your own personal choice. I would argue that your overlap might be different and in the sense that you are likely getting people who do consume newsletters via LinkedIn as their primary source, and you're going to get people who like to get it through their email as a primary source, and so therefore, between the two, you're likely going to have some overlap, but you're likely going to have some unique. So, I think the model that you have proposed, as long as you're not handicapping the newsletter too much, I think, is likely a great way for you to. Cross sell into the two channels. And I do think both channels are worthwhile. So, so how you have done it? I think is a very reasonable approach. I don't see a downside to it. I only see a downside if you're handicapping one side, too much.

Mark Shriner [30:13]

Make sense. And thank you for being diplomatic and not saying that I was stupid.

Nathan Yeung [30:18]

But you're not. I think, I think it's a reasonable approach and, you know, I think if you're copying it one for one, you would be creating some challenges. But I think limiting it has more upside than not.  

Mark Shriner [30:29]

Okay, awesome. In addition to SEO, what are some other areas that A, B2B, SaaS platform should be definitely putting into their you know, Arsenal,  

Nathan Yeung [30:41]

review websites and lists management. So, um, there's a study by by Google that just shows how being seen during the decision-making process can impact the decision by up to, I think, I think just with a logo is like, up to, like, think 12% or something. If you supercharge it, aka, you've got reviews, and you've got social proof, and you got some of these heuristics in play, you can increase the decision to be changed by up towards, I think 60% don't quote me on these numbers, but I know they're impactful.  

Mark Shriner [31:19]

So, what you're saying is, when somebody, Hey, I'm going to buy X type of software, and I go online to find out who the leading providers are, and then I find this list here. And it could be an affiliate site, it could be somebody making money on the lead generation, whatever. But hey, it looks legit. And So, you know, and, but it's that kind of, I don't know, you just kind of become familiar with the brand, and I've seen them on three different sites. These guys must be legit, and also, I'll get in touch with them.  

Nathan Yeung [31:44]

Yeah, and just being seen with your competitor, with no additional heuristics, you can see upwards to a 12% change in opinion.  

Mark Shriner [31:54]

So, how do you get on those list pages?  

Nathan Yeung [31:56]

Some of them is pay to play. To be honest, I'll be straight up like Garner's pay to play. Source Forge is pay to play. Cap tears, pay to play. They are all pay to play. But the difference is how much time and money you invest into it. In the sense of getting your actual reviews, you need to get the reviews right, because, as I said, that 12% is meaningless. You want to get up to this higher point where it's actually like 50% or more. And in order to do that, you have to have heuristics at play. And those heuristics, one of the major one is going to be social proof, right? So, you really want to actually invest in the time. So, I really recommend a lot of the companies to actually spend the time to get reviews. I don't think enough companies really do that. I also recognize how operationally difficult that is. You know, I work with a lot of B2B companies getting a case study done professionally with one of their clients, can sometimes take a year, like, it's not like you, you gotta run it.

Mark Shriner [32:46]

We gotta run it through our legal team.  

Nathan Yeung [32:50]

And go to you would think it's a one-month exercise, but it's like, it's really not. And So, you know, I think that's the other thing that I'll you're going to ask is, like, what activity is really important is actually, like, having this, like testimonial case study cadence and like, operationalizing that, because it's not something you can force, right? It's not something where you're like, I need to ramp up and I need to get 10 reviews today. Like, there's no way to force that. It's like, it's not possible. It's a little bit like SEO, actually, if you think about it, it's like, it's an activity you have to start and you just have to massage, because if you, if you, if you force it, you're going to lose it.

Mark Shriner [33:27]

When I've led sales and marketing teams, you know, one of the kind of habits that I would try to ingrain in our team, you know, is when we got into any kind of serious negotiation and the customer, or prospective customer, was asking more than we were typically willing to give, we would say, Well, you know, what we could consider doing this. Would you be willing to provide a testimonial, just as a reflex, you know? And why not ask it? The only thing they can say is yes or no, right? And, you know, it's like and if you get in the habit of asking it like you said, you're planting all those seeds. So, you're not, all of a sudden in this urgent race to get a bunch you've got, you know, one or two coming in a quarter, and it's energy just build up that cadence,  

Nathan Yeung [34:08]

Yeah, and it's huge, like, the amount of work that is required, and it becomes very front loaded when you need it. Or, you know, when the sales teams, you know, a lot of times when we go into organizations, one of the first things we work on is sales enablement tools. And I always go where the testimonials or case studies, and they go, we don't have any, and I'm like, well, well, that's bad news, because I can't really rush that. So, we'll start now. But you know, we're going to come up with what I consider subpar sales enablement tools. You need that social proof. It's really important. And that's also comes down to, you know, the other thing that I talk about really, really important, is I hate this word, because it's like it haunts me to this day, focus. You know, if there's one thing that is just something that works, but you go, well, Nathan, that's such a broad, you know, thing to say about. Marketing, it's like, what does focus mean in marketing? Focus, to me, on the most materially impactful way, is obviously focus in just your channel execution, like, don't, don't go on the L 18, figure out one or two, double down on that. Maximize. Squeeze the living juices out of it until you can't squeeze it anymore. Then start expanding, right? But the other part of focus that I think is really important, and you know, I've talked to so many startups about this, they're like, Yeah, we're raising $500,000 it's really for market expansion. We're really trying to, you know, gain, gain a foothold into the market. And I go, Okay, well, where are you planning to do this? And they're like, Canada or US or Europe, and that's, there's, that's a geographical area. And I was like, I'm going to be honest with you, 500 grand on a country perspective on display ads will last you maybe two months. So, we got to tighten this down. And often I will tighten it down to a city. I'll tell them, you need to spend 500 grand on a city. And they're like, what? And I'm like, Just hear me out here, okay, you're 500 grand, and you're trying to become a leader in a space, okay. Would it not be more impactful for you to have three major companies in Vancouver use you versus one in Cincinnati, one in somewhere in Ohio, one in New York, of which none of those three companies know each other.  

Mark Shriner [36:30]

They're in different industries, and they're just like, there's no synergy, and you're not getting any geographical or industry expertise to go out and kind of replicate your efforts exactly you want to you want to play the long game.

Nathan Yeung [36:39]

You want the network effect. And you know why? Because when three people or four or 10 or 20 people from Vancouver in a same in the same industry, same category, go to a conference, and they're all from Vancouver, and people start talking to them whose name gets brought up, if you ever if whatever solution you solve, whatever problem you're solving, comes up, you come exactly. And that's way more impactful than having a bunch of sporadic sales across the so I always say, go win in the city first. And if you can really win, the city, expanding becomes much, much more easy.  

Mark Shriner [37:23]

It's funny that analogy holds true to a lot of my previous experience. I spent about 20 plus years in Asia in leadership roles, also doing a fair amount of consulting. And there were so many times where companies would want to come in and say, Hey, we want to open offices in Singapore, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Beijing, Tokyo and I was like, Well, you could do that, but maybe you figure out what's the most viable market in the region. Build a core set of customers there, because most of those customers will have other related offices or subsidiaries in the region. So, you could use that as your springboard to the other regions. It's a similar approach, just at a different kind of scale. But it totally makes sense. Man, don't try to do everything all at once everywhere.  

Nathan Yeung [38:08]

Yeah, and at the end of the day, like when you when you own that, all these people have professional colleagues, yeah, all these people go to the same conferences. All of them talk about their problems. And if you can become a consistent solution amongst a very dense group of people. It's like, I always say, if you can get three people to bring up your name, indirectly, you typically win the contract. Yeah, like, it's almost impossible.  

Mark Shriner [38:31]

Totally agree with you. Let me ask you something that I find most marketing leaders managers will kind of shy away from and it almost makes them cringe. But you know, with sales people, you can see what their performance is. I mean, you've got the number the revenues right there, right marketing. With marketing, it's, it can be a little less obvious. So, you know, if I always say, like, show us the number of leads, well, you know, all leads aren't created equal. I was like, Well, show us the number of converted leads, or high value leads, you know, and whatever the metric is, what metrics do you recommend that companies look at from their marketing efforts?  

Nathan Yeung [39:16]

I think what's really, really interesting is, I think there's a lot of companies that believe there is a turnkey KPI framework for every function and I think we like to think like that, because so my this book I'm writing is actually about how we're lazy. We like to be lazy. We like to oversimplify things because it just makes us feel better. It makes it feel like we can progress through life easier.  

Mark Shriner [39:46]

Let's do a SWOT analysis. Oh, that's a good idea.  

Nathan Yeung [39:49]

Okay, Let's state a bunch of opportunities and threats are really obvious to us already. But when it comes to marketing, what I would actually say is marketing KPIs are. Based on the maturity of that function, actually. And so actually, the KPI should evolve, and I think that's actually the complex part, right? So, when you start the marketing function, it's not fair to forced quality conversions, because you're not going to get enough conversions to measure quality. So, the reality is, is that when you start you're going to start with what I call vanity metrics. The vanity metrics are, how many people do we have on the website coming through? Have we increased the click through rates? How many MQLs do we have? Right? That's your first vanity metric, right? As the function matures and as you increase those metrics, aka, you are doing better on website visitors. You are do better on click through, rates. You are doing better on MQL, and you actually have statistical volume, right? That's the issue. Statistical volume. You then move your metrics lower, down the funnel, all right, now we have MQLs, okay. How many MQLs to SQL are we getting? What's that percentage? Okay? And then once you do that, then you go, Okay, what's the SQL to close, right? And I think as your function gets scale, you want to move your metrics lower into the funnel. The problem is, is that a lot of companies jump and they assume they should be in one part of the phase, and whether they are, they are or they aren't in those phases, they force that metric. And so therefore, they put what I would consider marketers in a position where they're likely to fail. So, a great example, if a company comes to me and has, you know the exact problem I solve, which is you don't have a marketing department, you want to hire your first person. You hire Nathan, great. What does that usually imply? Means you have no marketing metrics, you likely have no foundation, and you likely have a half broken funnel that kind of works, kind of doesn't right, which means your CAC numbers, your LTV numbers, probably aren't really sussed out well, you probably have no idea what your general cost per action is. You probably have no idea what angle or ad actually works for you. All right. So, it's like, Nathan, I only want SQL. It's like, okay, great. So, I have to start from scratch. I have some positioning stuff from your sales team that I can put in together, and you don't want me to do any strategy work because you're impatient. So, I'm going to go straight to demand gen and tactic work, and I'm going to have to build a funnel of which you don't have and I have no learnings of, and you're going to measure me on an outcome that typically takes time for us to validate. So, then I'm set up for failure, right? Because they're like, We want SQL. I don't care about MQ Loes. It's like, well, in order for me to get you the SQL, I have to get the MQLs first, and if I don't have enough NQ Loes to actually figure out what works for you, because this is not a system yet you have ever observed to work before. You know, it's kind of just lucky if I actually get a perfect process right. And this comes back to the thing where I've said every channel works. It's the same process that takes on every channel. You have to figure out, as I've said, that person who consumes media from that channel likes to consume in a certain way. You're finding that perfect match between the ad, the landing page, the targeting of your of your actual campaign, where they all sync and they come up with a cat that makes like a customer acquisition cost that you make sense for your business. And if a company comes to you, and they have none of that, then a marketer can only do 50% of that job well, because the other 50% is testing and being prudent, right? The goal is not to piss money away. Now you might be incredibly lucky and you find a marketer that comes from a company that's the exact company that, essentially you're doing, and they have no non-compete, and for some reason they can just go ahead and take all their learnings, like, think a law firm in a local city where they have a SEM guy, and literally, that person leaves and then joins another law firm. High probability they can get SQL pretty quick. But majority of people are not in that situation, right? You know, a lot of people are coming people are coming from like manufacturing, enterprise software, ERP systems for convenience stores. Like, you're not going to find a marketer that has that experience. So, most of the time, a marketer's job is to be the best at optimizing and best at putting a great foundation for learnings. So, I think that's like, that's when companies fail because, because they put out these KPIs that are too early, right? So, rather than forcing this idea that marketing has to have these set KPIs from beginning, I really challenge the thought process is like no marketing has phased KPI frameworks, and depending on the maturity of your fund. Function, you should modify those KPIs as your function matures,  

Mark Shriner [45:04]

Yeah. So, what I'm hearing you say is you definitely need KPIs, but they need to be appropriate for where you're at in your marketing journey, okay, or the mature maturity of your business. And  

Nathan Yeung [45:15]

I think it's fair for sales too if you really think about it, right? Like if you just started your sales process, and what's called technical founder led business technical, right? Not sales LED or marketing LED. You, you have a technical founder telling a sales person that has no hit it, yeah, no sales enablement tools, no objection handling, no battle cards, no nothing. And you're like, SQL right now I need, I need book calls, and you're just going to be like, how about you measure me on, like, my calls first, yeah, and how many book meetings and secondary meetings I get before we start jumping into, like..

Mark Shriner [45:54]

Completely agree with you. I mean, again, manage many sales teams, and I'm a firm believer in your targets. You can't control when a deal is going to close, but you can't control how many calls you make, how many emails you send, how many events you go to, et cetera. One more thing on this topic, you know, you mentioned the cost of acquisition. What you know, how do you formulate that? What are the easiest marketing activities to formulate the CAC, and what are the ones that are more challenging?  

Nathan Yeung [46:26]

What do you mean by formulate? You mean just like, trying to understand the math, or trying...

Mark Shriner [46:31]

Like, figure out what is the actual acquisition cost for a customer or group of customers, you know, with SEM, let's just say AdWords, you know, I can kind of calculate, okay, that, you know, we spent this much per month and we generated X number of inbound leads, which generated five deals, for example. And I can take that total amount spent divided by the five leads that were, that were converted to customers, and I can come up with a cost. Of course, there's some overhead to that as well. It's not just the ad cost, it's the management so on and so forth. But I mean, maybe you can walk me through a couple of those scenarios.

Nathan Yeung [47:08]

Yeah, So, you know, a great example is just trade shows, right? And I think trade shows is a great example where I don't think a lot of companies do a comprehensive approach as to calculating the CAC there, right? These are you got to look at it. You have flights, you have meals and entertainment. You got the hotel cost, you got the conference cost. You have the time value of all these individuals, right? You have the assets required. You have the programming activations, right? And I think if you do all that, you actually have a really great picture of like, how valuable trade shows are. Because, because, often, often, more often not. If you actually do a comprehensive approach on calculating your cost per acquisition on the sales side and on the marketing side, you'll actually often notice that marketing isn't that expensive because, because a lot of times we don't actually do the full CAC number on a sales side, right? We don't take in, you know, the CROs salary. We don't take in the VP of Sales salary, we don't take in the BDR salary. Combine all those and then actually look at numbers all the time. We generally don't, but sometimes a bit more of a blended number. So, I think trade shows are a great example where you can do a better job, and you'll actually recognize that trade shows have high value, because you'll notice, yes, your numbers aren't high, but likely your quality and your conversion rates are incredibly high. So, there's a trade off there. So, I think that's a great way of calculating. I think one of the more nebulous ones that are, that I think have broad definitions amongst organizations, is organic leads. These organic leads can lead to a lot of different things. They could be influenced by sales, they could be influenced by referrals, they could be influenced by your partnerships. They can be influenced by your SEO. And so it's like, how do you figure out that? CAC, well, one thing that I'll simply say is organic leads just in general, period full stop tend to be the cheapest leads period across all organizations I've ever worked at. So, you can beat yourself to death trying to figure out, like, the value of this, but let's just say it's always going to be pretty low. And I will say there is no set definition. I think the goal here, though, and I'm sure you've seen this through many organizations, is, let's just set the definition so that we have a standard that we can actually measure, and this is the one thing that I talk a lot about with companies. It's like email opens. It's a perfect example of this. Email opens is, is a useless absolute measurement. And what I mean by that is looking at 60% opens meaningless. Looking at 60% opens to 65% opens, that's meaningful. The contextual trend is meaningful, not the absolute number. And so I think when it comes to your organic that's kind of the same thing. You just want to create this base to understand I have a number to four. Follow, and I know that it's standard, and I want to see a contextual positive trend, and that's, that's, that's what really matters. So, I think if you were to challenge me, it's like, what KPI is the most confusing? I think organic website traffic is like the hardest to define. Like, with a hard definition, I think it's pretty, pretty hard. You have to define it for your own organization. And agree with that in sales, because I'm sure somehow it's going to affect someone's pay and compensation, right? So, you just have to make that agreement. You know, generally speaking, I find, like almost every other activity, tends to be pretty straightforward, because they tend to have costs quite directly related to it. I would say branding activities are probably, again, the most ambiguous, right? And the KPIs there aren't really sales related, they tend to be recall related, right? And how do you define recall in a part of the sales funnel and attribute that to a CAC? You can but I will say that 90% of organizations can't afford the marketing stack, to afford the type of attribution, to afford that type of detailed granularity, to actually ever get to a point where you can do that with some semblance of sanity. So, that would be the hardest. I think branding is definitely the hardest. You know, recall rates are easy, but they're expensive exercises to do. Think Google runs recall campaign. It's 50 grand minimum just to run that campaign. So, you know, branding activities suck, but they're but they're required, right? Because I think every sales person, every business owner, knows if someone can't mentally recall you quickly, you're in a bad situation, especially knowing that 95% of your buyers are typically out of market, right? You need to be at the buyer table that first three right, and that increases your probability success by, you know, magnitudes.  

Mark Shriner [52:02]

What about podcasts? Where does, where do podcasts fit into the whole marketing mix?  

Nathan Yeung [52:07]

Oh, again. Great, great question. Um, so I'm not going to take credit for this, because I never take credit for someone else's work. Um, Podcasts can work as a way to get your ICP to talk to you. And I think that is a brilliant model, the other model So, so a lot of companies, and literally, I think I'm on one on Monday where I was a little sussed out, because I was like, You're 100% promoting your SaaS product, and they're using their SaaS product as a part of their onboarding to be the guest on their podcast.  

Mark Shriner [52:44]

Really, that's interesting. So, sign up here. Wow, that's cool!

Nathan Yeung [52:52]

And if you think about it. So, one of the key things that I always talk about when I when I help people build marketing functions, is like you do want to do a lot, and the goal is, is that there's a lot of assets you need to create. And I like to use the term piggybacking. So, podcast work, one is, if you have the human capital to do it well, so that it's a practical so I always use these two words, practical and sustainable tactic for you, which means, practical, can you do it? Well, sustainable? Can you do it for a long period of time without taxing resources? So, I think podcasts are great because you can do the podcast, you can get your ICP, you can get them to engage with and on top of that, you can produce all this content for yourself, right? So, you piggyback on the fact. It's like, Oh, I got to do posts on LinkedIn. It's like, well, we've just cut up our podcast. So, this podcast isn't just a podcast. The podcast is actually a part of a broader strategy where it trickles down to different parts of your content, pillars, and essentially, this one piece of asset now fills out a bunch of your calendar. That's why I would like to do it. Now, the other thing that I again, I will not take credit for this, is you use podcast and you book for your ICP. So, you go, hey, hey, John from so and so company, I see that you're operational excellence manager at this, this large company, I see that you've done an amazing job, by the way. I don't know if you're interested, but I actually, I actually have someone interested in having you as a guest on their podcast. You'd be interested in guesting on their podcast, and that's another way to use podcasts to get to your ICP, so podcast is this, like, indirect, relational thing that I think you can get very one to one, and it's a very enticing vanity thing, because it appeals to your ego. Sure, you know, it really rubs us the great way. It's like, wow, I'm doing so well, I'm on a podcast. Wow. This guy thought about me and wants me on a podcast. Cast, and it's also this gesture of reciprocity, where it's like, I got you on a podcast. You know, can we talk for a little bit? And it becomes a very gentle conversation. So, I think podcasts are great, but to me, again, practical, and sustainable. This is a practical and sustainable strategy based on your constraints and resources of the business. So, I think it's worthwhile. I think there's a time and place for it, but is it the right time to do it? Right from the get go, that's up to how you've structured your team, or you're lucky and you Fluke out and your Nefer niece is some killer video editor and just has all this down, you know, like you just have these resources available to make it a valuable piece of your business?  

Mark Shriner [55:41]

Yeah, I think it makes a ton of sense. And then maybe one other item that I find useful from doing podcasts is, I just enjoy talking with people and then learning from subject matter experts and So, you know, and it's, it's kind of a way for me to continue my professional development, you know, I talk with somebody like you and I take a bunch of notes and be like, okay, you know, this is, I'm going to apply some of these, these lessons learned, to our business, right? And so it's, it's pretty, I guess, valuable, because a lot of times, you know, if I go to YouTube or if I go to an event, it's, it's kind of one way communication where you've got somebody who's a subject matter expert and they're sharing, but I, you know, I kind of absorb things more easily when it's interactive, and so it's very helpful for me. So, that's another selfish reason that I do it. But yeah, so I agree with you.  

Nathan Yeung [56:29]

It's intimate conversation without a coffee.  

Mark Shriner 56:34  

Yeah, exactly, yeah! I actually have my coffee. But hey, let me ask you. You know, one of the things with marketing these days is the development of new and really important tools is continuing to accelerate. Okay, so why don't you talk about what tools you and your team are most asked to use or most often recommend, and you can talk from lead gen to whatever you want to talk i and then and where and how, you keep abreast of all these tools, because you need subject matter experts. Man, I can't just say, hey, learn HubSpot tomorrow. No, it doesn't work that way.  

Nathan Yeung [57:17]

So, you're literally crushing the question. All great questions.  

Mark Shriner [57:22]

Nice to have a guest that says, hey, I'm doing the right thing, but yeah, go ahead.

Nathan Yeung [57:26]

You are and I hope people are listening. These, these are, these are fantastic questions. I was literally just talking to my client, and I said, Hey, you know, I just want to let you know I don't know if when you hired us, this was a part of our responsibilities, liens, when you hired us, but I want you to know that a part of my job, or a part of something that we do at Find your audience, is we're consistently taking demos every week on new tools. Every week. We're probably going through two or three tools every week. We're negotiating aggressively for us to use these tools for our clients, and we're always testing new things, because you're absolutely correct. Tools are accelerating. Capabilities are accelerating. And in my view, if I don't do enough of that, I'm not going to do as good as I can for my clients. And so I take it upon myself to POC proof of concept, a lot of new tools. And you have to, I think any company that doesn't think that a new tool isn't going to make a part of their business more efficient is just fooling themselves, you know, I remember when chafe just came out, a bunch of people were like, oh, you know, it's not going to do anything. Blah, blah, blah, you know, like, we, you know, I understand it, but it's not going to replace bunch of things. I hired a content writer, and then when I hired the content writer, I was like, You know what, I'm changing your title for a bit. And he's like, what we're doing? I was like, your job for the next three months is basically use every single chat GPT enable tool, and I want you to write a report on how exactly we can use in an organization. I don't even want you producing content right now. You're going to produce gibberish for the first three months, and I want you to produce the best gibberish possible. And I want you to tell me why and how. And I was probably one of the only few people on like a fractional CMO call, where I was the only guy that actually hired someone to dedicate their time to do this, because I saw the value in it and, and here's the stupid part. I then stopped. I was like, You know what? Chat GPT is probably peaking. We can probably stop. We can take a break. You go back into now your  proper responsibility lane, and let's start. And what has happened is there was a gap where I lost track of the latest and greatest. So, if you were to ask me what's happening inside of my organization, and what I would really recommend for every organization is you have to promote an AI oriented culture. And what that means is you want active discussions amongst all groups of your of your business, to promote things that they find useful. Role to them that is AI related, and that's what we do. So, my content writers, they bring up AI stuff all the time. My creative team, they bring up AI stuff all the time. My operations team, they bring up AI stuff all the time. So, I've built a culture where my team is always sharing the latest and greatest, because I'm not on some random Instagrammers, you know, list to see this latest tool, but my creative team is, yeah, and I'm looking at other tools that are going to be related to financial analysis or strategic management or competitor viewing, and, you know, all like competitor monitoring and all these different things. So, I'm going to be in my little area of AI. They're going to be in their little area, AI, but we need to cultivate a culture where, one, you need to be open to it, and two, you want them to promote it, right? And you want to actually have a model where you go, hey, you know, that looks really interesting. Let's buy it. I want you to figure it out for us.

Mark Shriner [1:00:59]

It's funny! It kind of goes back full circle to in the beginning of our conversation, you were talking about the dynamics of living in Toronto and doing business there, where you have all these people who you know have bring some value to the table and are sharing information, and if you if you can create that culture. I mean, it's just a recipe for success. I mean because a learning organization is a competitive organization. So, that's huge.

Nathan Yeung [1:01:23]

Yeah, and it's shocking, like some people are just so reluctant to, so I talked to two people who were out of a job. One is moving from Toronto to Vancouver, and one is a senior person, and I'm not going to name, but she's just out of a job. And the marketing coordinator said to me, she's, he's like, she's like, Nathan, what can I do to help, you know, position myself? And I said, well, first of all, I put a marketing coordinator job about last month, and we got 900 applications across Canada in 48 hours. So, you were in a competitive space. First and foremost. Second thing is, you know what you should do? And the first part is, you should create a job. And that job right now, as you're in between jobs, is you're going to become a generative AI workflow master. That's from your title, because I can guarantee you that'll separate you from every single applicant, because it's going to showcase that you are doing something that they probably have problems with. And two, this is all you're doing. You're focusing on that you want to build workflows from AI, and that's a huge thing for a lot of organizations. The second individual, who was a senior, I said, Hey, have you ever thought about using chat, G, P, T to go help figure out your data analysis? She said, No. I was like, Have you not wanted to try? Well, I haven't tried it. You know, my partner does that, but, you know, he's really into it. I haven't tried at all. And I was just, I was flabbergasted, because I was like, you have to recognize that this tool can do your work right. And if you don't know how to, if you don't recognize that this tool can do your work, and the fact that this can, this can enhance your work. Why like what? Like this? This idea that it's going to just be there and not impact you, that's foolish.  

Mark Shriner [1:02:58]

It's like something like, I'm not gonna use the cell phone. I don't need an iPhone. Man, I don't like, what?  

Nathan Yeung [1:03:07]

Like, you know? Yeah, runway, MLs Gen 3 model is insane, yeah, it's insane. The Gen 1 model is kind of creepy. It's like, a bad trip, you know? I think that's like the definition of bad trip. That's what gen one was, sometimes it was very creepy. Make me feel uncomfortable. Gen three, it's producing mini clips. If you're a very smart story writer, you could write a movie this thing.  

Mark Shriner [1:03:31]

Wow! That's pretty impressive. Well, hey, you know, we've touched on a lot of stuff. And Nathan, I really enjoyed the conversation. Typically, we try to keep these under an hour, and this is we're pushing up on the limit right here. So, that's a compliment to you, because you brought a lot of information to the table here. You did mention that you're working on a book, I believe, and you know. So, if people wanted to find out about your book, get in touch with you. What's the best way for them to do that?  

Nathan Yeung [1:03:57]

Honestly, I would love for people to come find me on LinkedIn. I post, consumer psychology shorts basically every single day. So, my book is based on consumer psychology. It's based on about 200 academic articles that I reviewed, to essentially make this book. And my whole thing was, I wanted to make consumer psychology applicable to marketing in a easy to digest format. I won't give away the title right now, because it's still in flux, but I will simply say it's really a book for everyone. It's really a book about how to teach about how science and how consumer psychology really impacts marketing on a fundamental way, like on a fundamental scientific perspective, way, versus, you know, these anecdotes that you get from experience. So, if you're interested in learning about that, I'll likely be launching that on my LinkedIn as I'm teasing it, and then I'm hoping, and I'll probably, I'll just say, you know, I'm hoping by the end of this year, because it'll force me to finish it.

Mark Shriner [1:04:48]

That's awesome, and I will put links to your LinkedIn profile and your company website in the show notes. And hey, Nathan, really enjoyed you have been on. Grow fast podcast and hope to cross paths with you one day soon.  

Nathan Yeung [1:05:03]

Yeah, thank you so much.  

Mark Shriner [1:05:04]

Cheers!

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